Cognitive Surplus
In his seminal work Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky identifies the many remarkable gifts of our generation’s technology and information sharing. He points to the autocrats and dictators thwarted by public awareness — whether minorities in crime-ridden areas of Kenya, the rise of crowd campaigning, or the meeting of great minds across continents. He lauds the extraordinary opportunity of the global conversation afforded by the internet and the media platforms we have built.
His observations are certainly true. But they overlook some great fallacies and dangers — and one of them relates directly to this week’s parsha. The question is this: Can the public handle sensitive information?
The Failure of the Meraglim
Of the many ways of describing what went wrong with the meraglim, one framing speaks to a conundrum that affects us still today. Rabbi Shimshon Rephael Hirsch argues that the failure was not in the way they saw and gathered their intelligence, nor even in what they thought or what concerned them as they reported it — but rather to whom they reported it.
Consider the contrast. The spies in the days of Yehoshua bin Nun reported to the leadership. They delivered sensitive military information to those equipped to mediate it, to understand it, and to make decisions upon it. But the meraglim sent by Moshe Rabbeinu turned to the entire community. It was essentially a social media post. They publicized their findings to the masses — masses who could not take the report in stride, who could not amalgamate the complexities of the sensitive military intelligence they were hearing.
And so, the expected occurred. The people broke down in tears. They believed they were marching toward a massacre. They doubted their own capacity, and ultimately they doubted the Almighty. Raw information had not undergone the mediation necessary to be appreciated in its larger context — and it shattered them.
The Limits of Radical Transparency
Yes, it is important that governments be accountable to their people. Yes, it is important that dictators not act with impunity. But on the other side of the spectrum, it is also not healthy when every individual is handed information for which they have no context — or of which they receive only thin slices.
It should not be the public’s job to watch police body-cam footage and adjudicate whether officers acted in good faith. It should not be the public’s place to overhear the inside conversations of boardrooms or critical military deliberations between world leaders. It should not be the public’s role to disseminate, judge, and evaluate questions of sensitive military and political consequence between nations.
In our age of technology and global sharing, perhaps the sharing has become too much. Perhaps not everybody needs to know everything at all times. The human mind is simply not built to appreciate, digest, or hold the bandwidth to contextualize the torrent of information presented to it.
A Question for Individuals, Not Only Governments
This may not be a question only about governments. It is also a question for each individual receiving and consuming information. We only have the capacity to care for so much. We only have the bandwidth to worry about a certain amount of issues in our harried lives. How much of that precious capacity are we spending on matters entirely outside the sphere of our control — outside the sphere of meaning in our immediate lives?
These are decisions that must be made. Notifications that must be silenced. Focus that must be regained.
The episode of Parshas Shelach — as distant as it seems — turns out to be remarkably close by, related directly to who we are as human beings today.