The Discipline of Individuality
Be all that you can be
The internet has provided us enormous opportunity for self-discovery. It encourages us to probe, to seek, to experiment, to try new things that we otherwise might never have done. It’s a powerful tool that places each one of us directly in the center of our own universe.
When you’re online, you need only click or tap and everything on the screen changes and you’re suddenly in a whole new place. The universe, quite literally, revolves around you. Your choices are unlimited, aren’t they?
With those unlimited choices and paths before us it’s reasonable to expect that, finally, each one of us might reach our true potential. Want to learn how to be a great painter? No problem. Online tutorials are everywhere. Looking to become a yoga master, or a backyard gardener? Why not be daring and learn to play the banjo?
Heck, you don’t even need to wander outside of YouTube to have access to all of these things. You can rise to become the Renaissance person you always knew was hidden inside you, and the internet will show you the path to that enlightenment.
But is it really that easy? Can this digital ecosystem’s vast riches really free you to become the enlightened, advanced person you seek to become? Is it simply a matter of Googling information and cramming it into your head? Can you become a true banjo master by watching Bela Fleck or Tony Trischka on YouTube and practicing those Scruggs rolls?
Well, maybe. But then again, probably not.
The idea of “freeing your mind” doesn’t occur by having instant access to all the world’s knowledge. It isn’t a drive-thru where you choose from a menu. Enlightenment happens through rote repetition, doing the same boring things over and over again until you no longer need to think about them.
It is, literally, like riding a bicycle.
Matthew Crawford’s, “The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction” is a wonderful book on this subject, written by a thoughtful fellow who happens to have both a strong academic background and many years of real-life experience with hands-on mechanical skills. He writes:
“Our emergence from (what Kant described as) self-imposed immaturity seems to have stalled at an adolescent stage, like a hippie who hasn’t aged very well. The irritants that stand out now are the self-delusions that have sprouted up around a project of liberation that has gone to seed, ushering in a ‘culture of performance’ that makes us depressed.”
Crawford is describing our popular culture’s framework, based within the so-called “open culture” of the internet (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram…. take your pick), as compared with what he describes as “the well-ordered ecologies of attention” that are found within specialties that require discipline, and in which acolytes are obliged to follow a prescribed order.
Carpenters, fry cooks, motorcycle racers, musicians, auto repairmen, glassblowers, electricians, …. all are required to follow established, conventional methods set down by their predecessors before they can fully come into themselves as craftspersons or artists, before they are set free to become truly enlightened individuals.
Yes, it’s good to dabble, to experience tiny bits of things, and the internet encourages us to do that. But we should not mistake that for true, rote, repetitive experience.
This open world of digital ecosystems that we now inhabit is seductive. Because it places each of us at the center of our own universe; it wants us to believe we can have it all (knowledge, wisdom, compassion, and enlightenment) without doing the hard yards.
It offers the illusion that we can learn at the feet of masters, over a long weekend, that we can dispense with the years of living the frugal life of a spiritual master. We google our own reality, without having to plow through Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Nietzsche and all that other boring stuff.
The upshot, according to Crawford, is that individualism (the idea that each of us is unique) arose from the political context of The Enlightenment, and served to liberate us from authority. It elevated each of us to a place we think we belong: to the status of individual. As such, it’s a place each of us thinks we deserve to be, whether or not we have earned it.
Crawford writes about using jigs when making things by hand. A jig is a custom made tool that is used to control the location and/or the movement of another tool or device. It’s a tool that allows us to perfectly duplicate a repetitive task, over and over. Traditions, or “cultural jigs” as Crawford calls them, often create communities of practice in which true independence is possible.
A fry cook is not truly able to contemplate the world around him until he has full command of his work, until he can fry your bacon and eggs without really having to consciously think about it. Once that happens, he’s free to climb the rungs of the artistic ladder, to become enlightened, as it were.
I served a saddlemaker’s apprenticeship, eventually to become a master saddlemaker myself, and then I apprenticed others under me in much the same way I was apprenticed. I lived for many years (and continue to live) within that saddlemaker’s tradition, or cultural jig. I know what Crawford writes about because I’ve lived it.
It is not until the apprentice follows the discipline and finally masters its techniques that she is able to become a master herself. And it is not until she becomes a master that she is fully free to become an individual within the discipline, and to finally place her own self within the universe.
Saddle up. It’s a long ride ahead.
