Paradoxes of Place and Habits of Mind

There are the technical paradoxes of the philosopher, which aren’t of interest to anyone but the philosopher. There are also, however, “lived” or “relaxed” paradoxes, which aren’t so much paradoxes per se as unexpected twists in the way life tends to work. The former shapes thought; the latter shapes how we shape lives within a world shaped by thought (or from another perspective, not shaped enough by it).

Entrepreneurs like talking about lived paradoxes. For example, they’re often quick to point out that offering fewer services to fewer people leads to more leads. That might not be a paradox per se, but it’s a counter-intuitive outcome insofar as one might reasonably expect that offering more services to more people would lead to more business.

Another example of this type of puzzle, this one from outside the entrepreneurial world, could be called the Big City Paradox. While one might reasonably expect that big cities would encourage diverse, broad, and “big” lives, they often end up yielding surprisingly constrained and predictable lives. Even when living in a metropolis of millions, we often find ourselves doing the same things with the same people in the same places. Part of this is necessitated by structural conditions like the need to work or the expense and inconvenience of commuting in big cities. Another cause is simply how we as humans navigate the world. As Alva Noe points out in Out of Our Heads, even the most freewheeling of us tend to be pretty routine-oriented creatures in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, the Big City Paradox applies to any large, diverse scenario--not just physical settings. The digital world is an obvious example. While the internet theoretically opens the entire world to us, in many ways it’s done more to restrict than broaden our range of experience. More often than not, we end up in algorithmized echo chambers, cycling endlessly through the same sites.

There’s a reverse movement corresponding to the Big City Paradox: we can call it the Small Town Paradox. Rural settings are often thought to foster ignorance and prejudice, and there’s truth to that as far as it goes. At the same time, in a reversal of the Big City Paradox, being in a more parochial setting can foster a type of broad-mindedness.

Let’s start with a metaphor. One way to experience a gallery or art museum is to rush through the rooms, devouring as many distinct works as possible. Another is to focus on just a single work or small number of works. In a sense, the second approach obviously entails reflecting on fewer things, and thus in one regard, it’s a “smaller” experience. Yet, from another standpoint, focusing on just a single work leads to appreciation of that work’s nuance and inner diversity. It can be shocking to see how much you’ve missed in an artwork when you spend an extra few minutes with it—much less hours.

This experience can be forced on you. In a gallery you visit weekly and that only hosts a few key pieces, you likely have no choice but to visit and revisit the same works with ever increasing appreciation for their nuance. By the same token, revisiting a single neighborhood time and again allows for awareness of its inner multiplicities. This isn’t “better” in any sense than a whirligig tour of Paris, but it has its own beauty.

I grew up in a town that had its population counted in thousands if not hundreds. Especially in the pre-internet era, living in a community of just a few thousand people meant you were likely the only person you knew who had your niche interest or skill. On the one hand, this made it hard to find your niche in the first place, and it could be isolating when you did. At the same time, it also meant that you had no choice but to compromise with other people’s tastes and preferences. I was deep into punk rock/hardcore in my early teens, but, for some reason, my friends generally didn’t share my excitement for whatever Man is the Bastard 7” I’d gotten my hands on (this makes more sense to me now). One result was that if I didn’t already have a taste for the Beatnuts or Dream Theatre or whatever, I would have at least the rudiments of one beaten into me through the blunt force of exposure ad nauseum (this was pre-Spotify, so we listened to the same shitty, scratched CDs time and again).

The result was that you were forced to stretch yourself in a way that wouldn’t have been necessary in bigger settings where you could find exactly what you were looking for. The paradox of the entire town being a small, homogeneous clique was that it was too small to accommodate small, homogeneous cliques. There is multiplicity within the uniformity of micro-settings in which everyone does indeed literally know your name. The particular can lead to the universal.

I seem to remember Nietzsche noting somewhere that switching to writing on a typewriter changed how he thought. If I remember right, he meant that more descriptively than evaluatively: this wasn’t for the better or worse. And it was more about how he organized his thought than specific beliefs or conclusions. Similarly, I do wonder to what degree the patterns and shape of my thought can be traced back to my experience with the Small Town Paradox. I’m not thinking of my ethics, aesthetics, or even personality, but rather how I organize my thought—the heuristics and rhythms that structure how I work with ideas.

It's possible that having to stretch myself by virtue of having so little to concentrate on might have trained me to appreciate perspectives that were at least marginally different from my own. By the same token, having so little to focus on meant I had no choice but to learn the ins and outs of the few resources I did. I learned to see the few books in my small personal library from different perspectives and through different lenses. Sometimes I wonder if my tendencies to ferret out detail through close exegetical reading and shift between different theoretical approaches to the same content might flow naturally from having had access to such a constrained swath of material as a kid.

In a somewhat more concrete sense, I would say it encouraged a preoccupation with some of my pet themes, such as the disjuncture between appearance and reality, though I suppose that’s been a central focus of Western thought since at least Socrates’s day, so who knows where I inherited that from. Still, I think it’s one of the reasons I like David Lynch movies, Greil Marcus’s Old, Weird America, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, or American vernacular fiction that hints at darkness below a placid social surface. There’s an astounding number of nested social universes within a small town, and many are hideous.

I’m not sure how different any of this would be in a post-internet world. And I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have lived my whole life that way. It’s just to acknowledge that there can be a kernel of unexpected multiplicity at the heart of stifling uniformity. Ultimately, both have their place: there are times to consume widely and ravenously and times to mindfully foster appreciation for each bite.

Maybe part of what’s at stake is that the Small Town Paradox might be on the edge of extinction. One wonders if it’s taking a certain style of thought with it.