Has Everything Already Been Said?
Self-Doubt in the Library of Babel
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This article is a bit of a pep-talk to myself.
In high school English class we read Neil Postman's graduation speech, "Athenians and Visigoths". The speech is about the philosophies of two cultures (note that it's a short inspirational speech, not a careful work of historical scholarship). The Athenians valued knowledge and art, and as a result, we still remember their writings and are deeply influenced by their culture. The Visigoths were destructive—they only saw value in the quest for knowledge if it could "help you to earn money or to gain power over other people".
The speech is all about exalting the practice of culture. The Athenians saw culture as something of value on its own, while the Visigoths saw it as a means to an end. As a result, the Athenians live on in our culture. The Visigoths, if they are mentioned at all, are only mentioned in passing.
Despite this clear message that's supposed to inspire us to learn and give ourselves to the pursuits of knowledge and culture, I found the speech profoundly deflating. Not because of the speech's central thesis, but because of this line:
[I]t is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago
The problem I had with this is simple: If Athenians have already said everything worth saying, why the hell bother saying anything? We're all too late to the game.
Some version of this doubt creeps into my mind every time I sit down to write. I'm currently writing this article to procrastinate writing another one where this fear is keeping me from putting words down. And in a self-referential loop, I have the same worry about this article.
The issue isn't just that I worry someone has made an argument I'm making before—even worse is if they haven't. I'm frequently writing on topics I have some knowledge of, but it's not like I'm an active scholar who has dedicated his life to the topic. What if what I'm saying is new, but only because the real experts wouldn't say something so stupid? Who am I, a mere dilettante, to go out and feel like I have anything useful to say?
It's a sort of efficient market hypothesis about ideas. In finance, the efficient market hypothesis says the price of an asset (e.g. a stock) reflects all available information, so it's impossible to "beat the market". If you're a hobbyist day-trader who thinks the market has missed something obvious and some stock is far undervalued, you're probably the one missing something. People with much more knowledge than you who trade for a living think the stock market price is the right one (otherwise they would be buying it, driving the price up). Literally the best investment advice anyone could give you is to put your money in a broad, low-fee index fund, essentially investing in the market as a whole rather than trying to pick the winning stocks. But that means swallowing your pride and accepting you probably don't know better than the market. Like anyone trying to talk about anything since the ancient Greeks, you're not seeing anything new.
The Library of Babel
This concern about not having anything useful to say is related to a thought I had as a kid. I would worry we were running out of… pretty much every type of content. There are only so many words, only so many musical notes, only so many pixels in an image. They're all finite. There are only so many different words, and therefore only so many different ways to put them together. At some point, won't we just have used up all the combinations (or at least, all the good ones)? How will we continue to come up with jokes, songs, essays, and pictures?
What I was failing to understand was the combinatorial explosion of possibilities. How many 3 word sentences are there? Just looking at the number of words in dictionaries, there are well over 100,000 words in regular use in the English language. That means there are over 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) possible 3-word combinations. Obviously not all of those will be meaningful (that count includes sentences like "pickles aren't tasty", which is grammatical but clearly doesn't convey a meaningful idea in any context).
When it comes to 1000-word essays, we're dealing with a number of possible combinations that far eclipses the number of atoms in the universe. We could imagine a library filled with all of these possible combinations—every possible essay, journal entry, deranged love letter, and of course lots and lots of gibberish. We could spend our whole lives reading and never make a dent in the sheer magnitude of content in this library.
Of course, this idea itself is very much not new. I'm just reiterating an idea from Borges's short story, The Library of Babel. It isn't just the Athenians we have to worry about, apparently other people have written stuff, too. More competition.
Figuring out the number of books in the Library of Babel is simple combinatorics. Figuring out the space of meaningful things to say is much harder.
Does it matter if the key difference between two things, one uses simpler language and the other more complex? What if the analogies used are similar but some click with you and your personal experience more? What if the ideas are the same, but the language is more poetic? The same argument is made, but it relies a bit less on a technical background that you lack?
Levels of Abstraction
In some sense, if you abstract away enough, maybe everything has been said. It's often claimed there are only a certain number of plots stories follow. The exact number depends who you ask—it could be 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 20, or 36. Reduce anything to only two dimensions and you're sure to find patterns, but that doesn't mean you've captured the full complexity of the thing.
In some abstract sense, I'm not saying anything in this essay that hasn't been said before. I could boil it down to a few trite sentences—better yet, I could have chatGPT do it, it's good at condensing things down to overly neat summaries. On the other hand, no one has ever written these exact words in this exact order before. At a middle-ground level of abstraction, I doubt anyone has talked about the efficient market hypothesis, Neil Postman's speech, the Library of Babel, and foreverrwinter's internet joke in one place before.
So, am I saying anything new or not? Is there any point to any of this?
What's the use?
The reason to keep on writing is because, at some important level of abstraction, whatever you're writing is new.
Unlike the brute math of the Library of Babel, trying to quantify the number of meaningful idea combinations is a fool's errand. What is meaningful is context-dependent. The Ancient Greeks might have said lots of cool stuff, but they never said anything about Quantum Mechanics. Modern physics textbooks would be completely incomprehensible to them. The Library of Babel would contain opinions articles about political events that haven't happened yet—those won't make sense until later.
For each person, the items in the Library of Babel that will make sense are different. Those who are experts in a field and generating new ideas are often steeped in that field. It can be difficult for them to convey their ideas to those without a similar steeping. Those of us that follow are part of the way culture digests this new information, hopefully breaking it down to be more consumable to the average person. We each mix it with a different set of ideas and a different set of connections.
Each of us is navigating the Library of Babel in a different way. Each of us might take ideas that, when looked at from some hyper-abstract level, are the same as someone else has said before. But the chances they're the exact same is vanishingly small.
Most importantly, by writing—by figuring out, word by word, the specific item from the Library of Babel that this essay is going to be, I've grappled with my ideas. Even if it's of no use to anyone else, I've found new connections within my own mind, fitting them together in my brain in a way they haven't been before. And that's a unique construction all of its own.
So maybe someone can dig up some Athenian essay that's, at some level of abstraction, the same as this one (presumably published on the ancient Greek version of Substack). Even so, I think it was worthwhile for me to type this out.
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Sounds a bit like issues I, too, have wrestled with - and maybe most folks have to some degree or another.
As someone whose Substack is about the ancient Greeks, this is funny because I so often wish that certain ancient books had not been lost. Much of what I do, I think, is to serve as a replacement for them.