The Binaries of Adam Gopnik

As Adam Gopnik tours the Internet with Never-Betters and Better-Nevers, one has to ask, Does the binary make the writer, or the writer make the binary?

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It's been two and a half years since my last blog entry. In that time I've done not much important. There was a venal thing about a website, mortal exchanges with a girl or two, and an unholy amount of commuting to Vancouver's eastern quarters by bus and train. My ignorance remains intact – unassailable, even.

And as that last sentence shows, I've betrayed the em dash for her sister, en. My new girl pines for the spotlight less. A case of preferring Jan to Marcia, maybe, but once you get past the honey-coloured hair and deliciously long neck, Marcia's charms run cruelly thin. And so it is with the em. What was thrilling became gratuitous. Nothing gold can stay.

Adam Gopnik pulls this Feb. 2011 Internet
rumination out of the fire after opening with breezy
dismissal and a glib Nazi put-down.

Adam Gopnik won me back in the course of his recent survey of digital technologies and their impact on our lives, "How the Internet Gets Inside Us" (February 14th). The piece sketches out the essential responses of three groups of thinkers on the subject:

The Never-Betters, like Clay Shirky, who believe that we're on the crest of an ever-surging wave of democratized information, and that advances in technology are making humans ever freer.

The Better-Nevers, like Nicholas Carr, who are pessimistic about the Internet; they worry that by radically fracturing our attention and keeping us busy it breaks down our capacity for reflective thought.

And then the Ever-Wasers, who claim that a sense of vertiginous overload has always been central to our experience of modernity – that we might not be fully human if we weren't whining about the malign effects of clay pots, or television, or the Internet.

I say won me back because the article started slight. The clanking came early, in the writer's breezy dismissal of Shirky and Co.'s (admittedly thin) sketch of technological history. While mostly conceding Shirky's thesis – that greater information freedom eventually leads to greater personal freedom – Gopnik takes pains to remind us that It Wasn't Easy. Before that freedom arrived, he says, a lot of bad shit went down: book burnings, Martin Luther's "newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism," and "100 years of religious warfare." While you're savouring that liberty omelette, Mr. Shirky, forget not the broken eggs.

One of Gopnik's kicks at Nicolas Carr also feels less than fully gracious. Martin Heidegger's clairvoyant claim that "new technologies would break the meditational space on which Western wisdoms depend" is meaningless, he says, because, well, Heidegger later walked into the arms of the Nazis.

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882)

This was where I got to squinting and Billy Idoling a lip on the #22 bus. Does the one disqualify the other? Is the wagon not big enough for two ideas – that Heidegger was an asshole and had a profound observation of technology?

But I'm not sure "both/and" much works for Adam Gopnik. The literary binary, pivoting on "either/or," is his hammer, nails, and sawhorse. Take from this article our mirrored Never-Betters and Better-Nevers. Or look back to my favourite Gopnik piece, an examination of the life and legacy of Charles Darwin that attempts to reconcile another dyad – deep (geologic) time and quick (momentary) time.

"The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.

The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly – not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either."

Gopnik's binaries, if they were clunky or facile, would be as repellent George Bush's "With us or against us." But they're tightly sewn, and crucially move past thesis/antithesis toward synthesis. The binary is often deployed to to effect a burst of clarity or recognition, but not here. Gopnik's interested in a deeper question. 

And sometimes the question happens to be beautiful. Again from "How the Internet Gets Inside Us":

Everything once inside [you] is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet...has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.

* Republished, for no particular reason, on July 4, 2014. Actually, there was a reason: I'd just had a too-clever-by-half conversation about Gopnik's latest piece in the magazine, about cooking and memory and his eccentric mother, and remembered the cruelty of James Wolcott's takedown in 2007, and wondered whether it was as unfairly vituperative as I'd thought.

The Sensitive Atom: Panexperientialism & Human Importance

"A sparrow does not fall to the ground without God's awareness" (Matthew 10:29).

While Adam Gopnik has us on the subject of Matthew, Darwin, and human significance, let's look at another formulation of meaning and the cosmos.

Panexperientialism: the idea that everything—humans, dogs, mosquitoes, trees, blades of grass, and atoms—has feelings, or an inner life.

According to one of the "most decorated spirituality and ethics writers in North America," Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd:

"There is an intimate correlation between matter, emotion and that elusive quality we now call spirit."

"When it comes to understanding the environment, panexperientialism is also crucial. Humans develop a closer kinship with nature when they recognize that everything on the planet is ultimately made up of things that feel."

"This is not to say humans and a blade of grass are equal. Humans are infinitely more complex, possessing all sorts of emotions, thoughts and aspirations of which a blade of grass, literally, cannot dream."

I wrote him a letter.

* * *

Sun reporter Douglas Todd

Dear Douglas Todd,

I'm glad I read your column in this morning's Sun: I was dreading sitting down to my Saturday homework, but your argument about panexperientialism so alarmed me that I rushed to the computer with a cup of coffee and here I am now at 9:15 AM. Thank you.

So, divinity is "embedded in the evolutionary process, which works through a combination of chance and purpose"? That sounds like intelligent design to me. By your disclaimer, I was hoping your exploration of panexperientialism was a gesture of charity to those readers who asked for it. But you seem to think it was "the most important part" of your column, too.

The notion seems a last-ditch attempt by religious people to affirm human beings' centrality in the universe. If Christians now concede that a dominion-style relationship with the bears and sparrows, rocks and trees, as laid out in Genesis, leads to environmental rape and spoil, they have two ways to even the balance

• Make everything meaningful
• Make themselves meaningless

Panexperientialism is the former choice: man, assured of his own importance, magnanimously accords it to everything else.

And that would be fine, as far as it went—humans on par with the world of things. But then the ugly notion of primacy creeps back in: "This is not to say humans and a blade of grass are equal."

Do we need the special recognition for humans, Mr. Todd? Are we equal to the world or superior to it?

Here's a crazy idea: We make ourselves peers with the atom, not by making it feel, but by accepting that neither of us matters much.

Insisting on human importance will not, to use your phrase, "urge us towards beauty." Forgetting it will.

Best regards,

John Bucher

P.S. I've attached an excerpt of Adam Gopnik's recent article about Charles Darwin. It applies to this question, I think, and you both reference the same Matthew verse.

* * *

Dear John Bucher,

Thank you for your letter. We'll have to agree to disagree about panexperientialism. If you'd like, you can send your letter to the Letters section of the Sun, but I have no control over whether it gets published.

It's up to you.

Sincerely,

Douglas Todd

Deep time

Glaring and bescarfed Adam Gopnik sure sounds kinder than he looks. I caught half of his CBC Ideas lecture last night while driving into town.

In it (podcast due Feb. 5) Gopnik expounded a question he recently asked his kids: Do you prefer theatres, where you can sit? Or museums, where you can talk?

His point is that context is everything. Our experience of art, say, is "impure" because it is inseparable from our experience of the museum as a place of courting, of flirting, of surveying. Religions are the same: we can't tease the sanctified part from the ululating and the slaying of neighbors.

It's still early in this blog, so I'll be spare with terms like 'startling erudition' and 'searingly urbane,' mostly because 'sear' should always be followed by something something in a balsamic reduction. But Gopnik's got it going on. He's in the running for a golden ticket and a tour of the factory.

Luckily, I obsessed over a Darwin piece of his from October; I could see where he was cribbing it in his lecture. He read my favorite part almost word for word.

Bookworld, who also thought that section "very fine," quotes the last four paragraphs, although, for me, this part, about Time's relationship to Meaning, is the nut:

"In Darwin's work, time moves at two speeds: there is the vast abyss of time in which generations change and animals mutate and evolve; and then there is the gnat's-breath, humming-bird-heart time of creaturely existence, where our children are born and grow and, sometimes, die before us.

"The space between the tiny but heartfelt time of human life and the limitless time of Nature became Darwin's implicit subject. Religion had always reconciled quick time and deep time by pretending that the one was in some way a prelude to the other—a prelude or a prologue or a trial or a treatment. Artists of the Romantic period, in an increasingly secularized age, thought that through some vague kind of transcendence they could bridge the gap. They couldn't. Nothing could. The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.

"The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly—not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either."

Brilliantly sly how, in the penultimate sentence of that second chunk, he buries the really earthshattering sentiment—life has no meaning—in a slippery grammatical structure. By the time you get to the "it" you've nearly forgotten he means "everything."

Here are three big questions:

• Are the things you love meaningful?
• Does your loving them make them meaningful?
• Would you love them if they were ultimately meaningless?