Literature: The Ultimate Answer to the Algorithm
Building a Solid Self in a Shaky Society: Reviewing Luke Burgis’s ‘The One and the Ninety-Nine’
In his book Wanting, Luke Burgis offers us something we rarely pause to consider: the idea that most of what we desire, crave, and long for is mediated through webs of social influence of which we are largely oblivious.
One expression of this dynamic to which people are increasingly alert? The algorithm. Social media feeds us curated cues of desire through posts, videos, ads, and whatever else.
I love the algorithm; I’ve found a lot of wonderful people and stuff through it, people (including Burgis) and stuff (including his books) who, and which, have enhanced my life. But I also recognize the downsides: our entire political culture, for example, seems trapped in invisible echo chambers constructed of little more than math most of us can’t possibly understand but to which we gleefully—and angrily—subject ourselves.
Solid Selves vs. Pseudo Selves
We can never fully avoid mimetic desire, and why would we want to? We are, after all, social critters. And our species’ entire ability to develop culture is based on mimesis. Monkey see, monkey do; we’re just better at it than monkeys.
But we have agency. How do we sort the good influences from the bad? Working with the insights of literary critic and philosopher René Girard, Burgis highlights how these mimetic forces play out in our world and then equips us to pursue what he calls our “thick desires” (longings that resonate deeply within us) instead of “thin desires” (those we tend to passively pick up from the social environment).
The insight reaches into every element of how we navigate the groups to which we belong as individuals, and that’s what his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, is all about: the tension we feel inside those groups, and what it looks like to be a “solid self” in them, rather than a “pseudo self.”
To fit within groups—workplaces, bookclubs, digital tribes, political parties, a local parish, the list goes on—we conform ourselves to them. Some of this is obvious: we accommodate one another to make relationships work. But sometimes the accommodation goes so far we lose ourselves in the process.
This happens all the more readily, as Burgis points out, when we join a group without being in touch with who we are to begin with, so that we are immediately conformed and possess no real self to fall back on, or integrity to retreat into.
Burgis traces how this plays out across family, education, work, politics, religion, and digital spaces, showing in each what it looks like to build and maintain a solid self. He also addresses what to do when that isn’t possible because of group toxicity. “A group can have a unifying virtue,” he says; “it can also have a unifying vice.” Most of us have either been in such a community or are in one now. Maybe more than one.
Take the workplace. We often measure our worth by our output and do so subconsciously, unaware it’s even happening. Some of that is rational—our pay is to one degree or another commensurate with the value we contribute—but solid selves know where to draw boundaries and negotiate expectations so they can still contribute while maintaining their integrity. Pseudo selves, with nothing else to fall back on, swallow the norms of the organization whole and optimize till they burn out.
Outsider Perspective
One of the most remarkable features of The One and the Ninety-Nine is, for me, that Burgis presents a secular message about secular concerns, and yet the book is also a deeply Christian meditation on the individual and society. It’s right there, winking in the title, but it’s such a surprising combination I never saw it coming.
It’s published by a secular press; the endorsements are largely from secular figures; and all the coverage I’ve so far seen has skewed that direction. And yet, as if to serve as a demonstration of the thesis itself, Burgis’s Catholicism is shot through the whole thing. In but not of, as it were.
That outside vantage also facilitates his method. Burgis shows how we might navigate within groups by orienting ourselves to an external standard, and he adopts and adapts the Rule of St. Benedict for the purpose—an example from the Christian tradition that helps us step outside our own secular moment to critique it.
I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s point about the value of old books: not that they’re necessarily right—they’re not—but that they offer a perspective removed from our own. Christianity, in some of its manifestations, is so alien to the current vices of our culture that it can profitably critique them, even if you’re not a believer and have no interest in the belief system.
Several takeaways from The One and the Ninety-Nine stick with me (Ornette Coleman!), but I’ll limit myself to a couple that highlight the importance of outside perspective and closely pertain to my interests here at Miller’s Book Review—and presumably some of what draws you to engage in this community.
Curiositas vs. Studiositas
I remember reading, maybe a decade ago, a clickbaity headline about J.K. Rowling that snagged my attention like a fishhook. The moment came one afternoon after I’d tripped down a social media rabbit hole the algorithm bored in my brain. I had work to do, and here I was getting ready to click on whatever this eyeball farmer planted in my view. I came to myself in the nick of time.
“You know what,” I said to an empty room, “I don’t give a crap about J.K. Rowling.” I wriggled loose from the trap because apathy is a superpower in the Age of the Algorithm.
But Burgis has one better.
I was in the process of succumbing to an ancient vice, curiositas—a bottomless craving for titillation, intellectual or otherwise. Curiositas is why we bounce from link to link, even when we have better things to do, why we can’t stop watching Instagram reels, why we feed ourselves to the feed.
Burgis advises replacing the vice of curiositas not with apatheia—good but insufficient—but with the virtue of studiositas. He defines the practice as “the disciplined love of truth, an ordered desire to know what is worth knowing. It is the virtue that restrains distraction and directs the mind toward reality that perfects the knower.”
That may be pitched a little high for most of what we’re doing all day, but the point holds: our culture is saturated with information and entertainment of every kind, with hooks designed to reel us in.
I’m morally indifferent to a lot of that. Everyone has their own interests (then again, do we? we’re back to the thesis of Wanting). But I’m not psychologically indifferent. I don’t think it’s good for the human mind. If I held a moral stance, it would stem from that: taken to extremes, curiositas is unhealthy. “A society governed by curiositas,” says Burgis, “produces individuals who are hyperinformed, but poorly formed.”
Thankfully, Burgis offers a way to institute more studiositas in our lives: the idea of an anti-structure, or, as he also calls it, an anti-environment.
Literature as an Anti-Environment
As far as I can tell anti-structures and anti-environments amount to the same thing: a situation or construct that lets us stand outside the environment we’re in long enough to critique it. As the saying goes, you can’t read the label from inside the bottle; you have to step outside to understand what’s inside, and that goes for all the social dynamics and overlapping groups to which we belong.
Burgis defines an anti-structure as “a place or a period in time in which people are forced to make new meaning without the usual guardrails and safety of known relationships and identity markers.” It’s a means of stepping outside the world far enough or long enough to see it, and ourselves, with fresh perspective. Since individuality and identity are always understood in reference to larger groups—there is no I without we—we can garner valuable self-knowledge in that process of differentiation, evaluation, and comparison.
Books can, and you probably saw this coming, provide exactly that. We can go back to Lewis’s plea for reading old books and now apply it literally, though I think we can also profitably broaden it to include reading literature of most any kind.
This brings to mind Joel Halldorf’s wonderful new book Reading Matters, which I recently reviewed for Reason. Halldorf provides the example of theologian and anti-Nazi conspirator Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We need, said Bonhoeffer before his execution by the Third Reich, “to recover the lost sense of quality and a social order based on quality.” How? “It means a return from the newspaper and the radio”—and, had he been able to forecast our future, the feeds and screeds—”to the book, from feverish activity to unhurried leisure, from dispersion to concentration, from sensationalism to reflection.”
Stepping away from the feed to read is studiositas in action, and books can become the anti-environment from which we can take the measure of our present world and the social swirl in which we spin.
“Life,” said José Ortega y Gasset, “is fired at us point-blank.” Books provide a barricade where we can come back to ourselves, because literature offer time and space for deliberation, for thinking, for meditation, for turning over values and perspectives the algorithm can’t or doesn’t serve up in the moment, or ever.
And, as I said, it’s not just old books that do this for us. With that in mind, I’d recommend spending a few evenings this week with Burgis’s own—Wanting and The One and the Ninety-Nine—both of which can reshape how you engage with the world: what you want from it, and how you interact with it.
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If you enjoyed this take, check out my 2024 conversation with Burgis and my 2022 review of Wanting👇
Another book to add to my growing "need to read" pile. Thanks for making me aware of it.
I remember reading somewhere that "hyperinformed" people are more susceptible to propaganda, conspiracies, and disinformation because they consume so much media. This book sounds like an antidote to that.
"Books provide a barricade where we can come back to ourselves ..."
I'm deeply sympathetic to this case for books and reading. For the sake of discussion, though, how precisely do books lend themselves to sustaining their readers' integrity? Because as you point out in your *Reason* book review, for every *War and Peace* there exists a *Mein Kampf*. Or perhaps it's better to ask whether for every person who opens heart and mind to a book, there's another person whose reading is perverse, whose reasoning is motivated, who foists a narrow agenda on the expansive reach of the text (cf. here reader-response theory). It strikes me that the real danger of this era is not so much that people don't read; it's what people choose to do with whatever they do read.