TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030590/0305640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 72

Let Us Recuse Ourselves Awhile


By Lance Morrow


    The mind, Holmes told Watson, is like an attic. "You have
to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in
all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the
knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out."
Holmes stocked his own mental attic with a detailed knowledge
of chemistry and cigar ashes. Knowing about cigars helped him
solve The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

    Holmes believed in a sort of Doctrine of Discriminating
Obliviousness. He professed ignorance of the Copernican design
of the solar system. "What the deuce is it to me?" he asked.
"You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon
it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my
work."

    Perhaps this is an idea whose time has come. The
intellectual attic is stuffed now. Urgent, exotic pieces of
lumber (like Nagorno-Karabakh and Baku and Soweto and
Tadzhikistan and Violeta Chamorro and Yegor Ligachev and
Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Sisulu and Umberto Eco, on and on) are
gathering in the mind from all over the world. They are tumbling
out the windows.

    It is difficult, of course, to "choose" our knowledge, as
Holmes advised. We live in inundations of information. The air
is dense with billions of fleeting names, images, factoids,
electronic dust. Information jitters round in a Brownian
movement. But there is a way to impose order on this
incoherence. The mind must be a discriminating host. It needs
a bouncer at the door.

    When judges and prosecutors decide that they must bow out
of a case, they "recuse themselves." (The phrase cannot be
uttered without conjuring up the ghost of Algonquin J. Calhoun,
the lawyer in Amos 'n' Andy.) Judges recuse themselves because
of conflict of interest. Perhaps all of us ought to be able to
recuse ourselves from subjects in which we have no interest
whatever.

    Which brings us to Donald and Ivana Trump. I recuse myself,
on the grounds stated above. While I am at it, I should mention
Geraldo Rivera. Also professional golf. The baby-boom
generation, at least when it puts on its self-regarding tribal
panoply. The collected works of Sylvester Stallone.
Deconstruction. The Super Bowl. The northward migration of the
killer bees. Magazine articles that describe "Blank's Lonely
Fight Against Blank." Anything that Jean-Paul Sartre ever
wrote, said or thought. The intellectual life of Roseanne Barr.
The works of Erica Jong, who once composed a poem with this
line: "Actually we believe the carrot to be/ God's penis." And
so on.

    Make your own list. This intolerance -- the only form of
discrimination designed to protect the discriminator's sanity
-- is a natural reflex that can be trained. The individual's
list of recusals conforms to his interests and prejudices.
Customized recusal is superior to those presumptuous recitals,
regularly published by Women's Wear Daily and others, of "Who's
In" and "Who's Out."

    Armed with the right of recusal, the individual achieves
Emersonian self-reliance. He becomes something like a Third
World country that has nuclear capability: he can commit the
annihilations of his choice in the privacy of his own mind.
Every man a king.

    The dark side is that slapdash recusal can degenerate into
a form of internal book burning, a crank's bonfire. The
hyperactive recuser lives next door to the know-nothings and
crackpots. He is liable to mutter to himself in public.
Intelligent recusal must be elegantly done. There are rules.
No ethnic slurs. Avoid recusing yourself on entire countries,
such as Canada. Do not go scything down whole fields of
knowledge. (On the other hand, I long ago recused myself on the
subject of economics, about which I am a moron, and have not
suffered a day's unhappiness because of it.)

    Creative recusal means that you refuse delivery on unwelcome
items of knowledge. In a world of intrusive information, it is
rewarding to turn off your hearing aid in the midst of a
particularly cretinous and gaudy aria. In an epoch when fame
is the coin of the globe, it is satisfying to slam a mental
door on Trump.

    Recusal does not discourage curiosity. On the contrary, it
allows curiosity to breathe and put down roots. It clears some
of the junk out of the garden, pulls up a few weeds. In my
garden, I say, weed out the Trumps. You may choose to cultivate
the Trumps. Let a hundred flowers bloom.

    The average citizen has no power over Trump except the
sovereign right to ignore him. The exercise of optional
knowledge. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there
to hear it, if a 90-story grandiosity occurs in Gotham and no
one is there to witness it, then have either of these events
occurred? The second event undoubtedly has. Trump involves
certain pharaonic consequences. He sprays his name on buildings
and airplanes: a very, very rich graffiti artist. Trump is a
man whose ads speak of his apartment buildings as enactments
of his "philosophy." Hugh Hefner is another man who has a
"philosophy." We live in a Periclean age.

    History proceeds in gossip and fractals. Fractals are the
mysterious and apparently irrational forms proposed by the
mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who says that reality has
shapes undreamed of by Euclid and surprises that ridicule the
idea of order. The shape of a mountain is not a cone. Clouds,
coastlines, tree branches, commodity prices, word frequencies,
turbulence in fluids, stars in the sky, reputations, fame, the
passage of history itself (think about the past ten months) --
all these are fractal shapes.

    The mind is the grandest, most mysterious fractal. It takes
its shape from what it holds, and therefore, Zen-like,
sometimes grows more graceful because of what it has kept out.