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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.
Speaker 1 0:00
Social media has really only been around for about 20 years or so, and my hunch is that when historians look back 100 or 200 years from now, my wild prediction is that they're going to look back on social media and kind of look at it as this weird sort of interlude, almost like a virus, in the sense that we haven't metabolized it yet we haven't quite gotten used to it.
PJ 0:28
Hello and welcome to chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ weary, and I'm here today with Dan Trello, writer, cultural historian and photographer and a technology and humanity Fellow at the Center for future of mind, AI and society at Florida Atlantic University. Dr Torello. Dan, wonderful to have you
Speaker 1 0:47
on today. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
PJ 0:49
PJ, and we're talking about your book connection, how technology can make us better humans, which I actually really appreciate at the beginning you kind of, you actually do reference some of the negative stuff, but so much of the talk around technology is so negative recently, it's really encouraging to see a positive outlook, while at the same time you stay grounded with some of the negative repercussions. So I'm excited to talk about today, just from the get go, why this book?
Speaker 1 1:25
First of all, I love that you have the book there. My author copies are in the mail, so I actually haven't had a chance to hold it yet, so I'm a little envious.
Unknown Speaker 1:34
Oh yeah, it's really nice.
Speaker 1 1:36
Yeah. So thanks again for having me on the show. Let me tell you I like to tell stories. So let me tell you three stories that I think will help bring the book into focus and give some some context. Really, the germ idea for the book goes back a very long way to the days when I was in grad school, which is a long time ago now, and that a lot of life intervened, a lot of work, a lot of different circumstances and environments which also influenced it. But a few of the stories go back to that initial time. So let me tell you that the first story is that I'm trained as a as a literary critic and cultural historian, and there was a time when I was spending a lot of time reading medieval Italian literature, and some of the folks that I was reading were the Franciscan Franciscan poets. St Francis himself was a poet, and then a generation after him, a gentleman by the name of Jacopo nataldi. And as any academic knows, when you're deep, deep into a you know, academic pursuit, you always need to have some sort of an escape valve. It's just the way things go. And at that point, my escape valve was watching the newly released Battlestar Galactica show. This was, I think, 2005 2006 somewhere in that vicinity. The first season is just really, really amazing. It's philosophically sophisticated, if you haven't, for anyone who hasn't seen it, I highly recommend the pilot and then on from there. But the really short version is that in the Battlestar Galactica, the story is about a AI robots, the Cylons, who were created to serve humanity, and then decide to declare war. And at one point, they gain access to the the codes to the Marine, the human mainframe computers, and they destroy the earth. And they destroy the entire fleet of battle stars. The one that survives is the Battlestar Galactica, and it survives because of a because the commander was a bit of a Luddite, and all of the computers on board were standalones, and therefore the rest of the fleet got destroyed, and the Battlestar survived. So I was watching this while I was reading the Franciscan poets and the first Franciscans were really one of the first major counterculture movements in early modern European history, and they were very concerned with maintaining their identity and their independence from The bureaucratic mechanisms, bureaucratic and political mechanisms of the central Roman Catholic Church. And as I was reading all of this and watching all of this, I started thinking, you know, when was it that we first began to be afraid of technology developing a momentum of its own, and developing systems that were out of our control, and wanting to hedge and protect against that. So that was the intuition. And then a little bit later, Story number two, I was in California. I was visiting friends in Santa Barbara, and we went out to a went out to a bar one evening, and there was a band playing, and there was a guy on. Age, had long hair, and he was singing about the military industrial complex and world peace and the environment, and all of you know the traditional themes of liberation. And when we talked after the show, he asked me, you know what I did for a living? And I told him, oh, you know, I'm writing about the Franciscans right now, and his, his eyes absolutely lit up. And he, you know, he was like, you know, St Francis, that is. He's an inspiration for all of us. That's, that's where it's at. So, as I mentioned in the book The if St
Speaker 1 5:37
Francis is still making appearances and offbeat California establishments, it might not be a bad place to go digging and to start looking at these, these themes, I'll tell you one final episode, and this has, yeah, more to do with the the flow and the style and the vibe of The book, per se, if you you know you've you've read the book, you might notice that it begins as a as a relatively staid, traditional academic investigation, and then by the time we get to the final, the final few chapters, all of a sudden, I'm talking about embodiment. I'm talking about Holotropic breath work. I'm talking about shamanic shakeouts, and asking some of the folks who I'm photographing to engage in these kinds of activities. And you know, as a reader, you might be wondering, what in the what in the world, is going on? And it's it's actually the subject of my my next book that's a different story, but the very short version is that also, many years ago, my my body decided to stage a bit of a coup on me. So when you think of body systems, my auto not my the shorter is that my autonomic nervous system stopped working for a while. The autonomic nervous system is really fascinating from a philosophical point of view. Because if you think of bodily you know, just, just mechanisms physiology, you have all of the, all of the functions that just happen, whether you're thinking about them or not, liver enzymes, you know, all sorts of things that just happen. You're completely unaware of them. There's then the other category, which is all of the actions that come about because of agency. So I decide to drink a glass of water or to talk to you or to you know, do whatever it is I'm going to do. And at least theoretically, there's debate about this, but we think of it as being agentic and based and based in free will. But then there's this third category, which is the autonomic nervous system, and it really controls all of the functions that are liminal so things like heart rate and sweating and blood pressure and digestion and so on and so, to make a long story short, the the fact that my autonomic Nervous System was was decided to go haywire led me to look more carefully and to appreciate the embodied part of my existence. So up to this point, I was a pretty traditional academic. I my natural habitat tends to be from the from the neck up, and very rational based and but at the time, I had a climbing partner who kept telling me, you know, Dan, you really need to go to yoga. And my initial take to her was Yoga, you know, fuck that shit. I'm not a I'm not a yogi. I'm not a I'm not a yoga guy like this isn't my personality. But when all of this started happening, I went in purely remedially, and over time, that was a bit of a gateway. It led me to Vipassana meditation. It led me to a lot of other practices that really were about gaining more appreciation of embodiment as a whole. And over time, I started realizing that this was a really useful way to to think about philosophical issues as well. So that's a little bit of the backstory, and we can come back to any part of that.
PJ 9:09
Yeah, I had some what I thought were mental health issues during grad school, and actually turned out to be gut issues that I didn't discover till years later, and one that started a journey about food. For me, still don't know exactly what it is. I know things that trigger it, but I don't have, like, a name for it, but it's one of those things you could not think yourself out of it, right? And that's that does tend to be the academic answer, right? So there it is, very It's amazing. I'm reading Pascal. Just finished reading the poncets, and the way that you know reason is something that kind of tags along these, these massively important embodied systems. Really resonates with me.
Speaker 1 10:01
That's a great way to describe it, just not being able to think your way out of something. And it reminds me, you know, at the time, you know, I was, I was going, I was climbing almost every week, and we, you know, so a lot of this was indoors, but I remember, so it's, you know, I had an appreciation for physical activity and physicality, but I remember going to the climbing gym and charting out a route, and in thinking of it like a Petrarchan sonnet, this is how you approach it. This is this is how you go you go up, and you move in a certain way. And even though both Petrarchan sonnets are very much about emotion, and climbing is very much about the body I was approaching both as as an intellectual endeavor and very mind based. But there are certain problems that you have to solve via intuition and via just other other ways of knowing that may not be logic based. So I love how you how you frame that?
PJ 11:01
Yeah, it reminds me so much I've been reading. I mean, this sounds like a lot, but it's like 120 pages, so it's not but a Vygotsky talking about a colleague and what he was reacting against, who had gone home and tried to catalog every social behavior. He was like a social psychologist. He tried to catalog every single behavior his wife made while, well, cooking dinner. And about half an hour in, he had 200 observable behaviors.
Speaker 1 11:33
And first off, I was like, that sounds like a very dangerous kind of a task.
PJ 11:40
I was like, yeah. It's like, sounds like someone has a very patient wife. But also immediately, immediately, you're like, Well, why not 500 you know, you immediately start to break it down and get lower. But even then, you can't live life just like you. The solutions you need don't can come from reflection, but most of them, you have to do without any reflection at all, otherwise you get caught in this endless
Speaker 1 12:10
Absolutely, absolutely, in fact, really, I know you had someone on the show just a little while back who wrote a tome on the history of emotions. Yes, really looking forward to reading that. I haven't looked at it yet, but it sounds fantastic.
PJ 12:26
Yeah, well, and that's anyways, even like the different views of emotion, she charted quite the she goes from 600 to 1700 and she does a good job of covering it, which is impressive in itself, but I do feel like there may be some crossover there for your Franciscans. They seem to be, is it Jacopo? Yeah, Jacopo Na, definitely getting him mixed up. Is he the one that was, like, really excited about being eaten by the wolf.
Unknown Speaker 13:03
Yeah, that's exactly right.
PJ 13:07
I was like, Oh, that was not expecting that in the book about technology, but I'm glad it's here. I feel, I feel like, wait, I jumped right to the punch line, but what, what did you feel like you got? And you know, you go, you cross a wide territory, and I appreciate that, and it's a lot of fun. What did you specifically get about technology from jacopone and and Francis of Assisi.
Speaker 1 13:43
So let me start by, you know, when folks here, when folks say you're on thinking and writing about technology, I most folks just assume that I'm writing about social media and perhaps AI and chat GPT, and that's a that makes perfect sense. It's a really, it's what's on our minds right now. So it stands to reason that that's where folks would go. But when I you know, when we think about it, social media has really only been around for about 20 years or so, and my my hunch, is that when historians look back 100 200 years from now, my wild prediction is that they're going to look back on social media and kind of look at it as this weird sort of interlude, a bit of a, almost like a and I don't, I'm a fan of social media in some respects, so I'm not suggesting it's all, it's all negative, but, but it has elements of a of something that's a little bit like a virus in the sense that we haven't metabolized it yet. We haven't quite gotten used to it, but we're starting to move in that direction. We're starting to see the development of new technologies like bricks and blocks and whatnot that actually limit the way we interact with. Them were, you know, there's a lot of literature now around childhood development and how social media impacts cognitive function, and just looking at ways to regulate that and make sure that it's not unduly impacting children as they go through the their education. So all that to say that my take on looking back at technology is much more broad and expansive than anything that we've seen in the last 20 years or even in the last 100 years. And technology itself, I mean, I'm using it as a broad analytical category. So when we think of the etymology of the word, it's, it's really a fairly recent development. It goes back in the English language to the mid 1800s in 18 in the 1860s there was a naming of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and that's when it really entered the mainstream in terms of, you know, we think of science as being and we investigate natural processes, methodology, all of those, those theories and experiments. And then technology is typically thought of as the application of science. And that's a very modern usage. So before the 1860s and going back all the way to the Franciscans. And before that, what we think of as technology was really thought of as the mechanical arts or devices or different forms of crafts. And my understanding of technology goes all the way back to the really the origins of humanity. And if you think of the biblical story, the biblical myth, you remember that when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the first thing they do, you know, they were naked, the first thing they do is go find a a fig leaf, and then they, you know, they find animal skins with which to cover themselves. And to me, this is a first instant of of of technology in the sense that it's it's a way of relating to the environment, it's a way of relating to other people. It's a it's a way of relating to communities. So it's very much about relationships and how we how we interact. So going back to the Franciscans, what struck me? Well, there's, there's so many things that are interesting about the Franciscans, the their positioning in history. You know, this was a time in the the the 1200s and the early 13th century
Speaker 1 17:44
that was witnessing amazing amounts of change in terms of European cultural history and European economic history, you have a minor commercial revolution going on. So a lot of the mechanisms that we think of as modern and even contemporary had their origin during during this time period. So you have the beginnings of double entry bookkeeping. You have the first insurance mechanisms that are being established. You have the first real overtures to transnational trade. So you have Italian merchants who are heading off to France and heading into North Africa. And so you have this burgeoning trade that's taking shape over the continent. And you have the establishment of banking systems. So all of the things that Dante would rail against later on in the Divine Comedy, these are all taking shape during this time. And I think in, you know, out of this matrix, the Franciscans are birthed as really as a resistance to some of these new mechanisms of trade and wealth, and wanting to go back to a more simple life, a more authentic life, and wanting to develop relationships with each other, and ultimately, with Christ.
Unknown Speaker 19:01
But it does seem like it's a little bit more, rather than even return, at least for
PJ 19:07
Jacopo Na, it seems like it was kind of polemical, like it was like he was, like almost past the return, like the, I think the term, your phrase is naked in nature, which that seems, do you, do you think that is largely polemical in the way he's he's not actually living like that? Or do you think that they see that as a kind of an exemplar of this return to nature?
Speaker 1 19:33
Yeah. So what was going on with the aquapona? And here it's, it's helpful if we back up a little bit and set a little bit of the context so everybody remembers the story of St Francis. It's become iconic. He was something of a, I call him a trust fund kid among the letter. He was the, you know, his his family, his father was a, was a wealthy silk merchant who was always going off to France to trade. His goods, and that's where the name Francis actually probably came from. And Francis was was born in this family, and decided at one point, saw a church that was in disrepair, and so he appropriated some of his father's silk, sold it, and donated the proceeds to the church. And then, when his father called him in. Someone summoned him in before the bishop and asked him, asked him for the return of his goods. Francis, according to the story, stripped down naked and gave back his inheritance along with his clothes. And that was really the beginning of the Franciscan order. And this all happened in the early decades of the 13th century, Francis was a charismatic character, and soon the Franciscan movement actually became one of the most popular movements in Italy and in Europe. And as it became more popular, people were also making donations. They were they were leaving inheritances. They were donating property. And all of a sudden you have this, this major, major infrastructure Francis also less than left a testament in which he instructed folks in how they were, you know, the how they were meant to live and how to conduct their their business. And, of course, the vow of poverty was, was fundamental to the Franciscan Order. This is what briars, you know, renounced their worldly goods to join the order. Fast forward a few decades, to the next generation, and we get to jacopone da Todi. Jacopo ne was a was a lawyer. He was from the small town of toldI, which is also in central Italy, he studied law in Bologna, and then he was, you know, he was carrying out this successful practice as a lawyer. But in fact, his his wife, who was also a socialite, this, again, is, according to the story, but his wife was a socialite, and was going to all these parties. And according to the story, she went to one to a party one day, and tragedy struck. Folks were dancing, and there was revelry, and a balcony collapsed, and Jacopo and his wife was died in this in this episode, and when they went to to bury her, they realized that under the the festive garments, she was actually doing penance. She was wearing sackcloth or something similar. And so this was a pivotal moment for Jacopo now, who, of course, was grief stricken, but also realized that, you know, his his wife had been doing penance the entire time. And so he leaves his profession as a lawyer, and he joins the Franciscans as a friar now, in this, in this particular period, what, as I had mentioned, what, what was happening was that all of these folks had been donating properties and wealth of the Franciscan Order, and there were debates in the second generation In terms of how to manage that kind of wealth. And there was a faction of the the Franciscans. They're referred to as the spirituals, the spiritual Franciscans who wanted to they were just much more fundamentalist in terms of their understanding of the vow, and they wanted to maintain complete, complete poverty. And there's a lot of technical, legal details and theological details. Various Minister generals are involved in these debates, which develop over a period of of decades. And there's back and forth, and letters are written and so on. But the core of the issue is that Jacopo na was critiquing the apparent lack new laxness of you know, some of his Franciscan colleagues, but he was also critiquing the Roman church, more generally, the papacy, which was had a lot of temporal power at this this point, and was not particularly interested in giving up the sources of its wealth. So you can imagine this develops into a much broader feud, and it really becomes an institutional feud within within the Catholic Church.
PJ 24:10
And there's a and I'm trying to it's been a while since I've read anything Francis of sissy. I'm probably saying a seat here anyway. Right?
PJ 24:27
Easy, yeah, that's easy, yeah, we have he's the one that refers to Brother Sun, Sister Moon.
Speaker 1 24:36
So that was France. That was the original, the cannibal Canticle of creatures. And then Jacopo Na is the generation after that. But you had mentioned, you had mentioned the wolf. So yagopona has these ascetic tendencies. And there's this one lot, which, which, you know, he's, he's famous for, I mean, it's, it's, it's a beautiful lot. And it's very, it's very dramatic. Attic and presents these, these images. So he's basically going through an entire, he wants to be afflicted by an entire string of deadly and disfiguring diseases, starting with leprosy. So, you know, he's asking for leprosy to come visit him, and then, you know, Dropsy, and any I forget the, you know, there's, there's a long list of diseases that we go through, that he would like to experience. And then the final few verses says, you know, and I would like to be eaten by a wolf and shat on a bed of thorns. So he doesn't want to, he doesn't want to be buried. He doesn't want to, you know, he doesn't want to have any Memorial, and, you know, dedicated to him, he just wants to, you know, the fully ascetic experience be humiliated. And in this he, you know, he finds a greater union with Christ. And what strikes me, you know, the argument that I put forth in the book is that this is all really interesting, but the fact that he wrote poetry about this kind of betrays his intention, because he's not leaving a grave site, or he says he doesn't want to leave a grave site, but he's leaving this beautiful lot about the experience which has immortalized him. So this, this idea that you could have an ascetic practice without the bureaucrat bureaucratic and political mechanisms. So what I call technology, protecting giving you sacred space to exercise your asceticism in, it becomes a something of a self contradictory position, because in order to practice your asceticism, you need to have the protected space to begin with.
PJ 26:52
So as we look at things like his very visceral connection with nature, but also Francis's connection you know, the way that he talks about animals, the way that he talks about the sun and the moon, which is very distinct in some ways, from, like the kind of Anthropocene, you know, like we're in control, you know, crown of creation, idea, the title of your book. Connection, this reliance on poetry, this connection with nature, and I see that in partly as the reason that you're digging here and the value it brings is as we're just overly consumptive. We're breaking apart from embodiment and nature. Do you mind talking a little bit like, what? What is moving into, like, the practical, you know, you you talk about the different types of breathing, that sort of thing. What is the connection piece between our bodies and nature that is it right to say, harmonizes technology us with technology, or uses technology in a harmonic, harmonious way.
Speaker 1 28:03
So I need to tell you another story, and we need to go back even together. And let me, let me attempt to do that. So this particular story takes shape in Trieste, which is a it's a town in the northeastern part of Italy. The mountains come all the way down to the sea. It's this gorgeous, gorgeous area, and it's actually right on the board. It's always been a point of wanderings and of cross cultures. So it's, it's right on the border of current, present day Austria, and in the 19th and early 20th century, of course, it was on the border with the Austro Hungarian empire. Slovenia is also right there. So it's really this, this point of movement with with cross currents, intellectually, and in other ways, we're going back to the 19, early 1900s so like right before World War One, and then immediately after World War One, and there was a gentleman there by the name of Italo Zevo, which is a it's a pen name. It literally means Italian and Swabian and German. His his actually, his real name was e to the Schmidt. So his father was was German. His mother was Italian. He grew up in this environment. He wasn't he was a novelist. He was writing novels as well as essays, and most folks have not typically heard of it. The other gentleman who was hanging out with Eternals evil during this time was James Joyce, who happened to be in the city in the you know, right before World War One, and then again after the war. And Joyce was able to English teacher. So the two of them became friends, and Joyce was influential in terms of getting zevos work well known outside of his hometown in Italy and ultimately in Europe. What's interesting about Zach all from the point of view of the philosophy of technology, is that. That one of the essays that he wrote was a little treatise called man and Darwinian theory, Duomo e la theory of darwiniana. And in this essay, he goes way back to the origins of history, and he speculates. He tells the story of an early human being who was mostly naked, was running around on on two feet so fully Iraq, but just kept getting walloped by other, you know, by other predators, by animals, by the weather, by the wind, by the rain, whatever was going on at that point was, you know, and eventually this person got got tired of this. So what does he do? He decides to find the biggest, the biggest beast he can possibly find. And he finds a mammoth. And he, you know, he starts relating to the mammoth, and they make a deal. And he says, hey, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna scratch your back, and if you in exchange you're gonna, you're gonna protect me. So, you know, this is the arrangement they come up with. It's it's peaceful, it's symbiotic to a degree. And what he proposes is that this gave this man what he calls it, calls a pause, the opportunity to stop and to be protected from the elements and to reflect and to go off and build other implements and other tools, which then over time. I mean, this is a long term kind of mythical account, but over time allows them to develop into the tool, creating culture, creating human being that we are familiar with. Zachel, of course, was tapping into a tradition of German philosophical anthropology that developed soon after Darwin's Origin of Species. But the principle that I think comes out of this fable of this story is just this idea that technology and its original conception, as well as in our current situation, is really about relationships. It's about power. It's about how we relate to one another. It's about negotiation. It's about language and communication and the actual artifacts are, I don't want to say secondary to that. They're because they're intrinsic to it. But there's so much more involved than just the device
PJ 32:35
I've been reading. I think people at this point are just used to my bad pronunciations. But Bordeaux, and he's taught he's talking about like one of the most significant advances in warfare was the Phalanx, which had nothing, had very little do with the artifacts and had to do with the social organization and the almost like the dance, like being able to march in steps so you could have a closed line, versus kind of like charging at people, right? I think too of Facebook when you look, I mean, I, I think most of the people listening remember when Facebook came around, but I have a 13 year old daughter, so I'm more and more aware. Like, for her, Facebook is an old person thing that has just always been around. But when you look at what Facebook is, it wasn't anything revolutionary in terms of the what we would think of as the technology. It was the social arrangement. The idea that you could screen who saw your content was really, I mean, you had, when it first started, you had to have a.edu account, right? And it was like, Oh, this is a safer version of Myspace, right? Which like, and so I think that's it's something that's commonly missed, because we like to look at what's right in our hands, which is, you know, what technology is, smartphones, right? And the screen is the same as social media. It's like, no, actually, they're very distinct. And they're they carry very different practices. A phone can have very different effects on you, depending on how it's organized,
Speaker 1 34:13
absolutely, how you're using it, what you're doing with it, what, what it looks like. I mean, I, you know, I It's, you mentioned the phone and Facebook, and I have one friend who's whose name I will not mention, but they, they have this, you know, they've decided to, they've maintained a flip phone. And I love, I love that approach, because it allows this person to do everything they need to do with the phone. They're they're connected to who they want to be connected with in the way that they want to be connected. And they have this, this artifact from from the past, which is a political statement of sorts as well. You know, it really strikes me that we have so much more agency around technology that then we. We somehow or sometimes acknowledge it's something to our to our detriment. I mean, I think we regaining that sense is really important.
PJ 35:10
This is a little bit out of the blue, but is the question I want to be respectful your time. And there's a couple of questions I really did want to ask you. One of them is, you know, I look at your wow, I can't think of the word. All I can think of is obituary. And that's definitely your biography. That's like, I was like, it's definitely not obituary. Wait no, when
Speaker 1 35:35
I look at obituaries, is raising practice. I mean, if you write your own obituary, you you know, it's a great way to figure out what it is you actually care about.
Speaker 2 35:46
That's, that's true. Yeah, that would be a good meditating, meditational practice.
PJ 35:54
So writer and cultural historian, but also photographer and, you know, as you talk about embodiment, you talk about connection, how has your work as a photographer informed and influenced this work?
Speaker 1 36:15
I love that question, and it's, it's bringing back. You know, as a as a kid, I used, I used to hate being photographed. I mean, it was, it was very, you know, I'm still am a bit of an introvert. I'd rather be be behind the camera than in front of the camera. So I would actually describe it in a slightly different way, and that's that the emphasis on embodiment, and the appreciation for embodiment, and all the contemplative practices, from yoga to Vipassana meditation to other forms of conscious movement, all of those practices really informed my photography as a way of seeing the world and in a, in a in a different light, so to speak. So I've always been fascinated by photography. I picked up my first proper DSL, or not even DSLR, SLR camera at the time when I was on my way to India, and I've always found it to be an amazing way to view the world, to, you know, doing portraits and just taking in being able to frame things in a certain way. But it was really thanks to that, next to the embodiment practices, that I came back to photography in a different way. And when you're doing when you're doing portraits, you're attempting to you're asking someone to express who they you know who they are. You're asking someone to express their authentic self. And in order to do that, you you need to have some sort of a of a relationship, of a unit. There needs to be communication, there needs to be a sense of trust. And it's not really a cerebral kind of pursuit. This goes back to the very start of our conversation. It's a much more fully embodied way of approaching the world. So it's really, it's, it's one more way to meditate, in a sense, because you're engaged in this, in this dance of expression and of self creation and of artistic pursuit that is, is unpredictable. You don't know where it's going to end up.
PJ 38:47
And, you know, we, we've talked a lot about kind of technology, and I feel like you one, you've written this in a very popular style, and I appreciate that. I mean, it's, it's readable, right? Like, it's not like it's not a dense tome here, but I look at it and I also appreciate that kind of in response to technology, you start off the book by saying, and it's definitely the first book from an Academic Press I've seen say this, I don't expect you to read the whole book, you know. And it's not like it's a reference book, right? Like this is like, it's a very like, doable book, right? Also, you know, do you have a preference for vodka tonics that seemed like, you know, anyways, but where did that impetus come from? How do you think about how did that shape the book, this idea that we shouldn't be expecting people necessarily to read whole books? I Not that that's necessarily what you're saying. I'm curious about that statement at the beginning, because that's that's unusual.
Speaker 1 39:57
It's a wonderful question, and it's a it's a tough one to answer. So I find myself I'm a little bit torn in this regard, because I would love to think that folks would, you know, pick it up and read it from the first page to the to the end, and at the same time, I notice, and there's a little bit of sadness around around this, because I do notice in my own life, you know, even just 20 years ago, it somehow felt easier to pick up Anna, Karenina, or The Brothers Karamazov, and spend two weeks just completely immersed in a text and going into a world and and it just, it was easy to do, and something about it is is no longer particularly easy for me. And I think that has a lot to do with what we've been talking about. I mean, I think, I do think social, you know, I describe it as a, you know, blip in the history of technology that said, I do think social media does have dramatic effects on our cognition, on our neurology and how we process the world, and my hope is that we are beginning to develop ways of using social media in a much more deliberate way, and in a way that that does not is not so detrimental to our longer term span of attention, so that we can go back to to, you know, reading, reading a text from beginning to end is comes back to embodiment. It's really about being present with with someone there is a beautiful everyone knows Machiavelli because of the prince, and, you know, this idea that he's, he's a strategist, and he's, you know, he develops a new, new way of doing political ethics. He was a lot of other things as well. And one of the, one of the one of the passages in Machiavelli, he talks about his rituals around reading, and about how after, after dinner, he will wear his finest robes and go into his study and spend hours with the great writers of the past. And I think this is a, you know, it's, it's a beautiful image of of presence, because when we're spending time reading, we're spending time with with someone's thoughts, with someone's emotions, with someone's feelings, how they've constructed their word and that requires long term, sustained attention. So all of that to say that there's a there's a little bit of there's a hope that we might be moving back in this direction and to a place where we're able to spend more time reading sequentially and with longer periods of time. And that said, there's also a realism, and this is what prompted me to write what I wrote in the introduction to the book, which is simply understanding that the way our current lives are structured, most people will not spend 10 or 20 or however many hours reading a book from the front cover to the end, and that's okay. You can start in the middle, you can start at the end, and you can go back, depending on what makes you curious. And you can construct, you can make it a choose your own adventure through, through the narrative. And that's, that's an acceptable way of reading as well. As far as I'm concerned.
PJ 43:33
Do you think some of it is as I'm listening to you? And I kind of felt that double edge here, like, actually makes me sad, right? And but also like you're being realistic about it. Do you think? Do you feel, with the message of the book that the people you wanted to reach? It was important to say that too, because if someone's already reading sequentially easily, then they're probably going to understand a lot of what you're talking about in the book is that, is that one way to think? Am I on track with you there?
Speaker 1 44:05
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I what I think academics, I think I really think it's a, it's a broad phenomenon. I mean, I think I think academics are as guilty as as anybody, perhaps even more so, because as academics, we tend to want to go into a book too. At least, this is how I tend to approach books. It's to go in with like, Okay, what am I getting out of this book? What is the central argument? And it's much more of a I budget at the amount of time that I have. I'm not reading necessarily experientially. So I would separate it out. I mean, I think people will read different reasons, and and all of that is okay and to be expected. So if you're reading you know, perhaps you're interested in the Renaissance and not so much in the medieval period. And in that case, go straight to the chapter on the Renaissance. That's fantastic. And folks who are reading it, who may not be academics. Just our press for time, as we all are. I'm sure there's going to be one particular chapter or subject matter that is more appealing, and it's something of an experiment in the sense that it's constructed in a way I hope that is conducive to jumping in at any point throughout the book.
PJ 45:20
Yeah, I mean, and I've referenced this, but I wrote down the list you and there's more things in here, but like the the first chapter is kind of introductory. Then you have matrix and Heidegger for the second chapter, then you have labri and Franciscans and the third chapter, Dante Giorgio, Agamben and Boccaccio Virgil in the Fourth Chapter. And then you start off the fourth or sorry the fifth chapter, and you have that a German engineer, a Florentine sculptor and a courtier from Urbino walk into a bar right like and you can immediately see how each one can be self contained, but also does flow together. It's really the format is fascinating. So thank you for that. The I just had someone on to talk about this, but as you talk about academics reading, and it's almost, won't say, exploitative, but, you know, it's like, what can I extract from this? We were talking about what peer review is supposed to be for. And then his experience of peer review, which is largely almost every time the feedback is cite me more, it's, yeah, it's the theme of consumption in your book, and the way that social practices get moved into consumption. I want to be respectful of your time, but if I could kind of as the final question, how do we live more embodied and more connected in the face of these kind of over consumptive practices that are kind of buried in our technology.
Speaker 1 47:13
I think that, you know, one of the central themes of the book, and we've, we've touched on this already, but just just the idea and this, this will sound incredibly simple and perhaps cliche, but occasionally cliches, you know, developed for a reason and are really valuable. So just the idea that we there's a lot of, there's a lot of a lot of sense of determinism around technology. These days, technology is driving the markets and it's driving social media, and it's driving the way we relate to each other. And really the central, one of the central threads of the book throughout, is the idea that we have agency and that we have choice, and that we we are able to create the worlds around us in ways that are conducive to human flourishing. And it's, it's our responsibility to do so, so to claim back that agency and that technology. The the theme around consumption is, is really interesting as well, because my, my sense is that the the the ability to stop and to take stock and to be more deliberate and to be more meditative or contemplative, and to have more leisure. I mean, those are all that. They can be seen as ascetic practices, but they're also really a luxury. I mean, they're, they're in order to in order to stop and and reflect, you have to have an infrastructure that allows you to stop and reflect. And so it really is a community, a matter of community and a matter of politics, and a matter of how we set up our lived environment that allows us to emphasize those values and define those those spaces, because they're not going to just happen on their own.
PJ 49:11
Yeah, it reminds me of the start of not that it wasn't good what Francis did, but he did start as a trust fund kid. It would have been very different if he was already starving, and he walked by the church and didn't do anything.
Speaker 1 49:23
Right? That's exactly right. I mean, you you have to have, you have in order to be a revolutionary, you have to have resources. You have to have an infrastructure, and you have to have a social, you know, just a social environment that is conducive to you being a certain way in the world. So the and this is one of the one of the reflections from from looking at the Franciscans and Jacob Bona is just this idea that you you really cannot it to the degree that you're ignoring the system as a whole. Your your full. Philosophy is going to and your practice and the way you've set up your social structures is going to fall short and run into challenges because you're not you're not looking at things holistically and at the economics and the politics and everything involved.
PJ 50:18
Dan, absolute joy having you on today. Thank you so much. It's really, really been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 50:24
Thanks so much for a wonderful conversation. PJ I really appreciate it. You
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