If a god were to blog, I think the result would look a lot like mine, i.e. not very good, at least not very good when measured by worldly standards where traffic is king. In the morning, a god might post the cure for breast cancer, and in the afternoon, an explanation of gravity. In the evening, a god might post all of Shakespeare’s lost masterpieces, and on the next morning, while sipping a cup of coffee, such a god might reveal a mantra that, when repeated a hundred thousand times, guarantees enlightenment. But if such a god continued in this way, those who stumbled on the godly blog would start to complain that the blog had no focus.
That’s my problem. I have no focus. This could be a photoblog, or a theology blog, or a social activism blog, or a cartoon blog, or a philosophy blog, or a poetry blog, or a CanLit blog, or a warm and fuzzy human interest blog, or a current events blog, or a fiction blog, but because I don’t choose a focus, this has become a kitchen sink blog. I’m a Zelig blogger. Wherever I am, that’s what I find myself blogging about.
It’s not such a bad thing to be interested in the world around me. But if I were a serious blogger, maybe I’d be more selective in what I posted. Maybe I’d give it a thematic coherence. It wouldn’t be just a photoblog; it would be a photoblog that focused on pictures of geese that make you say “awwwww.” Or it wouldn’t be just a blog of pop-culture criticism; it would be an academic journal on Lady Gaga. You get the idea.
I’m not a serious blogger, of course. I’m just interested in being interested. However, because I’m insecure, I feel a need to justify my humble interest in being interested. While it won’t draw any more traffic to my site, it will make me feel better. As I proceed, you’ll discover that I’m not really writing about blogging at all. I’m writing about something altogether different. Maybe I’m writing about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. In fact, I’m writing about the meaning of focused writing.
The decision to write in a focused way inevitably involves us in an artificial narrowing of scope. This isn’t a new practice, but it has taken on a distinctive hue in today’s world. Nowadays, we narrow our focus, not for the sake of simplicity, not for ease of explanation, not even for aesthetic reasons, but because we want to package it and market it and sell it.
What sells in today’s world of non-fiction publishing? Oddly enough, what sells is the unified field theorem—the theory of everything. Every non-fiction writer wants to be the next Albert-fucking-Einstein. Everybody wants to be recognized as the person who drew a broad swath of knowledge into one grand pattern that accounted for everything and allowed us to dispense with fine-grained knowing.
Look at the best seller lists over the last decade:
Look at Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel, for instance, which tries to persuade us that all of human history has unfolded in ways that are ultimately traceable to the orientation of the continents. It’s pure dreck but people lap it up. Then there’s E.O. Wilson with his already forgotten Consilience. His big idea is that all knowledge falls within one big idea—nothing a baseball bat can’t disprove. There’s Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail which argues that the dissemination of culture via internet markets gives us access to more and richer culture because it makes “the long tail” more profitable. His work is demonstrably wrong, but no matter, he has another book out and we’ve all forgotten that he got it wrong the last time. After all, his status as guru of e-culture is determined by the culture he critiques: the truth doesn’t matter; it’s all about marketing. Or what about Jeffrey D. Sachs’ Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet in which he applies macroeconomic theories to persuade us that despite our nasty environmental ways, our planet is in great shape. This is the man who argues that as things warm up, we can just move our farming further north. Clearly, he has never toured the Canadian Shield or walked on tundra. You can’t grow crops from rock and it would take thousands of years to develop soil in this region. Even so, the fact that he may be mistaken doesn’t seem to matter. Another rising star in this firmament of packaged theorists is Malcolm Gladwell. He’s cranking out theories every other year now. Maybe he should crank out a theory-cranking theory.
Perhaps not coincidentally, most of the authors listed above have been invited to deliver TED talks. Elsewhere, I have suggested that there is something wrong with the TED talks. You can add one more to my list of reasons why: unwittingly or otherwise, TED feeds/celebrates/reinforces/legitimizes the commoditization of knowledge as a packaged, marketed and consumed product. Knowledge doesn’t have to be right; it just has to look right.
Go to any big-box store and look at the heaps of shining books and look at all the claims implicit in their titles. Seven steps to a new this or that. Learn the secrets of one thing or another. Discover why things are the way they are. We may think we sail an orthodox sea, but there’s a Gnostic undertow. We all crave a secret knowledge that will pull our lives into order and make our chaos explainable. Feel the crackling spine as you break open a new book and scan the flyleaf. Isn’t it a delicious feeling? You ask yourself: Will this be the one? Will this be the book that really pulls things together? It can’t be, of course. The logic of the market dictates that you must always be disappointed, otherwise you wouldn’t buy any more books.
In my world, there are no grand theories; there are only interpretations. They are helpful for a time. They lend perspective. They offer me a language to give expression to my experience. In time, they lose their usefulness and I must look elsewhere. Most experience sits outside grand theories. My grandmother’s gout is at least as important to her as Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. And Michael’s psychotic obsession has far more relevance to him than Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. These experiences may never be capable of being swept up within a grand theory, but I’m convinced that a compassionate view of life must give them at least as much weight as any great idea. And so I will continue to blog in my scatter-shot manner. If something I write interests you, that’s fine. And if something I write doesn’t interest you, that’s fine too.