Prelude

August 8, 2008

A favorite author of mine has some sage advice for bloggers and people participating in social networks and why it can be a valuable activity:

[An account of a trivial event] would be rather pointless were it not for the instruction that I derived from it for myself [...] Now as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.

And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am using only what is mine. If I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone.

He goes on to address the question of the value of the privilege granted to “experts” as opposed to exploring and thinking for oneself:

I have no doubt that I happen to speak of things that are better treated by masters of the craft, and more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural faculties, and not at all of the acquired ones; and whoever will catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less. These are my fancies, by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself. The things will perhaps be known to me some day, or have been once, according as fortune may have brought me to the places where they were made clear. But I no longer remember them. And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.

[...]

I have no other marshal but fortune to arrange my bits. As my fancies present themselves, I pile them up; now they come pressing in a crowd, now dragging single file. I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace, however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am. Besides, these are not matters of which we are forbidden to be ignorant and to speak casually and at random.

[...]

I speak my mind freely on all things, even those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no means hold to be in my jurisdiction. And so the opinion I give to them is to declare the measure of my sight, not the measure of things.

And, as many bloggers have been noting lately, it is important to honor our own diversity:

Not only does the wind of accident move me at will, but, besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture; and anyone who observes carefully can hardly find himself twice in the same state. I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly, and prodigal: all this I see in myself to some extent according to how I turn; and whoever studies himself really attentively finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and that discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word. Distinguo is the most universal member of my logic.”

And to embrace the diversity of others who do not think like us… no groupthink!

I do not hate all opinions contrary to mine. I am far from being vexed to see discord between my judgment and others’, and from making myself incompatible with the society of men because they are of a different sentiment and party from mine, that on the contrary, since variety is the most general fashion nature has followed… I find it much rarer to see our humors and plans agree. And there were never in the world two opinions alike, anymore than two hairs or two grains. Their most natural universal quality is diversity.

However, in being an individual who is also part of a networked community, we must carve out the space for ourselves… the participatory network should be the small visible part of an iceberg of contemplation, consideration, and thought:

We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.

In solitude be to thyself a throng (said Tibullus).

And in a disclaimer more than worthy of adaptation to my own, he notes:

If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.

Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.

I agree, too, that we don’t need less of the personal, introspective and individual in blogs and other networked communications, but more– don’t buy into the lie of the “merely” personal:

Custom has made speaking of oneself a vice, and obstinately forbids it out of hatred for the boasting that seems always to accompany it. Instead of blowing the child’s nose, as we should, this amounts to pulling it off.

[...]

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him order the architect to speak of buildings but not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man’s knowledge, not his own…

Perhaps they mean that I should testify about myself by works and deeds, not bare words. What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions. It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words. Some of the wisest and most devout men have lived avoiding all noticeable actions. My actions would tell more about fortune than about me. They bear witness to their own part, not to mine, unless it be by conjecture and without certainty: they are samples which display only details. I expose myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its own place. One part of what I am was produced by a cough, another by a pallor or palpitation of the heart– in any case dubiously. It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.

Montaigne wrote these wise words almost 500 years ago… maybe we should start listening.

Tags: participation, thinking, Writing