Interrogating the Internet, Part Four (and Conclusion): Networking

Let's get all the chips on the table.  Networking is the purpose of this series.  Or, more accurately, the distinction between networking and communication.  You see, in the early days of the web I feel like there was a rampant philosophical debate about the value of this new technology.  What would dominate the web, the question went, information or communication?  In one camp firmly sat Google and Yahoo, the early bastions of information search.  In the other camp sat AOL and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft (with MSN and Hotmail leading the charge), services that connected people through instant messaging and email.

In the years that have followed it has become clear that the Internet had room - perhaps infinite room - for both communication and information, along with the added and not-totally-unexpected third wheel of commerce.  In my last few posts, I've talked - in broad and inexpert strokes - about commerce and information.  Because we are increasingly natives of the digital landscape, I felt it was worthwhile to point out the obvious, to challenge us to remember aspects of the Internet that we now take for granted or ignore.  For example, information on the web is rarely unbiased, even when it strives to be, and is sometimes wildly inaccurate.  At the very least, search engines do little or nothing to filter results for reliability or accuracy, rather choosing to filter based on more arcane algorithmic criteria like "relevance" as determined by computational linguistics or, more simply, the criteria of the dollar.

That money underpins everything on the Internet, even free networking services like Facebook or Twitter, is another important reminder.  Increasingly we feel entitled, I suspect, to the long range (in time and space) contact that social networking has made possible.  That the services are "free" only increases our sense of entitlement.  But they are not free, no less than a phone, a radio, or a television is.  That does not, in itself, corrupt said services any less than charging for a book corrupts the book, but corruption is not the point.  The point is that we forget too easily that Facebook is not just a website, but a company trying to make a profit.  For day-to-day use, that may not impact us much, but it has implications for a philosophical discussion of the platform.

Before we venture too far down that road, however, let's return to communication and networking.  What do I mean by each of those words, and why have I gone to pains to distinguish between them?  I'll start with networking, since it's the easier of the two to capture.

By "networking," I mean making connections.  When two people network, they try to assess each other's position, and contribute resources - intellectual, physical, or otherwise - to each other in an effort to be of mutual use in the effort to meet emotional, psychological, physical, or professional needs.  Networking is, in short, a kind of poking at each other and shoving stuff (whether tangible or intangible) in each other's direction.  Building a network, then, is about creating a vast web of people to whom one can go for such assistance, and from whom one expects requests of a similar nature.

The beauty of the Internet - as opposed to previous incarnations of the same concept, all the way down to bartering at the local swap meet - is that it makes the whole thing both asynchronous and distributed.  Asynchrony is important because the exchange between one node on a network and another need not be simultaneous, so I might borrow emotional support from a friend or borrow a potentially useful business contact from a mentor without needing to engage in immediate payback.  Granted, this asynchrony of networked exchange is not unique to the Internet, as the phrase "I owe you one" indicates, but it is particularly strong on the web because no face-to-face meeting is even necessary.  "I owe you one" is built into the structure, rather than something that has to be said after an arrangement has been reached.

That networks are distributed on the Internet is by far the more revolutionary and vital of its differences with traditional networks.  What I mean by "distributed" is simply this: it is not important that the person who "owes you one" be the person who pays you (metaphorically) back.  In a sufficiently advanced network redundancies abound.  "You and Connor have 82 friends in common."  If you, then, help out Connor by connecting him with a potential employer, it is not fully necessary, in a world where networks are distributed, asynchronous, and - a third important piece that warrants mention, if not discussion - instantaneous, for Connor to provide a similar service to you.  It is taken as granted that he might, and maybe even will try to do so, but when you have needs that become paramount, you will not seek Connor on the basis of him owing you, but rather only if he is the member of your network most able to help you.

As a result, in a distributed network, there is ample commerce, but it is not always direct.  A cynic would point out that, in the long history of mankind (and especially in the last 300 years), almost every human interaction can be characterized according to political economy.  The debits and credits of that political economy are what made up the networks of the past.  That cynic, then, in order to understand the Internet and the kind of networking that the web has created, would have to decentralize the political economy, shifting it away from the exchange of capital (be it fiscal, emotional, spiritual, or whatever) from one person to another and towards a new model where exchange remains individualized, but the reserves, so to speak, are more communal.

Despite that shift from individual to community, however, the Internet is far from socialist or communist.  It is innately capitalist, innately concerned with individualism and personal gain.  Modern networking is in some sense the epitome of the capitalistic notion of the "invisible hand," where each person looking out for himself allows things to work out for the good of everyone, where the rising tide does, indeed, lift all boats.

Wither communication, in that picture?  Before I can answer that, I need to distinguish communication from networking.  Communication, as I imagine it, is an actual exchange of ideas, an effort not merely to assess the material or emotional needs of oneself and one's interlocutor, but to actually understand the spirit and mind of that person.  Communication is what happens when neither party in a conversation is looking out for his own advancement or the advancement of the other, but rather the shared effort of the two people is dialogue: a talking, thinking, and reasoning through difficult questions about meaning, purpose, and truth.  A modern cynic will say that such a conversation is not possible, because we're all too myopic and too self-absorbed to achieve the level of objectivity necessary for such a conversation to occur.  Moreover, said modernist (or, really, post-modernist) will argue that never in history have such conversation occurred; they have only seemed to do so because of the narrowness of the perspectives of those culturally hegemonic (or, at least, culturally isolated) societies in which conversations are said to have happened.

I suppose, on some level, the capacity for real empathy and, thereby, true dialogue is an article of faith.  Once convinced that such a thing does not exist, it is impossible to be persuaded otherwise, because the opinion itself precludes any evidence to the contrary.  Nevertheless, I believe firmly that such communication can and does happen.  Indeed, while this blog is hardly dialogic, in that I write all of these posts by myself, at its heart is the belief in ideas and communication, despite my doubts that such is possible over the Internet.

Which leads me to the end point of this series of posts.  Twitter and Facebook are two of the most successful and revolutionary services on the Internet.  We might also lump in email, skype, Linkedin, or any of a number of other networking services.  Regardless, however, we will be talking about networking.  It is undoubtedly the case that there is no online service which actively promotes communication in the sense I've talked about it above.  My question is, is there any service that does not, actually, actively prevent communication, in favor of networking?  What's more, is it possibly the case that some networking services begin to trick us into believing that we are communicating when we are actually networking?

Those are questions to which I do not have answers, even if I pose them rhetorically (as if I do have answers).  Regardless, it is clear to me that communication - or, we might also say, learning (a connection that might require a whole post to itself) - have been largely ignored, harried, or even battled against by the political economy of the last 300 or so years.  That dialogue has held on - if only in a few places - is a testament to how important it is to actual human progress.  That it has not yet, to my knowledge, broken through in the digital world is a testament to how powerful the myopic impulse for networking (we might as well say, for personal gain) is.

I leave with an analogy.  Networking is not merely with people, but with ideas.  Increasingly, we are concerned with what ideas link to other ideas.  While there is evidence that learning happens largely through making connections, and that building networks of thoughts and definitions and concepts is an important part of thinking critically, I wonder when we synthesize.  Building a network - of people or ideas - does not seem innately good or bad, any less than a blueprint or a scaffold for a building is innately functional.  Rather, the question is what do we do with that network.  If we merely connect ideas (or people) to each other, but never bore into them, try to discern their meaning and import, try to improve ourselves and our world, what good is that network?  It is as if we have made a blueprint for a building but have never actually built it, instead going from room to imaginary room, thinking about how we might decorate them, instead of how we might live in them.

What It Is, What It Isn't, What It Does, What It Doesn't: Interrogating the Internet, Part One

What, really, is the Internet all about?

That's probably not a great question, since, hey, we all use the Internet all the time for all kinds of things.  Part of the point is that it's not really about anything, it's just there.  The digital world is a part of our lives in much the way that eating, or, if it's not quite at that level, making insurance payments is.

Looking at the most visited - according this list to Quantcast.com - there are a few focal points of our web-lives.  There are three primary categories that jump out to me:

1) Information
2) Networking
3) Shopping

If human experience is richer than these three things, it's not reflected in our Internet usage.  Almost every top-50 website fits into one or more of these three categories.*  I could go through the entire list, but I think each of those categories has a site or two that capture the essence.  You can probably guess what those sites are, but I'll go ahead and tell you anyway.

* The exceptions are interesting (all rankings at time of writing, by the way).  A part of me thinks that microsoft.com at 11 and adobe.com at 22 are none-of-the-above, though information kind of works.  Microsoft's presence on the list owes to Windows, of course, and Adobe's to Flash.  GoDaddy.com checks in at 31, despite being a kind of meta-website.  In some sense it fits under networking, in some sense shopping, but really it's just a web-hosting site.  It's place this high - way above any other hosting service, owes to their aggressive Danica Patrick advertising campaign.  Monster.com is kind of reverse shopping, at 34.  Pandora rates 36th, the first website explicitly designed around artistic purposes, even if it also has a financial goal as well.  There are a few others further down, but you get the idea.

The top information site (and top overall site) is, of course, Google.  Quantcast estimates approximately 150 million users per day.  Google, however, as a search engine, is not an information provider so much as, well, a search engine.  The other end of the information spectrum is the 7th most visited site on the Internet, Wikipedia.  At over 70 million daily users, Wikipedia may be outstripped by other search sites like MSN and Yahoo, but is the most visited pure information site on the web.

The top networking sites, of course, are Facebook and Twitter.  Youtube has an argument, as well, but it straddles the line between information and networking a bit too much for it to really count as either, to my mind.  Moreover, Youtube is less a networking or informational destination than a hosting service for videos hosted or linked to from Twitter and Facebook or found on Google.  That it is a part of Google only goes to show.  Anyway, Facebook attracts about 140 million users a day, Twitter nearly 100 million.

Shopping is the least robust of these three categories, with Amazon's 70 million users and eBay's 60 million falling well short of Facebook, even when combined.

Now none of that is likely to be news to you, but I wanted to get the numbers on the table as a kind of primer for the picture I want to paint.  I've been trying to grapple with the questions in the lamentably verbose title of this post, lately.  What, really, is the Internet?  What does it do?  Is there, maybe, a way that we're using - or, more to the point, failing to use - it that might be particularly good.  And I don't mean good, as in useful, I mean good, as in good.  For all the talk about the meritocracy of the web, about the role of Twitter in revolutions, about the educational opportunities afforded by technology, I can't help but wonder whether there's an untapped potential, a chance to do more than make the things we do easier, a chance to actually make the world better?

There's an argument to be made - and a good one, I think - that it has done exactly that, and not just because is it difficult to separate "easier" from "better."  Even so, there's something missing, something essential to real human progress.  You see, despite the presence of the Internet, there's still so much social injustice, so much corruption and greed, so many profound and profoundly dangerous flaws in human society.  It is not, of course, possible for technology to address the bits of human nature that make us cruel, ignorant, or both, but that doesn't mean that we people who believe in trying to create a better world ought not to use whatever tools are at our disposal.

With that in mind, I want to talk about these categories of our digital lives, in my next few posts.  What do each of them represent in us, why are they so important, and what potential is there for something better.  I am leery of this project exactly because it requires me to take a moral stand, to say that certain actions or ways of thinking might be morally superior to others.  That's always a slippery slope, because it can be hard to separate real, fundamental morality from cultural and societal norms.  Nevertheless, without any moral compass, without a vision for a better world in which "better" actually has meaning, what's really the point of anything at all?

In any case, I don't presume to have answers, here, but part of my sense of "good" is that it has more to do with the way in which we do things than what we do.  That is, I may not know what the right thing to do is, but if I act out of compassion, empathy, and a desire both for the joy of myself and others, it doesn't really matter whether I do the "right" thing by some social, cultural, or religious standard.  What matters to me is the intentionality, not the action (really, this is just a repackaging of my preference for process over outcome).

Before we launch into actually looking at the biggest, best, most popular, most successful sites on the Internet, then, as we try to understand what it is that they are and aren't, and what it is that they do and don't do, I want to bring up two points as a wrap to this introduction.  First, I've chosen "networking" over "communication" for a reason that I'll discuss more when I write on those sites.  Suffice to say, I'm not convinced that communication actually does happen on the Internet.  Or, if it does, it does so in spite of, and not because of, the web-based services that currently exist.

Secondly, I want to make a point about intentionality on the part of designers of extremely successful websites.  There is no question that the entrepreneurs that founded Facebook and Google had good intentions.  There is also no question that they were a part of a system where the purpose of any product is not the betterment of mankind, but profit.  Were they motivated by money?  Are they now?  Does it even matter?  Those are questions I won't try to answer now, but I do want to share a true parable, that may not totally make sense now, but hopefully will be helpful in my next few posts.

Back when I was a music assistant at St. John's, we would make the students in the class write a Gregorian chant.  That sounds more complicated than it is, because what it really means is "write a melody."  So students wrote melodies.  The problem is, students wrote melodies that didn't follow the rules of chant.  Rather, their melodies followed the rules of tonal harmony.  They would begin with a tonic, they would move to a subdominant, they would reach a tension point on a dominant, and they would return to the tonic.  Of course, the melodies didn't really do this, because they were melodies, but were you to write a harmony to those students' melodies, it would, almost always, be a I-IV-V-I chord progression.

What is interesting is not that this happens - after all, each and every one of us has heard thousands of I-IV-V-I progressions in our lives - but that it happened most with the people who didn't know the language of tonal harmony.  Completely non-musical (even tone-deaf) students would write perfectly prim and proper tonal harmonic melodies.  It was stunning.

The analogy, then, I'll phrase as a question.  What happens when young entrepreneurial people who don't know the language of business, but are trying to create a service based upon the perceived needs of people (and not their own desire for fame or profit, at least not first and foremost) actually go and build those services?  What, actually, ends up being the purpose of those projects?

Rethinking the Great Books

Introduction

As a graduate of St. John's college, it's practically sacrilegious for me to suggest that there might be some flaw in the curriculum of the college.  "The Program" may not be sacred, per se, but it is founded upon the thinking of philosophers that the modern world - though perhaps not philosophy departments - largely ignores, and therefore there's a kind of internal sanctity to the whole thing.  You see, St. John's is an academic institution that shuns modern academia, a place where research - the modus operandi of every University in the world - is not frowned upon so much as regarded with a bemused detachment.  That is, it's taken very seriously, in a certain sense, but also challenged on the grounds that it cannot answer all of the questions it asks.  Where modern academia believes that the best questions are the ones that can be answered with rigorous experimental design and good implementation, St. John's rather tends towards the view that the best questions are the ones that cannot be answered, and, furthermore, that the process of dialogue around those questions might be more valuable to students - and to the world at large - than the more "practical" aims of research.

Perhaps "more valuable" is too much, there.  I should say, instead, that we live in a world overrun by research, largely devoid of dialogue (in its root sense*).  As Husserl might say - if he weren't such a terrible writer - we have plenty of answers, but we don't really know what any of them mean, or why they are important.  Perhaps we can't know, but at least we can ask, and we rarely do that anymore, either.

* OK, a parenthetical isn't enough here.  Dialogue comes from Greek, dia meaning through, logos meaning all kinds of stuff, such as language, words, logic, ratio, and so on.  So dialogue is kind of talking through, but also thinking through, or logic-ing through.  We do plenty of talking in the modern world, but how often do you see two (or more) people talk through the logic of a question, try to analyze it together and really build an answer, or at least a framework from which to understand that question?  I certainly don't see it often.

Not surprisingly, given its anachronistic concern with meaning, St. John's has been largely misunderstood by most of the academics I have met since my graduation.  Unfortunately, that misunderstanding has been for reasons I would never have guessed.  Rather than objecting to its philosophical purposes, I've heard time and again that the problem with St. John's is the Great Books, the hegemonic, conservative, rich-white-maleyness of the whole endeavor.  It matters not, it seems, what the books Johnnies read are about, or even the way in which those books are read, but rather what matters is who wrote the books in the first place.  Context, to the modern researcher's mind, is more important - or at least easier to pin down - than meaning, so St. John's is attacked on the basis of context.

It would be foolish to discount the criticisms of the Great Books, however, simply because they misunderstand the purposes of the college.  No, it is my belief that while St. John's itself may not be in need of any drastic reform, any program based on the principles of the college might benefit from an infusion of some of the modern research on learning, for one, and some of the great - or at least very good - works of the last hundred years.  With that in mind, I want to discuss the two distinct parts of the St. John's program, including whether they are interdependent or not, and what might be done differently.

The Great Books

It is certainly true that there is a preponderance of work from white males in the traditional Great Books curriculum, but that owes more to the vagaries of history, I would argue, than an innate bias from the founders of the program or the current faculty and administration at the college.  It is an unfortunate truth that, for much of the history of the western world, it has been only wealthy white males who have had access to the resources and means to print and distribute works widely and effectively enough that those works had a chance to survive to the modern day.  It is inevitably true and extremely frustrating that there were great thinkers who never had an opportunity to write among the oppressed women of Europe or the many foreign cultures that the Europeans subjugated, from the Islamic Northern Africans to the Arabic civilizations of the middle east (who did, incidentally, produce plenty of writing, much of which was lost to marauding crusaders) to the various islanders and tribal societies crushed under foot during the age of imperialism.

The fact of oppression, however, does not mean that we ought to ignore the works that are available to us, written by the oppressors though they may be.  Indeed, it is among what we now consider the "Great Books" that the most vocal opposition to said oppression can be found, where writers like Montaigne dare to suggest that the "savages" of the New World might be just as civilized - or moreso - than their European counterparts.  That, I know, does not excuse Europe any more than, say, American citizens who objected to Japanese internment camps during World War Two, but that's not the point.

No, the point is that history is valuable, and not just history as a retelling of the past.  The history of ideas is important, the history of science and philosophy and art and music and literature.  I, because I have read the Great Books, because I am white and male, have been accused of being a part of the hegemonic, oppressive culture that is still, in many ways, at work in the modern world.  But I would argue the opposite.  Because I have read Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Hume, and so on (and so on), I actually know that "oppressive" world from the inside out, and I can tell you that despite the context, the meaning was, more often than not, valuable.  Tracing the philosophical history of a patriarchal and oppressive West may come across as a worthless (at best) or even evil (at worst) project to the staunch multi-culturalist, but in fact it is remarkable and too easily overlooked how deeply, and often subtly, influenced by the authors and thinkers that comprise the Great Books curriculum our modern world is.*

* I don't have anything to add, here.  This is just a ploy to get you to re-read that sentence, especially the final clause.

The real distinction here, then, is the same as I mentioned above.  As a reader of the Great Books, I may have all kinds of hidden (or not so hidden, but potentially "dead white male" inspired) biases - like my insistence that meaning matters - but as a St. John's student I was never asked to read books from the perspective of a dead white male, or a European conquistador, or, for that matter, from any subaltern perspective either.  No, I was asked to read the works sans context, sometimes to the point of absurdity (ignoring, for example, collecting knowledge or interpretation of American colonial history while reading the Federalist Papers).  We were never asked to think about how Aristotle wrote, about what the condition of his Athens was, about who was oppressed and who wasn't, about his place in history.  While some of these things inevitably would come up, from time to time (and depending on the author), they were never the focus.  No, instead we were asked to think about what Aristotle was saying, why he was saying it, and why it mattered (or didn't).

Now there is a legitimate argument to be made that what St. John's tries to do is flawed, that meaning cannot be separated from context.  But I guess my argument is that context cannot be separated from meaning either, and that in a world where we are much better trained to think about context, thinking about meaning is more valuable precisely because it is rare.  To talk about context alone is to talk about nothing, and while I am amenable to discussing the flaws in the Great Books curriculum as a list of books worth reading, the perspective that something is wrong with the inherent process behind the way those books are read and discussed is, to me, a deeply flawed argument.

Unfortunately, the arguments I have heard against the Great Books do exactly that: they throw the whole thing out simply because it challenges the context-centric thinking that dominates modern academia, refusing to acknowledge that there might be something to be gained in such an education, at least for some students.  Without a hint of irony, the modern academic does to the Great Books curriculum exactly what they accuse the European authors of the Great Books of doing to other cultures throughout history.  I know, not a fair comparison, but worth pointing out because it underlines the main point: the kind of thinking that the St. John's curriculum is after is the kind of thinking that sees and understands how and why we think about questions and problems in the ways that we do.

The question is, where does that thinking really come from?  The Great Books themselves - the vast reading list - is only a part of the story.  Perhaps more important is the approach, which is much more than just the focus on meaning over context discussed above.  No, in spite of what is perceived as an anachronistic, conservative, and just generally stuffy curriculum, there's a pedagogy at St. John's so radical that it inspires the most progressive of educators.

A Dialogic Pedagogy

In the St. John's classroom there is no Professor.  Each class is led by a Tutor, a faculty member who is responsible for guiding and facilitating a conversation, but not for having mastery over the material or the ability to answer difficult questions about the reading in question.  Students and Tutors, in fact, use the same naming conventions, calling each other by "Mr." or "Ms." even when the Tutor holds a Doctorate.  Whereas the modern academic environment in the broader world, then, is extremely hierarchical, St. John's is not.

In addition to the somewhat superficial - but very telling - nomenclature of the college, there are other pedagogical policies that truly make St. John's radical.  For example:

- Instead of hiring experts in various fields and assigning them to Professorships in those fields, every St. John's Tutor is made to teach classes in every subject.  A Tutor with a PhD in Political Science will, in time, lead courses in Ancient Greek, Music, Science, and Math.  The result is that Tutors are often learning as much (or more) than the students in their classes, operating functionally as another member of the class - "model learners" - instead of teachers.

- All classes are discussion based.  There are no - or at least only very rarely - lectures at St. John's.  There is also, however, no hand raising.  The Tutor does not call on students, either.  "Discussion based" classes at St. John's are different from discussion based classes everywhere else I have been in this regard, because they depend upon the focus and listening of the members of the class, the experience that makes it possible to hold a dialogue with over a dozen people without some artificially imposed system to stop everyone from talking all at once.  While this may seem crazy in our modern world (on a political television show it's a miracle if three people can have a conversation without constantly interrupting each other), after the Freshman year actual interruption is fairly rare.  As much as Johnnies are learning to think about meaning, they are also learning to listen.

- There are no tests, no worksheets, few papers, and only superficial grades at St. John's.  Assessment remains the job of the Tutor, but only as a way of helping the student to learn to assess his or her own learning.  Tests would serve no purpose in a college where the effort to understand the material is more important than the material itself.  Moreover, tests notoriously do a better job assessing student ability in taking tests more than content knowledge anyway.  Instead, St. John's assesses based upon classroom participation and by means of the occasional writing assignments, which emphasize good ideas over good writing.  In the end, grades are awarded, but only because graduate schools demand that they be.  Philosophically, St. John's would not award grades if it did not have to.

- The classroom is only the beginning of the conversation.  While there is no requirement that Johnnies carry their philosophical musings outside the classroom, in inevitably happens.  In a small academic community where every single student shares the same reading list, the same pedagogical style in their classes, and many of the same questions about what the books they are reading mean, it is only natural that the conversations permeate throughout the life of the student.  Oh, college students are still college students, but there's something to be said for the drunk 21 year old who's arguing about Kant at a party.  Even conversations about things that are not on the reading list take on characteristics of the classroom conversation, and ideas are put through the same intellectual ringers.  In short, St. John's is a community of learning, a place where thinking, reading, and conversation happen constantly.  I have heard it compared to a military academy in terms of the level of discipline and the amount of single-minded focus on the curriculum that the students generally have.  The difference is, at St. John's that happens without students being required to have that discipline and focus.

The pedagogy of St. John's is unlike the pedagogy of any other school, university, or academic program I have encountered.*  Obviously there are a great many preconditions to creating such a culture: it has to be institution wide, it helps that students are old enough to take responsibility for their own learning, etc.  Nevertheless, the unique approach of the college towards how learning ought to happen contains lessons that are more widely applicable.  Particularly, it turns out, in multi-cultural, progressive classrooms.  Indeed, I was stunned to read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, only to discover that, ironically enough, the pedagogy he describes as being ideal is almost exactly what St. John's does.

* The closest thing, strangely enough, is the d.school at Stanford, which holds many of the same philosophies about academic hierarchy, group participation, and learning assessment, despite the very different end-goal of producing things.

Curriculum and Pedagogy in the 21st Century

As much as I love the St. John's curriculum and its attendant pedagogy, I feel as though there is room for improvement.  Two areas, in particular, afford a great deal of potential for the college's approach to education, namely 1) a re-imaging of the curriculum with an eye towards incorporating more works from the last eighty or so years, and 2) incorporating appropriate technologies, where appropriate, to enhance what is already going on in the classroom.

A Multi-Cultural Great Books Curriculum

The first of these two possibilities is almost too obvious.  Of course St. John's should incorporate more works from the last eighty years!  How could they not?  Because the still in-use Great Books curriculum was founded and shaped around the 1930s, it has changed little since that time.  At its inception, then, it was modern, including works that were then contemporary and influential.  The core of the program has always been historical, but the finishing touches, I believe, were never meant to stagnate in the way they have.  The Great Books, in any time, ought to span from the earliest available writings to the most recently available, as long as those works are, by some measure, great.  That's a sticky distinction, of course, and difficult decisions have to be made at every turn (for example, focusing on the West in the core program of St. John's means that the great works of China, India, and Japan are largely ignored, though the college also offers an Eastern Classics Master's program).

Any re-imaging of the St. John's curriculum, then, would require sacrifices and compromises, which is unlikely to occur as long as faculty and staff each have their own and separate favorites.  When arguments for staying the same and for changing are equally valid, we tend to resist change, and so St. John's is slow to adapt to the modern world because there is - as seen above - a compelling case for the status quo.  Nevertheless, I do believe there are things which could be cut which would not ruin the curriculum or rob it of its heart, and which would allow for the inclusion of more modern works.  I won't bore you with details, especially because any one personal opinion need not be decisive in reforming or recreating the St. John's curriculum.

Instead, I see a new Great Books curriculum as a backwards design challenge.  If the ultimate core goal of St. John's is to produce critical thinkers, and the secondary goals are to acquaint students with the history of Western thought, to encourage students to learn to dialogue, and to ensure participation in a community of learning, then there are many legitimate curricular choices that might lead to those end goals.  Indeed, my argument boils down to this: I believe St. John's could actually do a better job acquainting students with the history of Western thought.

The danger of making the Great Books curriculum more multi-cultural is, of course, tokenism.  When you add, for example, a book by Toni Morrison, are you adding it because it's great, or because it was written by a black woman?  Even if the answer is the former, the problem remains in the perception of people looking at the program.  So it is even now, as when I tell people we do, in fact, read W.E.B DuBois and Virginia Woolf  (among a few other non-white men) at St. John's I'm told that we're just engaging in tokenism, and not really taking seriously the subaltern viewpoint.

What's more, in the multi-cultural world there are a preponderance of cultures and sub-cultures, so much so that the very notion of greatness has lost its perceived legitimacy, or at least its practicality.  It is simply impossible to read the seminal works of every single sub-culture of American society (much less world society), because there are just way too many sub-cultures with way too many seminal works.  To me, however, this is a challenge that a modern Great Books curriculum ought to rise to, rather than ignore.  If it is impossible to read the great Japanese-American, Korean-American, Chinese-American, Phillipino, Hawaiian, American Indian, African-American, Afro-European, Polish-American, Czech-American, Arab-American and so on and so on (and so on) great works, at least we can raise the question by picking those particularly influential academic works like the famous Can the Subaltern Speak? or by choosing (and even rotating?) important literary works like The Woman Warrior or Their Eyes Were Watching God (or so many others) from among the many wonderful options.

The explosion of excellent, provocative, and maybe even great writing in the modern world is not something that the Great Books should ignore.  There's an opportunity to shape an even better curriculum, here, if only the few people who are shaping such curricula would rise to the challenge.

Dialogic Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Perhaps even a bigger opportunity than reshaping the Great Books curriculum, however, is the chance to use technology to further the goals of the dialogic pedagogy of St. John's.  I do not believe that technology can significantly improve the classroom experience and discussion at the college - though certainly there are times when a quick Wikipedia check for factual information would be beneficial - but that does not mean that there's no place for it in the Great Books education.  Even when I was a student, the Internet had already become a source not just of news, but of contextual or biographical information.

"Now wait," you're saying.  "Didn't you say that you're not supposed to talk about context at St. John's?"  I did say that, but only because I was contrasting a focus on context with a focus on meaning.  Inevitably questions about context do arise, not as a central talking point, but as aids to understanding meaning.  Sometimes it is useful to know context not because it can explain, and not because we want to hide behind contextual connections between texts as a way to ignore talking about more difficult and more profound matters.  Rather, the value of context is in coloring meaning, in resolving a dispute about who came first, or who studied with whom.  The easy availability of something as simple as a timeline can radically transform a conversation not because era and meaning are innately interconnected, but simply because era does sometimes explain away things like simple lexicographical differences.

Beyond merely making more information available, however, I think there's another dimension to what St. John's could do with the Internet.  As social media have become increasingly prominent on the web - with Facebook (a social site) occasionally outranking Google (an information site) - it has become clear that we, as a society, need to understand how human interaction translates to the web.  Unfortunately, it seems to translate fairly directly; that is, where most person-to-person interactions are rife with people refusing to listen to each other, willfully misunderstanding, and generally being pigheaded and closed-minded, the same is doubly true on the Internet thanks to the added veil of anonymity and the security that affords.  It's all too easy to come to an Internet forum (whether a literal forum or a networking site like Facebook or Twitter) with an agenda and an opinion that never gets revised.  True, the availability of information means that opinions based upon faulty factual information can be easily proven wrong, but even then the pigheaded will not change their minds.

Now, obviously not all denizens of the net are guilty of closed-mindedness.  Like in the real, material world, there's a range, and some people use the Internet precisely because it's a way to expand one's exposure to ideas and cultures and ways of thinking.  I just think that's relatively rare, because it's much easier to use the Internet for pleasure of various kinds, whether carnal, social, or intellectual.  Technology easily fools us into thinking that everything should be easy and fun.  But good thinking is still hard, even with technology to help (though perhaps it is more fun), and doing things that are hard requires a certain discipline of mind.

So where does St. John's - or some other dialogic Great Books-y curriculum - fit in this picture?  Well, I believe that it can shape - perhaps only for its students, but perhaps more broadly - a more dialogic mode of digital interaction.  Perhaps true dialogue is impossible on the web (perhaps it's impossible, period), but a place as committed to dialogue as St. John's ought to at least explore the possibility that some of the ways of communicating that it holds dear might be transferable to an online space.

What does that look like?  That's a difficult question, the answer to which would require a careful effort to understand what good dialogue really is, and how it might be recreated in a web space.  Maybe, in the end, that looks like Twitter or a Facebook wall?  Maybe - and this is what I would guess, but can't know - it looks unlike anything currently available on the web.  The thing is, in order to get there someone needs to make the effort to design and create a real web (or other technology) based tool for real dialogue.

If such a thing existed, in whatever form it might take, the role in a modernized St. John's is at least partially obvious.  The classroom could be supplemented, yes, but the more valuable use would be in reaching beyond the 800 or so enrolled students at the college.  If the world desperately needs to learn to dialogue, why not make it possible to learn - at least in part - with technology

Conclusion 

Not surprisingly, my suggestions and analysis here are based upon processes and not outcomes.  If I were tos summarize this essay, I'd say that the St. John's (or any other program with similar goals) could stand to reevaluate not what they do, but the way they do it.  How might St. John's better fit itself into the modern world, keeping its fundamental strengths intact?  How might St. John's reshape its curriculum to encompass Western thought not just from 1000 BC to 1935, but to 2011?  How might St. John's use technology to support its dialogic goals, both in the classroom and beyond?  Given that St. John's does do a good job - in my opinion - preparing it's students for life, how might St. John's do an even better job preparing its students for the modern, networked, distributed, changing, technological world?  In the end, the answer might be "stay the same," but it's a question worth asking, nonetheless.

The Language of Degree and Kind in Baseball and Life

This post is also available - with pictures and dancing bears - at Pitchers and Poets.  I lied about the bears.

When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories.  Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb."  People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad."  Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring."  Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative."  And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors.  Here at Nicht Diese Tone, of course, we think this stuff is all hogwash.  Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things.  While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.

* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.

Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue.  The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous.  The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.

* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests.  Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.

In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field.  Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven."  It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation.  Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield.  In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.

Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game.  Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box.  It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.

The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks.  Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300.  The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.

* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun. 

Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway.  It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense.  Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park."  And it is.  The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball.  It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind.  Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*

* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125.  Big?  Yes.  Infinite?  Not quite.

This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency.  The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%.  Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season).  That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.

Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy.  With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out.  Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large.  To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss."  The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).

The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors.  That Park Factor of 125 is big.  Really big.  Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best.  But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind.  While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.*  Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors.  Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.

* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9.  That's epically, historically great.  It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season.  I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?

Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias.  When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback.  When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks.  A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs.  A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark.  The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.

Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time.  Coors Field does matter.  It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%.  The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams.  But only very, very slightly more often.  The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors.  The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.

But wait, I'm not done yet.  We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp).  While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids.  And we can't know.  What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree.  What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use.  Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good."  We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids.  No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair.  They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.

Is that right, though?  My answer is no.  Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd.  Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many.  And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated.  Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks.  Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.

To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree.  It helps us survive.  It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual.  In nature, nuance leads to destruction.  That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however.  If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite.  That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink.  If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor.  In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.

The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful.  Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write.  Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy?  Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?*  The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad.  The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.

* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.

Ah, there I go breaking my own rules.  You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree.  The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad.  To say so would undermine the argument.  The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute.  We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category.  Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence.  Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.

So what is there to do?  Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both.  To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball.  We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate.  Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out.  Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate.  Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth?  Maybe, but probably not.  Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.

A Lion's Mane

There is always so much to say, and none of it is quite right.  A poet knows this, but his words are not closer to the heart of the matter for that knowledge.  No, they are rather further, because they clothe a fundamental mystery inside an intractable but mundane one.  What good is that?

Perhaps it is best, instead, to shut up and listen?  Ah, but where is the joy in that?  Why read Kerouac, for example, if you'll only ever read him?  Isn't the point to talk, to live?  (Isn't talking living?)

While we're at it, what is a mystic anyway?  Am I one?  I am an astrologer, after all, and while I don't pretend to know why or how it works, sometimes a chart opens up like a flower, or the universe, and I feel aware.

There's no room for such talk these days, though.  Our life unfolds 140 characters at a time, our thoughts no longer ours, but distributed, collective.  Where is poetry in that?  Or is that all poetry is?  Where is Keroac, then?  Where is mysticism and where is the soul?

No matter how hard I try, I can only write about myself.  Whether I write in a private journal, or in an anonymous Internet forum, or on this blog, or even in an academic paper, the words I produce are a reflection of my soul.  A very selfish, myopic, and even arrogant reflection.

What's wrong with self-confidence?  Ah, it always comes with self-doubt, for one thing.  Confidence - the need to express one's own perceived greatness - is flanked by fear that one's greatness is an illusion.  The simple-minded will say "that's not confidence at all, then.  Confidence is silent."  Ah, but a lion still roars, does it not?  And its mane is ever visible.

Who gives a shit about confidence, though?  It doesn't matter at all.  What does?  Heh, that's what we in the question-asking business like to call "a good question."  Problem is, it isn't actually a good question at all.  It's a terrible question, in fact, because it's obvious and totally unanswerable.  Because of these two facts, men throughout history have killed and died because they believed someone knew the answer, and there was never a way to weigh the value of those answers other than through rhetoric, violence, or both.*

* And, really, is there any difference between rhetoric and violence?  One is to the mind what the other is to the body.  I'll let the reader choose which is which.

Of course I, too, am guilty.  Of rhetoric, of violence, presuming to know what is important and what is not.  And yet, as I get older (slowly at first, but faster and faster) I find myself more and more confused - yes, as the cliche goes - but also more and more bored with my confusion.

Oh, I will be forever curious, forever a leaner, forever joyful (forever does not mean what you think it means).  But the "complex" and "outside-the-box" (the most ironic cliche there is) thoughts, when they become commonplace, do not readily give way to something more complex and more interesting or innovative.  Having grasped paradox itself, the thrill of intellectual discovery is, if not crushed, at least transformed.

I suppose the real question is, then, what is my purpose?  Now that I have a direction, a job to do, a path to travel, I must strive to understand why I am traveling that, and what I might achieve (is the wrong word) while on it?

I might as well ask: "What is being?"

Art and Abstraction in Waterston's "Clearing"

As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing about (and listening to) music, I've always struggled to understand the visual arts.  Actually, my problem does not stem from music, but from language.  I'm a linguistic thinker, a slave to narrative and context, a conversationalist and - to the occasional chagrin of companions - a deliverer of monologues that resemble my blog posts.  In short, I am in love with language, with words, with how sentences are constructed and how stories are told and how arguments are made.  Little wonder, then, that I struggle to uncover the meaning of pictures.  "What," I ask, "Does meaning even have to do with it?  Meaning is a linguistic concept, and much art - especially abstract art - is not linguistic.  Whither meaning?"

A part of me wants to believe that modern art isn't supposed to have meaning, but that's clearly not true.  While I certainly cannot penetrate into the hidden meanings of giant blue spots next to giant orange spots, or little red rectangles, or massive canvases painted in a single glossy shade of pink, obviously some people can to the extent that there is a massive modern art community, complete with critics, connoisseurs, and museums sufficient to fuel the careers of a good many artists.  What do those people see, then, in the abstractions of abstract art?  What dialogues do they have?  What narrative is present?  And if not narrative, what emotional content?

You see, much as I am a linguistic thinker, my problem ultimately is musical.  In music - and especially in, for example, Beethoven - there is an undeniable narrative arc, simply because music takes place in time.  Every listener, no matter how tone deaf and/or untrained hears the same fundamental thing in the same order.  The same is true in a novel or a play.*  The story, whether literary or musical, unfolds in a certain way, as determined by the artist.

* Granted, in both music and literature it is possible to get things out of order, but that is not the intent of the composer/writer, usually.  Exceptions like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake - which is just as confusing no matter where one begins or ends - only further support the rule: there is a strong temporal, narrative sense in literature.

In a painting, on the other hand, the experience of the viewer is much more haphazard.  While we have certain tendencies (left to right, top to bottom), any given painting might strike us differently.  Where you might be attracted to the white splotches, I'm drawn to the blue "stars," for example.  While the black spindly branches might strike you as the key to the painting, I might not even regard them as important on first glance.

Being out of time, paintings allow the viewer to revise their initial impressions, of course, but that doesn't change that we remain subtly and heavily influenced by that first brush with the work.  Add in the propensity for art museums to contextualize art with neighboring pieces, with biographical information, or with descriptions of the work in question, and the process of constructing a personal narrative gets very muddled.

Which is not to say that doesn't happen in other media.  Indeed, it happens very much, and such shaping of the narrative is exactly the point of, for example, the Beethoven project that I've undertaken in this space.  What differs, then, is where that narrative comes from, and thus what "understanding" a piece of visual art even means.  Whereas the Eroica Symphony, in my opinion anyway, speaks for itself once you know enough about music theory and a little about history, I'm not necessarily convinced that the same is true in visual arts.

That's not totally fair.  I think that, if I knew more about composition and technique and so on, that works like the one that we are, slowly, coming to would speak to me much more directly.  I suspect, however, that a lot of what they would say would be "this is the style used here, this is the technique, this is the skill," and not "this is the meaning."  Again, this is my bias as a musician, but I feel as though music theory is a way to unlock, yes, compositional techniques, but more importantly, emotional, spiritual, and even political meaning in music.  Is the same true in visual arts, especially the more abstract works of modernity?*  I don't know, but I struggle with the possibility that either answer to that question might be true.

* To be fair, again, we might ask the same question of music, where modern composition has been divided into music for the movies (and TV and commercials and so on) and music that is extremely strange and abstracted.  Maybe the question I'm asking here isn't about art at all, but about modernity (or, I suppose, "post-modernity").  Hmm...

Without further ado - since we've adone enough already - here's the particular painting I want to share and discuss, briefly.  Briefly because I'll struggle to know what to say, for all of the reasons highlighted above.  Nevertheless, I want to share the work because, of all of the many hundreds of pieces of art I say during my recent visit to the bay area, this was the one particular piece that most caught my eye.  Why?  Well, that's the question I want to try to answer.  Here it is:

"Clearing" by Darren Waterston.  Displayed at Cantor Art Museum, Stanford, CA.

The title of the work goes a long way towards shaping the narrative that the viewer - in this case me - constructs.  "Clearing" may be a word with multiple meanings, but it has one particular meaning that strikes me as being the primary - though probably not the only - one intended here.  The black tendrils in this piece are reminiscent enough of branches, and the background enough of a kind of abstracted night sky that, at first blush, "clearing" seems to indicate where you are metaphorically standing as you look at this piece.  The space in the middle of the canvas - with the nebular/amoeba-ish mass and the little blue star-like dots are the night sky from a spot in the forest where the branches part.

I particularly like the sky analogy here because of the figure that looks like a nebula.  While we, perhaps, don't see those massive gas clouds when we look at the night sky, they are there, and this painting in that sense reminds me that, while behind the trees there are stars, behind the stars there are still more things that I do not perceive.  The clearing is, in that sense, only a partial one.

Of course, we still see the branches on either side of the clearing, which further remind us that our view of the space between is constrained.  Consider the second nebula behind the largest of the branches, and you'll see that, though it is just as large, just as complex, and perhaps even more aesthetically pleasing than the more fully visible one, it is also muddled and unimportant thanks to its backgrounding.  Only looking closer do you see that, actually, it is prominent in the narrative of the painting principally because it is partially obscured.

What strikes me most, however, about the painting is the ambiguity of meaning in the symbols.  This work is somewhere in between abstract and representational.  The branches are only just barely reminiscent, the stars not quite the right color, the nebulae a bit too much like water stains.  The random white, blue, and black spots that occupy other spaces in the work may suggest - in the case of the largest one in particular - a not-quite-right moon or other satellites, but they could also be the splotches that occur in a camera when looking near, but not at the sun.

Then again, the painting is too dark to be daytime, but too light to be nighttime.  Dawn or twilight perhaps makes sense, especially with the reddish "cloud" that hands across the top of the painting, but placing the piece temporally almost seems unfair.

It also is unfair to leave the ambiguous symbols with only one interpretation.  The branches could also be briars, I suppose, but are also not unlike the tendrils of a neuron.  Nebula, amoeba, water stain... Why not a ginger root?  And so on.  At a certain point, the representational value starts to break down, and while there are hints and suggestions here, there is clearly no single interpretation that does the painting justice.

Perhaps this is too obvious a point to make, but I'm going to make it anyway: if Waterston wanted to paint a clearing in a forest, with the night sky shining above, I'm sure he could have.  Perhaps, in our sophisticated artistic age, we take for granted that we're not supposed to paint that way (we're not supposed to write music in the romantic style or Petrarchan Sonnets), but that doesn't answer the question at the heart of this post.  What is it that work like this is trying to capture?  Is ambiguity, as such, really the point?  How many works can be about mystery and absence or nebulous meaning before it gets old?  Doesn't art about art have a limit?

In short, the question is "so what?"

And yet maybe that question misses the point, and therefore answers itself.  For some reason this painting spoke to me, not in words, music, emotions, or any other structure that I can access linguistically.  Maybe I'm missing the words, but maybe there simply aren't any, and the "meaning" of art is a nonsensical thing to look for, an artifice we construct because we so much predicate the linguistic.  Understanding isn't what one does with a painting because "understanding" is a word, and words need not apply.  Of course, paintings are (usually) still titled and described, but is that maybe because we're afraid to acknowledge that they might have something profoundly powerful about them that we can't access?

As I've said, I don't know the answers to these questions.  In many ways, writing about art is almost as pointless as writing about language.  If you try hard enough, you're either reduced to talking about structure and technique or you start traveling in logical circles.  In some ways, I think, art drives you there even quicker, because it is so much more urgent than language, so much more removed from our mundane day-to-day experiences.  Looking at a piece like "Clearing," then may not tell me anything, but it certainly disrupts something, and I don't know what.  Maybe that's all that "meaning" means?

Living (I Presume)

"Life.  Don't talk to me about life."  - Marvin, the "Paranoid Android" from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

There's a place between our theoretical ideas about existence and the reality.  The amazing thing is, no matter how stone-cold practical we are, no matter how tough, no matter how wise, no matter how brilliant, there's still that gap, and we still inhabit it.  What do I mean, exactly?  Oh, but this is one of those posts, one of those times when What I Mean is too tied up in What Does It All Mean to be clear.  Nevertheless, we write on, we live on.

It strikes me that we're so obsessed with life (and the universe, and everything) that we forget living.  Or is it the other way around?  Are we so obsessed with living that we forget life?  The latter is closer to one of T.S. Eliot's more grim lines, anyway: "Where is the life we lost in living." I guess it depends upon which word we use to signal which place in our minds.  Is life the place we inhabit, or is living?  Or, worse, do we inhabit neither, operating as mere automatons in some great celestial or spiritual machinery?

Between theoretical ideas about existence and the reality...  What are our theoretical ideas, and what is the reality?  Well, that's easy enough to say.  Everything we believe is theoretical, and the reality something we can't really access, limited as we are by our senses and, above all, by the inexorable march of time.  Philosophers throughout history, it seems to me, have argued about exactly how impossible it is to get to reality given our limited capacities for thought and perception - granting, of course, that our capacities far exceed those of other animals - ranging in conclusion from thought is reality to perception is reality to there is no reality at all to it doesn't matter because God will save and/or destroy us anyway to let's play backgammon instead of thinking about this anymore.  Maybe the last of these is the most wise, after all, not because it is true, or right, but because to absorb oneself in a game might be the best way to inhabit our mysterious existence joyfully.

Then again, it might not be.  The irony of being counter-cultural is that you need a culture to counter.  Since all humans are a part of some culture or another, it stands to reason that we're never without opportunity to follow or break cultural mores.  It is still the case, however, that breaking the rules is irrelevant once you become invisible: consider the trouble-making student who is only relevant because he is so numerous; the individual who sneaks out of class doesn't really effect anything - including himself - all that much.

That is what it means to be obsessed with life.  We are so concerned with a troublemaker, with what happens to him, with whether he is caught, with how disruptive his actions are.  We take our cultural belief systems and apply them to the situations we see around us, heaping praise and scandal on the people who stand out (often the counter-cultural ones) because we think it matters so much.  But does it, really?  Why are we so concerned?  Why do we insist, with so much vehemence, that people do what we think is right?  The origin of imperialism is in this Christian sense of Life, and with it comes a much more profound death: a death of the spirit, of ingenuity, of love.  And, of course, of all of the non-Christians.

Of course, I'm essentially quoting Nietzsche here.  And don't get me wrong; just because we're the children of Puritan forefathers doesn't mean that we're alone.  The obsession with Life - the need to pry into other people's business, indeed, the need to see that others believe and act and do unto in the same way that you do unto - is hardly unique to Christianity, or indeed to the West.  Social creatures, it turns out, find it impossible not to meddle with other social creatures.

All of which is neither here nor there, as the saying goes.  The real point is that we don't inhabit either of those spaces: much as we are obsessed with life, we don't really understand - can't afford to understand, as David Hume might have it - that our beliefs are all predicated not on illusions, per se, but upon extremely limited information.  We are so obsessed and so certain precisely because we are so uncertain, because no amount of research or prayer can ever get us closer to really knowing what is right.  And, what's worse, we start to suspect that maybe there isn't some universal, timeless, "what's right" to begin with.  We start to think that, maybe, words are just that, words, and the whole problem with trying to understand life is that, as a human, we are forced into "trying to understand life," a series of sounds (or symbols) that only have meaning thanks to an accident of evolution (brains capable of rendering meaning out of sounds) and their cultural situation.

Which isn't to say that words aren't useful, or that there's some problem with being alive.  Far from it.  Living is wonderful, replete with joy, friendship and love, eating, thinking, writing, playing games, and countless other good things.  On the other hand, it's also full of pain, disappointment, unemployment, and frustration.  Of course, even those are a part of the joy of living, because they not only can be set against the good things, but indeed can mingle with the good things to produce a more interesting tapestry.  How many people love the feeling of completing a marathon, for example, not despite the pain, but because the pain makes it more sweet?  Isn't it the case that the difference between a romance novel and a pornographic story is mostly a matter of how disappointed the protagonist is for the balance of the narrative?

Sometimes, however, we get so caught up in life that we forget living all together.  Not that, again, we should ignore philosophies and theories and ideals.  Far from it, those things can be a part of the pleasure and pain of living.  But to inhabit them, to live only for life or - as Nietzsche might point out, for death - strikes me as the heart of silliness.

Ah, the irony here is too ripe.  "Not that we should..." is exactly what I'm writing against, no?  That's not a rhetorical question; it's a real one.  You see, I'm just as trapped as everyone else, inhabiting some place between life and living, between human and animal, between good and evil.  That I recognize it gives me no special benefit.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is the real lesson.

Follow-Up on Meaning and Truth

I was going to respond to Luc Duval's comment on my last post with a comment, but then I realized I'll probably be long-winded enough to turn the response into a post of its own.  Plus, this way there's a better chance you'll see the excellent points he makes.

Luc writes, in his comment to my last post:

You really dislike Twitter, eh?

That post was intriguing but overwhelming. I have some friendly criticisms and some questions.

1. Were you trying to expound on something you read by Hegel? Or...wait...Wittgenstein? Or Husserl? Though I'm familiar with most of these names, it would be helpful if you provided a more focused explanation of which of their ideas/statements you refer to, or, even better, some quotes.
2. I enjoyed reading what seemed to be buildup to conclusive statements of yours but sometimes felt left hanging. For example, your discussion of the tautology of meaning/truth or truth/meaning was valuable - I was really hoping for you to try to separate the two with something definitive, but I don't think you did.
3. You made a lot of comparisons to the past with great certainty but provide no examples, statistics, or metrics. (Maybe I'm looking for the wrong kind of truth.)

1. How did you get to "Well, certainly we have destroyed 'Capital T' truth," without first defining what you mean by such Truth?
2. Your discussion of media seems limited to online networks. Does your idea that, to paraphrase, "the search for meaning/truth has become homogenized via excessive individual 'shouting in a crowded room'" change at all when you give consideration to literature/drama/music/visual art? Furthermore, does that change your comparison to the past at all?
3. I got a little bit lost reading about "artificial and limiting" systems of expression. Spoken language seems limiting to me, but natural, whereas painting seems un-limiting, but artificial. Were you trying to say that "Truth" is less accessible because our systems of expression are limited? Is, then, "Truth" dependent upon expression?

To do justice to Luc's many excellent points, let's take them one-by-one.  First, the criticisms, all of which are valid.  I'll rephrase how I understand each one (and I'll probably be less tactful than Luc is), and then offer some brief thoughts.

1) Pretentious invoking of famous names does not help your point.  If you're not going to cite exactly what you mean when you mention Hegel, you could at least explain it a little bit.

This is very true, and it's a huge weakness of my first-draft style of blog writing.  Where, in an academic paper, I would never be so careless, I tend to write my blog posts with less care.  Which is ironic because the likelihood of my audience being able to follow the argument without further explanation is far greater if I were writing for a professor.

Anyway, the people in particular I mention in my previous post are people who I talk about regularly, especially with my friends who are fellow Johnnies.  The result is a shared understanding of what those names mean, but that's a shared understanding that does not go beyond the rather limited audience of, well, fellow Johnnies.  Even philosophy majors often don't actually read famous philosophers (though, of course, they are told what those philosophers say, in the opinion of their professors anyway).  It strikes me that I should probably do a post or two about the particular philosophers I cite or allude to most, not as be-all-end-all interpretations, but as helpful way-points for when I'm working on heavier posts, and I don't want to worry about spending extra paragraphs explaining the reference.

To answer Luc's question, then, in general if I'm responding to something I read elsewhere, I say so.  Rather, in this case I'm using "Hegel" as a stand in for a complicated, lengthy argument that I don't want to get into because I already "know" - or at least have a strong opinion about - the beginning and end points, as well as the process.  It's not, ultimately, vitally important to be familiar with the three philosophers in question to understand my last post, but I can see how their presence is confusing.  Luc is right to call me out on my name-dropping for exactly that reason.

2) The train of thought moves pretty well when it leaves the station, but where do these tracks go?

Now this, I would say, is a big part of the Nicht Diese Tone modus operandi.  Because I emphasize process so much over outcome, it is frequently the case that I avoid conclusive statements.  That's not fair, because I often make conclusive statements, but as a writer I generally treat them as a kind of dramatic flourish, and not at all necessary to my own satisfaction.  This, I think, is both a weakness and a strength.  It's also a symptom of my approach to writing: I'm rarely trying - especially in posts like the last one - to get somewhere.  Rather, I'm trying to explore things, and so often I end up with tangents that are more interesting than the main point.

Anyway, the weakness, here, is obvious.  My writing isn't always reader friendly, especially because it's not usually clear what the takeaway is.  And, frankly, if it is I feel like I haven't done my job.  I strive to be a complicator in a world of simplifiers, a person who makes understanding things hard (or, rather, who shows that understanding things is hard innately) in a time when we tend to believe that understanding things is easy.

I would concede, however, that my blog posts tend to get too far afield, which is principally, again, the result of them almost always being first drafts.  My usual writing style - when writing academically or professionally - is to draft, throw away, draft, throw away, and so on many times exactly because of how easily I'll get sidetracked.  Indeed, usually when I begin an academic paper, I'll write three paragraphs before I realize what I'm actually supposed to be writing about, and then I restart.

So, in short, I don't know where the tracks are going, either.  Sometimes I feel like that gets me to an interesting place.  Other times, I'm left as unsatisfied as Luc, with a profound sense of "and that happened."  But hey, at least the train is usually moving pretty well before it crashes.

3) Where's the beef/data?

This is actually a more interesting question than I can address in any reasonable amount of time here.  While I am certainly a proponent of good data and not making stuff up, I'm also extremely wary of the citation-over-idea culture that academia tends to cultivate.  I read too many articles and papers at Stanford that were, essentially, devoid of original thought (or even half-decent writing) that my own tendency is to over-emphasize ideas, to the point of not always doing the extensive background research I should be doing (and would be) were I publishing in a more formal setting.

Suffice to say, Luc is absolutely right to call me out for not supporting most of the assertions I make about the past versus the present, about modes of expression, and even about my interpretations of various philosophers.  Ironically, in the very post in question I talk about the modern explosion of "you have your facts, I have mine," and proceed to practice that very maxim.  Of course, the question becomes what the goal and audience of my writing is.  In general, my failure to provide data is a result of my taking for granted that my audience understands the situation to be very much as I suggest.  That is, I'm relying on "common knowledge," even of opinion.

Now that's hardly rigorous, but I dare say it's extremely common.  Sportswriters, generally, (at least in my experience) tend to take for granted a great many things that are alternately supported or denied by advanced statistical analysis.  Likewise, I suspect my previous post has a handful of assertions that intensive data collection would confirm, and a handful of assertions that intensive data collection would challenge.  I just don't know which is which, and - and here's the damnedest thing - in some cases I suspect the data does not exist, and would be nearly impossible to collect.

Let's not, for the moment, get into what is the most intellectually rigorous approach in such a circumstance.  Rather, sometimes, for the sake of argument, I'm liable to take a position that I don't actually believe - or, rather, that I don't actually have evidence for - because I would rather practice drawing actionable (or at least write-about-able) conclusions from limited data than trying to always be 100% certain about everything.  Indeed, that was largely the purpose of invoking Wittgenstein in my previous post.  His On Certainty is a work which tries and tries and tries to define certainty, and ends up talking itself in circles because, in the end, context matters so much to meaning that knowledge, in any fundamental sense, comes across as impossible to him.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.  Onward to Luc's questions.

1) What is this "Truth" of which you speak?  And who destroyed it?

This is a very good question, and as I re-read my post with Luc's comments in mind, I realized that I did a very poor job laying out my premises.  The distinction I wanted to make was this:

Truth, with a capital T, is to my mind an indication of some Platonic, universal, almost inhuman reality.  It is, in short, the idea that there is a single, unyielding, unchanging essential set of metaphysical (or, possibly, physical) things and ideas which are applicable to all beings.  In some sense, arguing for the Truth, with a capital T, is akin to arguing for a kind of abstraction of God.  That is, whether or not there is Truth or not is not the same as whether or not there is a God.  Rather, it's whether or not there is a single way in which God (or anything else, really) exists.  That's maybe an opaque distinction, so let me try to clarify.

It seems to me that God, as a word, undoubtedly means a thousand different things to a thousand different people.  We might say, then, that one of those thousand people is right, and the rest are wrong.  God means one thing and one thing only, and that is the Truth.  We might, on the other hand, say that there are a thousand different valid ways of understanding God.  While that doesn't mean that there isn't maybe a deeper Truth (still capital) that synthesizes all or some of the thousand of those disparate and maybe even mutually exclusive (to we humans, anyway) perspectives, what it does mean is that, as far as human experience goes, there is not really any Platonic, eternal, universal Truth worth striving for.  Rather, there's only truth in as much as it applies to a given context, in a given time, to a given society.

So Truth, as such, hasn't been destroyed, per se.  But I would argue that post-modernism, as a philosophical and social movement, has roundly rejected the idea of a single correct interpretation of the world, metaphysical or otherwise.  As a result - because post-modernism has become so ingrained in our society - we are a world easily able to say "let's agree to disagree," because "you have your truth and I have mine."  That doesn't mean it's right and, as I argue (kind of) in my post, that doesn't mean there isn't a Truth (only that we haven't sought for it hard enough).  What it does mean, however, is that society at large, and academia in particular, are a lot more interesting in discovering contexts and situations than Truths, because we don't really take Truths seriously anymore.  Or, perhaps more poignantly, we see Truth, as an idea, as tied into colonialism and racial and sexual oppression, thanks to the preponderance of rich white males among the historically prominent seekers of Truth.

2 and 3*) "Procedural homogeneity," who do you think you are?  People still write books, paint pictures, and play music.  Also, why the Twitter hate?  And what does any of this have to do with truth?

* Because my writing about the once bled into the other.  Also, I'm lumping in Luc's opening comment here, because it's related to his actual question.

I don't hate Twitter, actually.  I find it fascinating, and while I'm not in a rush to start an account, I do sometimes read a select handful of people's Tweets.  Like in many situations, there's a paradox at work here: constricted form limits expression, but it also liberates expression.  The sonnet is an extremely limiting formal construct, but it is precisely because of its limits that writers of sonnets are so creative.  Similarly Twitter, where the character limit may homogenize the creative process (just like the sonnet form does), but within those limits the possibilities for expression are actually quite large.

It is also the case, in our digital age, that people do engage in all of the same creative forms they always have.  And, on top of that, we've begun to synthesize forms in ways that previous generations could never have imagined.  A simple example, to demonstrate the point, would be modern video games, which increasingly blend principles of cinematography with dramatic writing, both two and three dimensional artistic rendering, and, of course, good audio design.  The creative process is certainly alive and well in our modern age, and - by virtue of our increasingly huge population alone, let alone greater access to technology - innovation is probably faster and more widespread now than ever.

The problem, then, is a subtle one, and I'm not sure my post did a good job explaining it.  Indeed, I know it didn't, partially because I'm not sure if I really can explain it.  What I'm getting at, more or less, is that there's a kind of complicity the writer of sonnets has with the sonnet form that I'm not sure the Twitter use has with Twitter.  That is, the writer of sonnets winks and nudges at his form, knowing that its limits are precisely what allow him to achieve such high artistic expression.

Now, compare that to a Tweet, which is generally not taken as a piece of art to begin with.  What does the user of Twitter consider to be his relationship with the medium of self-expression he is using?  Is he aware at all that he is limited?  Those are real questions that I don't have the answer to.  What I suspect, however, is that Twitter users take for granted their character limits, just like we take for granted the limitations of our native tongues (Luc's language example is a good one).

In that sense, there may be little difference between modern man and man of any time.  We have - as I say in the post - always been limited in our means of expression.  All art is limiting in form because it is principally through limitations of form that we are able to create anything at all.  What is more pernicious, then, is not limitation, but the widespread homogeneity in the type of limitation in which we, as a society, participate.  It's not just Facebook, Twitter, and text messages that I'm talking about, it's decreasing biodiversity, it's dying languages, it's fewer and fewer cultures.  Now - and this is a leap - those latter things might be related, at a procedural level, to the former ones.  It might just be... Or let me make it a question: is it the case that there is a technological imperialism going on?  Are the wonderful tools for self-expression and communication we have developed in our modern age choking out diversity of all kinds, not because of what they are, but because of how they work?

Again, I really don't know the answer to that question, but it's a question that I don't think is being asked nearly enough.

Wither truth (or Truth), in all of that?  Well, I'm of the opinion that not only more ideas, but more different ways of generating ideas will get us closer to whatever the Truth might be.  And, even if no such thing exists, at the very least it's a lot more interesting - and probably a lot healthier intellectually, spiritually, and physically - to deal with variety rather than homogeneity.  In the end, I'm not so concerned with truth, I guess, because I'm more concerned with the process of getting there.  Or, rather, it might very well be that the closest we can get to truth as a species is good process.  Not good thoughts, but good thinking.

With that in mind, thanks to Luc for forcing me to do better thinking.