Weekend Reading, 1/7/12

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Hope the new year finds all of you well. As you may have noticed, Weekend Reading posts have been on hiatus due to holiday busyness. Things will only be getting busier as the new semester ramps up, but I’ll try to keep these coming. For the sake of time, however, introductory/explanatory comments may be minimal as they are this week. Enjoy. All of these are quite interesting, the pieces by Havel and Lightman are particularly good.

“The Intellectual and Politics” by Vaclav Havel at Project Syndicate. By the late Czech poet, dissident, and president.

“Always the Optimist: Václav Havel’s transcendence of politics” by Stefany Anne Golberg at Smart Set.  On Havel.

“War No More?” by Timothy Snyder at Foreign Affairs. In conversation with Pinker’s recent book on the decline of violence.

“Their Noonday Demons, and Ours” by John Plotz in the NY Times. On distraction, past and present.

“The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith” by Alan Lightman in Harper’s. This article has gotten a lot of attention over the last couple of weeks. Very interesting.

“Christianity and the Future of the Book” by Alan Jacobs at The New Atlantis. Explores relationship between Christianity and the book form in light of the emergence of electronic forms of reading.

Can We? Ought We?

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Just because it can be done, it does not follow that it ought to be done.

This commonplace strikes me as generally reasonable and perhaps platitudinously so. So, for example, just because you can ram your car into your garage door, it doesn’t follow that you should. In ethical debates with a philosophical orientation one often hears the claim, first articulated by Hume, that you can’t get ought from is. In this case, we might say that you can’t get ought from can.

When the ought is generally established or commonsensical, as in the example above, then there is little to talk about. But there are cases when matters are not nearly as obvious. The principle is often cited in connection with new technologies and it is often articulated by those who believe that the mere ability to achieve some specified end, say human cloning, through scientific knowledge and technical manipulation tells us nothing about whether or not such an end ought to be pursued.

Two very recent articles raise the question of the ought-ness of a capability that may be on the horizon.

The first, “Should We Erase Painful Memories,” is an excerpt from Alison Winters new book, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History. It discusses the possibility of memory dampening or therapeutic forgetting, basically erasing certain memories a la The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The second, “The Future of Prediction,” discusses the possibilities opened up for more accurate forecasting by the emerging ability to crunch immense amounts of data. (Unfortunately, you’ll have to endure the Boston Globe’s atrocious formatting to read this article.)

In both cases, an ability to achieve a particular end is in view and it is not at all obvious whether the end is unproblematically desirable or not. Enjoy thinking through these issues. At the moment it is an interesting, speculative debate. In the not so distant future, it may be a concrete decision.

For an interesting model of how to go about thinking about these issues, you may want to consider reading Leon Kass’ “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls” in which he tackles a similar questions with regards to biotechnological enhancements.

A Chance to Find Yourself

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At The American Scholar you can read William Deresiewicz’s lecture to the plebe class of 2009 at West Point. The lecture is titled “Solitude and Leadership” and it makes an eloquent case for the necessity of solitude, and solitary reading in particular, to the would-be leader.

Throughout the lecture, Deresiewicz draws on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and near the end of his talk he cites the following passage. Speaking of an assistant to the manager of the Central Station, Marlow observes:

“I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt. . . .

It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”

Much to think about in those few short lines. “Papier-mâché Mephistopheles” — what a remarkably apt image for what Arendt would later call the banality of evil. It is also worth reflecting on Conrad’s estimation of work in this passage. He evocatively captures part of what I’ve tried to describe in my posts on the discontents of the frictionless life and disposable reality.

It was, however, the line “for yourself, not for others” that struck me with peculiar force. I’ve written here before about the problems with solipsistic or misanthropic individualism. And it should go without saying that, in some important sense, we certainly ought to think and act for others. But I don’t think this is the sort of thing that Conrad had in mind. Perhaps he was driving at some proto-existenialist pour soi. In any case, what came to my mind was the manner in which a life mediated by social media and smart phones is lived “for others”.

Let me try to clarify. The mediated variety of being “for others” is a form of performance and presentation. What we are doing is constructing and offering an image of ourselves for others to consume. The pictures we post, the items we Like, the tweets we retweet, the status updates, the locations we announce on Foursquare, the music we stream, and dare I say it, the blog posts we write — all of these are “for others” and, at least potentially, “for others” without real regard for them. Others, in the worst forms of this dynamic, are merely an audience that can reflect back to us and reinforce our performance of ourselves. In being “for others” in this sense, we risk being “for ourselves” in the worst way.

There is another, less problematic way of being “for others”. At the risk of oversimplifying, let’s call this an unmediated way of being “for others”. This mode of being for others is not self-consciously focused on performance and presentation. This way of being for others does not reduce others to the status of mirrors reflecting our own image back to us. Other are in this case an end, not a means. We lose ourselves in being for others in this way. We do not offer ourselves for consumption, but we are consumed in the work of being for others. The paradox here is that those who are able to lose themselves in this way tend to have a substantial and steady sense of self. Perhaps because they have been “for themselves” in Conrad’s sense, they have nurtured their convictions and character in solitude so that they can be for other in themselves, that is “for others” for the sake of others.

Those who are for others only by way of being for themselves finally end up resembling Conrad’s papier-mâché Mephistopheles, we could poke our fingers through them and find nothing but a little dirt. All is surface.

Altogether, we might conclude that there is an important difference between being for other for the sake of being for yourself and being for yourself for the sake of being for others.

The truth, of course, is that these modes of being “for others” are not new and the former certainly does not owe its existence uniquely to social media. The performed self has roots in the emergence of modernity and this mode of being for others has a family resemblance to flattery which has an even older pedigree. But ubiquitous connectivity and social media do the work of amplifying and generalizing the condition. When their use becomes habitual, when we begin to see the world as potential material for social media, then the space to be for ourselves/by ourselves collapses and we find that we are always being for others for our own sake, preoccupied with the presentation of surfaces.

The consequences of this mode of being are good neither for us, nor for others.

Now We Have Clouds

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Salon has an interview up  with David Weinberger, a scholar at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and the author of To Big to Know.  Weinberger believes that the Internet is revolutionizing knowledge by creating the “networked fact”:

“Over the past couple hundred years, we’ve had this idea that knowledge is composed of facts about the world, and together we are engaged in this multigenerational enterprise of gathering facts and posting them, and ultimately we’ll have a complete picture of the world. That view of facts as the irreducible atoms of knowledge has some benefit, but we’re seeing a different type of fact emerge on the Net as well. Traditional facts are still there. Facts are facts. But we’re seeing organizations of all sorts releasing their data, their facts, onto the Web as huge clouds of triples [another word for linked data]. They’re a connection of two ideas through some relationship — that’s why they’re called triples — but not only can they be linked together by computers, they themselves consist of links. Each of the elements of a linked atom is a pointer to some resource that disambiguates it and explains what it is.”

Okay, got that? Underwhelmed? You must not be understanding the import of the shift from “traditional facts” to “triples”. Let’s try this again with a concrete illustration:

“OK, so, if the triple is “Edmonton is in Canada,” ideally each of those should link to some other spot on the Web that explains exactly which Edmonton, because there’s probably more than one, along with which Canada (though there’s probably only one). And “is in” is a very ambiguous statement [Clinton nods], so you would point to some vocabulary that defines it for geography. Each of these little facts is designed not only to be linked up by computers, but it itself consists of links. It’s a very different idea than that facts are bricks that lay a firm foundation. The old metaphor for knowledge was architectural and archaeological: foundations, bricks. Now we have clouds.”

Okay, got it? Now we have clouds! Clouds … they’re here. We have them, now.

I really thought I was missing something until I came across Evgeny Morozov’s review of Weinberger’s book. Morozov is also unimpressed. He reminds us that Weinberger’s claims are not exactly original. Lyotard already made similar claims in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition. I would add that among the easier to digest elements in the work of the late Gilles Deleuze was the idea that knowledge was structured like a rhizome rather than a tree. (It is unclear whether he ever said, “Now we have rhizomes.”)

Moreover, Morozov is enough of a stickler for traditional facts to point out that what we mean by knowledge depends a great deal on our epistemic context. In his view, Weinberger’s thesis falters because he speaks of knowledge and facts as abstractions and fails to distinguish between contexts in which the truthfulness of “knowledge” counts and contexts in which it does not.

Judging from certain comments in the interview, Morozov seems on target when he claims that “Weinberger wants to be the Marshall McLuhan of knowledge management.” Here is Weinberger on knowledge and its medium:

“With the new medium of knowledge — the Internet — knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. So rather than simply trying to cultivate smart people, we also need to be looking above the level of the individual to the network in which he or she is embedded to see where knowledge lives.”

It’s somewhat unfair to ask for too much depth in an interview format, but I’d be hard pressed to unpack anything meaningful out of those sentences. When McLuhan comes off as vague and gnomic you have the sense that you’re not getting something deep; in this case I have the sense that there is not much to get. A little later on Weinberger offers this further reflection:

In 1988, Russell Ackoff, an organizational theorist, proposed a pyramid that has become really standard in many business environments. You have data at the bottom, then information, and then knowledge — and then at the top, wisdom, as if wisdom is the reduced set of knowledge. The idea is in line with our traditional idea of knowledge, which is based on the idea that there’s too much to know, there’s more than can fit into any skull, so we need to come up with strategies to deal with it. And that pyramid is the information age’s elaboration of this. In every step you get quality and value by reducing what was at lower steps, but we’ve had a reductive sense of knowledge for about 2,500 years.

Again, after reading that a time or two, I’m still not sure what the point is. But I do know that Ackoff did not come up with that schema. In his mid-1930s composition, “Choruses from ‘The Rock'”, TS Eliot wrote,

“Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Now that makes sense.

One last point, it is not a reduction that is entailed by the movement from data to information to knowledge and then wisdom. It is an enhancement based on the progressive derivation and application of meaning. This is a very different activity than the gradual reduction of a vast field of data to a more manageable set and it is an activity that cannot be abstracted to some nebulous realm above individuals. It lives concretely in embodied and embedded experience.

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Update: Perhaps the interview format did not suit Mr. Weinberger. In fairness, here is an edited excerpt from the book at The Atlantic that at least has the virtue of making sense: “To Know, But Not Understand.”

Play, Politics, and Worship

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Here is a thought for the day:

“I assert that in all the cities, everyone is unaware that the character of the games played is decisive for the establishment of the laws, since it determines whether or not the established laws will persist.”

This assertion was made by Plato in The Laws (book VII) and it suggests that the political culture of a society is bound up with the nature of its games. More specifically, Plato goes on to observe that the persistence of a society’s laws is bound up with the persistence of its games:

“Where this is arranged, and provided that the same persons always play at the same things, with the same things, and in the same way, and have their spirits gladdened by the same toys, there the serious customs are also allowed to remain undisturbed; but where the games change, and are always infested with innovation and other sorts of transformations … there is no greater ruin than this that can come to a city.”

We typically remember that Plato treated music with a great deal of seriousness in The Republic, we less often hear of the seriousness with which he treated sports and games, but there it is (courtesy of James Schall from whose essay, “The Seriousness of Sports,” these quotations are drawn).

There’s a good deal to think about here.

It is not insignificant that with regards to the two great civilizations of the classical period, Greece and Rome, we readily think of games which seem to characterize their societies: the Olympics and the gladiatorial games respectively. In Constantinople, that enduring but infrequently remembered enclave of classical civilization, the Blues and the Greens which functioned as part gangs and part political associations not infrequently contributing to riots and coups began and were sustained as fans of popular charioteering teams. More recently, in Egypt, one not insignificant block of participants in the current political turmoil are bound together primarily by their love of soccer.

On a related note, perhaps at the root of soccer’s inability to take in American culture there is more than a hint about the national character (insofar as we may legitimately speak of one).

Moreover, what might it mean that for a time baseball could legitimately be called America’s sport? And what, in turn, might it mean that while baseball remains popular, it’s place in American culture has been challenged if not replaced by basketball and football? Both of these, of course, have been around for some time and it could be argued that they too are distinctly American. So perhaps we may create a political taxonomy of sorts based on the three dominate sports of American society: baseball, football, and basketball. I wonder, has anyone studied whether a preference for one of these sports is a reliable predictor of political inclinations?

Two titles come to mind in connection with the theme of play and culture. The earlier one is historian John Huzinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture, the first Dutch edition of which appeared in 1938. Huzinga aimed at demonstrating the elements of play that variously manifest themselves in culture. The other is a more recent work,  Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, which similarly stresses the links between play and worship.

The link between religion and sports is frequently noted and perhaps there is more to it than we usually imagine, more than the surface similarities between the worship of the religious and the devotion of the fan.

In The Laws, Plato puts the following claim in the mouth of the Athenian:

“I assert that what is serious should be treated seriously, and what is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of a complete, blessed seriousness, but that what is human … has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing the noblest possible games, and thinking about them …”

This is all well and good, but it seems to describe less and less the reality of sports in America. Perhaps because sport has become an end to something other than itself. Schall also cites the following from Aristotle:

“Men have been known to make amusement an end in itself … for there is indeed a resemblance; the end is not pursued for the sake of anything that may accrue thereafter but always for its own sake.”

Sports at their best, Schall notes, approach a form of contemplation:

“Here, in a way, we near what is best in ourselves, for we are spectators not for any selfish reason, not for anything we might get out of the game, money or exercise or glory, but just because the game is there and we lose ourselves in its playing, either as players or spectators. This not only should remind us that what is higher than we are, what is ultimately serious, is itself fascinating and joyful.”

It is these realizations that explain our collective fury and anger when sports is tainted with betting scandals or steroid controversies and even haggling over the distribution of dollars in the billions. In each case, the happy myth of sport played and watched for its own sake as a kind of end in itself channeling even higher realities is shattered. It is not that men and women have disappointed us –although this also is true — it is rather that the vessel of a certain secular grace has been broken and we are all the poorer for it.