Life as a human being is a process of collecting lenses.
Lenses are any things that help us to navigate the vast ocean of raw data in which we are swimming every second of our waking lives. They are filters, maps, boats, magnifying glasses, motors. They allow us to make sense of the world, and give meaning and context to the streams of stimuli that flow from our sensory and mental faculties - streams amplified, in the digital age, by an exploding world of information available at our fingertips.
Collecting lenses is inevitable, and it’s the only way to survive as a thinking human. Some lenses come built-in, like the neurons in our brain and nerves that turn photons into sight, air waves into sound, chemical stimulation into taste and pressure into touch. But most lenses are acquired, like the magnificent lens of language by which almost all of us assign meaning to the physical world.
Our nervous system and languages are primary lenses, general filters that are extremely broad and fundamental to our interpretation of the world but still relatively basic. They require higher-level lenses by which to look more deeply and complexly at specific parts of our lived experiences, and to turn the basic interpretations of sense and language into more elaborate and abstract understandings of the world.
Science, for example, is a lens by which we explain, interpret and predict the behavior of the natural world. We all rely on basic physics, chemistry and biology to guide us through our lives - that apple is falling because of gravity, don’t put books in the fire or they’ll burn, don’t drink bleach because it’s poison and don’t lick the handrails because they have germs.
Similarly, social intelligence is a lens that helps us to understand the behavior of other humans, and to know how to behave toward them and what to think about them. That woman’s mad because that man said something that wasn’t true, share your toys with your friends because it’s a nice thing to do, don’t call people names because it hurts their feelings and they won’t like you.
As we get older and do and learn and experience more things, we collect lenses that affect the way we see and think about those things (and their related or attached concepts) as we move forward in life. These lenses can be social attitudes, scientific knowledge, artistic tastes, and ethical values. This happens subconsciously and unavoidably, but the curious person can also actively seek to find new lenses and refine or retune their existing ones.
For this, books are an excellent tool. Every book is a bundle of ideas about how or why the world works or how it could or should work, and reading books is a great way to acquire new lenses through which to filter and parse our lived experiences.
Some examples from my recent readings:
Michael Sandel’s Justice, a book about the moral philosophy underlying modern politics, gave me a new lens - an ethical one - through which to see and think about political debates. Reading it let me see a part of the picture previously invisible or unclear to me; that is, I could now identify and understand the precise ethical arguments underpinning different positions on political issues.
Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race gave me several lenses, which helped me understand a little better what it’s like to be Black in America, helped me turn my eye on my own privilege and see more fully how it affects my understanding of race relations, and helped me more precisely see the reasoning behind answers to important questions in conversations about race.
Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing helped me look at the social internet and discern its previously invisible effects on fame, identity, and public discourse (or better discern the nuances of those effects if I was already aware of them).
As these examples demonstrate, lenses can perform a variety of functions. Some allow you to better understand the world around you; some allow you to better appreciate it. Some lenses help you perceive physical phenomena, others illuminate on a more immaterial plane.
My most recently acquired lens, from Mark Miodownik’s book Stuff Matters, does all of these things.
Stuff Matters is a book about materials science, the study of the inner structures and natures of the materials that make up our physical environment. In 10 chapters, each dedicated to a different material, Miodownik explores the science, culture and history behind the ways that we interact with, create, and rely on the stuff that makes up our modern world. An eleventh chapter synthesizes these individual studies into a unified way of viewing the material world through the lens of materials science.
Miodownik explores materials new and old, fragile and strong, conspicuous and invisible. He looks at the stuff we make our buildings out of, and the stuff we rebuild our bodies with. He gives a fascinating tour of how many of the materials that we take for granted in our modern lives are marvels of chemistry, engineering, and creativity. He takes us from the cutting edge of materials technology to processes and traditions so old that they are literally prehistoric.
My favorite chapters from Stuff Matters are “Fundamental” (about concrete) and “Invisible” (about glass). Close seconds are “Marvelous” (foam & aerogel) and “Unbreakable” (graphite & other carbon structures). In each of these chapters, Miodownik blew my mind by revealing how deeply beautiful and ingenious some of the most common and ignored materials in my life are, and how many aspects of the modern world that I take for granted simply could not exist without them.
In the end, what Stuff Matters has done for me is provide me with one of the most rewarding and penetrative lenses I’ve collected in my life. It sees through the surface of materials into their inner structure, and it zooms in and out between scales in revealing beauty from the atomic to the microscopic to the miniature to the human scales. It travels through time in linking objects to their place in human history, and it traces the invisible threads between the materials we create and use and the way we imagine ourselves. And, most importantly, it turns what were once objects of mundanity into sources of wonder and appreciation - the lens of Stuff Matters allows you to see that the world’s grandest museum of human ingenuity and beauty is the man-made world itself.
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