Writing In The Stupid Age
Anne HavertyDec 05, 2024
Essay
This is the text of the 2024 Stinging Fly lecture, which was delivered at the United Arts Club in Dublin on October 23rd 2024.
I tried to resist calling this lecture Writing in the Stupid Age. It’s going to be misunderstood, I was told. Well, none of us likes to think we live and have our days in a time more stupid than others we might have lived in. All previous ages were the dark ages, we like to believe, and we are the new and enlightened ones. It gets reiterated decade after decade. But my ‘stupid age’ has nothing to do with Intelligence Quotient, low or high or mid-range, or yours or mine. The most intelligent are as capable as the least of wrong thinking or of not thinking at all.
I did consider other options. The Absent Age was a strong contender because of the growing absence from ourselves, aspects of ourselves we think of as particularly human, at the present time. But it seemed a bit subtle for this unsubtle era.
It could have been the Fanatic Age, subject as we are to the call of a variety of ideologies, some of them scarily fanatical. But the fanatical were always with us. History is filled with them. They simply have more means available to them now of imposing their fanaticisms on us.
The Age of Hypocrisy? As it has been described, for example by the journalist Martin Jacques. Or the Age of Hyperbole? – hyperbole being one consequence of the suspicion in our culture of the expression of critical thinking; except of course for criticism, usually vituperative, of targets culturally approved. Critical expression, dissent from the prevailing attitudes, has come to be considered anti-social and egoistic. In the darker regions online there’s the oppositional hyperbole of insult and vindictiveness.
‘Stupid’ however includes all those various alternatives. Although I’m thinking now that the Stupefying Age would say more precisely what I mean by ‘stupid’. Which is, that we, the clever and the less clever alike, are allowing ourselves to be stupefied or made stupid. As a friend astutely put it ‘there is no time to be not stupid’. We are not giving ourselves the time or the space or the permission to be not stupefied.
If you look at the etymology of the word ‘stupid’ – and of course I used the net and not the dictionary to look it up, I appreciate as much as anyone the convenient encyclopaedic capaciousness of the net – you will find it suits my meaning precisely. ‘Stupid’ is an old word, nearly two millennia old. It comes from the Latin when its meaning was to be ‘amazed, stunned, confounded’.
Exactly. We are amazed, we are stunned, we are confounded. Now, in principle I’m all for being stunned. But we are allowing ourselves to be stunned by and enslaved to a technology without any thought for the consequences. We have made it an object of wonder and veneration – which is what ‘stupendous’, a derivation of ‘stupid’, means.
Is this any different, is it even better, than making books objects of wonder and veneration? As I and lots of my generation and those before us did? This is a complex question but some kind of answer might be implicit if I tell you a bit about my reading life; how it began and about its place in deepening and enlarging my perception of the world.
I was lucky, books were around me from early on. Shortly before I turned seven, known as the age of reason, we moved from the country into the town. For me, this was an unwanted uprooting. That place had been rich in its variety of people and drama and interest. I had lived there in an intense state of observation.
We moved around the New Year during the Christmas holidays. Two big plywood boxes that we called tea-chests, came with us. One tea-chest was filled with small pink apples from the trees in the garden at the old house. The other tea-chest was filled with books. I don’t remember all these books being there in the old house though they must have been. Finding them piled up together in the tea-chest was like finding treasure. I had just learned how to read – driven to it because my older sister had announced she wasn’t going to read to me anymore. In those precious days before we would face the ordeal of the new school we nestled, myself and my sisters, between the two chests, lost in eating the apples and reading the books. I don’t remember what books they were, I suppose they were children’s books. I only remember that reading them was a refuge from the world outside and, offering a gateway to another world, a kind of sublime.
I wrote a poem about that week and leaving that house. The poem is called ‘Paradise’. The last line is ‘that was the week I fell to earth’. I remember it as the week of getting a new kind of awareness, and if the getting of awareness is a fall it was that.
Critical thinking came not long after when, to my grief and some indignation, I saw that there were good books and there were bad books. A few pages into a book from Enid Blyton’s Chalet School series, I found I couldn’t go on. I had liked Blyton’s books, but suddenly I found the writing wooden, the tone righteous. These girls in the chalet school were presenting some lesson I was meant to learn. I could tell it was about conforming, instructing me in a way of thinking and seeing. I refused to learn it, refused Enid Blyton. My reaction was fierce. Blyton’s name on a book cover could make me feel slightly sick.
A narrative now prevails that the latter decades of the last century were no different than the ones before them, those post-revolutionary decades when the Church was at its most powerful and worked symbiotically with society to enforce the social order. Those born around the 1920s and 30s, my mother’s generation, were particularly scarred by it.
But I see my generation of the 60s, the 70s, as a lucky one, maybe the luckiest before or since. There was an interregnum between the strictures of the recent past and the strictures to come. The air was light, you could sense Ireland shaking itself off and catching up with the big world out there that was seizing its freedoms. Most of us got glimpses only of the inevitable grim underside.
You often see that time described, like the time before it, as priest- and nun-ridden, our voices silent, our lives lived in black and white. I don’t remember it like that. Maybe this is partly because we didn’t have television in our house until late in the day and I have a suspicion that watching a lot of television when it was only in black and white may have left an impression of a black and white real world. The process of colourising old films allows a world that had been shades of grey to leap into colour, revealing it to be no less colourful than ours.
We need to remember that the story of the past is never fixed. History gets re-written in every generation to suit the purposes of the time.
For example, another narrative is that there were no women writers until about 1990. When I had moved on from the tea-chest and was getting my books from the library in town, I thought books were mostly written by women. The books I read were by Nesbit and Norton and Streatfield – I would feel especially happy when I found a Streatfield I hadn’t read – and, before I saw her in her true colours, Blyton. Once I realised that books were written by real people, I made the decision that I was going to be one of them. It would be a hard thing to do, I knew, to write a book, it would be impossible surely. But the idea that being female could be an impediment didn’t enter my head.
I knew it was do-able because when we lived in Holycross, in that country house, there was a neighbour who wrote, a novelist called Mrs Garnett. She was a colourful figure with a London accent and she dyed her hair a bright red. She had written a novel called Men I Have Kissed. My mother had read it and been disappointed, though I don’t know why. But she clearly admired Mrs Garnett for having written it. There was a literary agent living along the road who thumped his typewriter all day and got bulky parcels in the post from foreign countries. He may have been the agent for Mrs Garnett’s Men I Have Kissed.
The first really serious book I remember reading was George Eliot’s Adam Bede. It was in the school library. The school library was a large light-filled room in the charge of Sister Mary of the Immaculate Heart, better known as Mol Mac. Mol Mac would go to Dublin regularly to buy the latest novels on Penguin’s paperback list. Girls who used the library to do their homework instead of taking down a book to read were told to pack their bags and go and do it at home.
Adam Bede is Eliot’s novel about a fallen woman. Its sombre gravity, the girl Hetty’s piteous fate, the severe punishment society would mete out to the transgressor of its rules impressed me greatly. I could see the society around me presented a facade only a little kinder in these matters than it was in Eliot’s time a century before. It might be less forgiving, less generous, than the nuns would be.
To outward appearances the school I went to was an average convent school in an average country town. But it seems to have been unusual. From what I hear about other schools, it may even have been unique. It did have its quota of old-style nuns who were models of piety and compliance and there was one I experienced as fairly wicked. But they were eclipsed by a cohort who were on a liberalising mission. These nuns were energetic, enthusiastic women, back from courses at UCD and UCC in the new theology and philosophy and who knows what.
This wasn’t always a good thing. One of the English teachers took a course on the short story and lectured us severely on the profound significance of the genre and how hard it would be, unattainable in fact, to write a good one. She talked to us as if we were taking a writing class. This was discouraging. The few short stories I write are written with the sense that they’re bound to fail.
They told us they were teaching us to think. The ability to think, and the habit of thinking, was to be the most important takeaway of our educational experience. In religion class we could announce we were agnostic or atheist and not be censured. There was a small pantheist group. Sometimes a lecturer, a Doctor of Divinity and a sensitive man, would come from the seminary conveniently situated across the street from the school to take the class. One day our triumphant arguments against the existence of God – the existence or non-existence of a deity was our favourite topic in these classes – made him weep and his voice shake.
Neither was the compelling topic of sex shirked. An agony aunt of the day, Angela Mac Namara, came from Dublin to talk us through it and soothe fears we might have on the matter.
I left the school with the knowledge that life, like a good book, was about truth and memory, those closely related, and glimpses of the sublime. The sublime you could glimpse when we sang Gregorian Chant in the Cathedral and girls swooned around you, their awesome adolescent faints heightened by the ecstasy of Tantum ergo sung in sombre unison and the presence of the Christian Brothers’ boys across the aisle.
Everyone has their own past. There are different narratives, alternative narratives. The cultural climate then was more diverse than we’re told. And it could be more generous in some ways than it is now.
A society’s culture is a means to establish cohesion, consensus, order. We conduct our lives, our communal activities according to its rules. There are times when culture can be fluid and shifting, as I think it was then, and times when it can be coercive and oppressive. It can too easily discard risky and disruptive concepts like truth, the sublime, individual memory. Art cracks open a prevailing culture, releases us from the limitations of convention and conformity. If culture is the reigning political party, art is the opposition.
Culture and art live in a symbiotic and uneasy union. Culture’s purpose is conformity. Art, literature above all, restores the individual to herself. It assumes there is such a self, individual and contradictory, to speak to. Culture can deny this self in the interests of mutuality and stability.
*
I come up to Dublin to go to College. Doris Lessing’s are the books displayed on tables in the bookshops. I am stricken with doubts one day and full of confidence the next. Moving briskly on, I am in my twenties, writing for the newspapers and journals on a portable typewriter my father bought me from a small ad in the Tipperary Star, and starting novels that I soon abandon. I’m trying to find out what it is I have to say and how to say it. I’m living the literary life, much as it was lived for the past couple of centuries; by people like Johnson, Hazlitt and George Eliot herself. It was a life in which women had always had a part.
A precarious life, but that was easier then. A while more and I am living the literary life with Anthony Cronin who, apart from a brief period in American academia, never wavered from it and who I will marry. I am writing books, the kind of books I had hoped but doubted I would be able to write. I write a biography. I write novels, and to my surprise, poems. I had never hoped to write poetry. I am grateful to be living in a world that allows me to write these books. And in one that allows me to imagine it into what I considered to be its more real existence.
Fast forward to 2016. By now the tropes of the 21st century as we know it are well established. Beyond the Centre, a collection of essays by different writers, is published by New Island, edited by Declan Meade, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Irish Writers Centre.
In essays describing the 1990s – the one by Mia Gallagher for instance – that time can look pretty good. There were rackety flats still to be had in the city, pubs where you could talk and mingle. There was a sense of promise, of trust in each other. We were mysteries to each other in the same way that people had always been. The only way to really know someone was to imagine them. Everyday life was a process of invention.
My essay in the book was called ‘Enormous Changes at the Last Minute’. In it I argued that the two enormous changes which had taken place in those intervening decades were the Revolution of the Rich and the Tech Revolution. Both of them had been underway for a long time, but now they had properly arrived. One had found the other and both enabled each other. They were working hand in glove.
The revolution of the rich, I said, began when those people who see the getting of wealth as an end in itself, and the world as theirs to plunder – we call them capitalists – saw in us a great mass of potential consumers. Persuaded to see ourselves in the same light, our little individual wealth could flow into the coffers of the few from the pockets of the many. To oil the wheels we got deregulation, the new economics. I described it as a levelling up rather than a levelling down.
At the same time the internet revolution, which almost at once evolved into little more than a giant global market, was underway. They came together in a perfect conjunction. By the turn of the century the market and the marketeers were starting to infiltrate every aspect of our lives. We were being monetised. And we were happy to be monetised. It felt like liberty – but really it was only the liberty to spend.
The result is that the rich have got immeasurably richer. There’s that statistic that 95% or 97% – year by year it seems to get bigger – of the world’s resources are owned by 5% or 3% of the world’s population, a number that seems to yearly contract. The tech capitalists are the richest of all. The long project of commodification had ended in we ourselves becoming the final commodities. We delivered ourselves over, all that we are, inside and out, to be bought and sold, to their grand selling device.
I should pause to say that the web, the net, is a wonderful invention. In fact it’s awesome in the basic meaning of the word in that its inventors admit they hardly know how it works. It is beyond question wonderful that the screen can in seconds give any of us access to information on any subject, arcane and mundane, erudite and banal — even if this abundance and accessibility results in a devaluation of knowledge. The net would expand our possibilities, we believed, expand us. The whole world was in there, literally at our fingertips.
Instead it has had a reductive effect. When the world is mediated through a little screen as it has come to be, it’s flattened and diminished. Giving ourselves over to that self-limiting little world – how often we hear people say, I’m lost without my phone – we have become less than we used to be and often worse.
We are embedded in this culture of regarding ourselves as commodities. Our instruments of self-commodification are those various computational devices we’re each obliged to own even if we don’t want to. We trust them more than we trust our own faculties. Without a phone, an object made of bad-for-the-environment plastics and metals to which we are umbilically attached, we are locked out from the life around us. Without it, we are helpless and our lives are more or less unliveable. We must use it for everything from getting our food to getting a mate. We have made it as essential as bread or water. It accompanies us everywhere, clamorous and tyrannical.
In thrall to it we are in a process of re-modification as a species. The image of ourselves it displays is synthetic and standardised and we strive to conform to the image. Our view of ourselves, who we are and how we are, is more limited than it was. We’re told that we’re better educated than we ever were. And yet our surrender to the screen suggests we’re less discriminating and more compliant and more fearful. We are electing to set aside our critical faculty, our curiosity, our impulse to look behind the facade.
You could say we’re not people anymore, we’re phone people. We had the Tuatha de Danaan, we had Picts, Celts… We had Chinese, we had Irish… Now we have phone people. The phone people are everywhere, and everywhere the same. They are a global species.
Ironically for something that sounds as if its purpose is for speaking, the phone person is less and less disposed to speak. Speaking would take from phone time. Once convivial times around tables, at home and away, have become phone time. What has anyone to say that can be as interesting as what the phone is showing us? Conversations are punctuated with recourse to the superior knowledge of the phone. Fact is the modus of the phone’s culture. We have come to prefer the exchange of facts over the exchange of thoughts.
In the park a baby is being wheeled around in a buggy. The baby has a resigned, even sad expression as it gazes at the phone person. The phone person is not present, not to the baby nor to the world around them. The baby looks away. It is learning how to be a phone person.
The phone person’s memory, their ability to remember, is redundant. It’s nice that those boring co-ordinates of her life, the phone numbers, bank numbers, schedules, are transferred to the phone’s memory. But those other memories that furnish the mind, that make us who we are, they too are compromised. Replaced by the collective memory of the little screen, personal memories are fewer and poorer and less likely to be laid down. Memory is a kind of free-ranging capacity the mind has to concentrate on its own inventory. It makes imagining possible.
In that essay in Beyond The Centre I said that the online culture with its reductive quality had deprived me of something that had inspired writing. Phone people, online people, were showing themselves to be more banal and more similar than the people I had once been able to imagine. The socials, which had seemed to offer an opportunity for self-revelation, were revealing only vanity, an overweening desire for self-promotion. Everybody was selling something and that something was themselves. It was suddenly hard to sustain a belief in the existence of an inner self behind the public image. No more might Katherine Mansfield credibly say, ‘one tries to go deep – to speak to the inner self we all have.’ A writer’s freedom to invent or imagine suddenly looked spurious.
Can we write anymore about people? Can’t we only write about phone-people? Writers may be asking themselves this question, as more of them abandon what looks like barren ground and turn instead to writing about the past. The present is dispiriting for writers. A character’s relationship with a screen cannot go very far.
And it’s not good for another pressing question for writers, the perennial money question; the problem of how they are to write and make their living as well.
The literary life was once a way for writers to earn their keep. In the glory days, centuries old, of journals and newspapers and publishers and, later, broadcasters, novelists and poets and critics played an important part as editors, reviewers, journalists in the writing business, a business that played a significant part in the wider culture.
This has more or less come to an end. As readers switch to the screen, the print media limp along under the constant threat of final closure. Once flourishing literary pages are fewer and often non-existent. Those that remain pay dramatically less. The literary life is no longer feasible except possibly for the online market which could not be said I think, to be flourishing either, and lacks in any case the romance of the printed page. These days, unless the writer is a commercial success, and very few are, they are likely to be part of the education business. Most likely they will be teaching in a writing school to produce, in turn, teachers of writing. Teaching is demanding. Their energy, their time, their own writing and of course their freedom and autonomy will suffer.
Online culture, a culture characterised by pretence and banality, is now embedded in the real culture, what we have come to reductively call offline culture. It’s where people, politics, and technology are inextricably enmeshed in an evermore dominant and monolithic culture. In its mainstream manifestation we can say it generally means well, at least superficially. And then there is the other side, that powerful side where the culture of coercion and hate and bullying thrives.
Between them they have become the double face of the ‘offline’ culture, an orthodoxy to which we are required to submit, where truth has a vanishing place. Their reach is global and there is little refuge from them and no apparent alternative.
Between them they have created a sense of alienation, of incipient fear. We look into the mirror of online for what we used to look to others for: support, enjoyment, confirmation. At an event lately, the kind of event that not long ago would have been filled with a convivial crowd, the host remarked about his almost empty room, ‘People don’t want to commune with each other anymore.’
We have become wary of communing. Our thoughts, words, have become possible political minefields. We’re afraid we might say the wrong thing, the unacceptable thing.
‘A single taboo’ George Orwell wrote ‘can have an all round crippling effect on the mind because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up will lead to the forbidden thought.’ Our culture has uncomfortable echoes of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with its newspeak and fake news, its thought crime and un-persons – in our parlance, the cancelling of people who sin against the orthodoxy.
And yet online culture might be considered benign, even artisanal, now that AI is here. Artificial Intelligence could well be the final capitulation as we hand over our intelligence to a thing that has none. This energy-devouring assemblage of chips and algorithms and cables has no thoughts, no emotions or feelings, no access to senses or sensations, no desires or motivations. It has no experiences of its own. It has nothing to report. What it has is great computational powers which allow it to scour the vast store of human intelligence in its data bank and come up with a simulacrum of it.
In a moment of writing despair – I told myself it was research – I asked ChatGPT to come up with a lecture for me, title: ‘Writing In The Stupid Age’. In seconds I had a body of text. And AI’s comprehension of my meaning was a surprise, even a shock. By the stupid age, it told me, I must mean the digital age – thereby doing better than some not unintelligent people I had run the title by. Digital, it said, was indeed a distraction and, yes, you could certainly say it was making people stupid.
ChatGPT’s text was dull though, it had no conviction, no passion and I didn’t use any of it. But if I had used it, would you have known? You might actually have found it more coherent than I’m managing to be.
When I asked Gemini, the Google AI engine, to come up with a funny lecture on the same theme, its comprehension too was instant. Its text was not in any way funny; but it did have a cheery put-down tone in telling me that to say the digital age was stupid showed I was very old or very out of touch.
I wanted to engage with it, to protest, I wanted to tell it I was not very old, and no more out of touch than the next person. I wanted to tell it the ageism it was emitting wasn’t acceptable. If I had, it would probably have responded with a glib apology that of course it wouldn’t and couldn’t mean.
You could say we have been softened up to give ourselves up to AI. Our language is withering into banality, our concentration is wrecked, our respect for our unique capacity for thinking and creating eroded. We have come to take refuge from each other in the machine. As AI learns to do better will we be happy to hand over to it that capacity for thinking and creating, the capacity that gives us much of our sense of purpose and fulfilment?
Will we let it make our art for us? ‘Art’ that may look like art but can only ever be a travesty of art, a depthless mimicry. Will we be able to tell an AI product from a human artefact? Will we care when we can’t? Will we prefer its fakery to the real thing as we prefer the online image to the offline? Will we finally, and it could be soon, stop thinking?
