By one calculation the mind can take in eleven million bits of information a second, of which the conscious mind is aware of forty. The rest is in the Big Shaggy. As Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia put it, consciousness is like a snowball sitting on an iceberg. In other words, most of what guides us is not our conscious rationalization; it’s our unconscious realm. Matthew Arnold, without the advantage of modern cognitive science, put it best:
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light
Of what we say we feel—below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel—there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
When you raise children, you notice that their daemons are wide-awake a lot of the time. They have direct access to these deep realms. Moral consciousness is our first consciousness. But as adults we have a tendency to cover over the substrate, to lose touch with the daemon and let it drift asleep. Sometimes we do this by being excessively analytic about everything. I grew up loving movies. In my sophomore year of college, I went to see a classic old movie almost every night. Then, as an adult, I became a movie critic. I would sit in the screening room with my notebook in hand. I was no longer watching movies, I was analyzing movies. The notebook became a wall between me and the story I was supposed to be experiencing. I had lost the ability to discern what I liked and what I didn’t. By being so analytical I had lost the ability to have an authentic response.
Sometimes we lose touch with the daemon by adopting an excessively economic view of life. It is an interesting phenomenon that when you see life exclusively through an economic lens, that tends to replace the moral lens. For example, a few years ago, six day care centers in Haifa, Israel, realized they had a problem. Parents kept arriving late at pick-up time, so the teachers had to hang around an extra hour or so until the kids were gone. To address the issue, the day care centers began imposing fines on parents who were late. The plan backfired. The share of parents who arrived late doubled. Before, picking up your kids on time was an act of consideration toward the teachers—a moral responsibility. Afterward, it became an economic transaction; you perform the service of looking after my kid and I pay you for it. In the former, people are thinking in terms of right and wrong, being considerate or inconsiderate. In the latter, a cost-benefit calculation kicks in. What’s best for me? People who spend their lives thinking exclusively in economic terms tend to cover over their access to the Big Shaggy and to the daemons found there. Whatever is materialistic is taken to be real, and anything that’s not does not exist.
Sometimes it’s the whole totality of bourgeois life that covers over the deep regions. We’re just going about life, doing our normal prosaic things like shopping and commuting, and a film of dead thought and clichéd emotion covers everything. Ultimately, you get used to the buffer you’ve built around yourself, and you feel safer leading a bland life than a yearning one. The result is not pretty, and was best described in a famous passage by C. S. Lewis:
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Nobody makes a conscious decision to entomb the heart and to anesthetize the daemon; it just sort of happens after a few decades of prudent and professional living. Ultimately, people become strangers to their own desires. José Ortega y Gasset believed that most people devote themselves to avoiding that genuine self, to silencing the daemon and refusing to hear it.