Holodoxa

It is a Golden Age, it is a Dark Age: If one wanders over to a site like Our World in Data, it is easy to see how one can readily spin up narratives of miraculous prosperity or impending doom. We can look at the chart of trends in global GDP or global greenhouse gas emissions and respectively see riches or squalor over the horizon. The seeming conflict between any selection of data should increase our skepticism of simple narratives. In some ways, this process may already be underway.

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Into the tapestry of historical scholarship, David Hackett Fischer, professor of history emeritus at Brandeis University, has woven a beautiful pattern that illustrates something essential about America’s sociocultural heritage and its enduring identity, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989).

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There is a totalizing temptation among us. We like to take our tried-and-true mental toolkits put them to work on any and every problem we come across. We overextend. Nowhere is this more common, then in our tendency to turn to The Science™ to try and solve value-based or preference-based questions, such as “When, if ever, is taking a human life justified?”, “What size should our government be?”, or “Are humans more important than other animals?”.

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Given the dreariness of our literary culture, it is probable that the name Zadie Smith means little to you. However, she is a big deal in the elite literary circles we have left. She’s also an author I’m fond of because she’s a bit of a stylistic descendant of David Foster Wallace, a personal favorite. Let me introduce you.

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Our mental lives are a whirling cacophony of complexity. These streams of consciousness, our internal narrations, incessantly counsel, direct, and distract us. They appear to be the essence of being human, rendering our subjective experiences, our identities, our intrinsic perspectives. But from whence does this inner voice, this continuity of mental experience, emanate from? Where in the brain can we find it?