Accompaniment and Sincerity
Or, "Take off Your Clothes and Float in a River"
Accompaniment and sincerity are two concepts that I've pillaged from very different sources. Accompaniment comes from the book How to Know A Person by David Brooks; it is the quality of being able to be with someone or something. To attune oneself to something outside of oneself. Sincerity comes from On Sincerity by Joe Carl Smith. Sincerity is more of an internal posture towards the world, wrapped up with a few qualities. It is agency directed towards values; it is a high quality of attention dedicated to truth.
What draws these two concepts together is that they both hinge on "quality of attention." They employ this quality of attention towards opposite ends. Accompaniment by definition transcends the self. Sincerity is largely an internal disposition, though it drives behavior that effects others and the world.
I've been drawn to sincerity as a guiding concept in recent months. It's led me to good things, but also to a weightiness of the soul. Joe Carl Smith associates sincerity very heavily with seriousness, which he associates with a type of "depth." Since he's a rationalist, he has a very hard time trying to describe what he means.
Relatedly: sincerity, for me, connotes depth, heartfeltness, and vulnerability–but staple-clipping need not. Yudkowsky writes about having “something to protect.” Does that just mean: “having a utility function”? Nero can have that. So too the flippant socialite, the detached ironist, the casual troll. The ontology of utility functions does not, itself, make any immediate room for a “depth vs. shallowness” dimension on which preferences can vary.
And yet it feels like we need such a dimension. Relative to other ways of arranging your soul, sincerity seems uniquely at odds with “fucking around.” It sees something important, in a way that even coherent preferences and harmonious self-government need not imply. It’s not that sincerity need be grave, or dour. But something is not a joke, or a game. 1
What he's describing as "depth vs. shallowness" is really just the real moral order of the universe. That there really is a way things ought to be, and while Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns may both have internal clarity about his values and be fully devoting a high quality of attention to his fiddle, he is still blind to the moral wreckage outside his window which makes him fundamentally unserious.
Having some spiritual or moral weight is a good thing, it lends itself to the exercise of power. Paraphrasing the Guanzi, "When a person’s virtue is not equal to his position, all will suffer." But although Joe Carl Smith is careful to point out that sincerity doesn't have to be dour, this kind of sincere reckoning with moral reality very easily does lead to a sense of severity. Severity is maybe the only rational response to a clear-eyed assessment of a broken world. At least if one only assesses the broken parts.
But that can't be all there is, right? The example of accompaniment that David Brooks gives in How to Know a Person is a story from Loren Eiseley, an American naturalist. You see, Loren was near the Platte River in Nebraska when the sudden urge to float came upon him.
A childhood near-death experience had given him a permanent fear of water, and the Platte, while shallow, does have its swirls, holes, and patches of quicksand, so the thought of floating in it came wrapped in fear, nervousness, and exhilaration. Still, he lay on his back on the water and began to drift, savoring the sensation of it, asking, What does it feel like to be a river?2
Loren is present, fully bringing his attention to the moment. There's rushing water that brings him back to childhood fears. The thrill of removing his clothes to float, the exhilaration of getting away with something while on the job. The courage of overcoming his mild trepidation. This is an unserious yet wholesome moment. "What does it feel like to be a river?" I don't know, let's float and find out! This moment of simple accompaniment opens him up to goodness in a way that a self-serious utilitarian operating with total sincerity simply may not be.
This will likely grow into a larger essay, but I think that the idea of accompaniment is the yin to sincerity's yang. The sincerity that Joe Carl Smith speaks of has to be cultivated together with this kind of accompaniment, or it becomes imbalanced and too utilitarian. In either state, one is attempting to bring the fullness of their being and attention to all moments of their lives. The distinction between the two is simply their objective: either changing the world (sincerity) or attuning oneself to the world (accompaniment).
Lightness and weightiness are both necessary responses to the world. I don't yet have a good understanding of lightness. That's where I wish to explore next. I think there's a connection between true levity and self-emptying love. Even as I try hard to work it out and achieve understanding, I'm trying even harder to remember this: it doesn't matter if you understand it, it matters that you are it.
On Sincerity, Joe Carl Smith
How to Know a Person, David Brooks, first edition, p. 44. He's paraphrasing an essay written by Loren Eiselely titled The Flow of the River published in The American Scholar in 1953. I was unable to retrieve a copy for free so I've quoted Brooks paraphrase instead of returning to the source.