Hamlet's BlackBerry (9 page)

When Phaedrus is done delivering the speech, Socrates lavishly applauds the performance, playfully pronouncing
himself “in ecstasy.” They then have a discussion of its arguments, and along the way Socrates spins one of the most famous metaphors in all of philosophy. Since Lysias's essential point was that love drives people mad, Socrates examines exactly what madness is and why the mind sometimes goes over the edge.

He likens the soul to a flying chariot pulled by a pair of winged horses. One of the horses stands for the good, virtuous side of us and the other for the bad, corrupt side. The goal of the charioteer is to drive the horses skillfully so the chariot soars up toward “the place beyond heaven” where “pure knowledge”—enlightenment and happiness—resides. But the horses are hard to manage, especially the evil one, and sometimes they pull in different directions. When this happens, the chariot loses its way and crashes to Earth.

The image still resonates because it captures something essential about the challenge of being human. Socrates aimed to be a practical philosopher, and what he's describing is really the journey of the inner self every day. We're all driving our own chariots through the chaos, struggling to reconcile the forces pulling at us from every direction. You know the feeling. You rush around chasing the things the world holds up as the keys to happiness: money, success, status, what passes for entertainment. Yet they don't do the trick, not in a lasting way. On some level, you know you could be using your time and talents to pursue a steadier, more authentic kind of existence, but you're not sure how. As Socrates puts it, chariot driving “is inevitably a painfully difficult business.”

Foolish people get caught up in the chariot race itself, he says, “trampling and striking one another as each tries to get ahead of the others.” Others manage to stay calm and keep their chariots on course, adroitly avoiding the pileups. And while these lucky souls don't quite attain “pure knowledge”—which
is reserved for the gods—they do soar to impressive heights and find genuine contentment.

Skillful life management yields wisdom and happiness. It's a terrific ideal, but the busier our days become and the more others control the reins, the harder it is to imagine achieving it. Lately, with the relentless demands of digital devices, the challenge often seems insurmountable. If you're a faithful connector who spends all day interacting with screens, you probably know, as I do, what it's like to have your chariot stuck in the bad place. “The result is terribly noisy, very sweaty, and disorderly,” Socrates says, and those who live this way wind up “unsatisfied.”

What can we do about it? This isn't ancient Greece, and Socrates and Phaedrus never had to manage jammed inboxes. But the beauty of Plato, and the reason he's still widely read today, is that he addresses life's fundamental questions in ways that transcend time and place. The chariot metaphor is a helpful reminder of the link between the outward self—how we spend our time interacting with the world, managing our work lives and relationships—and the inward one. In ancient Athens, there was a highly effective way to quiet one's busy outward life and get the chariot back under control: a simple walk in the country.

True, the star of this story, Socrates, initially pooh-poohs the idea of putting any distance between himself and his beloved city. However, Socrates isn't the only philosopher involved here. Plato wrote this and the other dialogues of Socrates after the latter's death. They're based on real historical conversations, but since time had passed and Plato was becoming a philosopher himself, it's widely assumed he took liberties and often arranged the material to make his own points. Though he never states his personal views directly, now and then he seems to implicitly criticize what Socrates is saying.

Phaedrus
is sprinkled with clues that Plato disagreed with his teacher about distance. First there's the question of the walk in the country. Though Socrates leaves Athens reluctantly, once he and Phaedrus have settled in by the stream, they have a conversation that, even by Socratic standards, is extraordinary. After the “ecstasy” of Phaedrus's performance, Socrates delivers a few stunning speeches of his own, becoming so absorbed in the task that he's in a kind of rapture. He's in the zone, you might say, and he attributes this pleasant state to their rural hideout. “There's something really divine about this place,” he says. He's using the word “divine” literally, to suggest that the gods are inspiring him. But notice he links the divinity to this
place
, the isolated location to which Plato has devoted particular attention. The message is unmistakable: the distance Socrates had dismissed as a pointless bother has played an important role in helping his mind take flight.

Second, the tool Phaedrus brought along under his cloak allows them to make the most of that distance. With the hard copy in hand, they can be away from town with all its distractions and burdens, yet retain full access to one of its chief draws: great, stimulating rhetoric. The gadget is the linchpin of their conversation, but once again Socrates doesn't see the point.

Toward the end of the dialogue he brings up the new technology and the question of whether written language serves any useful purpose. He tells a story about an Egyptian god named Theuth who had invented many “arts,” including arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. But his greatest discovery was written language. Theuth showed this creation to the king of Egypt, promising it would “make the Egyptians wiser” and “improve their memory.”

The king was not impressed. To the contrary, he told Theuth, writing would make his people forget more easily.
Once something was recorded in this external way, using letters, they wouldn't feel the need to “remember it from the inside, completely on their own,” i.e., in their minds. Worse, they would use writing to appear knowledgeable when they were merely parroting what they'd read. “[T]hey will be tiresome,” the king says, “having the reputation of knowledge without the reality.”

Socrates shares the king's dim view of this tool, and he expands on it. Writing is a dangerous invention, he tells Phaedrus, because it doesn't allow ideas to flow freely and change in real time, the way they do in the mind during oral exchange. Whereas conversation is all about back-and-forth, written language is a one-way street: Once a thought is written down, it's frozen and you can't challenge it or change its position. It's a record of ideas that already exist, rather than a way of creating new ones. He likens written texts to paintings, which “stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent.” A piece of writing “continues to signify just that very same thing forever.” In a word, it's dead.

Thinkers have been analyzing and debating this passage for ages, because Socrates got it so wrong. His reaction to writing is typical of the confusion and anxiety new technologies often cause. Like the Luddites of today who believe that digital technologies are irredeemably inferior to older devices and even dangerous, he judged the new tool exclusively through the lens of the old one. Because writing didn't work just like conversation, he felt, it couldn't possibly be worth much and would only make people dumber. To Socrates, writing was useful only as an aid to oral dialogue, a kind of script, which is exactly how he and Phaedrus employ it.

What led Socrates to this narrow, pessimistic view of writing? He failed to understand that new connective technologies
come along to solve genuine problems, and those problems usually have something to do with distance. In primitive times, the problem had been
psychic
distance; people were trapped in their own thoughts without an effective way to express themselves. Conversation solved this problem by allowing them to put their thoughts into words that could be shared and understood.

Oral communication was a great success, but it gave rise to a new problem of
physical
distance, rooted in the fact that conversation could happen only in close proximity to others. As civilization expanded, it became increasingly useful and important for people to communicate across great distances. By the fifth century
B.C
., merchants and traders were running businesses that spanned mountains, deserts, and seas. There were city-states and emerging empires whose political and military leaders needed to send messages to far-flung locations. Human messengers long met this need, delivering information by voice. But this system had drawbacks, including the limitations of memory. Written language solved the problem of physical distance by allowing words and ideas to travel anywhere and arrive intact, exactly as originally recorded. Writing also solved the
temporal
problem of storage, making it possible for information to be stored over the long term more reliably than it could ever be stored in the human mind.

As Plato shows in
Phaedrus
, this immensely practical innovation also had a less tangible, but ultimately far more significant, benefit. It allowed individuals to experience other people and their ideas
at a distance
, in a private, reflective way. A text written in a busy city could be “replayed” anywhere, including on the bank of a gurgling stream. Immediately after Phaedrus removes the scroll from his cloak, the two men step into the stream, which Phaedrus observes is “lovely, pure and clear”—a metaphor, perhaps, for what's about to happen to the flow
of their thoughts. While closing one kind of distance, written language opened another, giving the mind a new kind of freedom. As a result of that freedom, writing turned out to be much more than a static record of old thoughts. Over time, it would become the fantastic medium for exchanging ideas and growing new ones that it is today.

Given who Socrates was, a philosopher whose life's work was embedded in the old medium, it's understandable that he didn't grasp the value of the new one. Steeped in the culture of the voice, he never imagined that one could go off alone with a written text and read it silently and thereby gain new insights. His doubts may also have been related to the physicality of writing. A firm believer that the mind was the source of all meaning, he was suspicious of the body and, indeed, the entire physical world. At one point in this dialogue, he refers to the body disparagingly as a mere shell for the intellect, “this thing we are carrying around.” To him, a written text was just another “thing,” a dumb object that pretended to do what the mind does but never could.

Plato had more vision than his teacher about the value of distance. As the action of the dialogue shows, he understood that there was much to be gained by retreating physically from the crowd. Years after Socrates' death, when Plato decided to open his own school, he founded it outside Athens in the same kind of countryside where this dialogue takes place. The Platonic Academy would become synonymous with the best of Greek thought, further evidence that there really is something divine about distance.

Second, though there's no record of what Plato personally thought about written language, he left plenty of evidence that he thought better of it than Socrates did. Plato also took a dim view of physical objects as sources of wisdom, but that didn't stop him from putting pen to scroll and becoming a writer
himself. The reason we're able to read this dialogue today is that Plato wrote it down, using the very tool Socrates denounced. He was roughly forty years younger than Socrates and evidently more open to the possibilities of the new device. By recording in hard copy Socrates' dark fears about writing, he was effectively saying, “Sorry, old man, there's more to it than that.”

For our purposes, in
Phaedrus
Plato establishes a basic principle on which to build a new way of thinking about digital connectedness: In a busy world, the path to depth and fulfillment begins with distance. The technological landscape is a great deal more complicated today, and over the centuries distance has taken on different meanings. But the basic dynamic hasn't changed: to steer your chariot toward a good life, it's essential to open some gaps between yourself and all the other chariots crashing around this busy world.

Technology is unpredictable, and the gaps often appear in surprising places. So far, digital gadgets have increased the general level of our busyness, creating a new need for distance. It's a problem yet to be solved, and it's worth noting that some 2,400 years ago, it was just beginning to dawn on people that they could use
their
newest technology for the opposite purpose: to reduce or temper their busyness. Might we be able to pull off the same trick in the digital age?

For that to happen, it's essential to be more mindful of how today's devices change our relationship to the crowd, which in turn affects our busyness and state of mind. Human connectedness is fluid and ever changing. When they first meet in the city, Socrates and Phaedrus are in a busy, highly connected situation. By talking a walk, they become less connected to the crowd and more connected to each other—and the scroll helps make it all happen.

As new technologies are added to the mix, the permutations
and subtleties multiply. In Athens, the city was synonymous with the crowd. But today, walking down a bustling city street can be a form of
dis
connectedness from the crowd, especially if you've just come from an office crowded with screens. While you're walking down that city street, if your mobile buzzes with a call or message, your relationship to the crowd changes yet again.

To make sense of all this, it's helpful to imagine connectedness as a continuum along which we're moving all the time. It's pictured below as a straight line between two poles, which I've labeled with the Greek letters alpha and omega. Alpha represents minimum connectedness, or the self alone, while omega is the maximum connectedness of the crowd.