Absurdities of Scale
The 21st-century information and economic environment is putting unprecedented strains on human cognition.
You do not understand what a billion dollars is. You do not understand how many a billion people is. We know the terms, of course: a billion is a thousand million, a million is a thousand thousand. In fact, we hear about these figures every day. But that doesn’t mean that those numbers mean anything real to us. As these numbers approach the stratosphere, they leave our finite human brains behind. Even the factoids, meant to help illustrate these terms to us, fall short. One million seconds is only eleven days, while a billion seconds is almost thirty-two years. One million dollar bills is a thirty-story building, while a billion reaches seventy miles into the air. If you’re lucky, you might get to experience thirty-two years twice or three times. If you’re insane, you might someday walk or run seventy miles. But either way, it’s hard for our minds to put these numbers into their proper context.
It’s not controversial to suggest that as mathematical figures thus exponentially increase, our brains lose the ability to meaningfully grasp them. But what I’d like to suggest is that while this is fairly universal among humans, we don’t account for it as much as we should. Nowadays, hearing of figures in the millions and billions is commonplace, in reference to both money and people. And we pretend to understand. Of course I know what a billion is: it’s 1,000,000,000. But we can no longer put that number into a meaningful context. The figure has lost its precision.
Let me put this point into real-life terms. Think of all the people you know. If you lived for eighty years and met three new people each day (which seems to be a gross overestimation), you would meet about ninety thousand different people in your life, which sounds like a lot. Actually, it is a lot. But that’s my entire point. Because those ninety thousand people are fewer than those who fill the University of Michigan’s Big House every fall Saturday. They pale in comparison (2.5%) to the 3.5 million that ride the NYC subway system every day. And when you consider that the United States’ population is about 340 million, the tininess of human cognition comes into perspective. The world you inhabit is a minuscule fraction of the country we live in and the planet we live on.
And that’s where our brains begin to break. Humans are naturally self-centered, naturally self-interested. Being anything otherwise takes conscious and difficult effort. We are consumed by focus on ourselves: on our career, our appearance, our influence, our success. Then there are our immediate relatives: our spouses, our children, our parents, siblings, cousins, and the people we interact with regularly: coworkers, colleagues, and friends. We understand the world through our own experiences and the experiences of those around us: those are the only experiences we have. But those experiences are, again, the most miniature portion of the experiences that exist in the world. Forgive me for tumblr-posting, but the neologism “sonder” starts to get at what I’m saying here. It is a fully Christian idea to acknowledge that every human has individual thoughts, feelings, and struggles just as real as you do. And it is equally madness to try to comprehend it all.
At a certain point, this effect becomes tangible. Our inability to comprehend the world we live in damages our understanding of the world around us. Not that the world minds. The eight billion people on our planet will go on with their lives, whether you can understand them or not. But it hurts us. In our hubris, we consider ourselves worthy, capable of safeguarding the thoughts and feelings, the preferences of millions. We talk about politics, we talk about government, we talk about economics, always as if we know. We have to. This is the world we live in. The age of information has given us unfettered access to the entire rest of the world. And so we know about it. But we do not know it. The world beyond our immediate reality becomes an unsatisfying blur of larger and larger figures, words that, like all things, cheapen through their own abundance.
The onlineness of our time has enhanced this effect, of course. But it is not unique to us. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith wrote:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paultry misfortune of his own.1
This phenomenon is not new, but it is greater. For now, thanks to our terminal2 connection to a chosen few internet accounts—(that is part of the problem. We suppose the internet connects us to everyone. It does not. It connects us with a very vocal minority, often with financial incentives to keep us coming back)—we have a window to all over the world. Through that window we see glimpses only, cherry-picked facts and mangled quotes, edited videos and implied motives. We see the one, missing the ninety-nine. But because our view is so narrow, limited by our human experience, we are forced to reason backwards. We see the one, and assume it is characteristic of the ninety-nine; rather, the ninety-nine million. We forget that each of those ninety-nine million is an individual, created by God in his image, with thoughts and feelings and upbringings and desires wholly foreign to our own. The real psychological warfare is to not treat the some as the all.
If there is a political conclusion to draw from this, it should reinforce the idea that limited and local governments are preferable. Giving single men and even single governments grand power over millions of men is doomed to failure. But the larger reminder is that we must focus on Real Life. The sphere of influence we do have is, in comparison, quite small. We must not sacrifice it for the distractions of distant, imagined issues. The only way to fight our internet-driven polarization is with genuine, real-life personal relationships. Even if ragebaiting is more fun.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Project Gutenberg.
ter·mi·nal. (of a disease) predicted to lead to death, especially slowly; incurable.