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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.771)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Jeff Bilbrow, editor at Front Porch Republic and associate professor of English at Grove City College. We're here to talk about his book, Words for Conviviality, Media Technologies and Practices of Hope. Dr. Bilbrow, wonderful to have you today.
Jeff (00:24.526)
Well, thank you, PJ. I'm looking forward to talking.
PJ (00:27.161)
So Dr. Bilbro, why this book?
Jeff (00:30.702)
Well, it's been a long time coming. I was fresh out of grad school and thinking about my next book project. my first book was on 19th century and 20th century, I guess, environmental writing. But I had sort of been making connections between ecology in the sort of natural science sense and media ecology and thinking about some of the parallels there.
And so this idea for kind of an examination of the media ecology in 19th century America and how it might inform the ways that we inhabit and navigate digital media today sort of spun out of that. so, yeah, it's been 10 years that I've been molding on this, working on this readiness. So a lot has changed in the last 10 years, but I think one of the advantages of writing about a previous time is that
that doesn't change. And in many ways, I think it helps you kind of see through some of the, I don't know, the faddish takes that come up when we're talking about social media or digital media today.
PJ (01:46.585)
So tell me what does conviviality mean? Because I'm sure a lot of our audience is wondering.
Jeff (01:52.898)
Yeah, yeah, well, we talked about this a little bit ahead of time, but this is a my title is kind of a nod to a book by Yvonne Illich called Tools for Conviviality. And Illich's point in that there's a couple of, I mean, can spend a lot of time on Illich if you want, Illich makes a couple of points. Maybe one is that anytime tools become professionalized and institutions grow and mature,
there are often two key watersheds. so he just, in the beginning of Tools for Conviviality, he looks at medicine and he says, in 1913, you had a better than 50-50 chance that a doctor who graduated from a medical school would treat your disease in ways that were actually helpful. medicine actually began, the professionalization of medicine actually began to improve treatment.
And so that's great. And for decades, that was the case. And then he says, so sometime late fifties, early sixties, things began to change, with the rise of diseases that medicine causes or that medicine exacerbates in a professional sense and can't treat. So he looks at things like chronic diseases or. know, today we might talk about the opioid crisis, right? That things which were designed from this industry to heal people are actually making people more sick.
Or just certain kinds of complicated chronic diseases that the medical industry is really bad at treating. And his point is that we're now spending more money, but the outcomes are actually not improving. And he thinks these watersheds happen across pretty much any industry. He looks at education. He looks at sort of different transportation. You know, we now spend so much money per mile.
in very unequal ways. So he thinks in our quest to improve outcomes, at some point we begin degrading them. And what I'm trying to look at is how those watersheds perhaps influence or play out in the industrialization of print in the 19th century with the telegraph, with all the new printing technologies that made newspapers and books cheap
Jeff (04:18.232)
for the first time. in many ways, I think it brought about improvements in communication, obviously. It increased the speed of communication. But I think you can draw a direct line between improvements in communication and the Civil War and many of the theological and religious and scientific controversies that riled 19th century America.
And then of course, jumping to the present, you see a similar cycle, I think, in the way that the early days of the web fostered certain kinds of communication and community. And then maybe with the introduction of the iPhone or something like this, there's a kind of tipping point that happens, right? So in the introduction to the book, I point out that in 2010, 2011, everybody thought social media was going to bring about democracy, bring about, redeem the Arabs.
Arab Spring regime in the Middle East from dictatorship. And now everybody thinks that social media is going to destroy democracy. So these cycles seem to keep happening, right? And what is that and how might we arrange our tools in such a way that actually promote living together rather than these cycles of optimism and then doom?
PJ (05:22.755)
Hahaha.
PJ (05:42.175)
And as you're writing that book, I think you get this from Yvonne Ilitch, but correct me if I'm wrong, you're really focused on technology should make relationships better. That should be the purpose of it.
Jeff (05:54.87)
Exactly. Yeah, that's kind of his point with conviviality, that good tools improve the freedom of individuals to foster real healthy relationships and to live together. So rather than focusing on, I don't even know what the metrics would be for communication tools, speed or quantity. I mean, in that case, AI, chat GPT is like awesome, right? We can crank out a lot of words really fast.
But those are just the wrong metrics and we should be trying to think about which tools will help us live well together and improve the health of our relationships.
PJ (06:34.703)
So, and talk to me a little bit, you mentioned the Telegraph, you mentioned newspapers and books becoming cheaper.
Why the 19th century and why literature? So you really seem to focus on what's unique about going to people like Melville, Twain, Thoreau. Obviously Thoreau and Emerson do have some philosophical bends, but for the most part, you're really leaning into literature. And why do you find that to be a unique contribution to this discussion?
Jeff (07:09.582)
Yeah, it's a question. So first, I think the reason the 19th century appealed to me, besides that, that's just where my intellectual home is. Is there has been a lot of attention as people have thought about analogs to the digital media revolution today. know, some people go back to Plato and the invention of writing. A lot of people go back to the Gutenberg printing press. And I think those are both helpful inflection points.
But I think an under-examined inflection point is the industrialization of print. one of the things I try to lay out in the introduction is just how radical it was to live through the antebellum decades in the US. In many ways, the printing press that Ben Franklin uses is hardly different from the one that Gutenberg invented. It hasn't really changed much. There are very few presses, like in the dozens of presses,
in the colonies in the early days of the US. And then all of a sudden, they figure out how to make the whole thing out of iron, and then they can apply steam, and then they do the rotary press. And you go from setting the type by hand and pressing each one individually, it's very laborious still, to line of type and rotary presses, and you're printing out penny papers every day, thousands and thousands of copies.
So it just really radicalized, radically reshifts the way the information flows. And in many ways, the telegraph is the first digital technology, right? It's the one that makes communication across distance at the speed of electricity, and it reduces all information to ones and zeros, bits and bytes. So that's, think, the zero to one technology, and the internet is the sort of unfolding of those potentialities.
So that's why the 19th century. And also, I just think we see the kind of political, religious, scientific disruptions that we're experiencing now. We see those play out then too. Why literature? That's a great question. So Marshall McLuhan has this famous adage, right? The medium is the message. But Postman, Postman, slightly tweaks that in amusing ourselves to death. And he says, the medium is the metaphor.
Jeff (09:33.784)
And think that's really helpful. And he argues that we, whatever our communication technologies are, those provide the lens through which we view the world. provide, they frame the world for us. They shape our expectations and our affordances. And he doesn't really talk about this, but I'm getting this from Lakoff and Johnson, their book on...
PJ (10:01.495)
Metaphors We Live By.
Jeff (10:02.456)
Exactly. That's it. was yes. Metaphors of mine. where they say like the only way to think beyond the given metaphor is to propose a new metaphor. And that's what I think these literary authors are so good at, you know, as they're struggling with the shifting communication landscape that they inhabit, they are throwing these different metaphors at it to try to, imagine alternative, more, more convivial, ways of
communicating with and relating to one another. So yeah, I think, you we want to jump to the kind of solution. Like if we have this policy or this technology, we'll fix things. But I think these literary authors are inviting us to the deeper and necessary first step, which is try to figure out like, how do we name the world we inhabit and the world that we want to inhabit?
PJ (10:57.815)
And I may, maybe, you know, let me see if I'm on the same track with you. If your goal is relational, that definitely seems to inhabit less a world of quantity over quantitative over qualitative. Is that also kind of part of the answer there?
Jeff (11:15.128)
Yep. Yeah. Exactly. Yes, absolutely. That the metaphors are in keeping with the kind of relationality that you're looking, because metaphor really is a relationship, right? You're putting two things that seem dissimilar and say, maybe there actually is a analogy that obtains.
PJ (11:34.351)
I have mentioned this before, but I had Dr. Colin Webster on to talk about technology in the body in ancient Greek and Roman medicine. And he said, you can actually trace, I think it's easier because our sources are so few and the rate of technological change was so slow. I think it's a good example. But the way that they talked about circulation in the body, they assumed that air and blood pass through the body in the
Jeff (11:51.0)
Yeah, smoke.
PJ (12:03.585)
single circulatory system. And that was because their pipes were not pressurized. So the water would go down, like, I mean, you just like, like if a kid built a pipe, you know, you'd have the water go through and then it'd be air on top. And so I assumed that's the way it went through the body. And in Egypt, they created pressurized pipes for the first time. You can, you know, it's recorded in their history. And within 50 years, they had developed
physician came up with the idea that there were actually two circulatory systems, one for air and one for blood. And it literally just came from, I mean, it's this exact example, like they could not conceive of it without seeing it outside.
Jeff (12:47.658)
Yeah, I think we think science is so objective, and that we have developed beyond those limitations. But I don't think we have. We still imagine the human brain on a model with the most complicated technologies we have. We think about the brain as computer. an information processor. When really, there's all kinds of limitations to that metaphor.
You know, I've argued in my first book on environmental ethics that in many ways the sort of the Darwinian evolution and the way that totalized scientific imagination for decades only happens because of the kind of free market competitive economy that Darwin experiences for the first time, which is not to say that like, you know, some kind of competition is not found in nature, but that that is.
You know, as we're discovering with all kinds of symbiotic relationships and the way the plants interact, that is not like the totalizing explanation for how life interacts. But these models come up because they're the ones we have available to us. And it's really hard to think outside of the, yeah, the metaphors or the models that we have accessible. So that's a great, that's a great example from ancient medicine.
PJ (14:12.567)
And let me see if I'm tracking with here. A perfect map is an isomorphic map, But that would be too big to use. That's actually the worst kind of map. So Darwin's model is really good for a very specific purpose. And it's like you have different types of maps for different purposes because the whole point of the model is to make it accessible to us. OK.
Jeff (14:20.16)
Yes. Yes. It's because it's no simpler than reality.
Jeff (14:37.326)
Yeah, yeah, exactly, So that we just have to recognize that these things are useful, but we should not allow them to become totalizing. And, you know, as they become distorting or limiting, I think it's crucial to have the capacity, the option to try out different imaginative models.
PJ (14:59.667)
Similar to the shift because Newton's mechanics physics do work at a certain level But at another level you have to switch to Einstein Einstein Ian is that quantum quantum physics? Okay Sorry, I'm
Jeff (15:05.218)
Right. They don't. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so much, I mean, we don't have get into physics, you know, so there are so many, I'm not, I can't speak particularly about this because I don't really understand it fully, but so many of the current physical debates are about which models work and they don't know, right? Even models that seem to work are not compatible. people are still looking for the grand one. I don't know if we'll ever find it, but again, I think it's like, what's the metaphor, the model that best explains the very
complicated reality that we have and the best scientists are the ones that can keep an open mind and not get locked into any given model.
PJ (15:59.311)
To shift a little bit, we talked about, you mentioned the telegraph and kind of that zero to one move from analog to digital.
PJ (16:13.017)
Can you talk a little bit about what it means that that's not neutral, but it's not necessarily, I don't know if it would say it's amoral, right? Like there's this weird, talking about how the purpose of an instrument shapes it.
Jeff (16:22.796)
Yes.
Jeff (16:29.964)
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out how best to articulate this. know, some people... So, McClune here again is, I think, really helpful when he says that... I'm going to get it slightly wrong, but a basic paraphrase of his quote is, you know, the belief in technological neutrality is the stance of the technological idiot and the person who just assumes I can use any tool for my ends and the tools are neutral. And I think he's right. That's naive.
On the other hand, it's not like, I don't think we should imagine our technological systems as determinative and it's giving us no choice whatsoever. So what I'm really interested in is, and the way they organize the book is first authors who think that these tools are gonna be determinative in an optimistic positive sense. So when the telegraph first comes out,
People like Horace Greeley say, great, newspapers will never print falsehoods anymore because they will be found out instantly by the telegraph. Like no more false news, it's infallibly spread. I mean, this is a stereotype, right? Now we experience the ways that improved communication only exacerbates misinformation or disinformation, we wanna call it. But there's a lot of optimism in the 19th century, early on. People think, you know, we're gonna
all come to the same agreement about reality. This comes in theology, Charles Hodge, the president of Princeton has this theory that like the Bible is like nature and if interpreters will just follow the scientific method, it will be perspicuous and we'll all agree. So yeah, so some people think these tools are like, more or less, the Civil War was a minor blip, right? It turns on,
PJ (18:23.823)
I mean, that's basically what happened, right? That's, yeah.
Jeff (18:30.498)
Yeah, interpretive discrepancy with the Bible. And then so the second part of the book, though, is looking at people who were worried that these tools are determinatively negative. You know, they will enslave, they will isolate, they will make real community and health relationships impossible. And I think, you know, both have like there are affordances within these complex technological systems that can push both ways. So I think
I disagree with either totalizing view, but I think they're worth attending to. And then the third part is I look at people who are trying to use tools kind of maybe against their affordances or against the grain in more hopeful and healthy ways. And I think that's kind of where I land that we don't get the ideal system if there is such a thing as an ideal system, but whichever one we inhabit, we're going to have to try to imagine together.
how to make do along its margins and maybe kind of hammer swords into plowshares and find ways to use tools for conviviality rather than, you know, maximize the power, use them in the most powerful ways, which would, I think, eventuate in destroying relationships, right? As we try to use them to increase our own power.
It tends to enslave others and isolate ourselves. So that's the basic model, I guess. But I think back to your main point, I think it's crucial to recognize there is no neutral tool, but that doesn't mean like some are good and some are bad. It's always more complicated, right? They just have all these effects, often ones that are opaque to us as users of the tools and are more apparent later on. So we'll find out, you know.
all the effects of social media in like 100 years or something.
PJ (20:32.461)
It does take time. mean, that's, yeah, that makes total sense.
Jeff (20:33.516)
Yeah, let's go to front-shooting part.
PJ (20:39.167)
I want to make sure I might not be quoting you correctly here, but I did want to ask, I think I understand, but I'm not sure. When you talk about finding space in the margins for conviviality, for making these better relationships in the systems that we're in, can you give me a for instance of that?
Jeff (20:56.684)
Yeah. So,
One thing on the theory first and then I'll give you an example. I'm getting this partly from Illich, partly also too from Michel de Serteau, who's a French philosopher. I think it's helpful to understand Serteau as kind of a conversation partner with someone like Foucault. Whereas Foucault analyzes the systems of oppression, the systems of power, and sees them as very totalizing. Serteau's like, yeah, but people find ways to subvert them. He gives a lot of great examples.
you know, maybe one vivid one is like Charlie Chaplin in modern times who is inhabiting this machine world, but, but subverting it, you know, his body keeps getting in the way and he keeps making the machines not operate as they're supposed to. And it's funny in the, in the film. but I think Chaplin is like sort of image of the human freedom that remains even in the most dehumanizing systems.
So yeah, so Toe's mantra is we need to find ways to make do where we are in healthy ways. you know, in the book I talk about several different ones. Like, I'll give one, know, Thoreau is inhabiting this world, new telegraph, new amounts of information bombarding him. And he doesn't go off in the wilderness, but he lives for a couple of years outside of town.
Like a mile and half from town, he walks to town every day. It's like he's trying to get in the way. He's just trying to get a little bit of space. And even after he moves back to Concord, he still takes these long walks almost every day. And for him walking, I think is a key practice to like slow down and digest and not get caught up in the news of the day. And what I find so remarkable, remarkable at someone like Thoreau
Jeff (23:02.634)
is that as he decreases the quantity of his informational intake, he increases or improves the quality of his commentary on it. His essay on civil disobedience, I think really lays the groundwork for the kinds of resistance movement that Gandhi or MLK developed later on. They both cite him as an inspiration. And his essay on John Brown.
transforms sentiment about John Brown and I think sets up Lincoln's election. like Thoreau is deeply engaged in contemporary events, but he has something to say because he has cultivated slower habits of thought. I he says in his essay Walking, you must walk like a camel which is said to be the only beast which ruminates while walking.
PJ (23:58.927)
Mm.
Jeff (23:59.07)
He wants to walk in a digestive slow manner. And he says he walks four hours a day. I he just thinks that's a practice that fundamentally changes the way he inhabits the immediate ecosystem of his day. So it's not like he opts out, but he inhabits it in a different posture because of this practice that he cultivates. So that's what I'm interested in. How can we...
be in the world but not of it. How can we use the tools that we have been given, whether we would have chosen them or not, but shape ourselves into the kinds of people who use them in ways that were not immediately imaginable or in ways that... Twitter, I think if you go to Twitter, it says, the prompt is like, what's happening? Once you're just sort of be reactive and feed it whatever's happening.
But what if, you know, we practice to kind of meditative walking that Thoreau enjoins and think in a different wavelength and, and then act or communicate out of those habits. That's, that's what I'm interested in.
PJ (25:13.315)
Haiku only for Twitter.
Jeff (25:14.582)
Yeah, yeah. Now, if we all had to, yeah, form our thoughts into these limits, these forms, would limit what you would say. Absolutely.
PJ (25:23.983)
Forgive me. It's a little bit further back, but as we as you were talking, I couldn't help but think about tools not being neutral. I have never owned a truck, but I have several friends who have trucks and have complained that when you have a truck, people notice, right? And they get asked. People do not ask me for my car or for my minivan to, you know, to come help with the projects. But if you have a truck.
Even if you choose not to, you still get asked, right? And I think that's similar with, you can make all sorts of choices with the truck, but by virtue of having a truck, you have a different set of choices to make. Kind of similar with if you engage with Twitter or X or whatever, know, whatever it's called now. You have a different set of options than if you go to Facebook, YouTube.
Jeff (25:56.995)
Yeah.
Jeff (26:06.733)
Yes.
Jeff (26:11.383)
Yes.
PJ (26:23.219)
And what's interesting is we're seeing a lot of that even collapse because of the rise of TikTok. when I talk to my day job is as a digital marketer, when I talk to people about TikTok, they're like, that's a young people's thing. I like reels. Well, it's just like reels. I don't think they realize it's it's literally just reels.
Of course, the algorithms and all that behind that are different. that's something, or is kind of a black box effect to that. That's a different discussion. but forgive me, that was just something that popped to mind. The truck example.
Jeff (27:02.346)
No, that's a great example because I think it's a concrete example of the kind of upstream decision that oftentimes has to be made. If you choose not to have an internet enabled phone, right, then there's all kinds of choices, downstream choices that you don't have to deliberate about, right? So yeah, if you choose to put these limits on your engagement or to only engage in these ways,
then you don't have to work through the kind of tricky prudential choices later on. And I think, you I'm not sure there's one prescribed set of upstream choices to make, but I do think we should be more like the Amish in thinking as families or sort of institutional level, community level, what are some upstream choices we want to make to just relieve us from these burdens downstream of always being asked.
Can I, can I borrow your truck? Should I post this? Should I weigh in? You know, I, can post to all my followers about what I think about the election. Should I do so? And if you can't, or if you put limits on yourself, that it's not an option, then you don't have to think about it, you know? And I think we often see our adoption of tools as inevitable, right? We have to do.
whatever is accessible to us. And we need more people who will remind us that this is not a foregone conclusion. My friend Brad East likes to call Wendell Berry the prophet of the evitable. Someone who tells us it could be otherwise. And we need prophets of the evitable to say, you don't have to use these tools in that way. You don't have to use all the tools.
You can choose from among the tools. can kind of cobble together the assortment that makes sense for our context and our obligations and vocations. So yeah, your example of truck is a great example because, yeah, people who own a tool like that all of sudden think, wow, am I obligated to use it? Because I could use it for good for all these good things, but it really reshapes your life.
PJ (29:22.495)
on a
little bit more on the social media side of things. I remember seeing an article and it just kind of it just really struck me how odd this was during you know the Palestinian situation has continued to escalate but when that first started I remember seeing an article said this list of celebrities have not given an opinion on on the Palestinian I was like why and just the idea that everyone has to I mean and that's that come that's baked into
Jeff (29:54.476)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (29:55.411)
medium there it's like if you can give it you should give it because we can just Give out all this kind of information and then the people who were giving their opinions I was like, why is their opinion better than mine? I mean, what is this? It's such an odd thing that Everything's become a poll and it's like if you
Jeff (30:17.378)
And if you opt out, you're somehow morally culpable.
PJ (30:20.749)
Yes, you're morally culpable and it's like, what is their expertise in this? Right? Like there's this kind of loss of expertise and I think if you get down to really absurd examples, people see it, right? It's like if you take 20 people and have them look at a car and 19 people say you should do one thing and one person says to do something else and the one person's a mechanic, we're going to follow the mechanic, right?
Jeff (30:44.526)
should follow that person. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great point. I mean, that's just one example of how we inhabit this system and we so rarely think, why have I adopted the expectations of the medium? Right. And how could we inhabit the system with a different set of expectations? Like I could remain silent and try to learn and not be an expert on everything.
PJ (31:01.422)
Yes.
PJ (31:12.527)
Which of course is, it goes back to, I love that you've been using that term totalizing, right? It's like, I have to know everything about everything, which is a ridiculous goal when said out loud, but we feel that pressure.
Jeff (31:23.756)
Yes. Yeah, and I think these metaphors help us to recognize the ridiculousness of some of the expectations that are put upon us. Because so often it's unarticulated and it's just the sort of assumptions that we catch from the tools that were given, that we're asked to use.
PJ (31:46.223)
There's a couple other metaphors, I actually think you have quite a few throughout your book, but another one you have is conversation. You talked a little bit about walking and how we can think about slowing down and ruminating. Of course, that's a great... immediately makes us just think of meditation in general or rumination. But how does conversation help us to think better about technology?
Jeff (32:05.58)
Yeah, yep.
Jeff (32:13.774)
Yeah, so sometimes we can be nostalgic about the book. I think Postman falls into this sometimes, like, if we just get back to the book, that'd be great. But I the book has some baked-in problems, too. The book can be kind of one way, and it can privilege sort of long-form, sustained thinking to the detriment of back-and-forth conversation. know, something like you get in a
platonic dialogue, which is clearly coming out of an oral culture. So one of the authors I look at is Margaret Fuller. And I think she's an editor, for one thing. So she sees her job as editing, as kind of staging a conversation, where maybe she doesn't have to be the central voice, but she can shape other voices and put them together and maybe try to come up with a conversation that is more than just some of its parts.
She also holds these sort of like conversations, like a European salon or something, or kind of like maybe an idealized college classroom where there's like a question, maybe she'll bring in some readings, but she'll try to help people think substantively about fundamental issues. And there's an art to that, right?
kind of go in guns a blazing say, this is the point boom. Maybe people will take agree with you, but they won't have engaged in the process of thought. And she wants to her kind of question asking and kind of dosages of new ideas. She's trying to incite participants into thinking for themselves. Again, I mean, she's thinking about this as explicitly following on a form of a Socratic dialogue.
PJ (33:52.591)
Mm.
Jeff (34:10.914)
Right? Where Socrates' point is to get his interlocutors to think. And if he just told them the answers, that would be counterproductive. So, you know, sometimes we want the TED talk to tell us the answer, give me the takeaways, know, have chat, GPT, read this long thing and give me the content. Margaret Fuller would be like, no, you're missing the whole point. The whole point is you yourself participating in the process of the back and forth of dialogue toward
truth. And even in her books, I look in particular at one of her books, Somewhere in the Lakes, 1843, even in her books, she violates all of your readerly expectations and she doesn't just give you a point or have a straight narrative. She puts voices, often contrasting voices, in dialogue, which made the book have very poor reviews. People didn't like it because it didn't meet their expectations.
Maybe it's a not a good sales technique. But I think, you know, her goal is again to form readers who could, in that case, who could participate in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, confusing democracy in the West or the mid Midwest at the time. In America, we have all these different ethnicities and religions and people with different priorities coming together. Like, how are you going to live well together? Well, you're to have to learn to be good conversationalists.
And so she writes a book to try to produce the kinds of readers she thinks the country needs. So, you know, I, I'm not sure exactly what the analog to those forms are today. Analogs. think one of the things I actually talk about briefly is the possibility that podcasts could sort of fill in that role. You know, maybe two or three people having a conversation might model the arts of conversation for listeners, even though they themselves can't.
chime in immediately directly.
Jeff (36:14.122)
So yeah, and I think social media maybe, but it has other problems. It's often not like a sustained conversation. It's often more chaotic and noisy with spectators clamoring. Not a lot of truth seeking sometimes. But I think Fuller is helpful in helping us imagine maybe the goal should not be somehow returning to the book, but in finding forms.
in our current technological environment, finding forms that could make space for sustained, leisurely, thoughtful back and forth dialogue.
PJ (36:55.919)
Well, of course I resonate with that. mean, that's yes, exactly. So I appreciate that. I've always found myself more drawn probably to books than even talking to people. And so, it's also a good reminder that there's, there's weaknesses to books, right? one thing I've often found myself doing in my, my friends would laugh at me. I'll read a book and I'll take away whatever I think is useful or valuable and I'll forget about all the rest.
Jeff (36:58.69)
Yeah, that's why you're doing this.
Jeff (37:14.562)
Yeah.
PJ (37:26.081)
And so I'll be like, didn't this author make this great point? And they're like, I think you're kind of misread that and use is like, I'm like, yeah, I just disagreed with that. I just took what I thought, you know, it's like it's so easy to do that because. The author is not there.
Jeff (37:42.072)
They can't speak back. Right. It's in your hands. That's absolutely right. You can be the, which it, and there's good and bad, right? I mean, the one hand, can glean wisdom from a lot of sources. On the other hand, maybe you need to sit with, yeah, that disagreement more and hence why it's important to read books and then talk about them with people. You can do both, get the best of both.
PJ (37:48.302)
Yes.
PJ (38:03.779)
And it's easy to dismiss something you read in a book in a way that you can't dismiss a person to your face. it was like, well, that's just stupid. And you just keep reading. Unfortunately, I mean, face to face conversation, think people realize generally you don't do that. But sometimes. in in social media, that's a I've had those conversations here on the podcast where, you know, that
Jeff (38:22.946)
Sometimes.
PJ (38:32.162)
that lack of presence can make it much easier. We definitely see that more in especially comment sections. People are very confident to say, well, that's just stupid. like, I know how long I spend reading comment sections and it's not like I'm giving it really sustained thought. mean, I have, that's pretty rare. Most of the time, if you're, that's a very flippant response.
Jeff (38:37.89)
Yes.
Jeff (38:56.11)
Yes, yes, exactly. That's not the kind of deep conversation you're looking for.
PJ (39:02.954)
You know, that's not that's not the metaphor you're looking for the YouTube comment section
Jeff (39:05.694)
No, no. I I think I think it's Zat Ifuki, who's a Turkish writer writing about the Arab Spring protests. And she says, you know, one of the problems with the social media in that context is it galvanizes support. Right. But then it can actually build the community. She says, when we engage with these voices on social media, it's not like we're talking to other people. Her metaphor is it's like we're sitting in a sporting
PJ (39:21.199)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff (39:35.35)
Stadium cheering with our fans and we see and hear the fans of the opposing team, but we're like with our fans So we're taunting each other and it's like, you know, we're Developing group belonging and group opposition even as we're hearing other views it's not conducive to like Learning and changing our minds or anything
PJ (39:40.568)
Yes.
PJ (39:59.427)
something I've seen with my own channel is, especially with these kinds of hour long conversations, I'll get some very thoughtful, very long responses on the interviews themselves. But when we put up the shorts, the responses I get are very different.
Jeff (40:15.202)
Yes, yes. mean, this is like the technocratic thing. Twitter has experimented. I'm not sure they still do this, where you can't retweet or comment on something that has a link unless you first read the article or click the article, right? They're trying to get people to slow down and read the whole thing. But I just don't think that is where they work. People don't, or it's not going to change behavior.
PJ (40:43.984)
So some of the other metaphors, and if you don't mind, I'd love to keep kind of walking through these. You also have cross-bearing, and that one's really fascinating to me. How does bearing one's cross help us think better about technology?
Jeff (40:47.746)
Yeah. Yep.
Jeff (41:01.698)
Yeah, so this is the kind of culmination of the book. And I get this from Melville's poem, Chlorelle, which nobody reads. It's an 18,000 line poem, super long, he self-publishes it. But C-L-A-R-E-L, Chlorelle. It's the name of the title character that sort of, which is sort of loosely autobiographical. But Melville publishes,
PJ (41:16.803)
How do you spell that? Forgive me.
Jeff (41:30.84)
Confidence man on April Fool's Day, I think in 57, 1857, I think and then Shortly thereafter he goes on this pilgrimage to the Holy Land and then decades later He reworks his his journals and his notebooks into this massive poem And what happens is the character Clarell goes to the Holy Land? Basically having lost his faith. He no longer believes but he thinks well
Maybe if I go back to like where Jesus walked, I will have some epiphany, some recovery of faith. And pretty much every significant scientific, religious, philosophical, cultural debate in the 19th century gets played out over the course of this poem. Like, know, Tim and a group of sort of a shifting cast of fellow pilgrims kind of making the circuit in
in Israel now, the Levant, and their conversation. And one of the characters has tattooed on his arm this symbol of the sort of five crosses, kind of representing the five wounds of Christ. There's also allusions to the three Magi going to Bethlehem after the sign of the stars.
That's the image that Melville imprints on the cover of the book. So I think a little bit about what does it mean to sort of own and carry one's sufferings and to walk toward this hoped for truth that we might not be able to totally glimpse. what I think is remarkable about Clarell is all of his questions about religion, about God are not really answered. Like there's no propositional answer.
But at the end of the poem, there's this remarkably affirmative epilogue where the poet sort of tells Clarell, even Stoics may be astounded into heaven. You might receive an epiphany that you did not expect. And I go back to Moby Dick, Melville's earlier novel, to give one example of this. So a couple of sort of
Jeff (43:52.152)
Condensing a lot but a couple threads from Moby Dick that I think indicate what Melville's thinking about here One is when Near the end of the book kwee kwee this sort of pagan harpreneur Has he thought I was gonna die so they made a coffin for him and then he got better and so his coffin becomes Commandeer to be the life buoy and as the carpenter is refitting this coffin to be the life buoy
Captain Ahab comes up to the carpenter and is kind of mocking him. And he's like, what are you doing that this sign of death has been remade into a symbol of life? That seems crazy. You have no respect for meaning. But that is precisely what Christians think the cross is, right? This sign of death remade into a symbol of life. And the very ambiguity or ambivalence of signifiers
which so often is a source of frustration, right? In our communication with one another, we misunderstand each other, we argue about things. So oftentimes ambiguity is a source of frustration. At that moment for Ahab, or at least for the carpenter or for Melville, I think, that kind of ambiguity becomes the possibility of redemption. That things which are signs of death could become the sign of life. And then dramatically at the end of the book, it is that
coffin turned to life booby that saves Ishmael's life. So he is not saved because of anything he does. He's saved, even a stoic may be astounded into heaven. He is saved sort of eucatastrophically, unexpectedly, and he's saved by this symbol of grim death that has been transformed into a symbol of life. So what I try to do in that chapter is say, I think there are ways that we can sort of bear
mystery and the finitude of human understanding, humbly and hopefully, we can seek meaning together and perhaps meaning will be given to us in ways that we don't expect or foresee or anticipate. To me, that's the sign, that's the way that Melville understands the cross. It's this, the possibility that death and ambiguity and failure could be transformed into hope.
PJ (46:21.023)
Perhaps I'm seeing this a little too literally. So let me just clarify this. When you're talking about, of course, there's a metaphorical and there's a metaphysical, an Orthodox Christian, the understanding of that. But for your book, are you talking about viewing technology that seen at the outset is seen as death, but if we change our perception on it,
Jeff (46:27.054)
Yeah.
Jeff (46:35.682)
Yes.
PJ (46:49.729)
it could become a means of life. Is that... Am I reading that correctly or is that... Am I reading that too literally?
Jeff (46:53.55)
I guess the way I frame it is not so much the technology itself, but the conversations that we have on it maybe. The possibility that our search for meaning might seem thwarted by technology. So often the technologies we have, they can seem to only foster misunderstandings.
I that the recent elections are good example of this, right? People, I can't believe that, you you don't think this president is the obvious choice. How could you possibly think otherwise? people are very sure about what they think and can't even imagine alternatives. So sometimes we can, get very frustrated by this failure of communication. And I, I think Melville looks at the cross as both a literal sort of theological metaphysical.
statement of this, but also maybe a metaphorical statement of the possibility of understanding beyond all expectation. So yeah, I haven't thought about whether it's the technology itself. It's not how I thought about it, but maybe that too. I wouldn't want to exclude that.
PJ (48:08.079)
Yeah, I understand that, if I understand you correctly then you're talking more about us. I mean, you're taking out your bearing cross, there's pain and there's suffering. And so what you're talking about is continuing to pursue meaning even in the face of that. Understood.
Jeff (48:16.524)
Yeah. Yes.
Jeff (48:22.606)
Exactly, exactly, exactly. That we take up, it's not easy to try to understand other people and try to communicate across disagreement. But if we endure, Melville suggests maybe we'll be rewarded with understanding and conviviality in places that we would not have expected. yeah, yeah.
PJ (48:54.319)
I don't think I had anticipated perseverance as like the main, like one of the main virtues of your book, but that makes a lot of sense actually.
Jeff (49:02.37)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, mean, walking, conversation, cross-breeding. The other hopeful metaphor I have is friendship, which I think is also tied up with persevering through the inevitable ways that people will disappoint us. Yeah.
PJ (49:21.965)
And it takes a long time. Like, if you're like, we've been friends six months, you're like, okay. Like, I mean sure, but like, it's very different from like, we've been friends continuously for 20 years. That's like,
Jeff (49:26.99)
Good start. Yeah.
Jeff (49:32.684)
Exactly. Yes, there's no shortcuts.
PJ (49:39.119)
Dr. Bilbro, it has been wonderful having you on. I would want to be respectful of your time besides buying and reading your excellent book. What is something you would recommend the audience think about or do this week after having listened to this episode?
Jeff (49:56.29)
Well, I think, you know, as we talked about, maybe listening to an episode is itself a way of practicing this sort of capacity to go back and forth and to engage in a conversation. You could go for a long walk. You could, you know, sort of seek, think, think, where are the places in my life where I experience conviviality, glimpses of conviviality, glimpses of healthy life with other people and relationships.
And how can I cultivate those and maybe let those shape or crowd out the sources, the places in my life where I experienced frustration and kind of being at loggerheads with other people. But I hope that the fruit of this book and of this conversation is maybe a more sober
assessment of our media ecology, but one that has plenty of room for hope. There are opportunities for us to do good work, even in an imperfect system, because all systems are imperfect. But we still have the capacity to try to seek truth, seek understanding, and seek friendship with other people.
PJ (51:18.777)
Dr. Bill Breaux, it's been a joy talking to you today. Thank you.
Jeff (51:21.634)
Thank you.