Philosophical notes…
On Paper Surveillance
An interesting article was just posted reviewing Ben Kafka's recent book The Demon of Paperwork: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. It's interesting in pointing out the bureaucratic nature of writing, and, more importantly its optimistic promise of the power of transparency in making governments accountable. Precisely here, the gordian knot of surveillance and citizenship is tied.
“The hope of some of the French revolutionaries was that paperwork would rationalize the state, that it would depersonalize power and destroy the corrupt networks of aristocratic influence.... While this desire can turn documentation into what Kafka calls a “technology of political representation” by which citizens can track whether the state is serving their interests, it also makes paperwork into a voracious medium that authorizes blanket surveillance of citizens and their reconstitution as vulnerable data sets as a condition of citizenship. You are no one without your permanent file. Part of Kafka’s achievement in The Demon of Paperwork is to show how readily revolutionary optimism is undone by administrative surveillance, even when it’s adopted in the revolution’s name. Revolution promises to wash away the most intractable social problems, but then paperwork rears itself to show that these problems have only been displaced to an impersonal and intractable medium.”
Paperwork Against the People" Dissent - http://bit.ly/Y4vCzZ
On Cursive
“I did also once ask my daughter’s teachers what they thought they were doing by teaching her cursive. When they realised this was not a rhetorical question but a literal one, there was bemusement and panic. “It’s just what we do,” one said. “We always have.” Another ventured the answer I’d anticipated; that the children will be able to write faster, and then added that she thought she’d seen some research somewhere showing that some children find the flowing movements help to imprint the shape of whole words more clearly in their mind. ”
Philip Ball, "Curse of Cursive Handwriting" Prospect - http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=131155
16th Century Kindle
“One of the defining features of Kindles and iPads and their fellow e-readers is their ability to store tons of books in the same place, at the same time. Which means that, thanks to these quintessentially twenty-first-century technologies, we are newly encouraged to consume our books not as long meals, but as occasional snacks: a few nibbles of Moby-Dick here, a few bites of Bossypants there. Under e-readers’ influence, the linear project of book-reading — from page 1 to page 501, sequentially — has shifted to something much more chaotic, much more casual, much more accommodating to whimsy and whim. Literary restlessness, though, dates back much further than the 21st century. It dates back, at least, to the 16th — to the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, and to his desire for a reading interface that would allow for book-borne snacking.”
"Behold, The 16th Century Kindle," The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/Y4uHzv
Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, via Wikimedia Commons
Kant's Beer
The following joke is usually told with different characters, but it works just as well as follows: Descartes, Hume and Kant walk into a bar. They each order a beer. A fly lands in their steins' suds. Descartes, calculates the volume of liquid oblivious to the fly. Hume, enraged by the presence of the fly orders another beer. Kant, picks up the fly and says, "Spit it out! Spit it out!"
Kant not only intuitively sees the fly (empiricism), but does so according to his categories of understanding (rationalism). It's not a precise analogy, and too bad Kant is said to have advocated teetotalism, but it made me laugh nonetheless.
Locke and Hobbes
I was reading in philosophical hermeneutics this past month for something I was writing. I came across an excellent essay by Anthony Thiselton on "New Testament Interpretation in Historical Perspective." What jumped out at me was how much time political philosophers like Locke and Hobbes spent interpreting the bible to promote their own rationalist aims. Mark Lilla makes a similar point in his recent The Stillborn God. Whereas some secularists avoid theology for the sake of the political order, Lilla contends that the key to a healthy secular society is a certain degree of sophistication in political theology. He cites Hobbes in particular as a master at using political theology towards secularising ends. In any case, whether religious or not, theological literacy is valuable to thinking and engaging the claims of religion in public.
This March 21, Russell Blackford will be giving a Religion in Political Life seminar at the University of Newcastle's Cultural Collections. He'll discuss his new Blackwells Press book, Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, where he explicitly discusses Locke's proposal. In any case, here's how Thiselton puts it:
“There is a parallel to Locke in the response of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) to royalist appeals to Christian theology to support the divine right of kings and to parliamentarian appeals to a doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to support a more egalitarian political order. Locke and Hobbes approached theological issues independently against a theologically or ecclesially manipulative background. Locke produced a painstaking critical apparatus of notes on Paul to serve the single ‘plain meaning,’ which was to cut across all social and religious attempts to commandeer Pauline texts for manipulative purposes. His motivation was not a ‘secular worldview’ as such; he was a religious man. The issue was not an assimilation of Christian faith into his empirical or rationalist philosophy. Too often Locke has been seen through the eyes of the ecclesiastical writers of his own time who formulated counterattacks against his use of the common sense ‘reason’ and his appeals to the ‘plain sense’ of the Bible. But he appealed to reason, not against genuine faith as such, but against manipulative religion, whether from the political and religious left or from the political and religious right.”
Stems and Soil
This time of year I often feel the need to say why the humanities matter in a university. It's linked to why I get up in the morning or do what I think I am doing in this vocation. But I also feel obligated to explain its value for incoming students. Implied here is the question, "What do I do with that degree?" To some extent this is an economic question of sustenance. But, so too, implied by this question are metaphysical suppositions about what "matters." Increasingly, our understanding of the world is shaped by a rather limited materialism which refuses to face questions of love, beauty, history and cultural and philosophical beliefs. Terry Eagleton's recent Faith, Reason and Revolution addressed this, and I don't mean to suggest that there is not a live debate here. Quite the opposite. It seems increasingly important to raise the materialist question again and again in order to avoid the rather banal assumption that degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM subjects, can do without the soil of the humanities.
Of course, nobody would deny that we need more engineers to help design better buildings, more efficient transport, and biologists to keep working on cures to the pandemics we face. Some of the most complex mathematics sit behind one of the most simple buttons we click each day, Google's search.
As I introduced the incoming students studying philosophy this year, the key value I hope they learn is cognative empathy, that ability to step into the shoes of another and really understand their disposition. Reading others well, especially those we disagree with, is crucial to this habit. It seems to me that the humanities are about training students in the habits of the mind which underwrite civil society. They provide the historical, literary and cultural understanding to examine and interrogate the human condition.
To use another analogy, one of the great challenges in physics today is to develop a theory which can account for newtonian and quantum mechanics together. "God does not play with dice," Einstein quipped, at the rather probabilistic whacky-ness of the quantum view of reality. The challenge can also be summed up as the relationship between two forces. While gravity is a weak force which nonetheless orders planetary movements, the atomic forces which quantum mechanics accounts for are incredibly strong. The world that seems solid and stable to us is actually mostly empty space held together by atomic forces, electrons, neutrons, etc. The analogy is that whereas the STEM subjects seem to be rather strong forces building, healing and creating, the humanities function like weak gravity. Understanding other human beings, the ability to empathise with the positions of others, is a weak force. However, our everyday sense of decency to others utterly depends upon it.
As so many recent philosophers have understood, the enlightenment values which undergird our societies are fragile. The so-called postmodern critique of the likes of Derrida were meant to call our attention to this fragility, not undermine it.
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.