Mechanized Princetonians ought to slack

Every time I awaken from a stupor on Firestone's B-floor, gorged on Kipling or Chesterton and inevitably several hours late for some crucial appointment, I pass several students assiduously tapping away at their laptops or bent over a text with furrowed brow and index cards.

These students fill me with envy. They are the masters of their academic fate, captains of their future. They have set themselves to their tasks, and will not flag or fail until satisfied they can do no more. These students have real goals, they have carefully laid out the paths to those goals and they are treading their way toward achievement. What makes them so different from me? Why are so few of my friends and acquaintances dilettantes, idlers and wastrels? The answer, I believe, has to do with a noisome prejudice that grips the heart of every modern Westerner.

The attitude is an inveterate obsession with results. When my engineer roommate wishes to level a devastating insult at me, he never accuses me of reprobate debauchery or asinine fatuity — only of being "useless." Nor is the phenomenon limited to engineers, who are forced to think of inputs and outputs all day and therefore have some excuse. Many an emotional would-be artist friend of mine has described her emotions as pressure buildups, as if her mind was nothing more than a boiler room, and a little more distress in her day would make her synapses burst. Naturally, the metaphor excludes any sovereign choice she may have.

The metaphor is not limited to emotions. A machine trope governs our images of ourselves in general. We often speak of food as fuel, and even more often talk about our lack or surplus of "energy" as a cause for our behavior, though there is little direct connection between short-term caloric intake and how energized we feel. Even our habits, good and bad, are reduced to mechanical processes by our language. This analogy appears most often in the phrase "that's just the way I operate," and is usually used as an excuse for some obviously foolish practice. We talk as if changing our ways is somehow harmful to us, somehow dysfunctional.

The subconscious view of man-as-machine affects our metaphysics as well. No matter how he protests otherwise, the modern Westerner is a materialist at heart, or at least a reformed materialist. This allows us a curious freedom to believe what we wish. We advocate religious tolerance so strenuously only because we cannot countenance the idea that a religion might produce results in its adherents. The moment Islamic fundamentalists, driven by faith and nothing else, attack our country, our tolerance ends. Only by calling the Jihadists heretical can we draw a sharp distinction between religion that produces results and religion that does not.

I do not mean to suggest that religious tolerance is an evil, or that peaceful Muslims do not take their religious beliefs seriously. Whether Materialism and language that tends to minimize human choice are an acceptable exchange for the slow elimination of loafers and good-for-nothings from our society, I do not know. Whether we are masters of our machines or they of us, I leave to you. I offer no conclusions about what I describe, and only one suggestion.

Next time you are encircled by an ocean of books about battles, love affairs and God, look up from your problem sets for a few minutes and waste some time. David Schaengold is a sophomore from Cincinnati, Ohio. He can be reached at dschaeng@princeton.edu.