The continued relevance of physical space in the postmodern global village

'Round about now, my sister is driving along the coast of Oregon or maybe Northern California with her new boyfriend, which is not what she is supposed to be doing. What she is supposed to be doing is recuperating from having just run the London Marathon. You already know why she's not in London. One of the many disruptions of the big ash cloud of 2010.

(As a side note: Sort of strange how the world media covered the event. At first it was all, "huh, this is kind of weird." Then increasingly it became, "MONEY IS BEING LOST HERE. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING!" And then, "Fucking pussies who won't go up in the fucking air with their fucking big jets. Fucking losers.")

Long time ago, Marshall McLuhan observed that the world was becoming a "Global Village." As is the case with pretty much everything that McLuhan ever wrote, the idea is both useful and also capable of leading us completely astray. To be sure, the modern media have allowed us to connect more easily with people living vast distances from us, and this has caused profound changes in how we interact with both those distant others and the not-so-distant others who share our physical space. It has changed how we think of ourselves, how we construct our social identities. And it has allowed for the near-instant transmission of some kinds of information, a feature of modern life that in turn has been essential to the rise of global markets.

But we can, and we do, take it too far. What media can't do is that they cannot transfer the large packets of information that we call human bodies. And since it is these packets that, in the end, most concern us--although we sometimes manage to forget, or ignore that--the effect of all these transmissions of electronic bytes is not exactly what we imagine it to be. Other things that cannot be sent over fiber optic cables--steaks, tulips, onions, magazines, automobiles, t-shirts, sneakers, living room sofas, video cameras, iphones. The modern world has actually not made distance disappear, or even made it irrelevant. It's just made our experience of it different. It's always good to have these sort of disruptive environmental events take place at unpredictable times to help us see that the new world we've been so busy building for the past 50 years has actually not managed to overcome certain fundamental realities of human existence. You can buy your plane ticket and reserve your hotel room and surf to find the best place to eat in Porto but if the pilots strike, or an earthquake tears up the runway, you're not going anywhere, buddy.

The continued relevance of space--and of embodied experiences--is why most people, if they have the choice, still opt to live in places like Manhattan and Paris and Prague instead of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Estevan, Saskatchewan. Those latter spots are wired: you could order up some genuine Chicago-style deep dish and get it delivered to your door in a day or two if you really wanted. But somehow it just wouldn't be the same.

Modern media discourse ignores this obvious point because it needs to sell us on the bogus notion that the networked world is making the world "flatter," making every place the same, thus making opportunities increasingly equal for all. The battle against the takeover of our lives by people in places far away from us requires that we periodically remind ourselves of what a crock of shit this has always been, and remains.

Yeah it's not so funny when it's happens to you, huh?

This is rich. Blogger Jamelle Bouie has called out Chris Hedges for being self-righteous. To appreciate the (polite word) irony of this, you need to know that besides writing on his own blog, Bouie also contributes to a group project called the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Go read the blog. Now, consider that someone who writes for that thing has the balls to accuse anyone else of sanctimony.

The strange circumlocutions our politics force upon us

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow: and look, they really drink Chardonnay, too

Nobody is sticking up for Roman Polanski anymore. At least, I haven't read anything written on his behalf for the past week or so, and once Conor Friedersdorf has decided to opine on a subject, I think that we can all assume that conventional wisdom has definitively made its stand on the matter.

Since a cultural scandal has once again passed me by, then, allowing me no chance to demonstrate my populist bona fides by expressing my outrage at the outrage (I was properly outraged, though, let me assure you), I've decided to engage in my little academic strategy of meta-commentary: that is, commenting on the controversy itself.

Michael Kinsley has famously described a gaffe as when a politician accidently tells the truth. Seems to me that we've got to have a similar sort of term for when a group, or some subset thereof, in a moment of communal indiscretion, reveals that what a generous soul would have taken to be an unfair characterization or stereotype is pretty close to the actual case. An example here would be when a few tea-baggers out on the Washington Mall hold up cartoons of Barack Obama as a monkey, or crazy-ass anti-abortionists assassinate a doctor, or when employees of ACORN provide tax guidance to apparent prostitutes and their apparent pimps.

In the case of Polanski, the defenders played into a common prejudice regarding the bicoastal "cultural elite" (at least, it's common out here in flyover country): that they are over-educated moral idiots who have convinced themselves that artistic talent allows one to dispense with any obligation to treat other human beings with decency or respect. Which is, in fact, often true. Our clue here is, no one who lives in Hollywood seems all that surprised that many of the people there are assholes and hypocrites who apparently believe pedophilia is an outrage when practiced by some loser unknown Catholic priest but Not Such A Big Deal if you've done some good work on edgy historical mysteries and horror films (and been forced to live in the 14th arrondissement for the past 25 years, for God's sake, and were not even allowed to come pick up your Oscar trophy!)

The more interesting issue now is a political one. Because of the tendency of so many in Hollywood to adopt fashionable liberal political stances (probably because they associate this with being "artistic"), the question is whether their obtusteness could infect the whole left side of the spectrum among general public opinion. And this is why the most angry and eloquent screeds against Polanski and his cultured defenders are coming from people like Katha Pollit, Gene Robinson, and Kate Harding in the liberal webzine Salon. They're well aware of the long-term damage this could do. I doubt that Limbaugh and Beck are really paying much attention right now, knowing that they can feast on this little nugget (Woody Allen sticking up for a child rapist, Haw!) for the next ten years or so. They can trot it out every time they want to rail against fancy-pants east coast liberals and their cultural nihilism.

The rough equivalent would be the sort of damage control that comes up from the conservative commentariat every time Sarah Palin says something stupid or when some cracker Republican congressman gets caught making a racist joke. Except, of course, that never happens: the folks in places like The National Review and The Weekly Standard mostly just plough on through. Nothing embarrasses them, not even the birthers. This is because conservative intellectuals (and maybe, also, Hollywood film directors) realize something that liberal journalists like Robinson and Harding haven't figured out yet: there are no longer consensus, middle-of-the-road, default positions in this country about issues of common decency and public decorum. We're all just defending the tribe now.