“Y’all are self-deceived rational utility maximizers.” This is how Alan Jacobs addresses his students at the beginning of each semester. It’s his lighthearted way of explaining why, despite our best intentions at the beginning of the semester to do the reading for the sake of joy and wisdom, we will eventually start reading for the sake of our grade.
Dr. Jacobs’ diagnosis of his students really indicates a much more pervasive cultural disease, one with bigger consequences than a few tedious reading quizzes. While utility maximization is helpful in some areas of life, letting it become our only way of thinking could compromise our very humanity. But guidance from Martin Heidegger and Simone Weil has given me hope of a cure: a greater, second type of thinking which trains us for prayer.
Our entire culture is built on utility maximizing, from our economy to our government and even to our own weekly lives. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. With market prices being automatically dictated according to computer calculations of consumer demand, ordinary people can take meaningful financial action in real time, with confidence that consumer sentiment is efficiently and accurately represented. Without such computer calculation, the market would be much more exclusive, uncertain, and ultimately less productive.
While our government is definitely not known as the most speedy institution, it too is built around utility maximization. Rather than prioritizing quantitative measures like our economy does, the government revolves around maximizing certain qualitative values. Checks and balances make legislation take longer to pass, but they keep our system stable and representative of the people. While certain utilities like speed are sacrificed, other utilities are nevertheless being maximized at all times.
And in both of these cases, we should be extremely glad for utility maximization! Otherwise, most of us would benefit far less from market success, and all of us would have to worry more about government stability. The real question is whether the utility maximizing in our own lives is just as beneficial.
Most of us order our weeks according to the things we value most, be those assignments, parties, church, video games, etc. However, our weekly calculation of what we intend to allot our time and energy to is often unreflective and even appetitive. We deceive ourselves in thinking that our calculations help us make the most of our time, but in reality we have not even begun to reflect on what our criteria are in our calculations.
Many of us hide under a vague notion of ‘rationality’ as our guiding principle. We tell ourselves that we are ordering our lives ‘rationally,’ but I do not think we know what that word really means or why it is valuable. Is rationality just thinking and acting according to reason? But then what is reason? Is reason ultimately just logic? But then what is logic? Does logic exist as the systematic structure of reality, or is it just something we have just made up in order to make sense of reality? These are the types of reflective questions we must ask ourselves in order to go beyond our blind utility calculations.
In his Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger puts forth a dichotomy of thought. On the one hand, he argues that modern culture is overrun with calculative thinking, the thinking which “plans,” “computes,” and “never stops, never collects itself.” On the other hand, he argues that our culture is deprived of meditative thinking, the “thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.” This is problematic because Heidegger believes that man is fundamentally a “meditative being.” And if we let this dichotomy develop further, someday calculative thinking may be “the only way of thinking,” and “man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature.”
Unfortunately, it has been 70 years since Heidegger made this observation, and for 70 years we have only become more calculative and less meditative. To make matters worse, the rise of artificial intelligence threatens an exponential decline in meditative thought. AIs are calculative machines, with efficiency unlike anything we have ever seen. As we use them and come to rely on them more, not only will we continue to forsake meditative thinking, we will begin to outsource even our calculative thinking, causing us to stray further from our nature as meditative beings.
However, it is still not too late to heed Heidegger’s warning and grow out of our reliance on blind utility calculation. But to do so, we must understand what meditative thinking is and why we should practice it. Thankfully, Simone Weil articulates one way of practicing meditative thinking which offers a clear and final end. In her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” she argues that the end of all activities, especially challenging activities like mathematical calculations, is “increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer.” For Weil, every activity is an opportunity to train our faculty of attention, so that when we enter into prayer, we can more fully meditate on and attend to God.
We can think meditatively by focusing our attention as much as possible on each activity that we undertake. Rather than only focusing on outcomes, like we would with calculative thinking, Weil encourages us to meditate by immersing our attention in the activity itself. Ultimately, this will bring us into deeper meditative thought in our prayer to the True God, the “living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared: ‘I am the Truth.’”
