A Tale of Three Loves, Part Two

As one who chose to become a philosopher, I have often felt some dismay at the fact that science seems to guard its territory, i.e. the natural and physical world, from incursions by other disciplines. It is as though scientists say, "You poets go over there and sing your songs; you philosophers go that way and speculate; but leave the study of nature to the professionals. We have instruments, calculations, and empirical data, after all. What do you have but pretty words and abstract notions? Your heads are in the clouds, while we soberly examine the real world."

So there.

Ours is a scientistic civilization, which is to say one that affords science with the prestige we used to give religion in terms of providing us with ultimate truth. Scientism is not science but rather a philosophical doctrine which holds that science is the supreme arbiter of truth in everything--including what have traditionally been considered matters of the heart and of the spirit, the answers for which have traditionally been provided by things like religious faith, philosophical wisdom, or literary and artistic works.

This worship of science as the be-all and end-all of human knowledge has created an unnecessary conflict between science and other forms of knowledge in our culture. As a young science lover who also loved to write stories and draw, and who had a religious upbringing, I never understood what the big deal was. Whether or not I actually heard it or read it, I knew instinctively the dictum that "All truth is God's truth." All modes of human knowledge were valid. They did not contradict each other, but rather were complementary, members of a team that worked together toward the common goal of understanding reality. Each member of the team had a different job, and each member was valuable and important in its own way.

It is true that each field of knowledge has its particular domain, its area of expertise and authority. However, the definitions of these boundaries may not always be properly understood. I feel that this is the case with science in today's world. Yes, science studies the natural world. But that does not mean that science provides us with all possible truth about nature, and it does not mean that other disciplines such as philosophy, poetry, and art cannot tell us anything about nature that science cannot tell us.

For it is not enough to say that science studies nature. Science studies nature in a particular way--a scientific way. It observes, records, experiments, verifies, and makes hypotheses and theories about general laws of nature. But is this quantitative approach the only way to study nature or to know anything about it?

I would say no. There is an assumption in our culture that if someone is interested in the wonders of the natural world or the mysteries of the physical universe (as I very much was when I was a boy), that person should study science. Well, science is good--I've made it plain that I have had a lifelong passion for it myself--but it is only part of the picture. Science seeks to approach nature objectively (although many philosophers will point out that it is never truly, completely objective), without reference to any human values. (It can be thought of as the Dragnet approach: "Just the facts, ma'am.") The humanities, on the other hand, are by definition concerned with human values and seek to understand reality in human terms. Why can't the humanities--things like philosophy, poetry, art--seek to understand and know the natural world in their own way? Why can't a poet tell us things about a flower, for instance, that a scientist cannot tell us? The poet speaks a different language than the scientist, and is looking at different aspects of the same thing... but why isn't the poet's knowledge about the flower valued as highly as the scientist's quantitative data? What about the philosopher's musings about the nature of the flower? The artist's vision of the beauty of the flower?

Of course, the reason lies in our ideas about what makes knowledge valid and valuable, and our current bias is toward the practical, the verifiable, the quantifiable. All very useful in the world of business, industry, and technology, but if we (quite unreasonably) accept that this is all there is to life, we find ourselves living in a very dull and drab world indeed.

A Tale of Three Loves, Part One

Science was one of my first loves in life. When I wasn't reading books about outer space, the prehistoric past, the arcane secrets of mathematics and physics, or the animals and plants of Florida and the world, I was peering through a telescope at the cold evening stars, or through a microscope at the weird world of incredibly small things, or perhaps experimenting with a chemistry set, examining the organs of the Visible Man, trying to predict the weather by observing cloud and wind patterns, building and launching model rockets, or collecting pet walkingsticks, snails, and Venus flytraps. Even my tastes in fiction, movies, and TV shows reflected my deep and fond attraction toward science, for my favorite genre in each was--what else?--science fiction.

With such solid and impressive science-nerd credentials, no one could accuse me of being unfriendly toward or ignorant about science. When I started college, I was planning to major in Biology, with the idea of perhaps becoming a zoologist and studying animals in the wild. But, after the first day of Philosophy 101, I decided I wanted to be a Philosophy major, and the rest is history. I had already been tentatively exposed to philosophy prior to this, through discussions with my father, so I was already predisposed to an interest in the subject, but upon this more formal introduction, my curious like blossomed into ardent love.

Meanwhile, my passion for my old flame Science, I am sad to say, flagged during my undergrad years. It had already decreased somewhat in intensity during my teens, but around the time I graduated from high school, I experienced a renaissance of my artistic and creative side (which had also been strongly apparent in my childhood in the form of drawing and writing), and I became focused on making music, writing poetry and fiction, and cultivating my newfound fervor for the arts in general. Science during this time, unfortunately, lay all but forgotten in the dust. My interest in science did not begin to recover until around the time I graduated with my philosophy degree, and has continued to grow throughout my adult life until today it has reclaimed its rightful place beside philosophy and literature as one of my primary intellectual passions.

All of this has given me a heightened awareness of the relationships between science, philosophy, and literature, and the ways in which they are alike and different, complementary and sometimes seemingly in conflict.

My current love for science, while in one sense just as pure as in my youth, is in another sense more complicated. For one thing, I see now that there is a distinction to be made between science itself and that which science studies, which is essentially the same thing we call "nature" (in the broadest sense of that term, including the whole universe and all of physical reality). Science is of course one method--in our modern civilization it is the predominant, and seemingly exclusive, method--of studying the natural world. But what I understand now is that it is not necessarily the only way to know and understand the natural world. While I continue to admire and esteem science as an essential human mode of understanding, I am adamantly opposed to scientism--the opinion that science is the only way, or even just a vastly superior way, of attaining knowledge about everything. To truly love and respect this lady Science does not mean putting her up on a pedestal and worshipping her as an idol.

(to be continued)

The Once and Future American Classicism

When I worked as the serials librarian at St. Petersburg Public Library, I was in charge of a large collection of periodicals, many of them in old hardbound volumes, spanning a range of time going back to the late 19th century. I undertook an inventory of these periodicals, since the vast collection had never been catalogued and the library needed to know what exactly it had (what we librarians call "intellectual control").

During the course of this inventory (a project which took up many months), I enjoyed glancing through these thick volumes of old magazines, each volume a sort of time machine taking me to a particular moment in the history of American popular culture. As I explored these weighty, dusty volumes with their crumbling, brittle pages, I was struck by the high aesthetic quality of much of the graphic design exhibited in the pages of these old magazines. Particularly in magazine covers, advertisements, or illustrations from the mid-20th century, I admired the simplicity and elegance in these images, whether they were paintings or photographs.

This graceful visual aesthetic, so foreign to the cluttered and gaudy visual culture of our Internet age, is something I see not only in graphic design but also in much of the architecture, furniture, movies, and fashions of roughly the middle third of the last century. This is, of course, what is commonly known today as "midcentury modernism", but what occurred to me as I viewed the wonderful and tasteful images in old magazines such as a 1930s Fortune or a 1950s Collier's is that this midcentury aesthetic is a kind of American Classicism.

When I call it "classicism", I'm deliberately comparing it to the aesthetic culture of ancient Greece and Rome. There have of course been revivals of "classical" aesthetics before, most notably in the Renaissance and later in the Classical Revival of the 18th century. The early American Republic, which consciously modeled itself after the ancient Roman Republic, constructed many of its important public buildings in a modified neoclassical style. But after World War I, and all the more so after World War II, when the United States came of age as a dominant world power, American culture and aesthetics seemed to come into its own as well.

Rather than imitating the style of the Greeks and Romans, it was as if the United States had suddenly discovered its own voice, its own unique style and aesthetic expression. In this way, American modernism was decidedly unclassical, a distinctively modern and forward-looking aesthetic that left the past far behind. However, I came to see that it was fitting to describe this new style as a new kind of classicism. The simplicity, grace, and elegance of this visual culture--interestingly balanced by an energy and movement that the ancient classicisms often lacked in their static grandeur--were simply a new expression of the classical spirit, a new way of formulating these enduring aesthetic ideals in a fast-paced, technology-dominated modern age.

Like the classicism of Greece and Rome, the postwar American aesthetic expressed the highest aspirations of its civilization, a modern civilization of electricity, speed, and the promise of space exploration. Though these qualities may seem uniquely modern, they are just variations of the perennial American values of renewal, freedom, expansiveness, optimism, energy, ambition, progress, and prosperity.

In another sense, of course, this style seems a thing of the past. We find ourselves now in the very future to which midcentury modernism looked forward with such anticipation, but the future is not what we once thought it would be. This is, of course, inevitable because midcentury futurism was a utopian vision, and utopias have a way of never quite becoming reality. What we once might have imagined as the marvelous space-age tomorrowland of 2010 has turned out to be just the same old real world.

But the real world needs ideals, and real life needs dreams. Whatever problems existed in the United States in the mid-20th century--and for those who have forgotten history, there were many--it possessed a wondrous vision of the future that made it seem like, no matter what darkness we were going through at present, a bright and better tomorrow lay ahead. It's true that too much optimism is naive and ultimately leads to bitter disappointment. But a complete lack of hope in the future deadens the soul, of an individual or a nation, and leads to demoralization, defeatism, and despair.

Just as Western civilization once looked to the glorious past of Greece and Rome and was inspired to renew itself, to reach for the future by looking to the past, perhaps the jaded, cynical United States of the 21st century can look back to its glory days in the middle of the 20th and seek once again to attain new heights.

Learning Curves

There used to be such a thing as a polymath, i.e. someone who had mastered all subjects (or at least a very large range of subjects) and could be said to "know it all". A walking encyclopedia, if you will. Granted, such people were the exception to the rule (for most of human history, people with anything beyond the most rudimentary education have been the exception rather than the norm). But during the Renaissance, such an achievement was considered attainable enough that it was held up as an ideal... the "Renaissance Man", someone who was talented and accomplished in many different fields of human endeavor, not just an expert in one area. One thinks of Leonardo da Vinci as perhaps the most famous instance of a Renaissance Man. There is also the more recent example of Goethe, who is described on the back of one Penguin Classics volume as "scientist, critic, autobiographer, letter-writer, sage, statesman, conversationalist"--and all this in addition to his biggest claim to fame as Germany's greatest poet.

Many people have noted that it has become more or less impossible to attain the status of polymath in today's world, given the explosion of information and the ever-increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge that this has created. Today's academics tend to focus narrowly on one subcategory of a subcategory of a subject area. Indeed, given the sheer quantity of what there is to learn in our 21st century world, it is enough of a challenge just to become an expert in one subject, let alone all (or even just many) subjects.

But there is another factor that further complicates the picture and adds to the difficulty of knowledge mastery, and that is the ever-accelerating rate of change in today's culture. In the past, once you mastered a subject, you didn't need to learn a whole lot more to remain a master in that field. Today, in many areas, there is no end to the learning required to stay on top of the latest developments in the field. This is especially true of technology, of course, but applies to varying degrees in other areas as well.

One problem this creates is that depth of learning becomes far less important than learning just enough to keep up and continue to function without falling piteously far behind the curve. After all, what good is it now if you became an expert in a 1995 version of a certain software package or programming language that has changed dramatically since then, but which you failed to keep up with? Many types of knowledge have an increasingly short shelf-life and become obsolete almost as quickly as they become "necessary" to maintaining one's professional expertise and skill set. Why should we invest the time and energy in learning the latest thing in depth when the knowledge will be useless a year from now? Why not learn just enough to get by? It's sort of like cramming for a test just to pass the test, without caring if we retain the knowledge for the future or truly learn something deeply. After all, how can we explore the ocean depths when we have to spend all of our time just treading water? Better yet, why should we care to learn something deeply when the knowledge will be worthless a year from now?

The end result of this ephemerality of knowledge is that expertise and depth in a given subject area is becoming less and less possible with each day that goes by. But perhaps more to the point, it is not so much impossible as it is increasingly irrelevant. Much knowledge in today's world is only "knowledge" for a brief time, then is discarded like yesterday's newspaper, as relevant and useful as last week's weather forecast, as sought-after as the last decade's fashions. Under these conditions, why invest more time and effort into learning something than you really have to?

Let Us Pause for Thought

In this article, David Levy discusses the Memex, a personal information device imagined (but never built) in 1945 by pioneering computer scientist Vannevar Bush. However, unlike most commentators on the Memex who celebrate its role as a forerunner of the personal computer, hypertext, and the World Wide Web, Levy looks at the legacy of Bush's idea in a different light: its effect on thinking and learning. Levy's assessment is ironic, for, whereas Bush's whole purpose in conceiving the Memex was to solve the problem of information overload, the information technologies that have been inspired by Bush's idea have ultimately served to make an already tremendous problem many times worse.

The problem, as Levy points out, is not merely that the volume of information available has exploded, but that the nature of networked, hyperlinked information, and our constant immersion in it, makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find the time and space in which to reflect upon and contemplate that information. This issue has been addressed by a number of writers, but Levy takes the admirable step of bringing in the German philosopher Josef Pieper to help enlighten the problem for us. Leisure--the time and space for stillness and reflection--is the ground from which knowledge and wisdom can grow. Our modern mental landscape, however, is cluttered with weeds. Who has the time, in a world of incessant "information", to stop and think?

Library of Congress All Atwitter

In what is surely one of the most bizarre historic preservation decisions ever made by a government agency (even by government agency standards), the Library of Congress is saving for posterity every tweet ever tweeted on Twitter.

Now why our national library would deem worthy of preservation in perpetuity every single 140-character-or-less burst of communication "tweeted" since the service began in 2006 is beyond me. Would they, if they could, save every letter ever written? Every telephone conversation? Every email? Every blog post and comment? Every Facebook status update?

Of course, many of the above-mentioned communications are meant to be private, while Twitter updates are public by definition. Then again, history has a way of making all surviving recorded communications, however private their origins, fall into the domain of scholarly and/or public knowledge.

But the more relevant question to ask here is: Why? Which is not to doubt that some Twitter communications may be worthy of remembering and would be of potential value to historians and other researchers--but every single one?

This goes against every principle of archival preservation, which is decidedly not about saving everything, but about selecting what is worthy of being preserved for future generations. The LOC seems to be taking the intellectually lazy approach to preservation. It is acting like a hoarder, obsessively saving every little scrap, however worthless or forgettable it might be.

Perhaps future historians, confronted with millions upon millions of tweets, will say, "I'm sorry, but that's a little too much information."

The Irrelevancy of the iPad

At right: The original iPad.

There has been much hype about Apple's latest toy, the iPad (which is being released today), just as there is about every new gadget that comes out. Since the 1990s, there has been an almost continuous stream of hype and giddy optimism about computer technology in general, and an ongoing myth about how the Internet, the iPod, smart phones, Facebook, blogs, etc. are "revolutionizing" our turn-of-the-millenium world. There can be little doubt that we are living in the midst of a technological and cultural revolution in the strictly objective sense (i.e., that things are changing a lot, and changing fast), but it is another question entirely as to whether this revolution is completely good or beneficial.

I can already hear the impassioned screams of "Luddite!" at merely questioning the complete goodness and beneficence of the current digital revolution, as though I were committing a grave sacrilege against the all-knowing god of the microchip. But technology is our invention and our servant, at least that is what it is supposed to be, and we certainly have the right to question our own creation and to evaluate it soberly (which doesn't mean blindly demonizing it any more than it means blindly exalting it).

As I've said before, computers have produced many benefits for society, and the iPad will surely prove to be a useful tool for many people, but it will not help to advance human knowledge and intelligence any more than the computer already has. And it is questionable how much the computer has done to advance human knowledge and intelligence (in many ways, it seems to work against it, but that is a topic for another post). The only real advantage for knowledge that networked digital technology provides--and it is a big one--is that it greatly aids in the dissemination of information, and makes it easier to find things. But it does nothing, and even harms, the ability to actually gain knowledge or to enhance intelligence. We have already reached the apex of mind-enhancing technology. In fact, we reached that point centuries ago. This great advance was called the codex (known more popularly as the "book"). Gutenberg's printing revolution greatly enchanced this technology and made it more widely accessible, but we haven't really improved on it substantially. Even before the invention of the codex in the early Christian era, however, human knowledge and intelligence thrived and advanced, and culture blossomed and flourished. Wisdom never needed technology, still doesn't, and never will.

In our oh-so-enlightened and sophisticated 21st century, we like to look back at the "naive" utopianism of the 1950s, with its faith in space exploration and household gadgets, and even to look back in scorn at disastrous 20th century attempts to "modernize" our cities and our food. But we ourselves have our own starry-eyed utopianism, and that is our optimistic faith in computers and all the associated digital technologies that promise to make our lives complete. Perhaps, in 2050 or so, our children's children will look back on us and see us as laughably naive, or perhaps even resent what we did to ruin our cultural landscape and obesify our intellectual lives with our blind digital faith.

In the meantime, whenever I enter the marketplace of the microchip, I will follow the example of my teacher Socrates and be amazed at how many things I don't need.