Some sentences just stick with you.
I never forgot the following quote from an assigned reading in college. Years later, I would discover the author of the quote, Columbia University Professor Jacques Barzun, also wrote my favorite book on research:
Fiction—written and filmed—was such a big part of my youth, I often forgot it was not actual life. That’s why Barzun’s idea struck me back in film school. I didn’t agree with it. I thought fiction had a greater presence in our lives than the Professor gave it credit.
I pursued two art degrees because I believe the arts are nothing less than human-directed evolution. When an artist and audience collectively select a work as a “masterpiece,” it becomes a doorway. It may take time for everyone to step through that door, but once we do, the species enters a new understanding of the world and thus, a new world.
All of us today live within Shakespeare’s and Dickens’ richer atmospheres. Shakespeare woke the groundlings to the drama in their human relationships. Dickens woke his readers to the morality, or lack of it, in their lives.
We are different than our ancestors because of extraordinary individuals, groups, and their works. We are also more anxious.
I wrote about how smartphones and digital cameras can either strengthen sight or replace it just like a calculator can advance our math skills or do the work for us. The decision to use a tool to improve or weaken our muscles always rests in the individual.
We can’t go back to a time before the iPhone, and we shouldn’t want to go back. It’s another threshold we stepped across collectively because we saw the benefits and knew we could solve the problems.
Our growing anxiety is a product of greater cognition and metacognition. I’ve also written about our growing levels of mindfulness. We ask modern children to think on multiple levels, and to question everything, even their dearest foundations and beliefs. It’s unprecedented and arduous and far more than we’ve asked any generation previous.
Today’s New York City would strike dumb any of Dicken’s Victorian Londoners with its choices and freedoms, never mind an Elizabethan like Hamlet.
America, and its culture of checks and balances and diversity, has little in common with any foreign nation with a history of tradition and a homogenous people. As I just wrote about America, we troll ourselves, often too much.
Look at this footage of old New York.
Our ancestors, in their dapper suits and dresses, were wrapped up tighter than an Apple product. Even the villains who bombed Wall Street in 1920 no doubt wore lapels and bowlers. People just weren’t exposed to the amounts of nonconformity and creativity that exist today.
Yet those same people in New York were a new people, made of nations the world over. Their diverse mixing still produces most of the world’s Nobel Prize winners.
Though their improved knowledge exists right now, about our minds, bodies, societies, and actions, the conversations online reveal how little has penetrated the average life. People still believe in an “eye for an eye” or that “seeing is believing.” It takes a while for everyone to get through the doors.
I expect how unevenly we progress has a lot to do with our anxieties as well.
Anxiety is the energy created when people face choices over habit and they recognize their situation is partly up to chance and partly up to them. College kids are drowning in too many choices these days.
Students need another level of education to prepare them for our increasing levels of introspection and innovation. AI won’t cut it, and neither will teaching that continues to look for algorithms to memorize and follow.
Every day, with every new invention, our children do not wither in the richer atmosphere of what was previously fiction—they fight to improvise within it. With more creative use of computers and calculators and cameras, they will build muscles their grandparents never knew existed.
They might even use those muscles to shake the hands of Hamlet and Mr. Pickwick.