How does your mind work? How do you approach problems? How do you organise ideas? Ben Macintyre summarises Isaiah Berlin’s suggestion that there are two kinds of thinkers: the hedgehog and the fox.
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Hedgehog writers, argued Berlin, see the world through the prism of a single overriding idea, whereas foxes dart hither and thither, gathering inspiration from the widest variety of experiences and sources. Marx, Nietzsche and Plato were hedgehogs; Aristotle, Shakespeare and Berlin himself were foxes.
Richard Serra: The Hedgehog and the Fox, sculpture at Princeton University
Today, feasting on the anarchic, ubiquitous, limitless and uncontrolled information cornucopia that is the web, we are all foxes. We browse and scavenge thoughts and influences, picking up what we want, discarding the rest, collecting, linking, hunting and gathering our information, social life and entertainment…
This way of thinking is a direct threat to ideology. Indeed, perhaps the ultimate expression of hedgehog-thinking is totalitarian and fundamentalist, which explains why the regimes in China and Iran are so terrified of the internet. The hedgehogs rightly fear the foxes.
For both better and worse, fox-thinking is dominant. At its worst, it means shorter attention spans, shallower memories, fragmented, unsustained argument, the undermining of intellectual property rights and a tendency to mistake anecdote for fact. At its best, the internet represents an intellectual revolution, fostering free collaboration as never before, with dramatically improved access to boundless information, the great store of the world’s knowledge just a few keystrokes and clicks away.
The nimble internet fox is both an extraordinary time-saver, nipping from one place to another on instant mind-journeys that would once have taken years. But he is also a prodigious time-waster, wandering down distracting avenues of celebrity gossip, pornography, invective and the minutiae of other peoples’ lives.
Reading the web usefully requires a new form of literacy, the ability to sift from the abundance of information what is helpful from what is pointless or merely distracting. Many feel overloaded by the onslaught of information: too many websites, too many messages, a deafening chorus of tweets and texts. Internet thinking is not just about browsing and gathering, but choosing and rejecting. The internet fox knows many things, but while hungrily snarfing up titbits from every corner, he must also know what is indigestible, what is nourishing and what is poisonous.
I’m only half-convinced by this. It’s true that an intellectual revolution has taken place. It’s true that we have to develop these skills of scanning, sifting and sorting. But the paradoxical effect of this information overload is that our core beliefs can remain unchallenged. The mind darts around the web but finds it much harder to settle down and engage deeply – as you have to do when you read a book or enter into a conversation. So the hedgehog that forms our identity can remain untouched. The infinite freedom of the internet makes it a place where it is very easy to reinforce one’s prejudices. Perhaps we are hedgehogs in foxes’ clothing.
Interesting. And I think you’ve nailed it when you say it’s all about core beliefs. The sad thing is that there are a lot of foxes out there who have never gotten in touch with their inner hedgehog to figure out who they are an what they stand for and at the same time there are a lot of hedgehogs who are rooted in an ideology they find safe and they refuse to open their minds to some foxy activities.
An interesting post. I half agree with you about the inner hedgehog remaining untouched, but this seems more true, or applicable to older generations.
The older generations didn’t have interent during the impressionable formation years, so they went through the procss of forming an inner hedgehog- conversation, books, listening to seniors etc.
This person with the inner hedgehog can meet the internet and may well put on fox’s clothing, whilst the inner remains.
However, the new generations have around the clock instant access to the internet and all its contents. The internet, along with tv, has become the first and constant point of contact and provider in the forming of the inner hedgehog for the new generations.
As such, the younger generations do not form this inner core, so the fox dominates the inner and outer. There is no one big idea, tv and internet are used by postmodernism to tell people this, its the rejection of the metanarrative.
I agree with most of this. I’d just add: I don’t believe the post-modernist mantra that there is no meta-narrative; I just think it goes underground. In other words, young people who are largely formed in their way of thinking by the flitting internet, by texts and posts and snatches of conversation – they still have an underlying approach to life, or (to change the spatial metaphor) an overarching goal; even if that goel is unarticulated. I remember arguing about this in an ethics class last year – young people saying they don’t have overriding priorities that structure their lives, and me saying (in a very Aristotelian say) that they do really, they are just not very explicit. What you do in your day (whatever it is) reflects something about your priorities about life (within the constraints that are imposed upon that life – I don’t mean that everyone is practically free to do everything they want).