Philosophical notes…
The Wealth of Words
“Why should vocabulary size be related to achieved intelligence and real-world competence?... Words are fantastically effective chunking devices. Suppose you put a single item into your working memory—say, “Pasteur.” So long as you hold in your long-term memory a lot of associations with that name, you don’t need to dredge them up and try to cram them into your working memory. The name serves as a brief proxy for whatever aspects will turn out to be needed to cope with your problem. The more readily available such proxies are for you, the better you will be at dealing with various problems. Extend this example to whole spheres of knowledge and experience, and you’ll realize that a large vocabulary is a powerful coping device that enhances one’s general cognitive ability.”
E.D. Hirsch, "A Wealth of Words" City Journal - http://bit.ly/VsmTgn
On Jewish Words
“‘[N]o other premodern people,’ Oz and Oz-Salzberger insist, ‘were systematically exposed, in this way, to written texts in their homes across a broad social spectrum.’ At the very least, the primacy of Torah study set Jews apart. For their first 12 or 13 years of life, Jewish children would (and do) listen to their families engage in prayer and tell stories; as soon as they are old enough to do so, they begin to read and memorize prayers and tractates on their own. Upon reaching the appropriate age, children undergo a bar or bat mitzvah, a ceremony that not only anoints them as adults but entrusts them with the ‘textual legacy’ of the Jewish people. In the eyes of Oz and Oz-Salzberger, ‘this piece of social history is […] the single most important fact about the survival of the Jews.’
Then there is the fact that many of Judaism’s most venerated heroes are scholars, sages, and priests. Even King David was a poet. Moses, meanwhile, achieved his eminence not just by leading the Jews to the promised land but by bringing them the Ten Commandments, that most canonical of written texts. Even in their myths, authorship and education offered Jews the surest path to achieving renown. And scholarship, as Oz and Oz-Salzberger convincingly argue, could also be the key to being remembered at all: ‘From late antiquity until early modernity, most of the Jews on historical record are on record because they studied.’”
Jacob Silverman, "Trading Faith for Wonder: On Judaism's Literary Legacy," Los Angeles Review of Books - http://bit.ly/V7HrFl
Enlightenment Surveillance?
A recent post in Oxford's "Practical Ethics" blog prompted me to think about some of my past work on surveillance. I've posted a few comments here.
“New York City contemplates using aerial drones for surveillance purposes, while North Korea buys thousands of cameras to spy on its impoverished population. Britain has so many cameras they cease being newsworthy. The stories multiply – it is trivial to note we are moving towards a surveillance society.
In an earlier post, I suggested surrendering on surveillance might be the least bad option – of all likely civil liberty encroachments, this seemed the less damaging and hardest to resist. But that’s an overly defensive way of phrasing it – if ubiquitous surveillance and lack of privacy are the trends of the future, we shouldn’t just begrudgingly accept them, but demand that society gets the most possible out of them. In this post, I’m not going to suggest how to achieve enlightened surveillance (a 360 degree surveillance would be a small start, for instance), but just outline some of the positive good we could get from it. We all know the negatives; but what good could come from corporations, governments and neighbours being able to peer continually into your bedroom (and efficiently process that data)? In the ideal case, how could we make it work for us?”
Stuart Armstrong, "Enlightened Surveillance," Practical Ethics, The University of Oxford - http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/?p=5487
There are two things about this post which I wanted to question briefly.
Firstly, yes, I think this is basically right, we are moving towards a surveillance society and the social and economic logics which are driving this move are seemingly inevitable. It's important to note however that although the electrification of surveillance is new, the practice of tracking and tracing citizens has a much longer history. Surveillance is linked to the history of writing, which begins not with poetry but with mesopotamian bureaucracy. Enlightenment scepticism about surveillance is rooted in a critique of this bureaucratic power. Current concerns about privacy and the integrity of individuals are only one symptom of this longer history. In this sense, surveillance is very old and public concern about its electronic and digital forms are a continuation of a longer engagement. Thinking about how to get the most out of surveillance is, then, a rather banal comment. It's a central concern of democratic cultures for the last three hundred years and is written into many of our constitutions.
Secondly, however, the author of this post passingly notes that "we all know the negatives." I disagree. Part of my previous research on this topic was to uncover some of the hidden costs and dynamics of a surveillance society. The key paradox I tried to show was that the very camera which is said to bring safety, simultaneously undermines it. The reason is that precisely by tracking an individual, it alienates them from their neighbour. We see this time and again in the way people live in highly surveillanced societies. The goal is not to get to know your neighbours, but rather to get a camera up in your neighbourhood, so that when they do something wrong they can be caught by somebody in power. This practice undermines the reciprocity of human relationships, the engagement and communitarian practices where people do not live in constant fear of who is lurking beyond their surveillanced boundaries. The very idea of total surveillance demonstrates the paradox. Human people cannot be completely surveyed. It is a practical impossibility to see all that a person is and is doing. More to the point, however, there is always an excess lurking beyond the data being tracked. This excess leaves citizens with an even more severe fear, of the "other" beyond the camera'd walls, or the "other" beyond the political reach of the particular state in power, or indeed, the various ways in which people always find ways to circumvent the surveillance apparatus. The farce of "360 degree surveillance" only perpetuates the possibility that such a goal may, in the end, produce the least safe society in human history.
A recent Brazilian film, Neighboring Sounds, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, explores this dynamic of safe, surveillanced building complexes in neighborhoods that are springing up all over the globe. The geographer Emanuel Castells' notion of a "space of flows" is relevant here, in that it is increasingly possible to land in any city in the world and enter a frictionless, glass walled pleasure ground just like the one you came from. All the while the makeshift rick-shacks of the have-nots and service class live just out of view. The film brilliantly captures the paradox of the safety these neighborhoods promise. The soundtrack and camera work both foster a sense of unheimlich, of terror. As the film critic A. O. Scott commented, "No one can quite see or hear what is coming, but something is out there, just on the other side of the whatever we think keeps us safe."
In the end, I agree that surveillance is an inevitable part of contemporary society and will continue. So too, the idea of enlightenment surveillance is redundant. Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, who promoted independent thought and self-governance were acutely aware of the power of governments to survey their citizens. However, this very recognition of the longer condition of surveillance should make us even more critical of its current uses and abuses. The "negatives" are not well known, and turn out to be far more problematic and paradoxical than a mere concern for privacy might suggest. A luddite response is impossible at this stage. We must think technology through.
Where Prayer Echoes
An amazing set of photos has been published on the NY Times' Lens blog. It's a sample of Kenro Izu's exhibition "Where Prayer Echoes," at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhatten.
“Another experience nine years later in India changed how — and what — he shot. He was at a temple he had often photographed, Mr. Izu said, when he noticed how the faithful often left the sanctuary to bathe on the beach outside. In all the times he had gone there, he had not documented those rituals followed by thousands of pilgrims. ‘I had just photographed the temple from all angles from inside and outside,’ he said. ‘But without the people, it was just a shell. If you build a temple it does not have to be majestic. You can build a house, but once people come in and make an altar and start to pray, then it becomes a temple or church.’”
"Kenro Izu's Classic Portraits of the Faithful" NY Times - http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=122957
Gutenberg's Ghost
“None of this means that, in the end, e-books won’t come to dominate book sales. My own sense is that they probably will. But, as we enter 2013, I’m considerably less confident in that prediction than I was a few years back, when, in the wake of the initial Kindle surge, e-book sales were growing at 200 or 300 percent annually. At the very least, it seems like the transition from print to electronic will take a lot longer than people expected. Don’t close that Gutenberg parenthesis just yet.”
Nicholas Carr, "Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?" - http://bit.ly/S5FbTl
Culture of Copy
“Libraries should lead the charge in advancing the values of print culture, just as they need to consider the ways that Internet-based information should be archived and preserved. Print media fills in for the vast limitations of Internet media—serving as its ultimate backup and giving fixity to information. As we drive technology forward, an equally important task is to preserve the best of what’s left behind. We are living in the Internet’s revolutionary generation. The decisions we make now will affect culture for many years to come.”
James Panero, "The Culture of the Copy" - http://bit.ly/S5EQ31
Embodiment
“Starting as early as the 1970s, some cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and linguists began to wonder whether meaning wasn’t something totally different from a language of thought [Call it Mentalese, whichtranslates words into actual concepts: a polar bear or speed limit, for instance]. They suggested that—instead of abstract symbols—meaning might really be something much more closely intertwined with our real experiences in the world, with the bodies that we have. As a self-conscious movement started to take form, it took on a name, embodiment, which started to stand for the idea that meaning might be something that isn’t distilled away from our bodily experiences but is instead tightly bound by them. For you, the word dog might have a deep and rich meaning that involves the ways you physically interact with dogs—how they look and smell and feel. But the meaning of polar bear will be totally different, because you likely don’t have those same experiences of direct interaction.”
Benjamin Bergen, "Embodied Cognition," Scientific American - http://bit.ly/UjP0tQ
White Christmas
Summer Christmas is a southern hemisphere event. No bundling up to build snowmen. Rather, Australians strip down to as little as is legal and hop into the sea. Not noble firs, but barbecue's alight to grill prawns and Moreten Bay bugs. Choirs sing carols of silent and holy nights alongside those of green gullies, cool streams and brown paddocks. Although you'd think that sun, sand and surf would not make for a white Christmas, I awoke this year to the Australian equivalent. An overcast sky, mist, and humidity diffused the intense light of dawn into a singular seascape. It made me think of Rothko paintings, especially "Untitled 1, 1969." Some years ago I heard an art critic summarise Rothko's work as follows:
“I’m not afraid you won’t think this Mark Rothko beautiful, but what I am afraid, a little, somebody might think it’s just beautiful. Lovely colors. No meaning. But meaning is what he was all about, and he would have been furiously angry if anyone thought that, and told you so in suitably salty language. It was subject matter that mattered most to him. And the subject matter was the emotions. Not small, personal emotions – up today, down tomorrow – but the great timeless emotions. How we feel about death, and courage, and ecstacy. He was convinced that if you would just encounter his paintings, that emotion would be communicated to you with absolute clarity. So to achieve this he painted very large. Because in a small painting – big you, little painting – you can control it. But with a large painting, it controls you. You’re taken into it. Unless of course you look at it from a distance, that killing, assessing look. So to combat that, he insisted that always the light be very dim, so you couldn’t actually see the thing until you were right up against it. And then something does begin to happen. He painted with very thin mists of paint, feathering it on, breathing it on. And you are taken up, out of yourself, into something greater, something transcendent and majestic. If you can think of a religious painting without religion, this is what you experience here. It’s so timeless, that when I’ve had this encounter, I feel to return to the world of time, I have to shake my head and bring myself down to earth again.”
I've always thought that such an oceanside morning likely inspired the timeless transcendence of this painting. It seems the Pace Gallery in London had the same idea, juxtaposing Rothko's work with Hiroshi Sugimoto's photos in an exhibition, "Dark Paintings and Seascapes." So too, apropos Christmas, Rothko's work aspired to the religious beyond religion. This is a trick theologians have been keen to emulate, and the trend goes back to romantics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, who wrote about our "sense and taste for the infinite" in his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. In any case, my ghosts of Christmas past haunt me here, if only to remind me that there are many ways to celebrate the beauty and mystery of the season.
On Techno-Utopianism
“Lanier has another problem with the techno-utopians, though. It’s not just that they’ve crashed the economy, but that they’ve made a joke out of spirituality by creating, and worshiping, “the Singularity”—the “Nerd Rapture,” as it’s been called. The belief that increasing computer speed and processing power will shortly result in machines acquiring “artificial intelligence,” consciousness, and that we will be able to upload digital versions of ourselves into the machines and achieve immortality. Some say as early as 2020, others as late as 2045. One of its chief proponents, Ray Kurzweil, was on NPR recently talking about his plans to begin resurrecting his now dead father digitally.”
"What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?" Smithsonian Magazine - http://bit.ly/12SyHrU
Secret Reading Lives
“‘There’s such an increasing awareness today of nontextual uses of books,’ [Price] says. ‘Now that the textual meaning of books is migrating online, all that’s left is an empty shell.’”
"Secret Reading Lives, Revealed" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/TsxUtw