I don't really have much of an opinion about Microsort technology except to say that it seems like a pretty fucking stupid idea to me, and also totally predictable. If you had asked me 10 years ago whether I would have wanted a little baby boy or a little girl I would have gone with the former, almost certainly: carry on the family name, teaching the little feller how to do a cross-over dribble, etc. I am today the father of two girls, and I can't imagine them being anything other than their completely wonderful, occasionally infuriating, selves. (Listen: yuppies. Life happens. It's better that way.)
It's this quote from Matthew Yglesias's blog, where he compares Microsort to "the crude and taboo method of selective abortion," that got to me, though.
What a weaselly way of putting things. Really Mr. Yglesias. Using ultrasound to test the sex of a baby, and then deciding to abort if the fetus is a female, a decision which, I can pretty much guarantee, is not the mother's alone (and probably not even primarily) in most of the societies where it is carried out: you find that practice to be crude? Sounds like the only problem we have here is an aesthetic one. As for "taboo," it suggests that our discomfort is merely a product of our social environment, and neatly avoids describing the thing with its proper adjective. Next time try something a little more robust: like, the "evil," or "repugnant," or "morally abhorrent" method of selective abortion.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Ronald Reagan and the wages of stupidity
The idea for this blog post arose as I was listening to Cokie Roberts comment on Sarah Palin's upcoming book tour (transcript here: the Palin comments are at the end of the interview). Roberts notes that lots of Republicans--all the sane ones, I guess--are pretty dubious about Palin, and that David Brooks even went so far as to call her a joke, which is about as polite a way of putting the matter as I can think of, off the top of my head. But then she adds a quote from Newt Gingrich: that lots of people thought that Ronald Reagan was a joke too, at first.
Which got me to thinkin': one of the things that a lot of liberals probably won't admit to anyone anymore, not even to themselves, was just how much of a joke they thought Reagan was. All my professors at Harvard in the mid-80s did, and all my clever classmates at Harvard did, and because I was not ever brave enough to challenge that strong of a consensus I did, too. We thought he was a scary joke, to be sure: stupid, but also stupid enough to start a nuclear war. The other thing to point out is that, of course, we were correct--in this instance at least. The man was an idiot, and it wasn't just liberals and Democrats who knew it. Republicans knew it, too, but for them was a useful idiot. He was genial, and therefore popular with the people, and therefore able to sell the policies and ideas of people much smarter than him. Also, as stupid as was, he was right about the weakness of the Soviet-bloc states, and most of the smart guys, who had spent their careers in the Cold War, assuming that it would continue for a long, long while, just didn't see the Fall of Communism coming. So whether out of some sort of idiot-savant prescience or just pure dumb luck, he came out looking very good on that one question, and it turns out that it was a very big question.
The shear amount of damage that Reagan did to the United States and the rest of the world is so vast that it is hard to pinpoint any single, worst example of his influence, but in the long run this may be this: he made being stupid an acceptable quality for President of the United States, provided that the candidate is malleable and personally agreeable. George Bush Jr. should never have gotten anywhere near the levers of power. But Reagan allowed Republicans--and enough of the general public--to consider the possibility that, with a competent enough staff, the intelligence of the Commander in Chief really wasn't all that important. America was so powerful, economically and militarily, that it could muddle through.
I am certainly not the person who is going to make the argument that IQ has much if anything to do with excellence in politics. George Bush is by some accounts a quite intelligent man: by conventional measures. He's just not very wise. He lacked the judgment that was so desperately needed after that 9/11 attacks, and this country and its citizens have paid a very high price for that. But no one talks about Bush much now. Too embarrassing, maybe. They talk about Reagan.
Clearly, most of the media are afraid of criticizing Palin because they are worried about playing into her narrative of the snarky East Coast elites. But they forget one thing. The country is not in the position it was in 1985, and it can't afford someone like Ronald Reagan again. That Sarah Palin reminds anybody of the 40th President of the United States should not be an argument for her political relevance, but an argument against it. It's really time that someone had the balls to pull the Teflon off that guy.
Which got me to thinkin': one of the things that a lot of liberals probably won't admit to anyone anymore, not even to themselves, was just how much of a joke they thought Reagan was. All my professors at Harvard in the mid-80s did, and all my clever classmates at Harvard did, and because I was not ever brave enough to challenge that strong of a consensus I did, too. We thought he was a scary joke, to be sure: stupid, but also stupid enough to start a nuclear war. The other thing to point out is that, of course, we were correct--in this instance at least. The man was an idiot, and it wasn't just liberals and Democrats who knew it. Republicans knew it, too, but for them was a useful idiot. He was genial, and therefore popular with the people, and therefore able to sell the policies and ideas of people much smarter than him. Also, as stupid as was, he was right about the weakness of the Soviet-bloc states, and most of the smart guys, who had spent their careers in the Cold War, assuming that it would continue for a long, long while, just didn't see the Fall of Communism coming. So whether out of some sort of idiot-savant prescience or just pure dumb luck, he came out looking very good on that one question, and it turns out that it was a very big question.
The shear amount of damage that Reagan did to the United States and the rest of the world is so vast that it is hard to pinpoint any single, worst example of his influence, but in the long run this may be this: he made being stupid an acceptable quality for President of the United States, provided that the candidate is malleable and personally agreeable. George Bush Jr. should never have gotten anywhere near the levers of power. But Reagan allowed Republicans--and enough of the general public--to consider the possibility that, with a competent enough staff, the intelligence of the Commander in Chief really wasn't all that important. America was so powerful, economically and militarily, that it could muddle through.
I am certainly not the person who is going to make the argument that IQ has much if anything to do with excellence in politics. George Bush is by some accounts a quite intelligent man: by conventional measures. He's just not very wise. He lacked the judgment that was so desperately needed after that 9/11 attacks, and this country and its citizens have paid a very high price for that. But no one talks about Bush much now. Too embarrassing, maybe. They talk about Reagan.
Clearly, most of the media are afraid of criticizing Palin because they are worried about playing into her narrative of the snarky East Coast elites. But they forget one thing. The country is not in the position it was in 1985, and it can't afford someone like Ronald Reagan again. That Sarah Palin reminds anybody of the 40th President of the United States should not be an argument for her political relevance, but an argument against it. It's really time that someone had the balls to pull the Teflon off that guy.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Books as technology
We'll start today's lecture off with card catalogues. At some point in the past fifteen years, electronic catalogues more or less replaced card catalogues. I don't think my university library even has a card catalogue anymore. If it does, they've hidden it pretty well.
So, why did card catalogues disappear? I doubt anyone knows for sure, and since the modern study of communication is more or less designed to move us away from interesting questions, it is unlikely that some bright grad student will be giving us a definitive answer any time soon. But I would bet the given reasons went something like this: electronic catalogues were a) cheaper, in the end; b) easier to use; c) better at doing what they were made for (ie., searching for printed or other types of materials).
I can't speak to the first point, but on the other two, I would say this. If you simply have the title of a book, and want to get a call number, the electronic catalogue will be easier than the card catalogue. But if you have a kind of an idea of what the name of the author is, or the subject area for your study, the card catalogue is probably going to work better for you. For one thing, it's more forgiving. Some of the more sophisticated search engines may now make allowances for misspellings. The University of Tulsa's does not. So if I switch a single letter around when looking for Habermas's Structural transformation of the public sphere, it's going to come up empty, whereas I would certainly find that book were I to go to the card catalogue and search under "Habermas." And I'd probably find it fairly quickly (maybe 30 seconds).
The other thing that the card catalogue gives you that the electronic one doesn't is a serendipity built right into the technology. I look up "Structural transformation," but while I'm flipping through the cards I find lots of other books with similar titles or on similar subject matter or by the same author. Back in the day, I would go to the card catalogue to look for one title and walk away it with about four or five different call numbers: one of these other books often ended up being more useful than my original source. Electronic catalogues can do this too, but not in the natural way that the card catalogue does. Essentially, they're built for very specific searches. To cast the kind of wide net that I'm talking about here, with any degree of confidence, you need a specialized set of skills (a basic understanding of search strategies, for example), that you didn't need with the card catalogue.
The card catalogue is superior to the electronic catalogue for some sorts of searches, inferior for others. What this means, probably, is that electronic catalogues produce a different kind of scholarship than a card catalogue, certainly for non-specialists (like students).
Which gets us to books. I hear a great deal about the fact that ebooks are superior to paper books. For example, the claim is that ebooks allow for easy searching of terms. Also, the ebook allows you to keep multiple books on a single device. You get bored of one you can switch to another. Can't do that with a book.
Let's look at the first claim. What is the English translation of the French word "décapotable"? You're going to find the answer much more quickly in any basic French-English dictionary than you would through an electronic source (if that source even has the term: babel fish does, my electronic dictionary doesn't. And if it doesn't, you can't try figuring it out through words that are related to it, in the way that a dictionary would let you do. The thing just gives you a "?")
Okay, second experiment. You have in one hand the book Violence and the Sacred by René Girard. In the other you have a copy of the same book on Kindle (this is just a thought experiment. Kindle does not have that book. Nor, are we likely to see these kinds of scholarly works on Kindle any time soon. And it has nothing to do with the newness of the technology. Kindle will never have that book. For reasons that we will shortly see.) You remember that at some point Girard compares animal violence to human violence, suggesting that animals have an automatic barrier (or words to that effect) which keeps violence from getting out of hand. Humans have no such barrier (which is why, says Girard, we need sacrificial rituals). Where's the passage?
With the book, you look at the back, see "animals" in the index. Under "animals" there is a phrase "instinctive limits of, toward violence." Two different page numbers: the first is not what you are looking for, the second is. Took you about, again, half a minute to do this.
Now, how would you go about doing this on the Kindle? Search for "animals"? That will give you probably several hundred hits. You should get to the passage you are looking for in about half an hour. What about "barriers to violence?" or just "barriers?" Oh, I'm sorry, Girard doesn't actually use that term: his is "breaking mechanism." So "barriers" isn't going to give you the passage that you need, ever.
Like card catalogues, books are better search technologies than their electronic counterparts for some kinds of searches, and for some sorts of people. Unlike the card catalogue, the book does reward a certain level of knowledge and expertise. In the Girard example, someone unfamiliar with the book (or for that matter, with how indexes work) would probably have to read through the whole damned thing to find the passage. Moreover, lots of books that people read don't require this kind of search. Specifically, most fiction doesn't, unless you're a university English teacher. It is not a coincidence, I think, that almost all of the discussion around Kindle right now, both pro and con, uses fiction as a reference. Kindle, or something like it, may mean the end of paperback novels. (Eventually. For at least about the next 50 years, there will probably be a market for people like me, who just like to turn pages, and look at pretty covers, and don't need to take seventeen different stories with them on an airplane.) But unless the technology changes significantly, I don't see the ebook replacing scholarly books on paper. The codex is a more effective method of information storage and retrieval than Jeff Bezos realizes.
So, why did card catalogues disappear? I doubt anyone knows for sure, and since the modern study of communication is more or less designed to move us away from interesting questions, it is unlikely that some bright grad student will be giving us a definitive answer any time soon. But I would bet the given reasons went something like this: electronic catalogues were a) cheaper, in the end; b) easier to use; c) better at doing what they were made for (ie., searching for printed or other types of materials).
I can't speak to the first point, but on the other two, I would say this. If you simply have the title of a book, and want to get a call number, the electronic catalogue will be easier than the card catalogue. But if you have a kind of an idea of what the name of the author is, or the subject area for your study, the card catalogue is probably going to work better for you. For one thing, it's more forgiving. Some of the more sophisticated search engines may now make allowances for misspellings. The University of Tulsa's does not. So if I switch a single letter around when looking for Habermas's Structural transformation of the public sphere, it's going to come up empty, whereas I would certainly find that book were I to go to the card catalogue and search under "Habermas." And I'd probably find it fairly quickly (maybe 30 seconds).
The other thing that the card catalogue gives you that the electronic one doesn't is a serendipity built right into the technology. I look up "Structural transformation," but while I'm flipping through the cards I find lots of other books with similar titles or on similar subject matter or by the same author. Back in the day, I would go to the card catalogue to look for one title and walk away it with about four or five different call numbers: one of these other books often ended up being more useful than my original source. Electronic catalogues can do this too, but not in the natural way that the card catalogue does. Essentially, they're built for very specific searches. To cast the kind of wide net that I'm talking about here, with any degree of confidence, you need a specialized set of skills (a basic understanding of search strategies, for example), that you didn't need with the card catalogue.
The card catalogue is superior to the electronic catalogue for some sorts of searches, inferior for others. What this means, probably, is that electronic catalogues produce a different kind of scholarship than a card catalogue, certainly for non-specialists (like students).
Which gets us to books. I hear a great deal about the fact that ebooks are superior to paper books. For example, the claim is that ebooks allow for easy searching of terms. Also, the ebook allows you to keep multiple books on a single device. You get bored of one you can switch to another. Can't do that with a book.
Let's look at the first claim. What is the English translation of the French word "décapotable"? You're going to find the answer much more quickly in any basic French-English dictionary than you would through an electronic source (if that source even has the term: babel fish does, my electronic dictionary doesn't. And if it doesn't, you can't try figuring it out through words that are related to it, in the way that a dictionary would let you do. The thing just gives you a "?")
Okay, second experiment. You have in one hand the book Violence and the Sacred by René Girard. In the other you have a copy of the same book on Kindle (this is just a thought experiment. Kindle does not have that book. Nor, are we likely to see these kinds of scholarly works on Kindle any time soon. And it has nothing to do with the newness of the technology. Kindle will never have that book. For reasons that we will shortly see.) You remember that at some point Girard compares animal violence to human violence, suggesting that animals have an automatic barrier (or words to that effect) which keeps violence from getting out of hand. Humans have no such barrier (which is why, says Girard, we need sacrificial rituals). Where's the passage?
With the book, you look at the back, see "animals" in the index. Under "animals" there is a phrase "instinctive limits of, toward violence." Two different page numbers: the first is not what you are looking for, the second is. Took you about, again, half a minute to do this.
Now, how would you go about doing this on the Kindle? Search for "animals"? That will give you probably several hundred hits. You should get to the passage you are looking for in about half an hour. What about "barriers to violence?" or just "barriers?" Oh, I'm sorry, Girard doesn't actually use that term: his is "breaking mechanism." So "barriers" isn't going to give you the passage that you need, ever.
Like card catalogues, books are better search technologies than their electronic counterparts for some kinds of searches, and for some sorts of people. Unlike the card catalogue, the book does reward a certain level of knowledge and expertise. In the Girard example, someone unfamiliar with the book (or for that matter, with how indexes work) would probably have to read through the whole damned thing to find the passage. Moreover, lots of books that people read don't require this kind of search. Specifically, most fiction doesn't, unless you're a university English teacher. It is not a coincidence, I think, that almost all of the discussion around Kindle right now, both pro and con, uses fiction as a reference. Kindle, or something like it, may mean the end of paperback novels. (Eventually. For at least about the next 50 years, there will probably be a market for people like me, who just like to turn pages, and look at pretty covers, and don't need to take seventeen different stories with them on an airplane.) But unless the technology changes significantly, I don't see the ebook replacing scholarly books on paper. The codex is a more effective method of information storage and retrieval than Jeff Bezos realizes.
Friday, November 6, 2009
The infantilization of modern political life
In keeping with my ongoing policy of commenting upon Internet events that have occurred eons ago (in New Media time), I’m going to take apart a conversation that James Poulos, of the blog Postmodern Conservative, had with Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network lo’ these several months ago on Bloggingheads.tv. The discussion that I’m interested in happens near the end of the broadcast, when Poulos starts to complain that modern political discourse often focuses too much on our emotional, subjective responses to policy matters (the war in Afghanistan, in this case), and not enough on attempts to wrestle with what is actually going on. At that point, Hurlburt interrupts Poulos and claims that it was ever thus, that this is just how human beings reason. Says some stuff about the pre-frontal cortex and so forth and then: “I would disagree with the idea that we were somehow, colder, better, more rational actors in the past.”
It’s here that Poulos loses the argument, because rather than saying, “well, that’s not quite what I was arguing,” he takes up Hurlburt’s point and then tries to refute it. Goes off about deliberative rationality and all that stuff and ends up sounding a little like Roderick Hart or Jürgen Habermas, wagging his finger at the rest of us for not performing our democratic duties sufficiently well. You can tell that his heart’s not really in it though, possibly because he knows that Hurlburt’s got it all over him if it comes down to the historical facts. Not only is the decline of the rational public sphere a pretty worn argument by now, it’s just not true. It’s hard to look at any point in modern history and argue that political discussion was somehow dominated by cool, rational discussion. Didn’t happen in the nineteenth century. Didn’t happen in the eighteenth century, sure as hell didn’t happen in the seventeenth century.
The thing is, Poulos actually had a much more interesting argument, but he let Hurlburt sidetrack him into a debate that she could win and he couldn’t. That has to do with his initial point about subjective responses to policy (and to polling questions about that policy). This other argument, which does not refer to the tired distinction between emotionality and rationality, can be traced back at least as far as Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man. Sennett’s point, which is also Poulos’s at the beginning, I think, is that modern politics has become increasingly less focused on what politics was once centrally about--ie., the distribution of power and resources--and more and more about subjective feelings about policy, political figures, public events. What is Sarah Palin going to do for the white working class? Who cares? How does it make them feel? So we (and by "we," I mean both supporters and opponents) spend a lot of time talking about her daughters, and her pregnancy, and her son, and Levi, and the shopping trips, and almost no time on her actual performance as Alaska's governor.
I think that Poulos was on much stronger ground with this first point, and I would bet that part of the reason that Hurlburt moved him away from it was that it made her uncomfortable. After all, Palin is not the only recent political figure for whom symbolism is arguably more important than policy. As an Obama supporter from the very beginning, I have to say that one of the most noticeable features of his Presidency so far has been the way he allows liberals to feel good about ourselves--good about the country, good about the world. But now that he’s actually taking steps to govern, this imaginary mirror that he provides us no longer works so well, and many liberals are starting to abandon him.
In the end, it’s all tied up with what I would argue is the infantilization of modern political life: a desire for the world to look how we want it to look rather than how it is, and an intense focus on matters relating to self, on what I want. It's an intensely inward-looking, egotistical pathology, especially noticeable on the right, but certainly not limited to that side of the spectrum. It has infected all of us, and it is everywhere in the public culture.
It’s here that Poulos loses the argument, because rather than saying, “well, that’s not quite what I was arguing,” he takes up Hurlburt’s point and then tries to refute it. Goes off about deliberative rationality and all that stuff and ends up sounding a little like Roderick Hart or Jürgen Habermas, wagging his finger at the rest of us for not performing our democratic duties sufficiently well. You can tell that his heart’s not really in it though, possibly because he knows that Hurlburt’s got it all over him if it comes down to the historical facts. Not only is the decline of the rational public sphere a pretty worn argument by now, it’s just not true. It’s hard to look at any point in modern history and argue that political discussion was somehow dominated by cool, rational discussion. Didn’t happen in the nineteenth century. Didn’t happen in the eighteenth century, sure as hell didn’t happen in the seventeenth century.
The thing is, Poulos actually had a much more interesting argument, but he let Hurlburt sidetrack him into a debate that she could win and he couldn’t. That has to do with his initial point about subjective responses to policy (and to polling questions about that policy). This other argument, which does not refer to the tired distinction between emotionality and rationality, can be traced back at least as far as Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man. Sennett’s point, which is also Poulos’s at the beginning, I think, is that modern politics has become increasingly less focused on what politics was once centrally about--ie., the distribution of power and resources--and more and more about subjective feelings about policy, political figures, public events. What is Sarah Palin going to do for the white working class? Who cares? How does it make them feel? So we (and by "we," I mean both supporters and opponents) spend a lot of time talking about her daughters, and her pregnancy, and her son, and Levi, and the shopping trips, and almost no time on her actual performance as Alaska's governor.
I think that Poulos was on much stronger ground with this first point, and I would bet that part of the reason that Hurlburt moved him away from it was that it made her uncomfortable. After all, Palin is not the only recent political figure for whom symbolism is arguably more important than policy. As an Obama supporter from the very beginning, I have to say that one of the most noticeable features of his Presidency so far has been the way he allows liberals to feel good about ourselves--good about the country, good about the world. But now that he’s actually taking steps to govern, this imaginary mirror that he provides us no longer works so well, and many liberals are starting to abandon him.
In the end, it’s all tied up with what I would argue is the infantilization of modern political life: a desire for the world to look how we want it to look rather than how it is, and an intense focus on matters relating to self, on what I want. It's an intensely inward-looking, egotistical pathology, especially noticeable on the right, but certainly not limited to that side of the spectrum. It has infected all of us, and it is everywhere in the public culture.
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