On Social Distance

“‘Social distancing’ has actually lived several lives. It and its precursor, ‘social distance,’ had long been used in a variety of colloquial and academic contexts, both as prescriptions and descriptions, before being taken up by epidemiologists in this century. In the nineteenth century, ‘social distance’ was a polite euphemism used by the British to talk about class and by Americans to talk about race. It was then formally adopted in the 1920s by sociologists as a term to facilitate the quantitative codification that was then being introduced into the nascent study of race relations. In the second half of the twentieth century, psychiatry, anthropology, and zoology all adapted it for various purposes. And it was used in the 1990s in the United States to analyze what happened to the gay community when faced with straight fears of contagion. It was only in 2004 in a CDC publication on controlling the recent SARS outbreak that the term ‘social distance’ was finally deployed for the first time by the medical community. The history I trace here doesn’t presume that the doctors who appropriated it to control disease knew about its legacy, or that these links are relationships of causation. But there was something in the air in 2004 that encouraged the practices we now know as social distancing to be christened in this way—as if its past meanings had coalesced into a semantic atmosphere ripe for the emergence of this new use. Which is why if you think the term is weird, you’re right.”

Lily Cherlis, “Distantiated Communities: A Social History of Social Distancing,” cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/scherlis_lily_30_april_2020.php. Cherlis chose Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1560 Children’s Games for her touchstone image. It made me think of L. S. Lowry’s 1943 Going to Work in Manchester above.

On Cosmopolitanism

“Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term, not least for its anti-Semitic undertones. On the right, it is an epithet for bleeding-heart liberals who support looser immigration policies, foreign aid, and multilateral efforts to confront climate change. On the left (and the nativist right), it is used to describe the Davos crowd and footloose capitalists. But as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Tradition, cosmopolitanism has a rich history as a mode of political and ethical thought, one that ‘urges us to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings.’ ...But how such claims are to be determined and adjudicated remains unresolved. Nussbaum’s intent is not to argue for a world government; nor does she put much store in the modern system of foreign aid. Rather, her purpose is to determine whether cosmopolitanism can be made sufficient for a world in which it has already become necessary—that is, a world of nation-states comprising individuals on deeply unequal material footings, who are nonetheless more interconnected than ever. Nussbaum concludes that the cosmopolitan tradition ‘must be revised but need not be rejected.’ She proposes that it be replaced by her own version of the ‘Capability Approach’ to development.”

Stuart Whatley, “After Cosmopolitanism,” - hedgehogreview.com/issues/monsters/articles/after-cosmopolitanism

On Hermits

“The Thebaid is a collection of texts telling of the saints who in the first centuries of Christianity retreated to the barren lands around the Egyptian city of Thebes. In the Uffizi painting we meet a mass of isolates, each man declaring: ‘I want to be alone...’ It is harder to achieve the via contemplativa in the age of rolling news. That’s one virtue of the desert: no wifi. What one needs is a Working From Home hero. I have set Antonello da Messina’s ‘Saint Jerome in His Study’ (c.1475) as my desktop background. Jerome, one of the four fathers of the western church, the scholar who translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin, sits at his desk. Formerly a penitent in the desert, where he removed a thorn from a lion’s paw, we meet Jerome now serenely retired to a spacious cell in Bethlehem... Jerome’s colonnaded cell is a proper work-in-progress study: books propped, spines bent, ribbons marking places. Vincenzo Catena’s ‘Saint Jerome’ (c.1510), also in the National Gallery collection, is a one-tome-at-a-time man. His tidy cubbyholes hold clasped volumes, candlesticks, flasks and what looks promisingly like a biscuit tin. He seems to be nodding off. But that’s all right. ‘Read often,’ Jerome advised his followers, ‘and learn all you can. Let sleep steal upon you with a book in your hand, and let the sacred page catch your drooping head.’”

Laura Freeman, “The Art of the Hermit” - spectator.co.uk/article/the-art-of-the-hermit. Kindle owners will know that the device screensaver includes an image of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving of Saint Jerome in his Study (included here), a popular renaissance theme. For another reflection on the ebb and flow of isolated life, see also Terry Eagleton’s review of David Vincent'’s A History of Solitude here: theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/19/history-solitude-david-vincent-biography-loneliness-fay-bound-alberti-review

On Digital History

“History, as a discipline, comes out of the archive... enter the smartphone, and cheap digital photography. Instead of reading papers during an archival visit, historians can snap pictures of the documents and then look at them later. Ian Milligan, a historian at the University of Waterloo, noticed the trend among his colleagues and surveyed 250 historians, about half of them tenured or tenure-track, and half in other positions, about their work in the archives. The results quantified the new normal. While a subset of researchers (about 23 percent) took few (fewer than 200) photos, the plurality (about 40 percent) took more than 2,000 photographs for their ‘last substantive project’... the literal job of doing history has changed. It works through screens now; that much is for sure. Now we’ll have to look to the historians to document what that means.”

Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Way We Write History Has Changed” - theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/smartphone-archives-history-photography/605284/. Interesting summary of the ways in which archival work has become more accessible to a wider variety of scholars. The author’s brief description of such work sums up the experience quite well: “You put your things in a special locker, keeping only laptop, phone, pencil. You’re inspected for purity on the way into the sanctum and instructed in a series of obscure rights and responsibilities that attend to touching this very special paper.” I’ve added such work to my research process over the past few years, and in part, caught this odd little strain of archive fever, to recall Derrida’s comment.

On Divided Attention

“Price’s book about books reads like an anthology of ironies, including several that pertain directly to it. This book is self-consciously shaped by, and susceptible to, its own account of how we read now. Price takes divided attention for a virtue, and practically invites a reader to keep a device nearby to flesh out her examples. Almost every piece of data has its own story to tell. Perhaps more than any genre, nonfiction has been changed by the Internet, which turns a biography or a history book into a series of fascinating leads. Every reader brings her own curiosity to the printed text, and builds her own customized version out of adjacent or supplemental research... Though books have been mythologized as the one ‘non-database’ in a world of searchable content, readers have always ‘skipped and skimmed’ books, as Price points out, or rearranged them mentally, or composed their own tailored indexes for fast information retrieval. It is not unheard of to break a book’s binding and reorder its pages. I have a Latin lexicon from the seventeenth century, once owned by a clergyman. He essentially built his own search engine in it, affixing homemade calfskin tabs to its pages to mark the entries he consulted the most. Another copy of that book, with tabs in other spots, would be a different book. When a book sits next to the Internet, its authority as the final word on anything is automatically undermined.”

Dan Chiasson, “Reader, I Googled It,” newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/reader-i-googled-it. An interesting review of Price’s recent, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading.

On Essentialization

“I’m most interested in how science and religion came to be essentialised such that we can talk about there being a relationship between them. The standard view is to think that today we’ve got science and religion, and that these things, or something analogous to them, are perennial features of human cultures. On this view, we look at history to see what essential relationship there is between them. I think that’s totally mistaken. What we see happening in the West is the emergence of quite specific conceptions of religion during roughly the 17th century. The very idea of ‘religion’, then, is a distinctively modern, Western notion. ‘Science’ too, to some extent. Our present understanding of what science is is also something we see developing over time. It’s really only in the 19th century that we get our current conception of the natural sciences as constituting a coherent body of disciplines that share some essential features.”

Peter Harrison, “The Best Books on the History of Science and Religion Recommended by Peter Harrison,” fivebooks.com/best-books/history-science-and-religion-peter-harrison/.

On Walking

“Before the advent of scientific evidence and philosophical guidance on the subject, literary odes to the creative and health benefits of walking flourished... Writers from Petrarch to Franz Kafka to Will Self have recorded their enthusiasm for, in Minshull’s words, ‘ambling, rambling, tramping, trekking, stomping and striding.’ Higher-quality endorsements of the creative value of walking than these would be hard to find. Yet the more I read, the more questions this 21st-century renaissance of pedestrian evangelism raised in my mind. No, I haven’t lost my desire, Kierkegaard, but I think about my desire differently—and wish I didn’t.”

Michael Lapointe, “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking,” theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/how-walking-became-pedestrian-duncan-minshull-erling-kagge-walking/592792/. I must admit to the benefits of peripatetic thinking. Very lucky to have Newcastle’s beaches for its particular joys of ambulation.

On Enlightenment Humor

“For the Earl of Shaftesbury, to practice the comic spirit is to be easy, natural, flexible, and tolerant rather than stiff-necked and fanatical. Humor is a splendid palliative for ‘superstition and melancholy delusion.’ Satire, with its coarse belligerence, is a cultural residue of a more abrasive, agonistic world, and is now to be tempered by good humor and an irenic spirit, which spring from the genteel classes’ belief in their own inexhaustible benevolence. Men and women are to be seduced rather than censured into virtue, humored rather than harangued. As the historian Keith Thomas remarks, the early eighteenth century is a period when ‘humor grows kindly and...bizarre quirks of personality are not aberrations calling for satiric attack but amiable eccentricities to be savored and enjoyed.’ Hegel notes in his Philosophy of Fine Art that in modern comedy, imperfections and irregularities are objects of entertainment rather than disdain”

Terry Eagleton, “The Politics of Humor,” - commonwealmagazine.org/whose-laughter-which-comedy

On Distractions

“Medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating. And concentration was their lifelong work! Their tech was obviously different from ours. But their anxiety about distraction was not. They complained about being overloaded with information, and about how, even once you finally settled on something to read, it was easy to get bored and turn to something else. They were frustrated by their desire to stare out of the window, or to constantly check on the time (in their case, with the Sun as their clock), or to think about food or sex when they were supposed to be thinking about God. They even worried about getting distracted in their dreams... John Cassian, whose thoughts about thinking influenced centuries of monks, knew this problem all too well... That was in the late 420s. If John Cassian had seen a smartphone, he’d have forecasted our cognitive crisis in a heartbeat.”

Jamie Kreiner, “How to Reduce Digital Distractions: Advice from Medieval Monks” - aeon.co/ideas/how-to-reduce-digital-distractions-advice-from-medieval-monks

On Cooking Technology

“Next book? Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life by Albert Borgmann, a philosopher who studied briefly under Heidegger. It was published 1984 and is definitely one of the foundational texts in philosophy of technology. Its chief contribution was to bring the focus on quality of life into the analysis. The point he was making in this book was that there are basically two types of paradigm to think about technology. On the one hand is the device paradigm: where all our experiences and daily life are somehow mediated by gadgets and technology. We heat our food in microwaves and use our heating systems to heat our house and listen to recorded music rather than going to concerts. The second, his normative idea, the one he wanted to be in, was the focal paradigm: and that was the real thing – like cooking your own food. His classic example of the device paradigm was buying frozen food in a supermarket, heating it in a microwave, and eating it while watching television. The good life and his alternative to that would be gathering the whole family and cooking your food on a stove, spending some time doing it and sitting down and conversing.”

“The Best Books on Philosophy of Technology: Recommended by Evgeny Morozov” - fivebooks.com/best-books/evgeny-morozov-philosophy-technology/