ThoughtPossible.com :: It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.
The first argument I would make against this is that we have produced too many resonant intellectuals to be a society that does not value, seek and promote intellectual behavior. We can go back to our founders: Franklin, Jefferson, Adams (let’s not forget Abigail), Madison, Hamilton: each of these were serious intellectual heavyweights, using a deep understanding of millennia of philosophy, science and politics, to approach the formation of a nation “of ideas”. In the environment, we have others like Thomas Paine, whose intellectual treatise (necessary to our revolution as other treatises have been to others throughout history) helped to motivate mass support for a revolution based on ideas.
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Paine’s “Common Sense” is arguably the most important “pamphlet” ever distributed anywhere, its achievement the distilling of heroically complex meditations about the nature of human beings, power and society, into a vernacular that not only made them accessible, but took the reader deeper into the personal relevance of those ideas. It is hard to overestimate the achievement of the work as writing, but what is truly astounding is the degree to which Paine’s contribution demonstrates that the United States of America was founded as a nation loyal to specific intellectual examinations of the world and its contents.
Frederick Douglass, a great American statesman, orator and author, was the first African American US ambassador, named by Abraham Lincoln as our first envoy to the independent nation of Haiti, 60 years after it declared independence from the French empire. Douglass was an ex-slave, and an intellectual. His case is known because of the work he did to make it known, by developing his intellectual abilities and by courageously touring the Union to make the case for abolition. The greatness of Frederick Douglass, his place of pride in our nation’s turbid history, is not down to his having escaped slavery, for others did that, but to his passionate intellectual pursuit of a yet-unrealized world of truth and justice.
Soundbite journalism, writing to the headline, making every turn of phrase another “hook” to stop the reader’s eye from wandering to something less tiring, is, I think, the main reason why such writing strategies appear necessary. A lack of complex, deeply relevant writing, is what pushes the best-soundbite headline to the forefront of our collective awareness. Not its inherent usefulness or interest. The potent soundbite headline is usually also the thesis statement of its attached text, meaning the argument is already made and understood and the reading seems, ultimately, either disappointing or unnecessary. So the mind becomes accustomed to wandering, incessantly.
The parenthetical expression —and I recognize the irony involved in taking so long to get to this point (part of me would like to think it was an artful wordplay, but it’s just the nature of this discussion)— is not about lateral movement, distraction, or fuzzy disinterested over-intellectualizing… it’s about going deeper. In Arabic folk tales, going back to ancient times, the oral tradition is “knit” into the fabric of a story, so that history and wisdom can be passed down through time, by way of wholecloth parenthetical renderings of a tale within a tale. One character tells a story, within which another character tells a story, and by the end, you must re-emerge, layer by layer, back to the surface, so that the entire story is cohesive, a closed circuit, comprehensible.
One can easily get lost —as with the complex familial relations spelled out by the long lists of three-part names at the beginning of many Russian novels, or the indulgent lyrical descriptions of landscape, manners and quotidian minutia, found in so many classical American or English novels— at any point in the descent into or re-emergence from the inner folktales, but they play a vital role in the memory-game that is oral tradition, the telling of a culture, the making and conveyance of ideas. Not just moral codes, but tested truths, aesthetic preferences, the cadence of language, are all captured by these techniques, and the story is made ever more relevant.
The 1,001 Arabian Nights is this kind of story. It is a single harmonious ship of narrative, within which we find stowed away a myriad —vastly more than 1,001— of vignettes, crucibles of faith and conflict, loves and narrow escapes, recounted for so many reasons that one quickly loses count. But we still value this collection of masterful stories today, because it works. The underlying wisdom here is that meaning is always layered: one meaning cloaks another, necessarily, or to put it another way, we often cannot see the forest for the trees. What focuses our attention also narrows our focus, in most cases, so the ability to first focus, then go deeper, allows us to also expand the ground our thought-processes can cover, without letting go of the original narrative.
If we shy away from phrases within phrases, from departures from the scene from within the scene, if we turn our backs to the Grand Canyon, at its very edge, we might be in danger of forgetting what gravity does to off-balance objects: to look at what we have before us, even in the midst of another tale, is not to lose touch with our preferred reality, but to know more clearly what surrounds and limits us. To do this is, frankly, to limit our freedom in a comprehensive way, and it is a caging in from which we cannot easily escape, perhaps not without the ability to imitate the liberating journey of telling the tales of the 1,001 nights, for that was the purpose of the surface-level narrative of the captive Sheherazade.
The meandering narrative, the open book, the chronicle of river systems of the everyday human, is our model of a free press, a decentralized, layered non-hierarchical web of meaning and fact, interrelated, referential, critical, and of necessity: parenthetical. We have retired our gaze from the most potent truth about our culture, when we propose that long, difficult reasoning is somehow contrary to our nature, when we forget that thousands of physicists among us have devoted their lives to the search for maddeningly, almost impossibly complex truths, at the level of elementary particles, that their minds are working to help our society as a whole keep pace with the complex aspirations we conjure up in our daily slog.
If we are afraid to go deeper within the body of any given thought or meditation, then we should put aside the undulating history of ideas, of instructive departures from simple clarity about those ideas, the violent clash of philosophies that plays out civilly in our judicial system, that is sometimes begrudgingly slow, but deliberate enough to give us back what we put into the system, our belief in common ideas, the patience to wade through the eddies and inconsquence of meantime arguments. If we are afraid to hash out our meditations in the school of layered and interlacing discussions of ideas, then we negate the fundamentally free-to-parenthesize nature of the American intellectual, and we give in to the temptation to negate our origins and believe again in the simplicity of a dangerous feudal clarity.
Order from simplicity is not the strength of the American system or the American mind; quite the contrary, we have fashioned our improbable experiment precisely to be resilient in the face of and even inviting to the expansive riches of infuriating complexity, of living in the gray area, keeping afloat in the mind-meld, working to craft individuality always from the omnibus of overarching concerns. We have sought nobility of spirit in the dignified complexity of those minds that have shaped our history, those heroic feats of imagining that have ushered in one after another bold new era of resonant upheaval. Without departing from our basic interest in the ideals of a free society.
We are, in short, parenthetical to our own narrative, which is to say, highly inclusive, overwrought with the prospect of being forbidden to be so, and in each individual, we are as such a universe of pretensions and hopes and relations, which for all our protesting to the contrary, desires the room complexity affords us for personal expansion. We should return to an awareness of the value of complexity in language, and use our trust in fact and truth-telling to reinvigorate the culture of reporting and comment, which has in recent years, been so corroded as to assert its right to infinite over-simplification, regardless of all that would deprive us of living.