The great monomaniacs—Darwin, Marx, Freud—leave their mark and have their powerful influence, though in the case of Marx and Freud that influence has long been on the wane and the mark begun to seem a blurry if not a black one. The short attention span man, meanwhile, plugs along, seeking primarily to amuse himself and anyone else who cares to read or listen to him. What he does may be ultimately negligible, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.
— Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits
I share Epstein’s mistrust of the monomaniac, though perhaps my sensibility is closer to Nietzsche’s pugnaciousness: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Systems aim to master reality; in practice, they often just master their adherents.
Marx built concrete cities of identical apartment blocks, and sometimes the camps beyond them. Freud built an asylum with no discharge papers. The short-attention-span man makes only shards and fragments. They can’t collapse; they were never connected.
Ironically, shards often outlast the systems. When a system falls, it becomes rubble; when a fragment survives, it is still whole. Montaigne’s casual essays are still beloved and in print, while most of the grand “world-systems” are footnotes in history books. Of course, over time, the “shards-only” approach becomes its own sort of system — a creed of suspicion toward creeds. The short-attention-span man builds nothing to endure, and so, sometimes, paradoxically, he does. Have I simply replaced the monomaniac’s cathedral with my silly little pillow fort? At least mine is easy to dismantle, and no one gets locked inside.