Yet Rasselas imparts important truths. For instance, melancholy people are almost always superstitious. Pilgrimage doesn’t necessarily improve us, and retreating into solitude is no guarantee of being devout. Undertakings that are hard to plan, or even contemplate, often transpire to be easy once we try to carry them out. Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless. The greatest teachers, no matter how celestial the beauty of their lessons, are human. We can recognize inconsistencies in our attitudes and still feel that they are authentic. People in authority must do what they can to allow those they govern to cultivate their intellectual faculties. You’ll never get anything done if you insist on overcoming all possible objections (but objections still need to be raised).
One of the more uncomfortable truths of Rasselas is hinted at in the title Sam originally had in mind – ‘The Choice of Life’. That phrase appears eight times in the text, and without the definite article another three times. The words, as they’re repeated, take the reader further into the limbo of ambivalence. Although it retains some connotations of hopefulness, choice is associated here with disappointment and undecidability. On one level, Rasselas recommends the questing spirit we might urge upon a student taking a gap year: the pilgrims must inspect various ways of life – learning from direct experience, rather than at second hand. But it also reflects on the complex, anxious business of choosing.
This, we gather, is a time-consuming process. It means examining alternatives, evaluating and comparing them, and finally making a commitment. In Rambler 178, Sam discusses choice:
Of two objects tempting at a distance on contrary sides, it is impossible to approach one but by receding from the other; by long deliberation and dilatory projects they may be both lost, but can never be both gained. It is, therefore, necessary to compare them, and when we have determined the preference, to withdraw our eyes and our thoughts at once from that which reason directs us to reject.
His description of how this feels is suitably lumbersome. Yet this is just choosing between two objects; the more abundant the alternatives, the more time the choice can potentially take. That may be obvious, but what is less obvious – to the person making the choice, even if not to someone observing it – is that the greater the abundance of alternatives, the more reductive we need to be in our appraisal of each of them, with the result that the process feels absurd. A world dense with alternatives is one in which we either stall hopelessly as we wrestle with the complications of choosing or make abrupt decisions – not necessarily bad, but mechanical, cavalier or offhand, and not alive.
The tyranny of choice is the tragedy of prosperity. Not, admittedly, the sort of tragedy that is certain to make a bystander feel compassion, yet the sort that confronts us with our vulnerability and fallibility. The problem of choice is one of scale – at my local supermarket there are 206 varieties of yogurt, 118 different fruit juices and 37 kinds of gin – but also one of attitude, because we come to think that all life’s choices are consumer choices, and we thus shop for a lover the way we might shop for a pair of shoes. What’s more, the expansion of choice creates the illusion that we are the masters of our destinies, perpetually capable of self-fashioning and self-improvement. Yet in reality, both the choice and the deliberation that results from it are alienating and isolating. Ashamed of the selections we have made, or exhausted by the process of making them, we are twitchily curious about the road not taken. Overwhelmed by information, we turn to authorities (in a broad sense, including both apps and real-life gurus), but judging their merits becomes yet another entanglement.
Rasselas, which has achieved its own kind of giddy plurality in attracting so many different critical interpretations, speaks to this feeling. When Imlac contemplates the difficulty of reaching decisions, especially ones that are informed by mere impressions of what’s being selected, he comments that ‘while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live’. It’s a mordant observation, a caution to anyone who believes it’s possible to navigate a perfect path through the dizzying bazaar of goods, services and experiences.
24
In which the definition of network provides an opportunity to appraise certain marvels of the twenty-first century, not least the inventions of Mr Mark Zuckerberg
Rasselas is rooted in a specific moment in the life of Samuel Johnson and draws on remote inspirations, such as Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, yet yields insights that are shapely and prescient. It confirms the impression that Sam’s works are simultaneously antique and alive. Here, in essence, is the Johnsonian spirit that excites each generation of his devotees – rational but full of feeling, stern but compassionate, orthodox in many things but unenamoured of conformism. Often he is most incisive when his phrasing looks most difficult; as he articulates himself in ways that demand our close attention, he is aiming for precision, for economy and durability of expression. Although the language may seem idiosyncratic and obscure, its condensed power becomes apparent when we try to come up with a more efficient alternative, and it is when we think we have caught him in the act of archaism that his words, re-examined, instead appear far-sighted.
We see this in one of his most celebrated Dictionary definitions, of the word network: ‘Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’ This isn’t a triumph of simplicity. Reticulated and decussated don’t crop up every day: there’s the reticulated python, a popular zoo exhibit, but one of the few other places I’ve found the first of these words is in a Sherlock Holmes story (‘There, criss-crossed upon the man’s naked shoulder, was the same strange reticulated pattern of red, inflamed lines which had been the death-mark of Fitzroy McPherson’), and decussated, meaning ‘formed with crossing lines like an X’, is an even rarer term, which Sam seems to have encountered in a book by Sir Thomas Browne. Yet part of this supposedly anomalous definition survives in the OED, where one of the senses of network is ‘A piece of work having the form or construction of a net; an arrangement or structure with intersecting lines and interstices resembling those of a net.’ Early critics of Sam’s Dictionary complained that the definition was too abstract. But even if it’s not much help to someone who doesn’t have a sizeable vocabulary, it has an oddly satisfying technical integrity, and while Sam was undoubtedly trying to describe a physical object, he evokes a more general form, a kind of lattice or matrix that doesn’t have the immediate tangible quality of, say, a fishing net.
This now seems quite apt, since today a network is likely to be a complex system of relationships that we can’t necessarily see or touch – between computers, people or neurons. The word and its definition suggest a link between our own era, with its network of networks, and Sam’s, in which a technology – print – created new channels of communication. Printing with movable type had been possible since the second half of the fifteenth century, but now it had come of age. The result was a cultural explosion, changing both public and private life. Books, images and ideas could travel further and more freely. Authors began to think of their works as being infinitely reproducible, rather than having a limited circulation; as the presentation of those works was standardized, and as their readership expanded, so they felt a greater need to express their individuality, the idiosyncrasies of self. Memory played less of a role in the transmission of texts, information and opinions. Readers’ literary diets became more varied. Teaching changed. Preaching changed. The mechanisms of politics changed. The production of literature (in the broadest sense of that word) became a playground for entrepreneurs. Yet the growth of opportunities for sharing knowledge, keeping records and doing business created anxieties about privacy, piracy, the precariousness of social order and the very stability of truth itself.
All these concerns are resonant today. The last of them, apparent in the ubiquity of the word post-truth, feels especially troublesome and seems to fester among the reticulations and decussations of social media. It’s natural to think of social media as a creation of the twenty-first ce
ntury, but it is much older than we tend to imagine. The ancient Romans got their news from papyrus rolls – the stories copied, filtered and amplified in ways that feel modern. If we focus specifically on Britain, we see in the manuscript culture of the sixteenth century something more than a little like Twitter, with wannabes promoting themselves and drawing attention to publications they rated, as one might now retweet something amusing or admirable. Starting in the seventeenth century, coffee houses functioned in ways that foreshadowed the tumultuous topicality of internet discussion forums.1 As so often, a phenomenon that appears novel is more like a rebirth.
In the realm of social media and post-truth, one of Sam’s most to-the-point remarks is this, from Idler 80: ‘We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.’ Here he anticipates a pestilential feature of life online, the widespread willingness to put faith in wholly unproven sources. The social-media-savvy Samuel Johnson is an odd conceit, arguably as chimerical as the ‘alternative facts’ of post-truth politics, but he is present in the pages of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of Modern Life, published in 2010 by advertising executive Tom Morton, who originally launched the project on Twitter. ‘Samuel Johnson . . . lives again within the pages of this book,’ wrote Graham Linehan, creator of such cherished sitcoms as The IT Crowd and Father Ted. In truth, the tone of Morton’s book is often closer to Ambrose Bierce’s satirical The Devil’s Dictionary than to anything Sam wrote. But many of the definitions are very funny, and although most focus on ephemeral phenomena – PlayStation, ‘wondrous Obsidian Obelisk that does dominate both the Room &, more oft, the Life of its Owner’ – some have more scope to endure – Spin Doctor, ‘Showman task’d with th’impossible Endeavour of lowering the Esteem in which the Publick do hold Politicians.’
Sam’s real Dictionary definitions are rarely this playful, but there are moments when he is enjoyably caustic, as in the entry for excise, part of which I cited in Chapter 15: ‘A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.’ His definitions can pack a great deal of worldliness and insight in a small space, and in some there’s a single verb or adjective that stands out like the wagging finger of judgement: a fortuneteller is ‘one who cheats common people by pretending to the knowledge of futurity’, a pressgang is ‘A crew that strolls about the streets to force men into naval service’, and suicide is ‘The horrid crime of destroying oneself’. Given his ability to sum up a whole swarm of society’s ills in a handful of words, the idea of transporting him into the twenty-first century is appealing, and it’s more than just a frivolous gimmick to imagine him casting a discerning eye over the trashier trappings of modernity.
Somehow I don’t think Sam would have been keen on posting selfies, but a lot of people would have wanted him to appear in a selfie alongside them, looking grave while they gurned for the camera. He would have grasped immediately that in the arena of social media, people present an embellished version of themselves. It is easy to look at the evidence they broadcast and believe that their lives are more glamorous and interesting than ours. But they are omitting all the dullness of their existence (or, if they acknowledge it, exaggerating for comic effect), and though we imagine that they are likely to regard our lives as flat, they find plenty to envy. This may not be the case right across the board, but it’s one of the more perturbing truths of social media: we feel bad because we believe we don’t have what others have – a superb physique, a beautiful home, a wide circle of cool friends, perfect children, idyllic holidays – yet in fact they don’t have those things either, or have a much less rosy relationship with them than we infer. We waste our lives fretting about some sorry inadequacy when in fact we’re in the grip of a delusion. All the while, our lives look different (and better) to other people from the way they look to us. What we may see as deficits – our not having children, perhaps – others may see as a lack of encumbrances. What we see as encumbrances – our untameable hair, a job that entails huge amounts of travel, a vast extended family – they may see as glorious gifts.
In saying this, it’s essential to point up a further truth: other people spend less time thinking about us than we imagine. Sam identified our inability to see this as an adolescent trait, easily carried over into adulthood: ‘He that has not yet remarked how little attention his contemporaries can spare from their own affairs, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines every one . . . to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy.’ Yet there will usually be a few people who spend a lot more time thinking about you than you’re likely either to suppose or to find comfortable. Social media illustrates both these points very well. Those of us who use it become experts in the art of ignoring and overlooking (or so we think), but are also at the mercy of silent obsession and covetous resentment.
So what would Sam have made of Facebook? Some readers may hold the question cheap, but Facebook is used by about a third of the world’s population and has altered the landscape of, among other things, advertising, politics and journalism. In the process it has achieved a degree of scale and influence that make it not only an almost inescapable object of interest, but also, as Sam would have noticed, a hostage to the risk of massive disenchantment. Besides, as an archive of the self and of relationships, it could scarcely have failed to fascinate someone so keenly concerned with memory and biography. He would have seen it, I think, as a space for vanity and self-deception, as an opportunity for selective attention at its most febrile, and above all as envy’s playground. ‘All envy would be extinguished,’ he wrote in the Idler, ‘if it were universally known that there are none to be envied’, and in the Rambler he remarked that life will always ‘incline us to estimate the advantages which are in the possession of others above their real value’. Envy is ‘a stubborn weed of the mind’, he wrote in another Rambler essay, and it ensnares those who ‘propose no advantage to themselves but the satisfaction of poisoning the banquet which they cannot taste, and blasting the harvest which they have no right to reap’. These last images are especially suggestive; they sum up two of the besetting vices of those social media users who seem able to type faster than they can think.
25
On the business of a Club – being not ‘a heavy stick; a staff intended for offence’ but rather ‘an assembly of good fellows’ (where the staff may cause offence, without intent)
The mechanisms of sociability were, of course, very different in the eighteenth century. Letters played an especially important role and were the best substitute for face-to-face conversation. Besides being a vital means of maintaining individual relationships, they were often shared around, with the result that they bolstered social networks and stimulated debate. Like so many of his contemporaries, Sam was a frequent correspondent, though not on the whole a jaunty one. He favoured a blunt epistolary style and demurred from the common view that a personal letter was a guileless expression of intimacy. It seemed to him not wonderfully revealing of hidden truths, but instead ‘a calm and deliberate performance’, and he believed that ‘no transaction . . . offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication’.
Still, beginning in the second half of the 1760s his correspondence becomes noticeably less functional and more artful. Although the letters he writes to Hester Thrale are his richest, plenty of others show him nurturing relationships, and in even the most perfunctory we find him hatching plans or making himself useful, whether it’s looking forward to drinking tea with the shy and scholarly Thomas Warton or picturing the cake he’ll eat with his Lichfield friend Elizabeth Aston, sharing a book with Edmund Burke or seeking help with getting an old acquaintance’s son discharged from the navy.
He had a broad sense of what letters could achieve, differentiating between those that were plain and purposeful (containing ‘business’ or ‘intelligence’) and uninformative ones that existed in order to preserve contact (and were heavily decorated, since ‘trifles al
ways require exuberance of ornament’). Here as elsewhere, his understanding of style was more flexible than tends to be claimed, for he thought that every item of correspondence should be tuned to its recipient and occasion. He also differed from most of his contemporaries in thinking of a conversational style not as the natural mode of letter-writing, but as one of several options – and as easy enough to aspire to, yet difficult to achieve.
The main reason for this was his unusually elevated idea of conversation, which he regarded as a source of good health. After the mental invigoration accomplished by physical exercise, it was ‘the most eligible amusement of a rational being’. What was more, conversation wasn’t something that could be simulated. Proceeding from gregarious closeness, it was more like an atmosphere than a technique – a communing with others that could also be a communing with oneself. Today we are inclined to think of conversation as something that needs lubricating (perhaps with alcohol or jokes), but Sam thought of it as the lubricant, akin to trust in its capacity to foster sociability.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 19