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``` Some more notes.
As a periodic reminder, information about unsubscribing from RRE can be found on the Web at:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html
That same page includes links to Web-based archives of the list and to most of the longer essays by other people that I have circulated.
In addition, most of the responses to my query about running Emacs on a personal computer can be found at:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/pc.html
This will also be of interest to anyone who has a Macintosh, Windows, NT, or Linux machine and who might be wondering why I keep wondering how life could be possible without Emacs.
Having laid out my business plan for numerology.com, I was shocked to discover that somebody already owns that domain name. I don't know why, given that just about every English word is a domain name by now. So I suppose I should issue a disclaimer that I have nothing to do with the person who owns numerology.com. (I had checked for a www.numerology.com Web page, but had not thought to check the host tables.) I'm sure that the numerology.com domain is worth $$$$$$, but I'll have my lawyers talk to their lawyers and we'll sort it out.
I am unimpressed with most of the technology-driven scenarios for the future of higher education, and the main reason is because they are not radical enough. Most of them incorporate superficial ideas about education. Part of the problem is the widespread idea that technology should produce something radically new. It is much better, in my view, to use technology to deepen the existing values of the institution. When institutions are stable over a long period, nobody is challenged to think deeply about their meaning. As a result, the practice of articulating the deep values of the university is largely left to the provosts who give graduation speeches. It's a nice spring day, the faculty and students have their medieval regalia on, the parents are absolutely thrilled like you can't believe, the provost stands up and speaks in a ritual manner for just long enough to keep everyone from glazing over, the assistant deans start handing out the diplomas, the provost sneaks off to the next of the day's ten meetings, and nobody thinks about the matter again until next year.
Nobody is acting in bad faith here. Everybody is attending to the business that is arising for them in the world is as it is. But now things are changing. New opportunities are arising. It is becoming imaginable to organize the university in a wide variety of unfamiliar ways. All sorts of people are stepping forward, all sorts of them, and all of them have their own ideas about the university. Some of them are ideologists; some are crackpots; some are single-issue activists who have no idea what it means to establish or run a real institution. Most of them have narrow ideas of what the university is about. Some of them are driven mainly by negativity, such as the people who for some weird reason dislike college professors so much that they will not even admit that such a thing called "teaching" should even exist in the new world that they are planning for us. And then there are serious ideas, thoughtful fragments of ideas that cut through the noise and actually say something. Faculty are by and large uninvolved in this debate. The existing institutions provide them with a stable framework for doing what they are good at doing. The institutions are very good at focusing their attention on issues and problems that are defined in certain terms. The institutions are terribly efficient that way, so efficient that nobody has time to change them.
So the field tends to be left open to people -- some of them acting in good faith and some of them not -- who don't know much about the reality of college, who don't know the students, and who don't teach in classrooms. The idea that technology radically changes things is misleading when it directs our attention away from the actual sites of teaching practice, and from what can be learned in those sites by reflecting deeply upon the practice that goes on in them. Shallow reflections on the existing practice will give us shallow technologies that simply pave the cow paths, doing just what we're doing now only with a lot of extraneous hardware. Deeper reflections, however, can remind us of why we're doing this in the first place, and tell us how we can change both the technology and the institutions to put back in motion the same drives that led us to do things this way as the best available compromise within the limits of the old system. Once upon a time this idea was called conservatism, back before conservatism devolved into nothing more than an excuse for being mean. What I want, then, is to explore a radically conservative approach to the technology and institutions of higher education.
I want to draw out a few concepts that, in my experience, are central to whatever real learning takes place in college classrooms. I am not happy with the prevailing concepts, which are polarized around an opposition between understanding and doing -- for example the conflict between constructivists on the one hand, who try to rig up experiences in which students supposedly rediscover things that it took human society tens of thousands of years to discover, and vocationalists on the other hand, who treat every skill as an industrial process to be learned by rote. Students should learn to do some real thing, and understanding can then develop as a reflection upon their iterative attempts to do it well. Although many concepts are useful for talking about this process, I will nominate four, four C's and a G: concepts, cases, community, critical, and genre. Students learn, I submit, by applying a set of concepts to a series of cases, practicing the skill of parsing each case analytically for what a given conceptual framework would have us find in it, doing so within both a local community of learners and a global community of practice, acquiring in particular the skills of parsing these situations reflexively with a repertoire of critical concepts, and learning to produce good examples of the particular genres of documents (in whatever medium) that are a traditional part of that particular community's practice.
An obvious example of this system is in law, where students practice applying certain bodies of law to a series of cases until they can parse a case and write a case analysis in their sleep. But examples are found everywhere. In physics one learns one system of concepts after another, and then one applies the concepts to a battery of word problems ("a mass M traveling with velocity v on a frictionless surface is struck by a mass M' traveling with velocity v' ..."), the result being a worked-out solution. The categories of grammar (noun, verb, adjective) are another conceptual framework, as are the categories of logic and those of rhetoric -- or at least any given grammatical, logical, or rhetorical system, of which there might be many. Robert's Rules of Order are prescriptive rules, but before that they are a conceptual framework for the conduct and reporting of meetings. In each case one acquires one set of concepts after another, practices applying them to cases, learns to produce documents in a particular genre, and thereby joins a certain community. In each case critical reflection is typically in short supply, but in each case that can and should be profitably fixed.
Now the kind of teaching and learning that I have described is not in fashion. Conservatives oppose it because it involves understanding, which conservatives are apparently against. I wouldn't have ascribed such an absurd view to them or anyone, except that they themselves affirm it quite openly every time they organize protests against the use of meaningful word problems in grade school math classes. They actually use slogans such as "fuzzy math" to name the idea of applying mathematical concepts to real examples, as opposed to limiting math teaching strictly to the usual algorithms for arithmetic calculations. Go figure. Liberals, for their part, will be appalled at the high degree of structure in my conception of education. They don't like structure because it is oppressive, because it inhibits the natural creativity and stifles the natural love of learning that all real students supposedly bring with them to the classroom. They will incorrectly interpret my prescriptions as a set of mechanical rules. But mechanical rules don't work. What's needed instead is a kind of conceptual scaffolding for the construction of self-sufficient understandings of any given case.
Conservatives want right answers above everything, and liberals want freedom above everything. Both views are misguided. Learning is really a matter of joining a community by learning its language and practices. And we can use technology to close the institutional and geographic gap between newcomers and oldtimers in communities of practice by using concepts and cases as a go-between. Those who know the literature on these topics can reconstruct many of my views by combining three very disparate theories of knowledge. One is the communities of practice theory that I mentioned here before, and which has been applied to the technology-enabled reconstruction of higher education by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid; see their article, "Universities in the digital age", in Brian L. Hawkins and Patricia Battin, eds, The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Resources for the 21st Century (Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998). The second is Vygotsky's theory of learning through the symbolically mediated internalization of the relationships and practices of a culture; for a comprehensible introduction see the works of James W. Wertsch.
The other theory that I have in mind is Doug Lenat's brilliantly strange artificial intelligence theory of heuretics. Having been trained in AI, and having worked my way through the fine details of all of the respectable work in that field up through my departure from it several years ago, I've decided that, at the end of the day, the best work in AI is the most cracked. That means Marvin Minsky's bizarre work of genius, "The Society of Mind", and Doug Lenat's work on a program called Eurisko. Doug is better known for his grandiose plan to create an intelligent digital encyclopedia called CYC, but I have in mind his earlier, more radical experiments. These experiments will not be familiar, so I will explain the relevant aspects of them. For the full details, see Lenat's articles in the journal Artificial Intelligence 21(1), 1983, entitled "Theory formation by heuristic search" and "EURISKO: A program that learns new heuristics and domain concepts". I should hasten to say that I do not think the world has much, if any, place for intelligent computers. That is not why I am interested in Lenat's work. Rather, I am interested in his radical extrapolation of some basic computer science representational ideas.
Start with the conceptual framework that I mentioned above: concepts, cases, community, critical thinking, and genres. Not just those words, but the concepts that I explained. Then notice that what I presented is a conceptual framework for describing conceptual frameworks. I suggested how all fields of study might be described -- not exhaustively to be sure, but usefully -- using the same conceptual framework. This kind of reflexivity is what Lenat's theory is about. To see its value, consider what a good conceptual framework gives you. Once you have analyzed a hundred cases using the same conceptual framework, you can get good at it. You can start to notice patterns. You can use these patterns to prepare a taxonomy of the cases. That taxonomy will itself be a new conceptual framework that relates in a well-defined way to the old one. You can invent concepts that group the cases in new ways. You can notice cases that seem like outliers, and you can pay special attention to them. You can compare and contrast the cases. You can develop analogies among the cases, and you can use the analogies heuristically by taking observations from one case and asking what they correspond to in another case -- maybe they point out something you hadn't noticed before. The points of comparison and contrast that you notice can then be generalized and used to enrich your conceptual framework.
Those are some of the benefits that "you", an individual, can get from a conceptual framework, but in fact conceptual frameworks live in communities -- the community of lawyers, for example, or physicists. Once a community has formed around a conceptual framework then a consensus can develop about what a good analysis of a case is like, and which are the important cases, and which are the useful concepts. Subcommunities can then develop around further elaborations of the concepts. Community members can prepare curriculum materials using the conceptual framework, and they feel confident of knowing what a right answer is. No longer need we pretend that the right answers are universally and objectively right; rather they are the answers that the community regards as right, provisionally and defeasibly, based on its good faith attempt to articulate what works well in its own engagement with real cases in real activities -- based, that is, in its practice.
My radical proposal that every community of practice in the world make its conceptual frameworks explicit, and that we use the Internet to organize these communities around a digital library of XML documents that store a vast archive of all of the cases that the community's members have analyzed. We would need a document type definition for each genre, and no doubt we would need specialized indexing and search tools for each community as well. But the basic conceptual framework of conceptual frameworks would provide a template from which community specific tools could develop. In fact, a community could develop around the study of communities and their conceptual frameworks, and another related community could develop around the constructions of technology-enabled institutions to support communities and their practices. Members of this community might develop new conceptual frameworks for describing the workings of various communities, and then having developed a corpus of case studies, they might then compare and contrast the workings of the various communities. Best practices and the methods for their identification would themselves be a conceptual framework and the basis for a practitioner community. Consider the implications of that: a generalized, domain-independent framework for identifying best practices, with a library of cases that accumulates over time. The best-practices community could develop taxonomies of best practices, heuristic devices for discovering best practices, analogies among best practices in different fields, ways of evaluating how good the best practices really are, and above all best practices for the identification of best practices. That, weird as it is, is the power of the reflexive approach. In doing all of this, we would make explicit on a grand scale the modularity of knowledge. The digital library of cases would be an extremely valuable resource for both practitioners and learners, and each community would develop its own peer review procedures for admitting case analyses into their various case collections.
The analysis of various cases provides insight into the nature of
conceptual frameworks. Consider, for example, the simple conceptual
frameworks for which management consultants are famous, most of which
seem to sort the possible cases into simple two-by-two matrices.
Or consider another conceptual framework, the observation-decision-
action loop that was developed for fighter pilots by the late John
Boyd, a legendary Air Force officer who wrote the book on the subject.
(See
My scenario for the future of higher education really becomes radical as we start to enumerate some of the conceptual frameworks that will be required -- each with its own community, its own genres for representing case studies, its own section in the digital library, and so on. We will need conceptual frameworks for process skills like organizing projects and building social networks. We will need conceptual frameworks for critical reading and thinking skills like parsing the logic of an argument, finding the metaphors in a text, reconstructing the history of an idea, and analyzing the ways in which a given practice is located in the institutions around it. Some of these conceptual frameworks and their associated skills are obviously more advanced than others, but the community around a given conceptual framework is free to establish a list of conceptual frameworks whose mastery is a prerequisite to entering their community. Graduating from this kind of training is no longer like leaving something; it is more like joining something, and everyone will have a collection of membership cards for the communities that they have successfully joined. Every community will be self-organizing, issuing its own membership cards by its own rules, and anybody who comes up with a new system of concepts that they like will be free to create a new community anytime they want. All of the necessary software to set up an online community infrastructure will be readily available and effortlessly interoperable with all of the existing infrastructures. Communities can undergo schisms if different subcommunities feel the need to evolve their concepts in different directions. The whole system will be like the scientific community, except that it will include the whole of higher education, and indeed a large proportion of all of the activities that take place in every sector of society. Barriers between learning and doing will fall. Students will get a clear line of sight to the communities they want to join, and practicing community members can stay involved in the university by (for example) jurying students' case reports. Knowledge can multiply and accumulate, and learning will accelerate as students internalize the analytical practices they will need. The world will prosper.
Now that is a radical scenario for the future of the university. It makes clear just how thin so many of its strident competitors are: little more than superficial ideas about the market applied to superficial ideas about learning. By getting in underneath the whole structure of human knowledge and making it visible to many varieties of reflexive thinking, this new proposal promises to dramatically amplify collective intelligence. But do I really believe all this radicalism? It's complicated. The basic idea is to embrace and amplify the logic of ontological standardization that I have described elsewhere. If the proposal works right, it's because it standardizes the right things. And as computer people well know, standardizing the right things is a powerful tool that enables society to diversify everything else. But we can't really evaluate the proposal as it stands without a more worked-out conception of institutional issues. Brown and Duguid, for example, proposed putting the teaching and evaluation functions in different organizations, but I am strongly opposed to any centralization of the evaluation function because whoever evaluates students and thus hands them their credentials has complete power over everyone else. Once a given credential becomes established as a standard, for example because employers build their processes around the assumption that their new hires have it, it will be hard to replace. Network effects are crucial. Communities of practice will probably exhibit network effects, in that larger communities will attract new members more easily than small ones. But these effects may be limited beyond a certain point because different conceptual frameworks really are useful in different environments. Likewise, the difference between a community with a library of 100,000 case studies and a community with a library of 100,000,000 case studies is probably not so great for most purposes.
A more serious issue pertains to the internal structure of communities of practice. Right now, the university world has a matrix structure. There is only one field of physics, but the practice of this field is organized and taught at many hundreds or thousands of universities. Each university can develop its own approach, and a mania that grows at one university cannot easily spread to others. Likewise, a spread-out network of physicists that develops a distinctive approach to their subject cannot easily be subdued by a single university, since all of the members of the network can reinforce one another, looking around as individuals for friendly environments while still maintaining their collective identity. These kinds of decentralization are conditions for the self-organization of the current system: the system is less likely to fall into a single overwhelmingly dominant approach without a good reason. If we lose the matrix structure of the university world, then we will need new mechanisms to preserve that loosely integrated self-organization. I think that this is another weakness of Brown and Duguid's proposal, as well as of my own.
Nonetheless, despite the wild-eyed nature of my proposal, I hope that it makes clear the strategy of radical conservatism that I sketched at the outset. My intention is not to throw out the university that we know, but rather to start over from a rational reconstruction of what is important about the university. In fact I have only picked out one element from a larger picture. I also think that the university's existing role as a manufacturer of social networks will be increasingly important in the future as well, and any radically conservative design for the university should use technology to amplify that role too. The university should have permanent seminars. Once you enter the university, you should never have to leave. As you move from newcomer to oldtimer in your various communities of practice, you can play more and better roles in the community, and these roles will keep your social networks up to date, as well as your intellect. The university will truly be the hub for the intellectual lives of a whole society, or at least those people in society who care to have that kind of relationship to a university. That very possibility is perhaps the greatest reason to ensure that we retain a diversity of university institutions. The dangers of an intellectual monoculture are great, and the if we submit ourselves to simplistic market models then the economics of information may well turn us into a monoculture in short order. I am not opposed to markets, just to the pathologies that they can get themselves into when they are designed badly, especially where information is concerned. I see little or no comprehension of those potential pathologies in the many facile proposals for a market in higher education, and I wish I did.
Ultimately, I hope that we will see a diversity of models. There are two organized ways of generating knowledge in society: the market and peer review. I have started from peer review because it provides a much more sophisticated model of the relationship between knowledge and social processes, and because it is more congruent with the values of openness. But market mechanisms will probably have a variety of roles to play in the various communities. If it is still hard to imagine what that variety of roles might be like, that is because we still understand very little about the relationship between the peer review and market models. That relationship is endlessly negotiated in many contexts -- in the private sector just as much as within the university. Every time the patent lawyers and venture capitalists start distorting the principle of open publication in the university, something like the open source software model irrupts in the middle of the market. It's a complicated dance, and we mustn't fall into a priori ideas about it, such as the ones that we see in proposals for marketplaces in standardized learning modules. Knowledge is richer and more complex than that, and I hope that my scenario gives some hint of what a proper engagement with that richness might be like.
In my last set of notes, I snorted at the ideological people who promote hatred of college professors. That does not mean, however, that I uncritically embrace everything that happens in the university. An example would be the unfortunate manner in which many American scholars have imported the French poststructuralist thinkers of the 1980s. Most of those French thinkers were valid intellectuals with useful things to say, but their forbidding rhetorical style makes it easy to collapse distinctions and promote stereotypes. Many of the French thinkers have had a positive influence on critically-minded scholars who can apply the ideas selectively without trying to copy the whole style in a superficial way. The problem is that the French presuppose an audience that, having been through the French educational system, has had decades of rigorous training in reading philosophy and writing essays. It is thus that Americans, who have typically had neither, sometimes misunderstand everything they read. Thus, on the one hand, one routinely encounters in American newspapers the embarrassing idea that deconstruction is the doctrine that a text means whatever you want it to mean, or the confusion of deconstruction with reader-response literary criticism. And then, on the other hand, one sees academics copying Foucault's writing style, which Foucault himself eventually more or less admitted served no useful purpose.
Perhaps the saddest consequence of the American appropriation of poststructuralism is the current alarming state of architectural theory. The profession of architecture has long had a problematic social divide between a handful of stars who drive the theoretical discourse and the great legions of working architects who end up having to follow the fashions that are set at the top. (See for example Garry Stevens, The Favored Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction, MIT Press, 1998; and Roxanne Kuter Williamson, American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame, University of Texas Press, 1991.) Today that unfortunate trend is as extreme as ever, and the leading journal of architectural fashion-theory is ANY, which stands for Architecture New York. Some of the people who have published in ANY are sensible scholars such as Saskia Sassen, even though it must be said that they have not always been using that venue to publish their most thoughtful work. But for the most part, ANY is given over to an exceedingly uneven body of poststructuralist theoretical writing that is completely inaccessible to normal people.
An example of the regrettable transition is provided by a historian of ideas named Sanford Kwinter. Once upon a time, back in the 1980s, Kwinter cofounded an annual publication called Zone that published interesting if very uneven volumes about urban planning and the body. At the time it all seemed very eighties, what with the extremity of Wall Street and the white-collar looting of savings and loans and the final show-down between the lunatic protagonists of the Cold War. But in fact most of the articles in Zone were written in reasonably plain language. In the first issue of Zone, for example, Kwinter published an article on the Italian futurist architects called "La Citta Nuova: Modernity and continuity". It was about their rather interesting ideas about modern physics and the way they applied their ideas to proposals for train stations and the like, which they thought should express a sense of energetic attraction and circulation in the city rather than the stasis of previous forms. Worth knowing about. In a recent issue of ANY, by contrast, Kwinter published an article entitled "The genealogy of models" which is just ... sad. Clearly inspired by the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, it appears to be written with the intention that every single sentence, indeed every single word, should announce a spectacular cosmological ontological discontinuity of world-historical proportions. It's all very portentous in such a way that graduate students often feel obliged to pretend that they understand it. It does flow in a certain way from Deleuze, who despite the wrongful reputation of contemporary French philosophy is a serious scholar and quite the realist. You can work some meaning into every sentence if you try hard, and if you let him get away with a lot of sloppy and vague uses of words that really ought to be used in a clearly defined relation to philosophical tradition. But really it makes no sense. And most of the articles in ANY are like this, like for example the deconstructionist writing of a prominent architect named Peter Eisenman. (I mean, what on earth is the point of deconstructing architecture?) It wouldn't be so bad if ANY was just a fringe player in the great theoretical bazaar. But no; it (or the trend it reflects) has just gotten done driving out of business an architectural journal called assemblage, which has passed from fashion because its articles were written about real buildings.
So what is to be done? The ideologues stereotype professors because they want to organize a purge. They say so in their fund-raising letters to their donors. They know that their work can't cut it on the intellectual merits, so they pretend that the deck is stacked. The fact is, those relatively few conservative scholars who do write useful, serious work succeed just fine, and show up the ideologists for what they are. Of course, those conservative scholars all lie low when the ideologies fulminate against "intellectuals" and "academic elites". They don't step up and say, "hey, we're intellectuals too, you know", any more than conservative journalists take exception when the pundits rail in a generalized way against "the media". They all know what the game is. The excesses of the poststructuralist epigones make good raw material for the mass-manufacturers of stereotypes -- an industry with its customers, its technologies, and its products. But we should resist the whole game. The question is not whether foolish ideas exist. Foolish ideas have existed since ideas first existed. Complaints about relativism date to ancient Greece, and the versions of those complaints that we encounter today are wildly unoriginal -- much less original than the putatively relativistic contemporary ideas they are complaining about.
The ideologues want to politicize the institutions of learning under the guise of accusing their opponents of having done the same. This kind of projective aggression is their longstanding stock-in-trade. In fact, the institutions work reasonably well. Deans make their names by assembling fashionable new areas of intellectual strength, and in those areas where conservative scholars have anything original to say, deans line up to hire them. And conservatism is fashionable. How could it not be, with scores of conservative pundits filling every available medium? I've seen conservative authors submit illiterate papers for publication and then complain that they were discriminated against by fashionable powers that be. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? The institutions more or less work, although they could certainly work better, and they work in part because they are decentralized. There's plenty of room in the institutions for any new intellectual movement to build itself up and put its case to the larger community. If those scholars who have problems with the more unfortunate of the intellectual fashionlets commit their problems thoughtfully to print, then that's part of the process. These things are decided in the end by the smartest prospective graduate students, who generation after generation demonstrate an uncanny ability to move into the programs where the real intellectual energy is. And it's better to have graduate students decide things than the direct-mail commissars and their friends the pundits. Refute bad work; don't purge it. And don't fall for the stereotypes that portray academics as all of a piece.
When the war in Kosovo ended, I made a batch of notes toward an essay about it. But somehow it didn't seem time to write that essay. Now that I look back on the notes, I see that some of them have aged a little better than others. So instead of an essay, a few fragments.
Like most Americans, I was heartened at the lovely reception that we all gave to the Kosovar refugees. We put them in nice facilities, told the soldiers to play ball with the children, got a batch of psychologists in there to deal with the appalling traumas, and placed people with relatives and church groups. Communities adopted refugees. People turned up at the camps to donate stuff. It was great. We should remember all of that and turn it into a regular part of the culture. "Welcome to the neighborhood, Mr. and Mrs. Rivera. We're so glad you came. Listen, we've got a little apartment for you here, and Mr. Chin from the church group has a job for you in his shop. It's not much, I'm afraid, but maybe it'll do until you get on your feet. We're so sorry about the American-trained paramiliaries who tortured your daughter. We were working on getting that school shut down right before you knocked, in fact. Meanwhile, just let us know if you need anything." People who dislike immigrants are just weird. You know? I wish that the world were twice as big as it is, so that we could get immigrants from twice as many places. I have a long wish list of immigrants who the United States could use more of: Hungarians, Uighurs, Tuvans, Tswana, Cariocas, Spaniards, and so forth. And all the Tibetan monks living in camps in India, and all of the traditional crafts people in Japan, and all of the electric guitar players in Zaire. I want Nigerian restaurants to become as common in American cities as Indian and Chinese restaurants are now. We should pay these people to come here.
Every time something like Kosovo happens, the media start a fight between two theories of it: the ancient tribal hatreds theory and the modern political machinations theory. It's always those two and no more. The problem, of course, is that both of them are always true. Ancient tribal hatreds only live in the present day because someone decides they can benefit by poking at the wounds, and modern political machinations always draw on historical memory in selective ways for their emotional raw material. Unless you put the two partial theories together, you do not have a clue as to what is happening. That is one reason why I so enjoyed Noel Malcolm's book "Kosovo: A Short History" (New York University Press, 1998). I bought it from a bookstore in Vienna and read most of it while sitting in a Greek restaurant eating fish and pita bread, and then on a long plane ride. It was finished literally months before the war began, and its last few pages predict that the war would happen and that it would be as awful as it was. What's most striking is the sense that the author knew that his book would be read very closely by the combatants in a horrible war, and that his book could make things either better or worse depending on how credibly he reconstructed 500-year-old events in places with names like the Plain of Blackbirds. You can feel this powerful sense of responsibility on the page. His problem, of course, is that nobody really knows what happened on the Plain of Blackbirds. All anybody has is conflicting fragments of evidence, mostly in the form of traditions that were handed down orally for centuries before being turned into the raw material for the modern political machinations of one generation after another. So he sifts, and he sifts, and he talks about the different versions of the story, and about the generic forms in which historical songs happened to take in one century or another afterward, and how one variant probably arose a hundred years later because several other songs in that same period changed in the same way to fit with the fashions of the time, and so on. This sifting requires page after page after page -- no matter what the title says, it is not a short history -- until something like a plausible story emerges. The whole book is like that. Kosovo was a battlefield over which one army after another got pushed and pulled, and he traces every episode with the knowledge that this stuff really matters to the descendants of the people involved. Now, if you were listening to the fashionable hype about the current state of historiography, then you would be inclined to hold this stuff up as good old-fashioned respect for the truth. But the fact is, this reconstruction of historical memory is exactly what historians and anthropologists and others have gotten good at in recent years. It is hard work, and it requires a sustained engagement with the materials. But it also requires theory, and it requires a sense of the many ways of getting it wrong, the many ideologies that can distort one's vision and render one's engagement with the materials superficial after all. That is what decades of critical inquiry into history have bought us, and what the ideologues want is to throw that all away and return us to the dark era of myths -- myths such as those of ancient tribal hatreds and modern political manipulations, separately that is, and not interrelated to one another.
Listen to this quote: "I expect the administration will try to define this as a victory, but it was a botched war from the very beginning." It comes from one Kim Holmes, director of foreign policy and defense studies at the Heritage Foundation (USA Today, 6/4/99, page 6A). Note how this person is spinning the war by accusing the administration of intending to spin the war. If the public had the slightest knowledge of how World War II was actually conducted from day to day, then Bill Clinton's unprecedented air-power-only victory in Kosovo would seem an astounding chapter in the annals of warfare in comparison. But of course the public had no idea how World War II was conducted, and for the most part they still don't. Having temporarily lost the battle against open government, conservatives are using open government as part of their battle against its proponents, just as they are doing with all of the tools of resistance to power. That said, I sure hope that somebody is conducting a systematic on-the-ground survey of what the NATO bombs actually hit. Some of this has been happening. They have announced, for example, that they hardly hit any Serbian tanks, mostly decoys. But that's just one small part of the larger question. The answers matter for many reasons, including the moral evaluation of the war and the ways in which the future political manipulators on all sides will seek to remember the ancient tribal hatreds of the present.
Let us hope that the war in Yugoslavia will finally spell the death of European civilization. When the Serb spokesmen appeared on the television, they kept repeating over and over, "We are a civilized country". They had this look of bewilderment on their faces that America and Europe would bomb a civilized country. "We are not some African tribe", one of them said incredulously. Here we had these people organizing a barbaric campaign of mass murder and forced expulsions against innocent people, and in their minds they were, above all, civilized. Where does this idea come from? The truth is that it comes from Europe. The Serbs who said this stuff are normal Europeans whose minds have been preserved in amber for a hundred years. All Europeans used to be like this. The civilized Belgians slaughtered people in the Congo, the British in India, and so on. What if an alliance led by the Italians had bombed Washington in the 1830s to stop the ethnic cleansing of North Carolina? In each case the killers claimed to be civilized and claimed their victims to be uncivilized, and in each case the claim to be civilized masked the most uncivilized of all possible realities. This has a name in psychology; it is called projection. The good news is that Europe and North America have started getting decivilized. They no longer pretend that they are good enough to go around slaughtering other people. Thirty years ago they turned away when their good friends in Indonesia slaughtered people on a scale matched only by the Khmer Rouge. But even that sort of thing isn't washing any more, and one could actually feel some confidence that the Australians who recently waded ashore on East Timor were actually going there with honest and peaceful intentions. This is a fragile new reality, to be sure. It surely felt odd to be fighting a war in Kosovo with so little of the jingoism that normally accompanies a war, and with so few persuasive conspiracy theories about ulterior motives for the war. It almost -- almost -- felt like we were fighting the war because we morally had to. It's too early to be completely certain of that, of course. We could still discover an awful lot. But still, let us be open to the possibility that global civil society actually now exists, that the concept of human rights is actually taking hold, and that something that actually deserves to be called civilization is finally taking root in the wreckage of this century.
In discussing the response to my recent round of short papers, I left out a couple of the more striking comments on my paper about John Commons' view of democracy. Several people sent me nearly identical comments on this paper, all lecturing me on the need for democracy to protect the rights of minorities. This is odd, given that my paper was exclusively concerned with a grassroots model of democracy and only addressed the formal mechanisms of democratic government in the most glancing way. Yet in these people's minds, democracy equalled majoritarian rule and majoritarian rule was obviously a bad thing. In the cases when this argument was spelled out, it became clear that it originated in an equation between democracy and mob rule. This equation, which dates back to the earliest days of democracy itself, has been heard in many places and times from aristocracies who are afraid that the rabble will use democracy as an excuse to take their stuff away. Some of the Founding Fathers of the United States said such things as well, although so far as I know the formulation in terms of protecting minorities (as opposed simply to protecting the rich) is a modern innovation. What struck me is that some of these people seemed to be unacquainted with the idea that democracy could mean anything else besides majoritarian mob rule, or that generations of democratic philosophers had explored the question at great length. In short, some of these people were unacquainted with any ideas about democracy except those of the most retrograde ideologies of a stratified society. How is this possible in a society in which the media are supposedly dominated by liberals?
I found another type of response to that paper even more remarkable. The paper was apparently distributed on a mailing list of people who are involved in financial cryptography, and many people who are involved with financial cryptography are literally anarchists who want to build a financial system that the government cannot touch. I had remarked in my paper that such people are not concerned about money laundering, and in fact these people openly said that they did not regard money laundering as a real crime. They actually said that money laundering is not a real crime because it is only a crime against the government, or else that it is only a crime because the government says that it is. What I found so remarkable about this argument is how poor it is. It makes perfect sense for a government, especially a democratic government, to outlaw the hiding of money obtained through criminal activity. One can certainly disagree how far the government can go to detect money laundering -- for example, whether it can open everyone, innocent or not, to unlimited warrantless inspection of their finances, or whether it can dictate that financial systems be designed in a way that facilitates law enforcement. Those are valid arguments about the inescapable tension between civil liberties and law enforcement in a democratic society. One might argue that money laundering laws are not very important because the vast majority of laundered money comes from drug dealing, a problem for which existing laws are failing drastically and for which alternative laws are nearly certain to work better. One might even discover that modern financial technology makes it impossible to enforce money laundering laws without a near certainty of much broader invasions, in which case it would simply be necessary for society to make the unhappy binary choice that results. But to argue that money laundering is only a crime because the government makes it a crime makes no sense.
The draft paper about 1984 and Enemy of the State that I distributed a while back had some loose ends. One of these loose ends pertains to the place of each film in the political cultures of the US and the UK. I suggested that the political culture of each country was shaped, at least in its relevant aspects, by its religious history, and I told a murky story about how this led to different ideas about oppressive government. One issue is the extent to which Orwell's antipathy toward the Catholic church shaped his representation of Big Brother's regime in 1984. I've read some literary critics who said that he was clearly thinking about the church to some degree, but I have not done enough scholarship to really be making statements on the matter. I'll do that once I get comments back from the referees at the journal to which I've submitted the article. I've been thinking about the matter in the background, though, and it was in this context that I was astounded to see a certain photograph in the Irish Times, 9/4/99, page 8, accompanying a review by Dermot Keogh of a book about Irish politics and the Spanish Civil War. The caption on the picture read "Irish Christian Front meeting, Grand Parade, Cork, on September 22nd, 1936: the crowd holding their hands in the shape of crosses to ward off the threat of communism". I wish I could show you this picture; we tried scanning it but alas it came out a blotchy mass of grey. It shows an enormous throng of people packing a city square, all of them holding their arms over their heads with their wrists crossed. This gesture is very similar to the gesture that the people make in the opening scene (and elsewhere) in the film version of 1984 during the Two-Minute Hate. It's not quite the same, since I believe that the people in the film are clenching their fists, whereas the people in the Irish picture have their hands open. This particular gesture having been current in Ireland in the mid-1930's, Orwell would surely have known about it as he was writing the book, perhaps 1946. What I haven't checked is whether and how this gesture is described in the book. I know that the film was striving for a high degree of fidelity to the book, but I don't recall the gesture being mentioned, much less its details, from my reading of the book many years ago. (I didn't reread the book for my paper on the film because I wanted to write specifically about the film.) When I get a chance I will check. Or perhaps someone has the book handy and is curious. On some days I feel like half of the institutions of the West derive from Catholicism and the other half derive from Protestantism. Although that is surely too simple, it is important to trace the various strands of history so that we can become more aware of the hidden structures of our lives.
A distinctive feature of Internet jargon is its prefixes, and someone should trace their history. The first, perhaps, is e-mail, short for electronic mail, which begat e-commerce, short for electronic commerce. Then cyberspace, which then gets generalized into cyber- everything else. Lately the prefixes have multiplied. There's i-, capitalized or not -- Apple has the iBook and MIT and Microsoft have announced the I-campus. In these cases, though, the abbreviated word is more of a brand name and not an abbreviation; one is supposed to know that the i- stands for Internet, but nobody is supposed to say "Internet Book" as the long form of the name. Lately Amazon.com has introduced zShops, which are the independent merchants who sell their wares through the Amazon site. You have to think about it for a moment; the z- prefix is presumably derived from the word Amazon, and is meant to rhyme with and generally remind one of the e- prefix. It is quite clever, actually, the idea that Amazon.com has the same status as electronics in general.
What do these prefixes imply? In each case, they mark out a contrast between the old/real world and the new/digital world. In particular they mark out what dialectical thinkers would call a double relation: distinct but still related. E-mail happens in a distinct sphere from (regular) mail, but is still joined to it by the word mail. One wants to call it a metaphor, but that doesn't quite capture it. (For more advanced theories of the relationship between the old/real/analog and new/virtual/digital media, see JoAnne Yates and Wanda J. Orlikowski, Genres of organizational communication: A structurational approach to studying communication and media, Academy of Management Review 17(2), 1992: 299-326; and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1998.) So there's a tension: it's new but not completely. It serves the same function, perhaps, but in a different medium. This is reasonable enough in a case like e-mail. It becomes hazardous, though, when we lose our grasp of the tension, when we go wild with the "new" part and forget the "old" part. "New good, old bad" -- that's our slogan. But it's not a very good slogan. So what's going to happen? As digital technologies become more and more pervasive, will our language become crammed with these prefixes?
Compare these prefixes to Nicholas Negroponte's informally trademarked use of the word "being". "Being digital" is supposed to be a wholly new existential state -- it's not just the computers but we ourselves who are making that transition. As the bits are liberated from the atoms, the technology starts defining the society and us along with it. Having declared the whole digital thing to be boring, Negroponte is doing something smart: he's moving along from the technology to the various states of affairs in the big world that the technology is supposed to bring about. Each of these is itself a "being", such as "being rural" for his idea that distributed information technology will dissolve cities and let everyone live in the countryside. We can ask him another time about his position on the universal service cross-subsidies that have historically made it possible to wire rural areas for telephone service. The point here is that each of the new "beings", such as "being rural", is supposed to be heard as something downstream from "being digital"; in other words it's "rural because digital". Again we have that tension between old and new, as with e- and the other prefixes. But where is the analysis of rural life? For Negroponte it's an idyllic refuge from the city, formerly reserved to the rich but now available to everyone. Surely there's more to it, but we won't know what. It's a clever device: the concept of "digital" is not overtly present in "being rural", and yet by a hidden reference it proposes to govern our thinking.
American culture has grown preoccupied in recent years with the evils of relativism. This curse is supposedly a reason to roll back decades of liberalism and embrace conservative values. Just for that reason, we should learn to notice the many ways in which conservative ideology is itself relativistic. For the moment I will satisfy myself with one small example, a quote from a conservative activist historian at Emory University named Elizabeth Fox-Genovese:
"... there seems to be a move afoot to transform slaveholding into personal guilt instead of membership in a broader social system."
This quote came from an LA Times article (by Sam Fulwood, 6/29/99, page 1) about some white Southern families who are finally admitting that they are related to some black Southern families, so that their family reunions are no longer segregated. Conservatives denounce this same relativism when it is applied to different cultures in the modern world, but relativism is quite necessary if one is going to advocate a return to older values. Decent people have repudiated many of those older values, and someone must negotiate the tension. Relativism is part of the answer. Here, then, is the conversation we never have:
A: We must uphold the values of the Founding Fathers of our nation! B: But the Founding Fathers held slaves. And even the ones who tried to end slavery believed all sorts of awful racist stuff. A: You're anti-American. Besides, you can't impose modern standards on another century. They were just members in a broader social system. B: So why should we uphold their values? A: Because their values were permanently truths that are independent of history. B: You're just picking and choosing, imposing your own values under the guise of a return to tradition. The truth is that American history is the history of an ever-expanding commitment to freedom. The Founding Fathers set that commitment in motion, and that's good, but it has proceeded much further since then and has a long way to go. A: You're the one who's imposing your own opinions. It's dangerous when people think they know better than tradition, because we have no guarantee that the people after us really will know any better than tradition. We must stick with original meanings. B: So, uh, what? You're saying that we should restore slavery? A: There you go again, always playing the race card. B: ((Makes that scrunching-eyebrows facial expression that you see in the comics on the face of Mallard Fillmore.))
Does that mean that conservatives are really relativists? It's more complicated than that. Different strands of conservative thought are internally contradictory, or they contradict one another. For example, one cannot uphold the inherent value of tradition against a modernizing rationalism that would think things through from first principles while also insisting on conformance to moral universals. These two positions are, in fact, direct opposites of one another. We might fail to notice this if any "traditional" society had ever existed that ever remotely conformed to those moral universals. But, as the Founding Fathers and their slaves make clear, that's not even close to being the case.
Furthermore, it has often been observed that liberal democracy -- not in the American political sense of the word "liberal" but in the sense of political individualism -- is necessarily relativistic: an absolute and thoroughgoing application of any particular set of moral laws wouldn't be democracy because it would prevent many people from participating in the democratic process. The US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Rehnquist, in fact, has often applied an opposite version of the same principle: increasing the power of the legislature by refusing to uphold moral principles in cases where the rights of certain minorities are at stake. That conservative majoritarianism, for example, is why the Bill of Rights keeps shrinking under a court whose philosophy is supposedly devoted to getting government off our backs. Conservative activists and politicians smeared Lani Guinier for exploring the limits to majoritarianism in defense of certain minorities who do not tend to vote for conservatives. Conservative judges and legal theorists have been revolutionizing American law by means of a legal theory based on economic analysis that explicitly eschews any conception of morality. The public relations practiced by the organizational supporters and proponents of conservatism is an amoral profession that distorts reality in a mechanical fashion for whoever happens to be paying. In fact, if you judge by their actual behavior, including their silence when this sort of stuff is going on, conservatives are interested in getting government off their own backs -- and putting it on everyone else's. They are relativists when it suits them, and when it suits them they use the label of relativism as a stick to hit their opponents. If liberals dominated the media then you would hear about this at least once a week. But you don't.
For some time now I have been predicting the return of authoritarian culture. I see signs of this everywhere. Since I have been tracing some of the rhetorical devices by which rationality is being eroded in favor of more primitive modes of thought, let me mention one more. I received a message recently from someone who was excited about the following article: . It is entitled "Just do what the pilot tells you", and its ostensible purpose is to refute those people who make a general point of defying authority. The person who was excited by the article was a mother who was preoccupied with getting her teenage son to obey her commands. Some people just have a driving need to get other people to obey their commands, and I guess that she was one of them. She wanted to be an authority, and she saw this article as a rhetorical resource in that project.
On one level, the article would seem hard to disagree with. Surely we can find one single situation, however hypothetical, in which it is a good idea to obey the commands of an authority. Yet one remains uncomfortable. Surely this person has not taken the trouble to write this article just to establish a trivial point. Of course: the real point of the article is to put a wedge into our minds, to cast doubt on the automatic respect that we accord to people who defy authority, and to pave the way for establishing a stereotype toward the opposite extreme. How we interpret the article thus depends on what rules we think the author is playing by. If the author is playing by rational rules then the conclusion of the article must probably be granted even as its purpose remains mysterious. But if the author is playing by the associationistic rules of public relations, preparing a new round of programming for the lizard brains of those people who are too busy with the serious business of their lives to seek out the slippery slope, then the article is insidious: not simply a trick, but a highly routinized sort of trick, part of a technology. I don't know exactly what neurolinguistic programming is, but surely it is something quite similar to this. Because the article does admit some kind of rational interpretation, albeit a trivial one, the author retains a level of deniability. But I don't buy it.
You may be saying, c'mon, surely there exist people who defy authority to a pathological degree. And I would agree. I used to work with someone whose whole modus operandi was to divide people. She posed as a political radical, and indeed she expended quite stupendous energy organizing people around her view of the world. But in the day-to-day affairs of the environment around her, she was seriously destructive. You could catch her saying things that were false, or that did not make any sense, setting up polarized conflicts around issues that could have been settled in a rational way, and when you caught her she would go into a whining fit that was embarrassing to be around. In her mind she was fighting oppression, and to some small degree some oppression might have been going on, but mostly what she was doing was projecting some pattern that she picked up from some other (presumably quite traumatic) situation.
So such people really do exist, just as there do exist people who really are whining victims. The danger comes when the existence of those people is inflated into a stereotype through the selective application of loose and vague words, for example identifying people as "victims" with an ugly tone of voice without a proper assessment of the validity of their complaint. Try this: find a longstanding conflict between two parties, choose one of the warring parties at random, listen to them tell their story, turn to the other party, put a disgusted expression on your face, and sneer "whatever happened to personal responsibility?!". It works every time. It feels great, like you're righteously upholding moral values against the scum of the earth. The truth, of course, is that you're just getting a power trip out of arbitrarily whacking people. Real examples: after smokers recently won lawsuits against tobacco companies that had lied for decades about the dangers of smoking, did conservative opinion leaders howl about the abdication of personal responsibility on the part of the lying tobacco executives? No, they howled against the abdication of personal responsibility on the part of the people who had been lied to. Go figure. Or take the recent legislation to protect computer companies against lawsuits for damage caused by their Y2K-defective products. Did Congress laugh at this transparent attempt to escape personal responsibility? Quite the contrary. Morality is real and important, but this sort of abusive moralizing gives morality a bad name. The danger is that this kind of selective overgeneralization will now be applied to people who defy authority. The sixties did produce a good number of polarizing personalities, and the cultural static they caused now provides an opening for the authoritarian personalities to step forward. These people are dangerous not only because of their beliefs, but also because of their mastery of the PR techniques of associationism, which facilitate obfuscation and stereotyping on a vast scale.
It is easy to design something that looks impressive on a computer. What's hard is to design something that is connected to the reality of the people who use it. Take the example of Web pages, in particular the home pages of companies and universities. When I look up a Web page for a company or university, at least half the time I am looking for an address or phone number. But far too many Web sites omit that basic information, or else they bury it in some random location that you have to drill though a dozen pages to find. These sites are designed by people who tacitly believe that the Internet is a zone of reality wholly unto itself, and they are not designing from the standpoint of the Internet as one part of a larger ecology of media. University Web sites often exhibit a further problem, which is that they fail to link to the home pages of individual faculty members. Often these sites are designed by the public relations people, who try to make them self-contained. Those PR-designed Web sites usually look okay, but they too often exhibit an almost creepy disregard of the questions that any real person wants answered. Those questions are usually answered on the home pages that the faculty maintain for themselves, yet somehow in year seven (or whatever it is) of the Web era, we still have no uniform mechanism for searching for an individual's home page given only their name. The commercial search engines don't remotely suffice for this purpose. It's frustrating. Last complaint: too many US companies do not list phone numbers that can be called outside the United States. They just list 800 numbers.
Some URL's.
The Learning Marketspace (belligerent proponents of technology in higher education) http://www.center.rpi.edu/lforum/ldflm.html
Research on the Effectiveness of Distance Learning in Higher Education http://www.ihep.com/difference.pdf
Career Outcomes of English PhD's http://www.cgsnet.org/Communicator_Online/september1999.htm and click on the link that promises PDF for Communicator Online
tools for world wide dialup http://kropla.com/phones.htm
Symposium on Narrative Intelligence http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~michaelm/narrative.html
Critiques of Libertarianism http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/tenets.htm http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/skepticism
Latest Management Research and Practice http://www.mcb.co.uk/lmrp/
Internet video broadcasts of civic meetings http://stream.hoosier.net/cats/
Encyclopedia Britannica online for free www.britannica.com
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