In his commencement address at Kenyon College, Wallace suggested that
learning how to think really means learning to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Wallace is saying something important: the ability to direct our attention as we will is a basic condition for living well. This sounds about two-thirds right to me, but I want to quarrel with his language of “choice”—the language of mere decision—which makes it sound like “construct[ing] meaning from experience” is somehow arbitrary, and insist rather that meaning and agency are tied in interesting ways to our efforts to reconcile ourselves to a world that is what it is, and find ways to love it.
Wallace states the central problem of life as one of critical self- awareness, as opposed to self-absorption. “[A] huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” In particular, “everything in my immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe . . .” The task, then, is one of “somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of the self.” His point, he makes clear, is not a moral one about being altruistic. The point is not to be deluded, “lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me . . .”
The reason to worry about being self-centered is that it makes it hard to cope with life. “There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration.” He describes the experience of getting off work, exhausted, and having to endure traffic and a crowded supermarket before getting home.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.
Wallace offers for the graduates a train of thought about fat, ugly SUV drivers, and points out that patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the most disgustingly selfish vehicles. The crowd begins to cheer, and Wallace intervenes: “This is an example of how NOT to think, though.” Then he gives some examples of what he has in mind by way of choosing to think differently.
In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Wallace concedes that “none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible.” Such generosity is meant as a corrective to our default setting, which is to be sure we know what reality is, to be sure it revolves around us, and therefore not to consider “possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable” when it comes to others who stand in our way. But “if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.”
This impatient, hostile self-absorption is spot-on as a description of my own default state, while driving especially. And Wallace is surely right about the need for charity of interpretation in our dealings with others, not least for the sake of our own tranquillity. The criticism I would like to make of his account begins with a seemingly minor point: when he suggests that the generous response results from “learn[ing] how to pay attention,” I think he has misdescribed his own examples. They are acts of imagination, not attention. He is positing scenarios that will engage his sympathies. On this point turn some crucial matters.
The first is a practical question about how effective or sustainable such an approach is likely to be. Wallace recommends a basically Stoic strategy of minimizing one’s pain by changing one’s beliefs about the irritants that are disturbing one. The problem with the Stoic strategy is that beliefs involve states of affairs in the world, so it isn’t simply up to us to decide to believe what we want. It would be nonsensical to come into a building and announce, “It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it.” Short of such outright contradiction, one has only so much interpretive latitude before one’s imaginings take on a hallucinatory aspect. Forrest Gump has a positive affect that is impervious to the world, but there is something defective about him.
Despite his repeated references to attention, Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that “you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.” But is this not, precisely, “to see and interpret everything through this lens of the self” and thus reproduce the problem that he is trying to solve? Wallace speaks a subjectivist language in which we posit the world, and do so according to the free movement of our will. His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own. Wallace’s therapy is offered in the spirit of virtual reality.
Iris Murdoch, like Wallace, is impressed by the problem of self-enclosure. But she suggests a different way out of one’s head—what we might call the Epicurean way. The Epicurean recommendation, in contrast to the Stoic, is that if you are being disturbed by some unwanted emotion, it is a shift of attention, rather than a willful effort of belief, that will deliver you from it. As she writes:
Where strong emotions of sexual love, or of hatred, resentment, or jealousy are concerned, “pure will” can usually achieve little. It is small use telling oneself “Stop being in love, stop feeling resentment, be just.” What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source. Notice the metaphors of orientation and of looking . . . Deliberately falling out of love is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing.
Murdoch’s therapy is predicated on realism: new energies come from real objects that one becomes interested in. This strikes me as more thoroughly liberating than the effort of reinterpretation that Wallace recommends. It is less concerned with moral improvement or being just. You simply abandon the object that is tormenting you. You walk away, and don’t even notice that you have done so, because your energies are focused elsewhere.
