The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech at Kenyon University
This section of the speech reminds me of a section of Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness in which he notes that the clinically depressed have a very realistic view of their importance in the world, and “tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations.” Which, of course, leads to the illustrious’ Adams tale of the fairycake, which ends by concluding “the one thing that a person cannot afford to have in a universe this size is a sense of perspective”.
What Wallace is talking about is empathy, but on the other side of it is the abyss, the Horror, the Horror, the part where reason trumps biological impetus and one is left with neither intrinsic nor extrinsic motivation. The rest of his speech goes down this path, detailing the mundanities of a life day-to-day and coming up with: nothing, no reason to wake up, no reason to go out and subject oneself to traffic and Musak and fluorescent lights. His recommended solution is more empathy: focus on others, get out of one’s own head; but that strikes me as more of a temporary relief than a real solution.
