CREATIVE NONFICTION 39I really want is instant gratification, answers
on-demand.
I know all of these philosophers are right. I’m
guilty of all their charges: I am a child, wanting
easy answers, a god craver, mired in attachment
and worldliness. A sinner. I feel constantly
betrayed by my youth. I hate myself for seeking
childish things—truth, meaning, the possibility
of a loving god. For asking for these things from
a mystical series of algorithms. But I want them
still. Even though I can imagine Nietzsche, my
therapist, the Dalai Lama and every professor I’ve
ever had—all shaking their heads, handing me a
tape recorder.
the only time I did poorly on an English pa-
per was writing five pages about Oedipus Rex. The
assignment was simple, borderline cliché: identify
what doomed Oedipus and analyze what makes
the play a tragedy. I knew my teacher wanted me
to write about hubris, to give the classic reading
that in denying his own fate, Oedipus sealed it.
Moral: Don’t mock the gods with your vanity.
But reading the play, I felt sorry for Oedipus.
He’s a blowhard to be sure, harassing Tiresias the
prophet and bullying everyone to get informa-
tion. But what really drives him is a desire to learn
the truth about his identity. It’s a universal need.
And it’s a mission no one else in the play will take
up, even though the health of the entire city of
Thebes depends on it.
At one point in the play, Jocasta, Oedipus’s
wife/mother—though the latter is yet to be
revealed—implores him to drop his whole
investigation. Oedipus says that he won’t do it,
that not knowing the truth will only bring him
more distress. “O you unhappy man!” Jocasta
replies. “May you never find out who you really
are!” Suspending Freudian analysis for a moment:
this is his own parent, telling him to quash the
question who am I?
Schopenhauer once wrote, in a letter to Goethe,
that what makes “the philosopher” is “the
courage to make a clean breast of it in the face
of every question.” Schopenhauer compares the
philosopher to Oedipus, who, “seeking enlighten-
ment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his
indefatigable inquiry, even though he divines the
appalling horror that awaits him in the answer.”
He adds, “But most of us carry in our hearts the
Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to
enquire further.” Nietzsche later mocked Scho-
penhauer for this false heroism, what he called a
deeply misguided “will to truth.” It’s only vanity,
Nietzsche says. Hubris.
In my paper, I took up Schopenhauer’s claim.
I argued that truth-seeking was Oedipus’ tragic
flaw. My teacher gave me a barely passing grade.
“A closer reading would’ve revealed that it’s all
hubris,” she commented. At the time, I was livid.
Who wants to read about hubris over truth-
seeking? But I’ve started to wonder if the two
might be closer than I thought.some theorists argue that technology
such as Google search will kill off the questioning
impulse. Ray Kurzweil, for example, has popular-
ized the concept of a technological singularity,
when computers advance to a point of super-
intelligence such that their predictive capacities
outstrip our own. A post-singularity world,
he posits, will be full of technology that goes
beyond the control of a single person, perhaps like
the restless, yearning operating system in Spike
Jonze’s movie Her. For my part, I imagine the
singularity as Super Google. Right now, as Dave
said, Google can access information, interpret it,
but not “understand” it in a human way. But it’s
arguably a fine distinction.
The writer Mike Thomsen compares this mo-
ment—Kurzweil predicts we’ll cross over around
2029—to when dogs separated themselves from
wolves and became domesticated.
“Years from now,” Thomsen writes in The New
Inquiry, “what we think of as a computer will
look on our efforts to work out logic problems
with the same paternalistic appreciation we feel
when dogs stop to inspect a promising pile of
trash on the sidewalk, hoping to find in it some-
thing meaty.” Our pets, he says, will never resolve
their “instinctive questions of hunger,” but they
also don’t need to. They have us to lead them, and
we enjoy having them around, too, so the end is
just mutual enrichment.
I am similarly split between the child and
the adult, the seeker and the enlightened one,
who simply accepts. I think about going to my
computer and searching how to let go.