“You Say You Want a Devolution” by Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: “Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper.” Not as dramatic as all that, but an interesting look at the stagnation culture over the last twenty years.
“Hugo Addendum: The Film in Context” by Adam Batty at Hope Lies at 24 Frames per Second: Excellent post on the film history that forms the context of Hugo. H/T Mr. Gladding.
Happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone. I hope the past few days have been filled with good food, laughter, celebration, family and friends, and, of course, much gratitude. And here’s hoping that you all managed to stay clear of any Black Friday pepper-spray instances of “competitive shopping.”
We’ll start this week with a piece on cyber-security (is that still an acceptable use of “cyber-“?).
“Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon” by Aslee Vance and Brad Stone in Business Week: Yes, Tolkien fans, you read that correctly. The highly-prized security software that had its start as PayPal’s anti-fraud program is named after the seeing-stones in The Lord of the Rings, and Palantir’s CEO unabashedly explains that the company’s mission is to “protect the Shire.” It’s an interesting company that seeks to keep its soul in what might be a seedy business. We hope they succeed, because as a friend and Tolkien enthusiast noted, “While the original Palantir were made by elves for the forces of good, they were eventually turned to evil ends. That may serve as a good allegory for those of us who get worried about Big Brother having infinite information about our lives.”
From the rather serious to a lighter piece.
“The Amazing History and the Strange Invention of the Bendy Straw” by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: The history of technology — and yes, the bendy straw is a technology — is full of interesting and quirky stories like this which shows how much went into designing and making objects we take entirely for granted. It’s a quick read and you’ll have a great an interesting anecdote with which to bore entertain people every time they pull out a bendy straw.
And now for a slightly whimsical take on a rather profound matter.
“The Umbrella Man” produced by Errol Morris at the NY Times: This is a great little documentary, it comes in at under seven minutes, based on the “umbrella man” that mysteriously stood on the route of JFK’s motorcade the decidedly sunny day he was shot in 1963. It finally makes a great point about our understanding and study of history.
Now, in case you were tempted to join the Black Friday madness, here is a little inoculation for you.
“Rabbi Lets Consumerism Have It Between the i’s” by Jonathan Wynne-jones and Martin Beckford in The Sydney Morning Herald. This is not a new message, but it is stated once more with some force by a prominent British Rabbi and member of the House of Lords, Jonathan Sacks. While not wanting to invoke too much self-loathing, I did find it interesting that, as the article noted, “Although religious leaders have recently used increasingly strong language to condemn banks and politicians over the financial crisis and the gap between rich and poor, few have directly criticised ordinary people for their materialism.” There is a lot of finger pointing going on these days, but seemingly very little by way of introspection. I’ll leave it at that.
Speaking of which, if you place yourself right of center on the political spectrum, you may find these two pieces from prominent conservative writers instructive:
Moving from politics to a very political and technological issue: energy policy.
“The Myth of Renewable Energy” by Dawn Stover in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: I’m far from expert on these matters, but this struck me as a rather grim, but well reasoned piece. The key point is straightforward: all renewable energies seem to have hidden and unsustainable factors worked in.
Not wanting to leave you on a downer this weekend, here is another sharp post from the folks at Cyborgology.
“Hipster Rivivalism: Authentic Technologies of Days Gone Past” by David Strohecker: Strohecker takes a look at the hipster fascination with vintage technologies and the quest for authenticity. It’s an interesting cultural trend as I’ve noted before here, and, I suspect, a symptom of the human condition groping for expression.
It’s a messy world out there right now, and storm clouds seem perpetually to be gathering on the horizon. At the risk of sounding trite, such times, for all of the angst they induce, can also have the effect of clarifying and reordering our priorities. I trust you still found much to be thankful for this week and, having already mentioned Tolkien, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite lines from the Two Towers. At the bleakest moment, Aragorn nonetheless manages to affirm, “Yet, dawn is ever the hope of men.”
With apologies for not posting any suggested reading last weekend, here a good list to make up for it. Be sure to check out the Robinson piece and the three essays reviewing recent books on what ails the academy. The video is pretty cool too
“Difference Engine: Luddite Legacy” at The Economist technology blog, “Babbit”: The title is not much help in this case. The post examines the possibility that what has been known as the Luddite Fallacy, that increased automation leads to fewer jobs, may no longer be so fallacious. It suggests that the stubbornly high rate of unemployment might be owed to the increasing number of white collar jobs that can be done by computers running AI. The post ends in rather hopeful fashion, but the compelling case made throughout seemed to me to make the hope rather like wishful thinking.
“Engineering the 10,000-Year Clock” by David Kushner at Spectrum: Great story about how two engineers with the backing of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos set out to design and build a clock that would run on its own power for 10,000 years. When it is completed, it will certainly count as a marvel of engineering. They’re goal? To get us to thinking more long term. No argument here.
“King James Bible” by Adam Nicolson in National Geographic: Explores the global legacy of the King James translation from Westminster Abbey to an American rodeo to Jamaican Rastafarians. Well done, with a lovely photo gallery as you would expect from National Geographic.
Three important reviews of recent books on education, they are each worth your time if you are at all interested in education:
“Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist” by Marilynne Robinson at The Nation: I linked this in my post yesterday, but I wanted to put in your way one more time. It is a piece worthy of your consideration.
“Brain Scan Overload” by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal: Lehrer cautions, wisely it seems to me, against grounding too much speculative stock in brain imaging.
Finally, here is a video you’ll want to take a look at if you haven’t already seen it or one like it. Three dimensional copying. Ink + Light = 3D object: “2D Patterns Self Assemble Into 3D Objects” courtesy of Wired UK.
Early on in the life of this blog I wrote a couple of posts referencing George Kennan, the American diplomat and scholar who played a seminal role in the evolution of American foreign policy in the years following the close of the Second World War. Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” for example, is generally considered to be the ur-text of containment, even if Kennan later disavowed its application. Kennan’s influence later permeated the State Department under George C. Marshall. After the Truman administration, Kennan would serve from time to time in an advisory capacity but largely as an outsider — a status he keenly felt.
Kennan once set out to write a biography of Chekhov; as Beinart dryly observes, “Bush sent a man to run Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, who had never before been posted to the Arab world. To grasp the intellectual chasm between American foreign policy toward the U.S.S.R. in 1946 and American foreign policy toward Iraq in 2003, one need only try to envision Bremer writing a biography of an Iraqi writer, or, for that matter, being able to name one.”
Perhaps I may be forgiven for a certain nostalgic and perhaps romanticized longing for a foreign policy team that featured George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson along with George Kennan. Acheson, Kennan, and four other contemporaries feature in Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’ The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. And Kennan is the subject of a new biography by John Lewis Gaddis, dean of Cold War studies, titled George F. Kennan: An American Life.
“Still, buried within Kennan’s realism there is a moral view: that in relations of power, which is what he thought international relations ultimately are, people can’t be trusted to do the right thing. They will do what the scorpion does to the frog—not because they choose to but because it’s their nature. They can’t help it. This is an easy doctrine to apply to other nations, as it is to apply to other people, since we can always see how professions of benevolence might be masks for self-interest. It’s a harder doctrine to apply to ourselves. And that was, all his life, Kennan’s great, overriding point. We need to be realists because we cannot trust ourselves to be moralists.
This was the danger that the United States faced after Europe had destroyed itself in the Second World War. We had power over other nations to a degree unprecedented in our history, possibly in the world’s history, and it was natural for us to conclude that we deserved it. “Power always thinks it has a great soul,” as another Adams, John, once said. Containment was intended as a continual reminder that we do not know what is best for others. It is a lesson to be ignored only with humility.”
And this from Kissinger’s:
“In a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also warned elsewhere against ‘violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place.’ He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and sought to join them.”
It is too easy to idealize historical figures after the more jagged edges of their performance on history’s stage have been smoothed over by the passage of time. But I cannot help but think that Kennan — and Acheson and Marshall — represented a seriousness that at times seems to be wholly absent from the present political scene.
Kennan had his contradictions and, being human, he was not without flaws and blind spots. And yet, we might safely conclude that he was no fool, and that, regrettably, seems to be more than we can say as we survey the population of our present political landscape. We are in the thrall of great frivolity and there is a disheartening lack of seriousness to our political discourse. And little wonder, we seem long ago to have lost the patience for intellectual rigor and nuance. That a diplomat would undertake the biography of a foreign literary figure is likely to strike us as a waste of resources.
The realities of lived, concrete experience demand a certain provisionality and openness, anchored by deep learning, that issues in practical wisdom. This wisdom coupled with moral courage is what the times demand. And, if I may be pardoned a moment of unseemly cynicism, it is precisely this package of virtues that our political discourse seems to forbid by the logic of the media ecosystem in which it plays out. In this environment our political options have calcified into grotesque parodies of themselves and it is at times hard to be hopeful.
In his 1994 memoir, Kennan wrote,
“… let us, acting on the principle that peoples tend, over the long run, to get the kind of government they deserve, leave the peoples of these ‘nondemocratic’ countries to be governed or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate …”
The principle that “peoples tend, over the long run, to get the kind of government they deserve” may not always be a fair historical assessment, but if there is even a grain of truth to it, as I suspect there is, then this does not bode well for us.
In a recent NY Times editorial, historian Paul Kennedy drew our attention away from developments in consumer technology and toward what he called “the hard worlds of economics and politics.” Kennedy believes that we may be passing through a watershed moment in human history largely unawares because we are distracted by less important facets of present circumstances.
Rather than obsess about the latest gadgets that come on the market, we should be paying attention to at least four developments that are, according to Kennedy, of momentous import. They are, in his words:
a. “the waning of the dollar’s heft”
b. “the unwinding of European dreams” of political union
c. “the arms race in Asia”
d. “the paralysis of the U.N. Security Council”
These are indeed significant developments and one should hope that they are not being ignored, by either the voting public, or those voted into office to steer the ship of state through these turbulent waters (although on the latter see the last post.) But it is unfortunate that Kennedy opposes attention to these economic and political developments and attention given to technological developments.
It is unfortunate, and also curious given some of what Kennedy himself alludes to in his essay.
Describing two previous watershed moments in the history of the West he writes,
“No one alive in 1480 would recognize the world of 1530 — a world of new nation-states, Christendom splintered, European expansion into Asia and the Americas, the Gutenberg communications revolution. Perhaps this was the greatest historical watershed of all time, at least in the West.
There are other examples, of course. Someone living in England in 1750, before the widespread use of the steam engine, would have been staggered at its application 50 years later: The Industrial Revolution had arrived!”
Well, as I think about these moments of great historical change, it seems to me that technology was inextricably implicated in each. Technology, or better, technologies were not the sole factor driving historical change in these instances, but it would be hard to imagine the change taking place without the technologies.
Notably, Kennedy later refers to the critical role of the printing press in a rather odd paragraph:
“So what about today? Many newspaper correspondents and technology pundits point excitedly to our ongoing communications revolution (cell phone, iPad and other gadgetry), and to its impact upon states and peoples, upon traditional authorities and new liberation movements. The evidence for this view is clear across the entire Middle East, and even in the very tame “Occupy Wall Street” movement, although one wonders if any of the high-tech prophets proclaiming that a new era in world affairs has arrived have ever bothered to study the impact of the Gutenberg printing press, or of F.D.R.’s radio chats to tens of millions of Americans in the 1930s and early 1940s.”
This is an odd paragraph because the events it cites seem to undermine the gist of his argument, and because of the closing line. I’m not sure which “hight-tech prophets” Kennedy has in mind, but, in fact, the printing press is often enough cited as a precedent of note when exploring the social transformations wrought by technological change. While I doubt her work informs much of the popular level discourse, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial two-volume, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change certainly explores the consequences of the printing press in fine-grain detail.
I suspect that Kennedy may be mostly distraught by the attention given to something like the release of the latest iPhone and the ensuing consumerist frenzy/orgy. Fair enough. But when we consider the larger “communications revolution,” to use Kennedy’s own formulation, of which the latest iPhone is but a bit part, then the focus on technology is not at all misplaced.
In fact, I wonder whether technology could not be implicated in the four developments that Kennedy himself lists from the hard world of economics and politics. I suspect so. For example, I would think it impossible to discuss the current monetary situation and fluctuations in currency values from the interconnected world of electronic, computerized buying, selling, and trading.
Finally, it was Kennedy’s conclusion that led to the train of thought developed in this post. Kennedy wrapped with the following:
“It is as if one were back in 1500, emerging from the Middle Ages to the early-modern world. The crowds at that time were marveling at a new and more powerful longbow. Surely we can take our world a bit more seriously than that?”
The irony here is that if you consider Lynn White’s work on medieval society, then you might conclude the attention to the longbow was not at all misplaced. White’s thesis taken by itself is probably reductionistic, but it does point to important factors. He argued that the feudal system and the consequent social order was premised on the invention of the stirrup which led to the appearance of mounted, armored soldiers and the rise of wealthy, landed aristocrats who could afford to maintain mounted knights in their service. This social order was itself challenged by the invention of the longbow which, given its long range and armor piercing capability, drastically undermined the combat effectiveness of mounted knights. Historian Theodore Rabb, in The Last Days of the Renaissance, has likewise argued for the analogous role played by gunpowder in the evolution of the modern nation state.
Looking only at technology, especially if by that we mean consumer electronics in suburban context, is certainly too narrow a frame by which to understand our times. But the reverse is also true: trying to understand political and economic realities while ignoring the underlying technologies that shape those realities is likewise ill advised.
Technology, politics, and economics — not to mention all of the other complex social realities we too neatly compartmentalize by the very act of naming them — these are all recursively interrelated and entangled in fascinating ways and we do well resist the temptation to take refuge in explanations and understandings that refuse the complexity by unduly privileging one dimension of social reality over all others.
L.M. Sacasas 