'No one can say the last and complete word about any of us'
We're never final, and that's a great relief
Greetings, everyone! When I took such a long break last winter, I knew that getting back on the horse to create this content would be challenging. But I may have underestimated how hard that would be.
But also, the times have changed. The world I was confronting, both in my mind and the larger globe around me, has shifted significantly in the past 18 months. So I will count today’s post as a win and move on.
Thanks for sticking with me here!
You Are Not a Server
In today’s post, I want to direct our attention to a recent article by one of my favorite authors Alan Jacobs written in The Hedgehog Review. In the piece, Jacobs notes:
So it is natural and indeed inevitable that we today think of our brains as computers, even though that is an inaccurate and woefully inadequate model. But I would like to suggest that, because there are many kinds of computers that perform widely varied functions, we should be more specific. I believe that we have been trained by social media to use our brains as servers—as machines designed to receive requests and respond to them according to strict instructions.1
The word strict is doing the damage here, as social media has trained us in an almost Pavlovian way to respond to what’s presented to us:
That request-response method is precisely what social media encourages us to practice. You must, like a server, respond in the designated way to the request.2
And social media is happy to give us a few specific choices.
So you have choices, and your decision may be consequential for you—but the choices are very limited, and it is necessary to avoid ambiguity. This combination of rigidity and consequentiality has the effect of producing rote responses…3
Jacobs shows how these limited choices we are given to think about have the unintended consequence of making us feel boxed in; they make us believe we can only respond to situations in a few minimal methods. This thinking has an authoritarian feel to it.
However, we are not servers; we are humans, and as such, our responses can exceed these imposed limits.
Someone who lived under a genuinely totalitarian regime, the great Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, often wrote about what he called the “surplus,” a term he used in several ways. The one I want to emphasize is this: The surplus of any human being (me, you, my neighbor) is what exceeds description, what cannot be expressed in any sociological definitions of identity. In his magnificent essay “Epic and Novel” (1941), Bakhtin writes of the “surplus of humanness” that each of us possesses and that makes us—this is a numinous term for him—“unfinalizable.” No one can say the last and complete word about any of us. It is the ambition of all authoritarian regimes, social or political, to utter that final and definitive word about whoever comes within its orbit; it is, for Bakhtin, an ethical imperative to refuse that final word, whether uttered about myself or my neighbor.4
Unlike servers, we don’t have to live by the request-response methodology. We don’t have a simple list of prescribed ways to reply, even though many of our media technologies and underlying metaphors tell us otherwise. As humans, we have a “surplus,” which I think is ultimately derived from our being made in the image of God.
So today, the question in front of us is perhaps something like this: As we encounter questions that demand a response, are we going to accept the framing presented to us, or are we going to realize that we have more agency and control than we think we do in how we respond?
You can check out the whole piece here.
And with that, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.