On Solitude
"Solitude is a defense mechanism in a world that does not deserve to be saved."
Robert Ferguson
"But if we don't have experience with solitude----and this is often the case today---we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness."
Sherry Turkle
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"Our unhappiness arises
from one thing only: that we cannot be comfortably alone in our room….That is
why the pleasure of solitude is seen as so incomprehensible", said the French
scientist-philosopher Blaise Pascal. With every passing day, we lose a bit of
our quietude, a patch of our silent spaces to the deafening noise and maddening
pace of new technologies and gadgets---the iPods, iPhones, tablets, HD TVs,
smartphones, video game consoles, smart watches and smart this and smart that.
With these come the conveniences, no doubt, but also accompanying them are the
flat and impoverished lifestyles often cunningly packaged as miracle manna, with
promises of bliss and fulfillment. The non-stop bombardment of online and offline propaganda tell us that nirvana and nijaat can be achieved and owned just around the corner
where the new iPhone or some clone of it, after a super-hyped promotional
bonanza, is being sold to the psychologically bruised masses, all of whom eagerly line
up, as if they were in a free-for-all langar, to get their hands on the new
gadget. This magical gizmo will soon become old, kicking in the same cycle of
mindless consumption all over again.
It is ironic that we
humans make these anti-spiritual and, ultimately dehumanizing contraptions only
to become slaves to them in a state of helplessness as they in turn shape control and eventually consume us. With every new “smart” device that promises liberation, we de-skill
ourselves and lose our independence: as our technologies grow and become smarter and stronger, we shrink and become stupider and weaker. Recall what the convenient calculator did
to the arithmetic ability of kids and what the computer keyboard or word
processor has done to the reading and writing skills of both adults and
children. Writes William Deresiewicz: “Reading now means skipping and skimming;
five minutes on the same Webpage is considered an eternity.” Convenience and
ease remain desirable but they also breed unhealthy, slavish dependence. When
we shun effort and difficulty, when we by-pass what demands our long and deep
attention, we also forego the opportunity to realize our potentialities, since
it is in our painful struggles with what is strange and difficult that we often
experience authentic joy and through them we achieve greatness. “The
purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things,” wrote the poet Rainer
Maria Rilke.
Every new gizmo
triumphantly announces the shattering of yet another frontier and the arrival
of a new age of progress for us, but in reality its essential victories are
over our interior and spiritual life, that qualitative and meaning-rich domain that matters most
for a truly meaningful life. It is yet another assault of the quantitative on
the qualitative.
Fifty years ago a
technology critic like Lewis Mumford could say:
“Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that
the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.” Not anymore. The “smart” machines are now
everywhere: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedroom and in our beds,
in the toilet, in our cars, in our offices and schools, in our heads and
hearts. They have colonized our most private and intimate spaces. They have
even invaded and desacralized our mosques and madrassahs. Today’s pious
Muslims, for example, will not let go of them even as they circumambulate the
House of God, the Holy Kaaba during Hajj in Mecca! It seems that this conspiracy of noise, this
modern project of maddening clamor, has but one aim: to continuously cannibalize our attention, to distract
us from everything that has always been considered a societal and cultural good
in sane and integral societies, things like deep thinking and meditation,
prayer and self-examination in silence and in solitude. These ever-multiplying
devices with their by-design centrifugal forces and tendencies (in the form of
SNS or social media, for example) pull us outward, away from our inner
resources. They have become the ugly clogs between what and who we are and what
and who we could be. Above all, they
make silence and solitude very difficult, if not impossible.
It is in solitude that we engage in a profound conversation with our inner and true self, realize our latent potentialities and thus become a moral, ethical and spiritual being. We become whole. In a brilliant long essay written in 2009, The End of Solitude, the critic William Deresiewicz, citing from different religious traditions, argued that no greatness can be achieved without solitude and that it is in solitude that the most profound self-encounters take place out of which arise great works of art, theology, philosophy and scientific excellence. “The still, small voice speaks only in silence,” Deresiewicz wrote. It is that mysterious voice that speaks to the hermit, to the sadhu, to the saint and the sage either in the solitude of a cave, or in the silence of a desert or a forest. The communicative depth of silence is of an altogether different quality and order. Our deepest passions are nurtured in silence, our respects for the dead are expressed in silence, intense love is shared and transmitted in silence and our profoundest thoughts and visions are experienced in silence as the anarchist John Zerzen reminds us. “The thoughtful soul to solitude retires,” Omar Khayyam has said, alluding to the importance of invocation in solitude. The prayer, and not just the Islamic prayer but all prayers in the different sacred traditions of the world, is meant to, among other things, interrupt the noise and madness of daily life. It takes us out of the chaos of this world, a chaos that is ever made worse by these distracting and disorienting modern machines and iGadgets. Prayer pulls us out of the prison of standardized time itself, and places us in the eternal or the timeless, so that we can remember (re-member) our forgotten, or re-collect our scattered, selves.
While silence and solitude have always been essential conditions for wholeness and spiritual well-being, they often strike terror into the heart of the digital “social” man and woman of our permanently connected or online times. This digital denizen who merrily and endlessly uploads and updates, texts and tweets and who seems to have proudly (dis)-qualified Descartes’ cogito, “I think, therefore, I exist” with “I update, therefore, I exist!” has eye on one and only one thing: the number of “likes” or the hits and listings on Google or the army of “friends” and followers in the dizzying networked matrix. The creature not only has no need for solitude, it is actually afraid of silence and totally clueless about the creative potentiality of idleness. This quintessentially modern condition was shrewdly observed by that “godless, jobless, wifeless, homeless” mad man of Europe, Nietzsche, more than a century ago. This is what he said: “When we are quiet and alone, we fear that something will be whispered in our ears, and so we hate the quiet, and dull our senses in society.” Contrast this with “the still, small voice” that the sage, the sufi and the saint pine for! Progress, indeed! Let me end this blogpost with this apt observation of Abdal Hakim Murad on these "tricknologies of mass distraction": “Insan with the e-culture becomes insane” and “If the culture is sick, then your ease with it is a sign of sickness.”
Originally published in online newspaper Balochistan Voices.
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