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First, consider that this is not the first time we’ve witnessed such high anxiety among humans.
Many will say that the rotting of our brains really began in spring 1967, when Texas Instruments unveiled the Cal-Tech, the world’s first true handheld electronic calculator. This boxy confection of bone-colored plastic would, on payment of about $400, perform any simple arithmetical task you might ask of it.
Although some aspects of life became as a result of its invention a tad more bearable, from today’s perspective, the most consequential feature of this shirt-pocket-size gizmo was that it performed its work quite invisibly. With an abacus and a slide rule, earlier helpmeets, you had to know something of the mathematical process. But with the Cal-Tech, you simply touched buttons and got answers. You could put the mathematical corner of your brain instantly, and forever, into cold storage.
In the nearly six decades since, a significant poundage of our cranial tissue has been pretty much retired from active duty. The cerebral quarters that dealt with spelling? No need for them. Those that told you how to find your way to Aunt Agatha in Dubuque or how to sail from Papeete to Panama? GPS could manage that, thanks. Want to know the capital of South Dakota? The atomic number of sodium? How to tell your Aeschylus from your Agamemnon? Just lie back, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page chorused, and let us find the answers.
Enter the doomsayers: But what about the downside! If we needn’t use our minds to know things, we simply won’t.
Nor will we care to sustain the curiosity that has helped us acquire our knowledge in the first place. Knowledge is finite, said the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, but ignorance is infinite. And then, the corollary: If we know so much less and think so much less, what of the imponderable essential of human society — of wisdom?
Most of us probably accept the rather glib definition of wisdom as being the product of great knowledge and much time, which is why clever old folk tend to be assumed to be wiser than the young. If you believe this, no wonder you might conclude that, ominously, a society of know-nothings and those with a newfound disdain for thought will produce only a few who can be counted as wise — despite society’s pressing need for wise humans to guide, counsel and direct us.
Absent such talent, the pessimists fret, where do we go? Certainly we must now be set on a path to mental decay and desuetude.
I beg to differ, and I say to these worrywarts: Dinna fash yersel’. Don’t fret.
There’s another way to look at today’s brain-saving technologies — not as drivers of decomposition, but as a purge, a cleansing, a liberation. For in truth, how does it really benefit most of us to know why sodium’s atomic number is 11 and magnesium’s 12? Or to be aware of the names of René Descartes, John Locke, Jean-JacquesRousseau and Voltaire? After all — and it might be seen as a heresy to say so — Pythagoras didn’t know any of this. Nor did Socrates, Euclid, Herodotus, Plato or Aristotle.
I have deliberately left in Aeschylus, since his plays may well have been performed before Athenian audiences that included one or more of these esteemed scholars; and all surely would have known of the legendary figure of Agamemnon, hero of the Trojan Wars, married to the splendidly named Clytemnestra. The Greek intellectual elite would have revered him as we revere our warrior-heroes today.
But — significantly — they would not have worshiped very many more. And this is where we should take comfort from the ancient Greeks.
For although these were among the finest minds of their time, there is an inescapable truth about them and their peers: They had so much less to know — so much less than the finest minds have to take in today.
The Trojan Wars were fought just eight centuries before they lived; Homer wrote his epic poems about the wars two centuries after the wars. One series of battles, little more. But how many more battles and wars, how much more history clutters our minds today than ever occupied theirs. How little geography these figures knew — though yes, Aristotle did his best to travel a bit. How few languages they were aware of. How little science. How little economics. And flat nothing about quantum mechanics. Or the far side of the moon.
The minds of these Athenian grandees were probably in their various potentials not too different from the potentials of the cleverest of more recent times. They were not qualitatively different from those of Bertrand Russell or Hannah Arendt, nor of any of a hundred polymathic and wise figures we can enumerate today. But there is a difference, and a simple one: Their minds were not overloaded.
Each of these, Pythagoras to Euclid, could be counted as a tabula rasa. Each mind free to ponder, contemplate, ruminate and consider. Each mind free to determine the nature of logic and curiosity (as Socrates did) or define knowledge (as Plato did) or ethics and happiness, as, most famously, Plato’s student Aristotle went on to do.
If our newly made magic devices can do the same for us — if they can run our brains under a faucet, as it were, and rinse away the unnecessary factual stickiness that imperils our own search for meaning and deciding what truly matters — then who knows? Maybe there will eventually emerge a 21st-century Plato, and we will come to think of the Cal-Tech and its kin as having gifted us an entire new set of possibilities to our collective benefit.
Humankind, at last unshackled from the overindulged tedium of the modern world, unburdened by factual overload, could sit back and reap the bounty of being able once again to think. And, by doing so, come to know not simply what we do know, but what we should know, to be fully human.
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