Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that we are all just quotations of our ancestors. The institutions we operate under were made hundreds or thousands of years ago. The values we hold were passed down from ancient philosophers and holy books. The way we think, talk, and behave toward one another is the way our long-dead forebears liked to do it. We inherit ways of seeing the world.

A lot is being written about how AI risks dumbing us down. We outsource thinking to ChatGPT and trust an LLM’s output or understanding more than our own. But there is a more ancient outsourcing going on — one in which we think the thoughts our ancestors thought. Someone with authority tells us it’s right, so we say it’s right. Everyone’s always done it this way, so I’ll carry on doing it this way.

The good news is that we can notice this and take steps to challenge it. The bad news is that most of the time, we don’t.

Closing the world

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Hilary Lawson about HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival. And during our conversation, Lawson argued that we all operate under what he called the “dead closures of previous folk.”

A closure, for Lawson, is a way of seeing the world and using the world. An artist “closes” a pencil for drawing, a writer “closes” it for writing, and an angry child might “close” it as a weapon to stab the wall. Sometimes these closures can be humdrum and practical like this, but they can also be far more widespread.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger, for example, argued that modernity has learned to see nature as a “standing reserve.” We see trees in terms of lumber, water in terms of sewage, and animals in terms of food. This is a “closure.” It’s one way to see and use the world, but, as Heidegger and Lawson both argue, it’s not the only one.

Obviously a lunatic

A dead closure, then, is some line we parrot off because we’ve heard someone else say it before. It’s the quotation of our ancestors. For example, as Lawson put it, when someone just assumes their opponent is “obviously a lunatic,” they’re often not thinking; they’re inheriting a closure.

The problem with a dead closure is that it often means we hand over our thinking to dead people. And so, we often find ourselves fumbling around using tools designed to operate in a very different world from the one we have today. We use ideas framed by other ideas that we no longer use. For example, there is a lot of discussion at the moment about “cultural Christianity.” Some scholars have argued that the values that many modern liberal democracies work under — human rights, the separation of church and state, the inviolable sanctity of life — were born in a highly Christian culture. If you take away the religiosity, you are left only with the ideas. And it’s a subject of much contemporary debate as to what that actually leaves us with.

Slip outside the eye of your mind

So, a dead closure can be a bad thing, but not necessarily. The “appeal to tradition” is an informal fallacy, but so too is the “appeal to novelty.” The answer, for Lawson, is not to go along nor to mindlessly throw out, but to adopt a philosophical position.

The role of a philosopher — and this can be anyone, anywhere, anytime — is to try to step out of your context and appraise it. As Lawson put it, you need to “be able to situate and place your thought so you can see the choices that you’re making by adopting that point of view, and you can see the strengths and weaknesses of it.”

The important point is how your closures determine your actions. So many people shuffle along to university, get married, and settle down to have kids, all to the choreographed step of a dead closure. The wise thing is to occasionally pause and ask, “What ways of seeing the world are determining this?” If you find yourself calling political rivals lunatics, evil, or stupid, then ask: What is motivating that behavior? It might be that we marry, have kids, and still go on to call that politician a lunatic, but the point is that we’ve readjusted our perception once to see whether it was a good one.

None of us can step fully outside our inheritance. But we can, now and again, turn around and look at the walls we’ve been bumping into. It’s up to us to then work out if we want to escape those walls or settle in for just a bit longer.