Philosophical notes…
You're Distracted
“The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students’ awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill’s course, ‘Information and Contemplation,’ goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation—during class—to sharpen their attention.”
"You're Distracted, This Professor Can Help" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/16c1Obi
How Movements Recover
“Like most of the world, I don’t know much about Pope Francis, but it’s hard not to be impressed by someone who says he prefers a church that suffers ‘accidents on the streets’ to a church that is sick because it self-referentially closes in on itself.”
David Brooks, "How Movements Recover," - http://nyti.ms/Xh8YVS
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