What do you know?: Selfishness and saber

Re-watching Tron: Legacy on Blu-ray last night got me thinking. It wasn’t the stunning visuals or superb score that got me. (Buy the Daft Punk soundtrack on Amazon and you get a bonus track.) It was Jeff Bridges’s pseudo-Buddhism.

The Dude’s philosophy is pretty much the same outside the Grid as inside it. In the film, Olivia Wilde tells Sam Flynn that the Dude’s been teaching her ‘the art of the selfless.’ (Yes, I refer to movie characters interchangeably as their character’s name, actor’s name and character’s name from other movies. Essentially, I just call people what they’re most known for. That’s why, as an actor, you have to be a larger personality than your role or you’ll be forever typecast. Sorry, Daniel Radcliffe. You’ll forever be Harry Potter.)

I get that Buddhism strives to annihilate self or, rather, realize that selfhood is an illusion. I can’t get on board with that. But I can get on board with the diminution of the self. (Is ‘getting on board’ a train metaphor? I guess, then, I’ll take the midnight train headed for Humility City.)

Selfishness can take many forms. At one extreme, self-worship is pride. Secure people roll their eyes at the proud, but insecure people flock to the proud like Harold and Kumar to White Castle. (I’d give an example of a proud person here, but I can only think of real people I’ve placed in my Acquaintances circle on Google+. It wouldn’t be very nice to name them. Then this would turn into a gossip blog. Also, I’m being highly parenthetical this post. I’ll stop.) On the other hand, self-hate can attract secure people and drive away the insecure. Gregory House can hardly move for the number of doctors catering to him at Princeton Plainsboro, but many of his weak-minded patients can’t bear him.

I think it’s a good practice to go through your own thoughts and writings and, metaphorically or literally, underline the pronouns. How often are they first-person?

I think self-absorption traps people in their own minds and keeps them living only present wonderings. Memory and anticipation kind of fall away when all you can do is think about stuff on your own. Insulated in thought, it’s difficult to experience things outside of yourself. In fact, for all the thinking going on, it’s really difficult to know things.

Spanish and French both have two words for the verb ‘to know.’ While referencing the French words would be more academic — I hate that — it would also be plagiarizing Lewis scholar Michael Ward’s lectures on his book Planet Narnia. So, I’ll still use his ideas but I’ll translate them into Spanish.

Saber is to know something as a fact. Conocer is to know someone or some place personally. Conozco South Kensington.* Yo sé a Señor Cornwallis. But, and this is important not just to this blog post but my senior thesis, espero que conozca a Señor Cornwallis.

*Now’s as good a time as any to link to this YouTube video I found of Conan touring London. It aired on his old Late Night program. If I’m being real, he really hasn’t been as funny since he left New York.

  

As C.S. Lewis, the patron saint of Protestants, once said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.” Thinking about yourself less means you can think outside your present time, remember and project. But selflessness also allows you to really know other things and, more importantly, other people more fully.

I really think it’s just the economic principle of the Crowding out effect applied to the individual. You can only know of things if you’re selfish because your person is too crowded to let anything enter in. You can only Know things by allowing them to enter into yourself. (Yes, I just distinguished between the two ways of knowing by capitalizing the conocer. And while I’m sorry for the parenthetical, I’m sorrier English doesn’t have two different words to express the difference.)

So, go out there and learn something. Hopefully you can gain some Knowledge, because I’m pretty sure knowing stuff doesn’t really help you relate to people. Knowing stuff, however, does, because the personal can more easily be shared than the abstract and impersonal. Plus, Knowing stuff is good practice for Knowing people, which is probably a better end than Knowing stuff anyway.

Where/When you at? – An Exploration of Place and Time

"History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology." –James A. Garfield (Twentieth president of the United States)

When Charles Guiteau pulled a .44 on President Garfield, he was targeting one of the great minds of the nation. Garfield was a Republican in the tradition of Lincoln and was serious about granting blacks civil rights during Reconstruction. He was even smart enough to oppose the fiat currency Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase had peddled on the nation during the Civil War. It’s truly a shame Garfield’s doctors weren’t smart enough to sterilize their hands before they went digging around in his back for Guiteau’s bullet.

That having been said, Garfield’s thoughts on history are intriguing. If history is a why meeting a how, then, according to Garfield, that union has both a where and a when.

Disgruntled office-seeker and crazy person Charles Guiteau (left) put a bullet through the lung of ambidextrous polyglot President James A. Garfield (right). 

When and where consistently converge in discrete events. E.g., President Garfield was shot in Washington, D.C. on 2 July 1881. But discrete events are merely the pegs on which we hang our understanding of the past. Do the how and why emerge directly from the where and when? Specifically, how do place and time affect an individual like Guiteau?

Individuals are the most beguiling variables of history, but are they merely pawns of place and time? If I can answer where and when someone is, can I determine what he or she is going to do?

Which place and time made Guiteau shoot Garfield? Was it growing up in Freeport, Illinois during the 1840s and 50s? Was it spending his younger days getting rejected by a utopian religious cult in New York? Was it spending the 1870s writing a speech for Grant and being repeatedly rejected for cabinet positions for which he had no qualifications? You might think the cult is what did it, but the assassin is often described as a disgruntled office-seeker. And does mere rejection really necessitate his shooting Garfield?

Okay, I’ve probably asked a few too many questions, but I hope you’re tracking with me. I’d like to think place and time aren’t the sole determining factors for an individual’s path. I know Morpheus would be upset with me as I cling to free will — “What happened happened and couldn’t have happened any other way.” —but Laurence Fishburne isn’t Emperor of the Universe, even if I’d like him to be sometimes.

This is the captain of the Nebuchadnezzar and Neo’s Obi-Wan, not the Emperor of the Universe.

Like the Oracle’s kitchen lintel plaque says: TEMET NOSCE. Know thyself. I’m going to make this piece a bit more personal than “History is for Lovers.” After all, it is my blog. Don’t worry: I’m not going to turn this into my diary.

I’m going to give three instances of place and time being the how and why behind one of my choices. Then, I’m going to go on the flip side and give three instances of place and time clearly pushing me in a direction I consciously turned from. Calm down: I’m doing it with pictures.

Elementary school Nathan was in the same class as P.J. Mangan from kindergarten to fifth grade, excepting the depressing fourth grade. Nathan became best friends with P.J., and they are still friends today. (There’s a great picture of us in a furniture/pillow fort back in kindergarten that I just don’t have access to. Believe you me, it’s a great picture.)*

Middle school Nathan could not watch PG-13 movies until he was 13. Thus, he watched all the old James Bond movies, rated PG before the PG-13 rating was introduced in 1984. He developed a deserved hatred for George Lazenby. He appreciates Australian Lionel Logue’s work with King George VI as portrayed in The King’s Speech, but no Australian has any business playing James Bond as Lazenby did in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

  High school Nathan watched CoCo, who was then just Conan, interview Sarah Vowell about her book Assassination Vacation, probably on 21 February 2006. (That book is an excellent read and, incidentally, is how I learned about President Garfield’s tragic assassination.) Now college Nathan wants to express history creatively like Sarah Vowell did in that book—even if it means sporting the original General Burnsides sideburns.

Now for ways in which place and time pushed me one way and I went t’other. Again, pictures.

Middle school Nathan’s parents were, and are, straight-ticket Republicans. He, however, developed a strange fascination with communism, even using the AOL screen name “SovietSting.”

     Nathan’s Texan mother pushed high school freshman Nathan into attending football summer camp. Instead of showing up to doubles, Nathan stayed home and played his Nintendo Gamecube.

      Prospective college Nathan was an intelligent, white, Protestant from Wheaton, Illinois. He did not attend Wheaton College but randomly decided to enroll in Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Go Waves.

The careful reader not distracted by these poorly Photoshopped pictures will notice that even in these contrary examples, I still reference specific places and times. These places and times did have a bearing on my choices, of course. But did they determine my choices? I’m leaning toward no.

We cannot escape where and when. We occupy space-time. But given the inputs of where and when, I believe we have a little wiggle room in choosing our own how and why. If only I could have chosen for Charles Guiteau to have been anywhere else besides Washington, D.C. on 2 July 1881. Then, I’m confident, we would all celebrate the Garfield presidency and see his bearded visage hewn into Mt. Rushmore. Would that it were. Would that it were….

President James A. Garfield takes his rightful place in the presidential hall of fame.

*2014 update: P.J. found the photo.