Post #204: Mental Culture in the Digital Age
10 Sep. 2026
Immanuel Kant identified the guiding principle of the Age of Enlightenment as sapere aude, daring to think for oneself, and thereby emerging from one’s self-imposed immaturity.* The Buddha taught that everything depends on the right use of our minds—not only in the lofty spiritual sense, but in cultivating everyday clear thinking and insightful, wise common sense. All philosophy starts from the premise that sharpening our mental faculties is not only worthwhile, but that an unexamined, unreflective life is so inferior as to be hardly worth living at all, as Plato had Socrates say.
But surely we have been going the other way of late: these days it has become commonplace to put the body before the mind, and to make no secret of it, nay to advertise the fact with pride. Witness the abominable stickmen that I keep pointing to as evident symptoms of mental decay. If we do not balk at being depicted as pinheads at every turn, if we do not even notice it or shrug it off, then what are we saying about how much we really value our mental faculties anymore?**
There is even a specious rationale now for no longer caring about mental cultivation. Since AI (or the internet, in prior years) will always be smarter than you, goes the argument, and since you can so easily free-ride on someone else’s brain, why bother with your own? Put all importance on developing your physique instead, or your appearance generally, since this you cannot borrow from anyone else. (You might notice, even at first glance, that the ideas guiding you in doing so will come from—and be accessible to—others, meaning that you are by the very nature of your strategy not likely to stand out as much as you are hoping. To put it more bluntly, the copycat look only appeals to those who do not know any better—a large contingent, admittedly, but one that excludes the discerning by definition.)
Such reasoning may have the appearance of common sense; alas, as one would expect from underdeveloped faculties, it misses something essential. True, you really can borrow the minds of others, at negligible cost, but you will stunt your own development by the habit. And this will affect your ability to borrow wisely, because first you need to know what to ask for, where to find it, and how to assess the quality of what you are getting. No matter how good AI may be at harvesting answers for you (and throwing fakes into the mix without scruples), it cannot tell you what to ask, nor what to make of (and do with) the answers it provides. Besides, even if you cared only about making an attractive impression, you would be sadly mistaken in thinking that only visuals count. Others can hear you, not only see you, and although our inside lives are not revealed at a glance the way surface looks are, our thinking does become visible to others such that it can quite overshadow everything else. Take Socrates, who was no looker on the outside, but who had some of the best-looking Athenians after him, Alcibiades for one.
Clothes make the man, it used to be said, and lately we seem to think that muscles do. But this is true only inasmuch as you wish to impress the correspondingly shallow-minded. Never mind that there will always be someone better dressed, more handsome, and more buff than you, just as there will be someone smarter. The young and foolish, or those overly bulge-minded at any age, should be aware that almost nothing suggests mental shortcomings more surely (to the thinking man at least) than the prize-bull look that is so much in favor these days.
Not that each and every one of those who follow this wretched fashion is dim-witted or uncouth, of course; all the more worrying that so many should be so untroubled by giving such an unfavorable impression of their mental lives. If they think this is the way to project manliness, they are a few centuries, even millennia behind (retarded, so to speak); and if they think this is the way to get the girl, not just keep up with the boys at the meathead factory, they might ask themselves, in a moment of clarity, how our species could have become so dominant if women were in the habit of selecting for biceps over brains, or crudeness over polish and pluck. It happens, of course, but so do car crashes and train wrecks. (As for the steroid craze among young men especially, for goodness’s sake read the fine-print at least, even if you will not read much else.)
People often get the idea that I must hate AI, given how forcefully I argue against its use in education. But they are quite wrong: I am in awe of what AI can do (see no. 195 for instance), and I both enjoy the benefits now and look forward to what more may come. At the same time I do worry about the losses I see accompanying these stupendous new prospects. If the price for becoming giants collectively is that we must turn into pigmies individually, then I am not in a rush to forge ahead. The point here is not my rejecting technology, which I have never done, but our urgent need to find wiser ways of using it—a wisdom that has not, I would say, been much in evidence these past thirty years of technological advances by leaps and bounds.
Matthew Arnold became an apostle of the book-creed when he proclaimed that culture in its fullest sense (“the great help out of our present difficulties”) meant nothing other than “the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters that most concern us, the best that has been thought and said in the world.” (Preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869), pp. 5–6 in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of 2006.) Reading the right books, he fervently believed, was what conferred the keys to the kingdom—that is to say, books worked through with the brain, not merely glanced at with the eyes, displayed on shelves, or held aloft before others as fashionable accessories, as has so often been the habit among ostentatious readers.
Such soaring faith in the power of the printed page may look more of a relic than ever, especially to the many who do not know a Victorian from a Swiss Army knife. But I remain unpersuaded by the detractors: I have long held (since being assigned Fowler’s French Lieutenant’s Woman in my last year of high school) that we get the Victorians quite wrong when we reduce them to the retrograde priggishness that we attribute to them. In fact they were true pioneers, who shaped the modern world with such resounding success (electricity, hygiene, evolution, humanitarianism) that we take their legacy for granted, as if it were no more than the natural state of things, which it is emphatically not. The rigidities that look so conspicuous to us were handrails to hold on to in an age that took even more drastic strides than ours from one generation to the next. (From landlines to mobiles is a big step, but not as huge as introducing telephones in the first place, or developing the very concept of electricity, without which there could be no electronics at all.) What was so remarkable, then, about the leading lights of the day especially, was not how much they clung to, but how much they were able to let go of without getting unmoored.
Coming back to Arnold and the power of books, I know very well what it has meant for my life that reading—which was already endangered by cable television in my youth (as per Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I was also made to read in high school)—prevailed against the currents of the time, after an uncertain period during early adolescence, owing to very unusual teachers and fortunate intellectual circumstances in the late 80s and early 90s in Berlin, followed by time-travel for three years at an Oxford that had barely arrived in the 20th century, right before it was violently propelled into the 21st against all the grain of its cherished traditions.***
I can also see, in my Gen-Z classrooms today, what a difference even a single twelve-week term can make for students—many of whom come to me with practically no offscreen reading experience, and often with an outright aversion to books—when for the first time in their lives they sit down with serious texts twice a week for an hour or two (or three, or four in some cases). I do not ask the impossible and assign them no more than ten pages per session, but on that much I insist (gently but firmly, with ample compensation in points). Nor am I prepared to make concessions on the quality of the readings. Mirabile dictu, what may appear to millennial scoffers as no more than antediluvian recalcitrance on my part has the intended effect more often than I would have expected myself, with students regularly telling me, after battling their way through previously hostile territory, and conquering small but significant portions of it, how the experience has changed their minds fundamentally and in ways they never expected. I’ve even been thanked, expressly and seriously (I have it in writing), for not giving up on Gen Z by members of that forlorn generation themselves. They know whereof they speak.
It is true that reading is not native and natural to us in the way that speaking and listening are; but then culture and civilization are not gifts of nature either, but something that had to be built up, generation by generation, with much effort and sacrifice. So far as the past quarter-millennium goes, whose heirs we are so thoroughly, books have been indispensable. It may be that we are discovering better ways; but before we destroy what we have known to be of such inestimable value—the ability to read not just in the technical and perfunctory, but in the profound sense, that is, carefully for deep meaning—I would like to be sure that what our brave new world substitutes for our bookshelves is indeed demonstrably superior. And I am not convinced.
If we can move ahead while preserving what was best about the old ways, then I am all for it. Otherwise not, and I will fight for every inch of shifting ground, even if it is a losing battle. We cannot always prevail in life; in the end we are always defeated, as individual organisms; but at least we can keep the colors flying, come what may, even as we go down, and pass along some of what we were given to those who come after us. If they still care to take it.
*”Laziness and timidity are the reasons why such a large portion of mankind remain immature all their lives, though nature has long declared them free from needing to be led by others; and also why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so much more comfortable to remain immature! If I have a book [or better yet, a clever screen] that reasons for me, a priest who serves as my conscience, a doctor who is responsible for my diet, and so on, then I don’t have to make any effort myself.” (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (1784))
**The latest outrage I spotted the other day at the aptly named Upside Down Café that recently opened in a trendy part of town here. Right at the center of the menu I found a specimen of indeterminate sex with so diminutive a head that the cappuccino cup before him-her could fit the space left for his-her brain at least fifty times. (I am not joking or exaggerating: I took a picture to prove it.) Not that I would make too much of kokology and its premise that the relative space we assign to objects when we draw them without deliberation says something about the relative psychological weights we are attaching; but when the phenomenon is so egregious and persistent, and when it has been popping up around the globe for a good decade or more already, then I would not dismiss it as insignificant, let alone as funny. If this is the kind of fun we are having now, then we are indeed well on the way to amusing ourselves to death. (The previous recordholder in brainlessness was, to my great chagrin, none other than the usually sound Economist, for putting on the cover of their 30 Sep. 2023 issue on “Living to 120”—no thank you, I say, given the cultural terms as we are currently being offered!—a most disgraceful stickman whose feet occupied easily twenty times the space left for any speck of a brain. See my howl of protest in no. 71; also no. 83 on the disturbing generational dimension to these waking nightmares.)
***Thus one of my favorite passages from Arnold, chapter 1, pp. 46–47: “Oxford, the Oxford of the past, had many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth: the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling that sap our adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future.”