Reader,
I've been reading Nassim Taleb's Antifragile (which, once you get past the mild MBA-adjacent aversion, is great) and Plato's Laws. If you've read Taleb you know he's pretty rabidly anti-Plato. I think this is rather unfair, but I won't be talking about that. Instead, what's been on my mind is information density and man's usual relation to the new. At the same time that Taleb points to modern studies attesting to the negative impact of more information on over-confidence, I find Plato, in the 4th century BC, piecing together a very astute historical analyse that is, with his usual framing (as in the Timaeus), very hedged against being taken for bonafide fact. He is actively concerned that his understanding not be taken for autonomous fact.
The concordance of these two observations brought me to the re-realization of a very obvious fact: through the vast majority of human history, man's daily news cycle probably didn't have a scope greater than walking distance. The most important events from far away might have reached him, but the further away the less likely he was to hear of them. We're probably built with that scope in mind. As we expose ourselves to the modern news cycle with a greater scope, and more and more variations every day, I'm apprehensive that we gain anything except an over-confidence that the world is knowable through more information, a confidence that is unrelated to the most important events in our lives: the ones which we couldn't have seen coming.
The ancient Greek may have had access to roughly 1000 years of human history preserved in cultural memory, but not with great detail or confidence in its reliability. The modern, on the other hand, is exposed to information about the world that is frankly too detailed and overconfident in its narratives. Ultimately, to paraphrase Richard Weaver, the modern finds himself only able to view the world sequentially, not holistically (and due to the speed and volume of informational "throughput" lacks any memory for comparison or dismissal).
For the modern interested in stepping away from the noise of the internet, this is a rather satisfying thought. Consider Hillaire Belloc:
… the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon thousands of years … Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit, that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy ... (The Path To Rome)
The corollary to this participation in the "immemorial habit" of man is that through man's history most men have assumed future and past men to possess by-and-large the same blood that they themselves know. When we record our serious jokes and stories (and other less-serious words), we, by default, implicitly assume a recipient whose interpretation (and expectations of silence and vulgar explanation) is very close to our own.
So, I am left with: might we understand Plato, and all men of past ages, better by changing how we live, participating in this immemorial habit that the modern moment contrasts so strongly with?
Thank you,
