Soul
nullius in verba
That is what I love best about writing. It gives me a soul in words, a heart in ink. Words have always danced for me. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
One of the surefire ways to get famous on the internet is to try and describe the differences between cultures, European culture is lazy and entitled and laid back, American culture is aggressive and full of winners. Another way is to do this same thing the professions, make fun of management consulting and finance and old companies like oracle or PNG, and talk about the amazing culture of small young fast-moving startups. Yet another way is to debate the best cities, about how the Bay area is vibrant and energetic and effervescent, while New York is all about ambition and money, why London is all about old school wealth. Paul Graham wrote about this almost two decades ago.
New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.
It still holds up. And this, if we’re being poetic, is ascribing a soul to a city. One that you can feel when you step off the airplane and walk around and meet people and get a cup of coffee. What this also means is that much like Calvino’s imaginary cities, we too live in imaginary cities with familiar names that exist only inside our heads.
All of these, even written by the most hard-nosed realist, is ascribing the notion of an extant culture to a collective entity that does not exist in any way that our ancestors would have understood. We look at the collective outcome of millions of decisions made by thousands of individuals and give it a name. A mixture of shared beliefs and aesthetics and traditions and a collective nous emergent from the behaviour of those in the city and their actions. We might as well call it the soul. And even if you're not Calvino, or Neil Gaiman, you ascribe a soul to those cities.
Souls of course are hard to talk about these days. They’re invisible, and rather gauche to discuss in polite company. Jung used to talk about the soul as granting meaning, linking us to the divine, leaving the dead matter as an artificial abstraction.
But we do talk around it a lot. Modern architecture lacks style and beauty and soul. Modern literature seems to live in the shadow of the greats from the past. Poetry is not the same, as is philosophy in so many ways. Not just in an individual’s output, the golden ages are gone. The very idea of a job seems to no longer have the meaning it once did. The culture is devoid of the human connection and too into screens.
We even say it about organisations. Google lost its culture, Facebook isn't what it used to be. The government as a whole has lost its soul. The institutions that helped us reach the civilisation we live in seem to have lost their lustre.
You don’t have to believe all of this, I sure don’t, but the fact that they are felt constantly and needs to be refuted regularly is evidence of our constant yearning for something.
When we think about purchasing that bottle of lavender scented cream while on a vacation in Vis we are acting in search of the numinous. When we yearn for personalised dinners from a hole in the wall nobody knows. We talk about it in terms of quality, but when we say “did you know how amazing that best breakfast place is”, it's not quality in the objective sense that we mean here.
I don't believe in the existence of the soul, but I do believe in the existence of some group of not quite explainable characteristics, some that are incredibly well engineered to make sense inside our brains, such that that collection can enable you to perform pattern recognition that would seem like wizardry to anybody who does not believe in its existence. Or rather, that there exists something that it means to be human, and it isn't yet reducible to OKRs and metrics. I don’t believe in a soul, though I do believe in the difference a soul makes.
Douglas Adams once spoke about the potential benefit of feng shui, which while hopelessly unscientific might point at the way an organic creature might **take comfort in certain forms of surroundings vs others.
There are all sorts of things we know how to do, but don’t necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed and instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, ‘how would a dragon live here?’ We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic creatures live. We’ve never seen a dragon but we’ve all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, ‘Well if a dragon went through here, he’d get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn’t see that and he’d wave his tail and knock that vase over’. You figure out how the dragon’s going to be happy here and lo and behold! you’ve suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.
The sheer complexity of the constructs we built have outgrown our minds. It's a throwback to the old days, when lightning bolts were due to Zeus and earthquakes from Poseidon. And those days are making a comeback, we might just need an artificial god after all.
We live in the time of rampant empiricism. For almost any question there exists the question, can you prove it, with the proof that is accepted only coming in the form of hard data or scientific evidence, while scientists who are revered historically might look at this and go these people don't have a clue as to how science is actually practiced, that is might be some truths that you might not be able to truly communicate using a clearly labeled and beautifully rendered chart.
We fought our way to get here. Nullius in verba, as the Royal Society admonishes, wasn’t an easy transition to make, taken as it were from Horace, about a gladiator who is finally free from control after retirement. It only came about because the ways in which we could understand the world only grew alongside our ways to measure them. We had to believe that the ineffable was, in the end, measurable and understandable.
We can see this happen everywhere, from the attempt at capturing the incredible variety of human experience through polls and questionnaires and surveys, as well as our ability to make sense of the answers coming our way to analysing those polls, questions and surveys. It exists in the ascendance of Nate Silver. It exists in our consistent belief in the markets, and the hope at prediction markets. The arguments that go around today about the way to actually understand the economy and make sense of the negative vibes is another.
It exists even within the Byzantine nature of conspiracy theories that we now see. No longer are we bound by the beautiful simple theories of a flat earth, but instead we discuss furin cleavage sites and the correct format of performing an RCT. Even our fancies are bound in an earthen form.
The observation that there are unobservables is not, of course, a major revelation. One thing that makes this hard to internalise is that so often we are surrounded by people professing vibes that should have been replaced by data.
Let's take this one for size, the absolute insistence of employers that their employees have to come to a designated place to sit there and work. There are famous venture capital farms like founders fund, who make it part of their persona. There are companies who profess it loudly, large and small and in technology and in media and in finance, who make you marvel at the fact that there exists a topic in the world beyond tax cuts that brings these folks on the same side.
Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got. - Peter Drucker
And yet, despite the belief that all of these folks hold, that exists no proof that this might actually be net negative. In a very weird sense we have lived through the most comprehensive natural experiment. This seemed to coincide with a rise in productivity, or if you believe the haters, a plateauing of productivity combined with a reduction in cost.
No matter what your belief system here, considering the sheer size of the experiment, don't you think that we should have seen some data? If it is about ability to innovate, then where are the charts showing us the drop off in R&D intensity or product launches? If it is about junior employees and the inability to mentor them, where are the charts about how you can't grade on a curve because the entire curve has shifted down? Everyone has a perfect anecdote, nobody has data. Nullius in verba.
My theory is that we are stuck in this detente because we are using the language of scientific analysis to analyse something which is closer to weaponised nostalgia. The idea of being the leader of an organisation you can’t see, of commanding thousands of people each individually sequestered in their own homes, is profoundly weird to almost all managers.
In the old days, pre pandemic, we could pretend as if we were all part of one family and working towards a common goal like brothers in arms while sitting in our cubicles. As they got segregated into their homes and found new ways of working, this fantasy disappeared.
But the ways in which the previous world was organised had a logic that told a story. The disappearance of that story is what’s causing heartache.
And if the office is not a family, but it is merely a Coasean method of arranging ourselves to produce more than we can individually, then there is no magic left in it. There is no soul.
It's the same thing in media. People talk about the golden age of journalism and bemoan its absence, however it was always true that a large part of media was either biased or sensationalist. We just happily ignored that part because we could focus on the positives, supported by the story that the fourth estate were gratefully guarding our borders and protecting us from iniquities of the powerful.
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent. – Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Brief Lives
And once we made that illegible fact of the authority and distribution of the fourth estate legible to ourselves, and actually got the reins to do that on our own, it became much harder to look away from the negatives and focus on the positives. The stories that we read stayed hollow, the writing self aware post ironic sensationalism, and unfortunately the entire enterprise seems to have lost its soul. You only have to see TV shows that try and fail to depict this profession as noble like Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom to understand how far we diverged from this reality.
The stories we like and that we tell ourselves are personal. They are about people and they are about actions and they are about consequences. That's why in the movies the heroes are deontologists and the villains are utilitarians, because the deontologist story is a human one, a relatable one.
And unlike the easier days of the past, we no longer have a clear idea about which stories we are telling each other.
But still, we can’t not somehow feel that sense of rightness, whether that’s seeing an image or an organisation or a city or a culture, and impute to it a soul that seems to make sense to us.
But though life may fool the senses, the soul finds the truth by its own powers. – Rabindranath Tagore
Most of what we see as the “Seeing Like A State” problems of our modern life is a fight against the removal of a piece of that soul, a human-shaped piece, without putting anything else in its place.
And the interstitial places were always the ones we can never quite place in our minds as having a soul. Airports, famously, or most train stations. For character to build it needs to have at least the feel of partial permanence. So its no wonder that its in times of upheaval that we find ourselves unrooted.
The cities we ascribe various features and cultures and souls to are also artefacts that constantly change. The London of 1600 is not the London of 1800 is not the London of 2000. The same could be said for Napoleon's paris, and the 1920s Paris, and the Paris of today. The difference is that these changes happen in generational time, not within living memory like a train coming after one has just gone in the London underground.
Now, if you have come this long way, you might ask yourself what is it that best describes today. Is there even one that we can understand, or is that a job best left for future historians, or maybe an AI.
We are living in a post story world where things do not happen linearly but rather simultaneously. A pagan world where panpsychism seems empirically evident. We have genuine confusion about when exactly a machine can be said to be sentient, with some thinking that date’s already in the past.
We had a small period of time when we thought we understood most of the things that were going around us. Whether that is the economy, the organisations, our social culture and relations to each other these were all in some sense something's we could grasp, within human scale. The last time we lost it was perhaps centuries ago, millennia, when the world seemed filled with pagan gods, capricious in there desires and uncompromising. We had no choice but to bow down and worship.
Now though, we live inside an algorithm. Multiple larger-than-human creations of ours drive us in turn. That's why there's this soulless feeling about modern culture. We are the ghosts in the shell. We can keep trying to understand the shape of the shell and be reminded that the stories we used to tell each other about our comprehension no longer hold true, or we can start to tell a new story. Where the psychofauna that we are surrounded by are created by and influence us, in ways that are only made visible through living, and make peace with that ignorance.
Institutions that existed to help us make sense of the world are no longer up to the task, and there's nothing to fill that chasm.
Just like we did once before, nullius in verba, we might have to make our meaning again. It’s easier now because a decentralised form of creating communities and finding meaning seem much more feasible. Especially steeped as we are in technology. We’re also far better equipped in dealing with the large egregores we’ve erected around us to help us live in civilisation.
But meanwhile, we lose the facade that those egregores were always things we understood and things we could control. Instead it becomes like living in nature, capricious and demanding, but ultimately one you live through rather than control. That innocence, once lost, can never be regained. But as Sartre said, Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great… Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd: The glory, jest and riddle of the world! - Alexander Pope
I also recently did an Infinite Loops podcast with Jim O’Shaughnessy on my book, Building God, that you might like!
You are excellent Rohit but to quote Paul Graham and not John Ruskin (Stones of Venice) is to situate yourself outside of city time, which is vast.
I didn't know that Strange Loop Cannon was a Metamodernism blog but I like it