When it comes to food and nutrition, we humans demonstrate a wide range of degrees of awareness, from the junk-food junkie to the vegan. Many of us are ignorant about the ingredients in the food we buy and eat, and the FDA is happy to allow us to remain blissful in this ignorance. The word natural, for example, appears on the label of many grocery store items, sending the message that these products are made with ingredients that are better for us, presumably, than “unnatural” or artificial ingredients, but what does it really mean? Most of these so-called natural foods contain “GMOs,” the acronym for “genetically modified organisms,” engineered using DNA from plants, bacteria, viruses, and other sources and introduced into the food chain by companies such as Monsanto, famous for its manufacture of chemicals and pesticides including Agent Orange, a carcinogen and teratogen to which some five million people, mostly civilians, were exposed during the defoliation campaign of the Vietnam war. The devastating effects of Agent Orange are still being suffered by many today, more than forty years later. One certainly could make the case that such genetic manipulations, injected into seeds, crops, feed, and other foundational blocks of the food supply, are anything but natural. Advocates of the use of GMOs argue that there is no scientific proof that they are harmful to humans; opponents maintain that this isn’t good enough, as GMOs have not been shown to be safe, either, and in fact, no one can guarantee that their widespread use will not have an adverse effect on human health and the environment, including possible alterations of the human genome. Using GMOs without a consistent, clinical demonstration of their safety follows the logical fallacy called “argumentum ad ignorantiam,” the “appeal to ignorance,” which reasons, for example, that, “there must be ghosts, because nobody’s proven there aren’t any.” Sound reasoning tells us that we cannot establish the truth of a conclusion based on the fact that the opposite truth-claim has not been disproved. The fact that nobody’s proven that there are no ghosts does not imply the existence of ghosts; it just means that the question remains open. In the same way, acting as though GMOs are safe because no one has proven they aren’t is an argument that only ignorance will find convincing. As consumers, we have the right to choose whether or not we want to buy and eat food that has been genetically manipulated, and decide for ourselves the extent of the risk. Furthermore, we may ask, why does the FDA not require food producers to label their products to let us know if they contain GMOs? Many of the GMO producers, like Monsanto, are spending millions to defeat Proposition 37 in California, which would require such labeling. Why would they do that? If the buyer is to beware, doesn’t he or she have the right to be informed? In light of the clinical studies that have been done (a mounting number show that GMOs can be toxic, allergenic, or less nutritious than their non-GMO counterparts),, and given that the longterm effects of GMO consumption remain unknown, the consumer who agrees to consume foods containing GMOs is essentially agreeing to be a guinea pig. Companies such as Monsanto can get away with this because we are willing to remain ignorant, to look the other way, to assume that the ingredients in the bowl of cereal that we ate this morning are essentially the same as the ingredients in the one we ate fifty years ago, because the box it came in bears the same name and the same company branding. But it isn’t. Becoming a conscious consumer and reading the labels isn’t enough anymore. Much of the crucial information we need to make informed nutritional choices isn’t on the labels, because the government doesn’t require companies to put it there, and the companies like it that way. Many of the corporations that we have trusted with our nutrition and the effects of that nutrition on our health, however, have shown themselves to be unscrupulous in the pursuit of profit, blithely disregarding human well-being, health, and the effects on the environment not exceptionally but as a rule, and while there may be a few that still operate with a conscience, it is simply foolish to look the other way when it comes to the ones that have earned our mistrust through the introduction of ingredients that have not been proven to be safe, deceptive labeling practices, and spending millions to keep consumers in the dark.

There is a striking parallel here to relationships—collegial, platonic, and romantic. When we meet someone we find attractive in any of these ways, we take some time to get acquainted, don’t we? For the most part, we don’t jump into a business partnership or into bed with someone we don’t know, because in order for these associations to be workable and good for all concerned, there has to be a foundation of trust, and trust takes time to establish. Not all associations are nourishing and sustainable, and some are downright toxic. We may not be able to read the signs immediately, but until the other person has shown himself or herself to be trustworthy, there is much to be said for erring on the side of caution. After all, the “labeling” may be deceptive; people are not always what they appear at first to be. Going slowly allows us to stay on course with self-care and alert to our instincts, so that if something is not right, it has time to come to light before we’ve gone too far down the wrong path, because we aren’t going faster than the truth.

There seems to be an epidemic of carelessness in the modern world, which has an aversion to going slowly—a carelessness I’ve described as “whatever consciousness.” It is characterized by looking the other way, by the failure to recognize the irrevocable connection between responsibility and well-being, by a detachment from the world and others that often seems to border on solipsism. The young man driving down the road with his car radio blasting the obscene lyrics of the latest rap song, the neighbor who allows his dog to continue barking in the middle of the night, the litterbug—these are personal manifestations of a serious disconnection from those things that are most deeply and profoundly human, the things that allow us to care about each other and ourselves, and inspire us to leave the world a bit better than we found it, or at least not worse. Nutrition, health, the quality of our connections with others—all of these depend on our willingness to care, to extend ourselves for the sake of something greater than ourselves, something that matters more than convenience or the gratification of the moment. This is what I love about philosophy: It cares. It wants to know the truth, and it refuses to look the other way. If I find myself even once on the short end of “caveat emptor” in dealing with any company, I do not give that company a second chance. In keeping with the requirements of self-respect, some things are not negotiable. We can do better than thoughtlessly agreeing to be guinea pigs for corporations that don’t care about anything but the bottom line. We can choose to hold to high standards of self-care and only buy or buy into things that have proven their trustworthiness. We can do better than “whatever.” It is simply a matter of refusing to settle for less.

Western philosophy has its roots in a dictum inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? It even makes a kind of intuitive sense, perhaps because if we don’t know ourselves, all of our other knowing must lack a foundation. Yet it seems fair to ask, in knowing ourselves, exactly what is it we know?

The Delphic directive has enjoyed (or suffered) a variety of interpretations. Some have suggested that it was a caution against hubris, against believing ourselves to be more than we are. Others have taken it as a reminder not to regard the opinions of others too highly. As we work with clients, we see how the lack of self-knowledge, of self-awareness, produces a kind of opacity in the psyche keeps out the light of truth, without which there is no inspiration, creative expression, or forward motion. In these terms, ignorance is anything but bliss.

These may sound highfalutin, as philosophy can. Yet they also can point to essential aspects of living well, of happiness, of what the Greeks called “the good life.” By “truth,” for example, we don’t mean something esoteric reserved for the priests and priestesses, but simply the truth of our own nature—the “yes” and “no” of who we are. In session after session, we see people suffering for no other reason than a lack of clarity about this “yes” and “no.” They don’t know where their own lines are; consequently, they keep crossing them or allowing others to cross them, and the result is that they suffer. Not knowing our “yes” and “no” may lead us to accept something unacceptable, or draw swords over issues that could in truth be overlooked. We end up saying “yes” when the truth is “no,” or “no” when the truth is “yes,” and in denying the truth, we deny ourselves. It is a failure method, for as Socrates tells us plainly in the Gorgias, the truth cannot be denied.

This one, simple thing—clarity about what’s a “yes” and what’s a “no” for us, where the truth of who we are allows us to be flexible and where that truth requires that we stand our ground—this alone would go a long way toward resolving even seemingly intractable and chronic problems. At the end of the day, “Know thyself” is a call to honesty that, followed diligently, allows things to find their own level. It implies a willingness to trust in the rightness of life and of our own nature. We can come into the company of this self-knowing with no more than the willingness to check in with ourselves before we speak or act, to pay attention to the inner voice and honor it, and to let the rest sort itself out. When living in cooperation with who we are becomes more important than outcomes, more important than what other people think of us, more important than the many things to which we may become attached, then our word carries the authority of our self-knowing, and many good things follow.

Self-work requires us to be teachable, to be willing to move beyond the mythos of our current beliefs and assumptions to a better way of being. Such an inner shift may elude us for no other reason than that we fail to question things that seem to us so obviously true that it doesn’t occur to us to question them. In this way, we live in stories that take on the living colors of reality, even when those stories don’t work well, or exact a high price, or work against our realizing what’s best in us. In philosophical counseling, we call this state “immersion.” Success in any session invariably depends upon the client’s willingness to take a step back and, through questioning the obvious, to come out of immersion and “surface” into a reality where new and better choices are available. Put another way, self-work depends on our willingness to allow ourselves to be moved by the gravitational pull of the truth from an old story to one that serves us better.

Socrates was a master of the process (called the “dialectic”) through which we can examine our stories and test them against our best understanding and vision. This is not always something we can do for ourselves. Sometimes, we need someone who is standing outside our “mythos,” which is the sphere of meanings, assumptions, values, stories, paradigms, conclusions, and opinions that determine our experience of ourselves, our world, and other people. A skilled philosophical coach, by asking the right questions, can help the client come out of immersion and discover the options of a more spacious story. All of this, of course, depends on the client’s willingness to engage in deep dialogue, to question the obvious, to take responsibility for the reality-shaping aspects of his or her participation in the problem, and to step up to a more profound truth than the client had acknowledged to date, once that truth is brought into the light of awareness.

This “truer truth” is never imposed. Rather, it comes out of the client’s own better understanding. Self-work is self-learning, in the sense that we learn increasingly who we are. And if we don’t stay teachable, how can we learn?

If you’re facing a problem and especially if you feel stuck, you might begin by questioning the obvious. One example that shows up frequently is a conflict situation, in which both parties are immersed in the assumption, “I’m right, you’re wrong.” This isn’t necessarily just stubbornness or complacency. From within the story in which each is immersed, it really looks that way. One of the consequences of such a position is that it tends to make one unsympathetic to the validity of what the other is expressing. As long as the story remains polarized, there is little hope of resolving the conflict. By finding a truthful way to acknowledge the reality that the other is expressing, rather than meeting it reactively from a stance of immersion in a narrow self-interest, one can dramatically change the conversation, disarm the conflict, and move toward meaningful resolution. As Lao Tze writes in the Tao Te Ching, “The sage cannot be beaten, because he does not contend.” Clearly, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories in which we live, are powerful. But more powerful still is our willingness to question those things we’ve taken for granted and perhaps not examined. Questioning our assumptions in this way is the heart of self-work.

One of the many fascinating things that one encounters in working as a philosophical coach is the disowning of knowledge. In other words, one knows something, but doesn’t know that he or she knows. The knowledge is possessed, as Socrates describes it, “in forgetfulness” and must be “recollected.” More often than not, the crucial bit of knowing hasn’t been merely forgotten. Rather, the client has a vested interest in not knowing what he or she knows, usually because admitting or acknowledging it would call for some daunting change or other. So, for example, one client came into a session with her husband, who was optimistic because, as he reported, his wife had been unwilling to agree to getting professional help for a year during which the marriage teetered on the edge of a precipice. When asked why she had waited so long, the woman replied, “I was afraid I’d find out I don’t want to be married.” This, of course, was exactly what there was to find out. The moment she let this genie out of the bottle, the conversation, and the nature of their association, changed irrevocably. It was changed by the sheer power of the truth. This was not just a truth that she had known all along; he, to, had realized some time ago that the marriage already had ended. In such cases, it serves no good end to keep trying to reanimate the corpse. All such efforts produce is a kind of Frankenstein monster, a semblance of love and closeness that no one wants when asked plainly.

We seem to be creatures who claim to know what we don’t know, while we claim not to know what we know all too well, once we’re willing to trust the truth to get us through whatever imminent storm, real or imagined, has us cowering under the bed. The though is never the thing, and telling the truth frees up the very resources we need to deal with the truth.

Sometimes, when a client responds to a pointed question with “I don’t know,” I ask, “What if you did know?” More often than not, this simple refusal to collude with the belief in not knowing is enough to open a door into the surprisingly accessible realm of the unknown known. To be willing to know what we know, no matter what it may require of us, to refrain from claiming to know what we do not know, to be at peace with not knowing by taking refuge in the faith that when it’s time for us to know, we will—these are fine delineations of the soul that philosophical support can help us establish in our life. Through the agency of self-work, we may learn that we knew not only more than we thought we knew, but exactly that thing that we needed to know to take the next step into a richer way of being.

When we’re dealing with a difficult, confusing, or intractable problem, we may tend to become preoccupied with the question, “What should I do?”—the idea being that the right action will put the situation right. Clients who are struggling with this question often find themselves in a whirlwind of conflicting options, each with its promise, each with its price, and it soon becomes clear that resolutions rarely are worked out this way. The reason for this is that action doesn’t take into account the self-relation, but primarily concerns itself with outer conditions. In the storm of speculations about these conditions, other people and what they might or might not do, considerations of timing, “what if?” scenarios, and so on, we may overlook a profoundly useful point, viz., that actions flow from our inner life, bubbling up from the depths of who we are the way water bubbles up from the depths of an artesian spring. If we’re in a state of confusion or ambiguity, our actions will be indecisive, exaggerated, or in some other way off the mark. If, on the other hand, we’re in a state of clarity and self-possession, honoring who we are in a given situation and simply allowing that identity to flow unimpeded into action, then that action will be unambiguous, appropriate, and truthful. As a result, it will carry an authority that no amount of running around trying to work out what to do can approach.

Understanding this, we can use difficult, challenging, even daunting situations as opportunities for self-work, reminders that, to the extent that we feel we don’t know what to do, we haven’t asked the right self-question and come to terms with what the situation has to teach us about ourselves, our choices, and the opportunity that lies just on the other side of the lesson. As Joseph Campbell writes, “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” This idea can be enormously helpful when we find ourselves stumbling in a situation, unsure of where to turn, because by remembering that the treasure of self-knowledge is close at hand, we can engage the situation in a new way—without resistance or judgment, not trying to get rid of it as soon as possible, but curiously, with the willingness to see something we haven’t seen before. It is during the most trying times, the times that “test our soul,” that it is most important to stay open, to embody the stance of the student, to stay teachable.

Staying teachable, we discover that our problems are instructions. All of our experience is working to bring us along, to teach us, to encourage self-awareness and self-honoring—even the tough times, especially the tough times. Putting down resistance and taking refuge in the truth and the willingness to be instructed, we find that action, like the weather, takes care of itself.

On Staying Human in the Digital Age

As if increase of appetite had grown by what he feeds on.
| Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I

I’ve been observing lately, and with distressing frequency, the encroachment of personal digital technology on those areas of human life that used to provide us with ready contexts for engaging, interacting with, enjoying, discovering, and learning from each other—so much so that I’ve come to believe that human estrangement is part of the inherent protocol of this technology. The man having a loud conversation on his cell phone in a public place, the driver checking email at a red light, the friend who suddenly disengages from a conversation to read or send a text message, the person who’s social life has moved increasingly to chat room and social networking, the steady decline of bookstores in favor of ebook downloading—all demonstrate how the now ubiquitous digital technology has fostered isolation, disengagement, and a culture of distraction. Whether this protocol is deliberate, and if so, what its reason possibly could be, one can scarcely imagine. The effects, however, are beyond question. Let me give an example: A father takes his nine-year-old son out for the day. The boy wants to go to the local video arcade, the father accedes to the child’s wishes. In the car, on the way to the arcade, they’re talking, laughing, exchanging ideas, bantering—in general, present to each other and having a wonderful and memorable time together. When they get to the arcade, they find that the place doesn’t open for nearly an hour. The father suggests driving around the corner to one of the local bookstores, and off they go. At the bookstore, an animal shelter has brought in a few dogs and cats, the sort that seem especially friendly and gentle by nature, and the customers, kids and adults alike, are having great fun petting the animals, asking their names, and so on. It’s not every day that one sees cats and dogs in a bookstore, after all. After some time with the animals, the boy finds an oversized book about dogs, and he and his father spend time looking at all the different varieties, adding funny captions to the pictures, laughing together, and having the same sort of experience they had earlier in the car. Soon, it’s time to go back to the arcade, which by now has opened. Back they go, and this is where the story takes a hard left turn.

As they approach the games, the child enters a state of distraction that immediately insinuates itself between him and his father, separating them—a kind of trance state, such that from this moment until they leave the place, there will be no interaction between them, no engagement, no time together. All of this has been summarily hijacked by digital images flashing on the surrounding screens, silently but persistently demanding tokens and attention. The boy’s altered state has become a surrogate for engagement, and a brand of “fun” that bears no resemblance to the time in the car or the bookstore, because the games have stolen the real world and in its place, substituted an artificial one with artificial goals and artificial experience. In seconds, the real has been supplanted by the virtual. As the boy goes from screen to screen, shooting dinosaurs, racing imaginary motorcycles, and winning false jackpots, the father checks email on his smartphone (the arcade provides free wi-fi) and exchanges a few text messages, shadowing his son who wanders from one console to the next like a sleepwalker. A couple of hours pass, and it’s time to leave. On the way to the car, the child wants to play games on the father’s phone. The father accedes to the child’s wishes; the boy returns to the trance state. There is no further contact between them, no conversation, no laughter, no shared moments. Instead, the boy sits silently in the back seat accumulating points, levels, rankings. Like the tickets spat out by the video games at the arcade that the children use to buy concession stand junk—plastic balls that light up or finger puzzles or candy made in Pakistan—these digital achievements have no real value. They provide only a simulation of the real, a lifeless engagement that, unchecked, has the power to take our children out of their bodies and the world, arrest their development, and rob them of their childhood.

We live, of course, in the 21st century. Digital technology is part of that life, and a remarkable part of it provided that we use it rather than letting it use us. But it is every bit as ignorant and dangerous to ignore the power that this technology has to do as much harm as good as it would be to fail to recognize that the same electricity that lights our cities can electrocute us, just as the fire that cooks our food can burn down the house. The prudent use of these forces requires that we respect their power, and use them in the service of human life—and this is the point: As humans, we possess the peculiar ability to live less than humanly. In the fullest sense of the term, human life depends on engaging human things—our own spirit, each other, the questions and values and issues that matter most, humanly speaking, and without such engagement, there is a real sense in which we are not yet fully human. More than anything else other than perhaps love and empathy, children need many, frequent, and consistent opportunities for such engagement, appropriate to their age and level of development. And personal digital technology has become so pervasive, so assumed, and remains for the most part so blithely unexamined with respect to its power to seduce and estrange, that these crucial developmental opportunities are being abandoned in favor of a perpetual infatuation with a digital banality that leaves no room for this world, for conversation or creative expression, for self-connection and real, undistracted connection with others.

Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, iPods, Nintendo DS and Wii, PlayStation and Xbox, YouTube, MMORPGs, arcades, smartphones, television, DVDs, Blu-Ray—there seems to be no end to the incursion of digital technology into our living rooms and our lives. Some children are sacrificed to these disembodying, off-world technologies as many as four, five, six hours a day—sometimes more. And any child who is spending more than at most a total of a couple of hours a day engrossed in media—including on Saturday morning—is practicing being out of this world, out of his or her body, out of the vital rhythms of healthy human interaction and development.

Remarkably, a bit of observation reveals that kids who remain immersed for too long in the virtual world of digital entertainment generally don’t even get much enjoyment out of it. If one watches them closely, one notices that they aren’t having fun in the fullest sense of the word, only a kind of contrived fun driven by the rules of the game. They may get a rush of excitement when they defeat a virtual enemy or outwit forces programmed to keep them from “leveling up”; they may attain a certain ranking or proficiency, but in the process they rarely laugh, learn anything new about themselves or the world, experience pleasant surprises (like finding cats and dogs at the bookstore), or express their intelligence or curiosity or native wit. The stimulation of the video game is artificial from start to finish. It is noteworthy that the most fun the father and son in our story had was in the car on the way to the arcade and during the unscheduled trip to the bookstore, because in both cases there was room for them to experience their real-world surroundings, themselves, and each other spontaneously, without the contrivances and limitations and agendas set by computer game developers. This leads ineluctably to the conclusion that most of the popular forms of digital entertainment aren’t even entertaining. In place of fun, they offer a series of mechanical, predetermined, goal-driven interactions that have a cumulative effect not unlike Pavlovian conditioning, which we should remember is autonomic and, in this sense, “mindless.” Worse the artificial, conditioned, contrived goals of the digital world almost always involve some form of violence, often graphic to a point that many adults would find distressing, such as simulated beheadings or dismemberment. Children who have grown up on these games, however, have no emotional reaction to such representations. Our children, while they’re checked out of their body and the world during video game immersion, are being systematically desensitized to the violence that it is the aim of the game to inflict, often on virtual human beings—as in realistic first-person shooter games. The only real-world application of this kind of conditioning in which violence and disembodiment go hand in hand is military training, for within the military reality, which means the reality of warfare, the human assets of creative self-expression, empathy, self-knowledge and discovery, conversation and the willingness to question, staying present to one’s body and the world, and all other forms of human engagement only get in the way. To do his job, the soldier must live in a trance state not unlike that invoked by video gaming. Many soldiers are rudely awakened from this state of disembodiment by the shock and brutality of combat, torn by the toll it takes on their humanness, to the extent that it may be accurate to say that no one who goes to war survives the experience.

Of course, we don’t become and stay healthy merely by refraining from what’s bad for us. We also need what’s good for us, and plenty of it. Nutritious food, clean water, fresh air, exercise—these strengthen and sustain our bodies just as human engagement, social interaction, the love of friends and family, self-expression, and heart-to-heart conversation strengthen and sustain our spirit. In this sense, human life depends as much on real connections in the living present, on shared laughter and stories and the willingness to meet and touch and be affected by each other as it does on oxygen, for without these things, we exist but are not alive, not humanly, not fully. At the start of this essay, I quoted Shakespeare: If indeed the appetite grows by what it feeds on, then we have to ask: What appetite are we cultivating in our kids when we allow them to be continually subjected to the disembodying effects of digital technology? It is an appetite for disengagement, and so, ultimately, an appetite for the inhuman and inhumane. Whether we realize it or not, deferring to virtual experience increasingly costs our children their native ability to engage humanly, and worse, eventually even their natural inclination to do so. No matter how much they may insist, no matter how convenient it may be to hand a child an iPhone or let the television take over Saturday morning, no matter how tired we may be or at a loss for a better alternative in the moment, we have a sacred trust as parents and grandparents to see to it that our children do not consume so much of the prevailing technology that they end up consumed by it, and that they are given frequent and regular opportunities to engage their inner and outer life in ways that will nourish their spirit. The world is a miraculous place, on loan to each of us for only a brief time. Let us be mindful then, and take care that the children we brought into this world have their chance to discover it.