A libertarian fallacy about government
Will Wilkinson effectively concedes that the Citizens United ruling will have undesirable effects but defends it anyway. He thinks government is already so tainted by special interests that any attempt at reform is simply futile. Even a law limiting the influence of special interests will inevitably bear their corrupting influence. So of course it can only make things worse:
But the granddaddy of all progressive errors – the one that breeds all others — is the assumption that greater government power can rectify the problem of unequal citizen power. Government can only act as a “countervailing force” in this regard if it is not acting already to serve corporate and special interests. But it is [so acting]. That is why new government powers merely augment, rather than offset, the already disproportionate power of entrenched interests.
But this is a ridiculous argument. Exactly which special interest is illicitly served by limiting the influence of special interests? The anti-special interest special interest? It also commits something like the genetic fallacy, arguing against a law because of where it comes from, not what it does. So what if a law is backed by certain entrenched interests? Its legislative origin may be a reason for taking a second, harder look at it, going over it with a fine-toothed comb, as it were, but it’s at best reason for skepticism, not condemnation. If purity of intention were relevant, no law would stand up to scrutiny. Then again, perhaps this is why libertarians like Wilkinson are so down on the very institution of government in the first place.
Wilkinson might have a case if the situation were different, for example, if the proposal were to set up some kind of ‘free speech panel’ that allowed corporately funded political advertisements on a case-by-case basis. That almost certainly would amplify the power of already entrenched interests. Or at least it would if it weren’t all just a fiction.
Vampire bats use the buddy system
I guess we’ve known for a while that vampire bats are (reciprocally) altruistic. They’ll share excess blood with the understanding that others will share with them in their own time of need:
Moreover, we found that blood sharing was not random, even among bats who had a high degree of prior association. Instead it appeared that the unrelated bats developed a buddy system, so that two individuals regurgitate almost exclusively to each other–a strong indication that their roles reverse on a regular basis.
PDF of the article is here.
Funny writers
From an appropriately entertaining, if sometimes annoying interview with Martin Amis:
Dryden said, literature is instruction and delight, and there are people who think that if they’re not getting delight then they are getting a lot of instruction, when in fact they’re not getting that either. But it has a sort of of gloomy constituency. If there is no pleasure transmitted then I’m not interested. I mean, look at them all: Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Smollet, Fielding, they’re all funny. All the good ones are funny. Richardson isn’t, and he’s no good. Dostoyevsky is funny: The Double is a scream. Tolstoy is funny by being just so wonderfully true and pure. Gogol, funny. Flaubert, funny. Dickens. All the good ones are funny.
This dynamic appears in other places too. Most academic writing is deeply, systemically humorless. There are jokey asides, but they only make the inner humorlessness more apparent.
Populism and pettiness
Even if the toxic rhetoric of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck can be confined to the fringes, it may yet make ‘populism’ a dirty word for a long time to come. That would be unfortunate. Populism, like virtually any other creed, can be corrupting and corrupted, but it isn’t necessarily so. It has its noble forms along with its base. It’s great when animated by principle and virtue, and bad when it simply gives cover to vicious self-interest. That’s life; the exact same thing is true of any other ideology. Even if populism is unusually susceptible to this kind of debasement, it’s a mistake to think that ‘populism’ is just another name for political malfeasance.
E.D. Kain flirts with this error when he criticizes conservative politicians for being petty. He thinks they are too obsessed with scoring cheap points, with whining, with feigned outrage and empty gestures, and attributes all this to ‘cheap populism’. He then equates populism with playing to the mob—a bad and dangerous thing if ever there was one. Populism, then, explains why pettiness is bad: it roils the masses:
Populism, after all, is just a nice word for “mob”. If ever there was a thing that conservatives were meant to protect us against it is the rule of the mob. Conservatives were never supposed to be the mob, were never meant to be its advocates.
Set Kain’s distrust of the common man to one side. He is right to be put off by ‘cheap populism’ but the reason it’s bad is not because it’s populist but—surprise, surprise!—because it’s cheap. Pettiness is bad because it’s petty. Playing to the mob is deplorable, but so is playing to anyone.
Why this need to invoke political theory to explain one of the most common of all vices? There is an unfortunate tendency to collapse virtue and ideology, to think that being good is simply a matter of endorsing the right slogans and aligning oneself with the right interests. We would do well to remember that they are instead two separate dimensions. Sometimes people are just stupid, shortsighted, and petty. This makes them bad leaders and pitiable human beings, but it has nothing much to do with their politics.
Notes on conspiracy theories
Interesting interview with David Aaronovitch, who has a new book on conspiracy theories:
I think we live in a more conspiracist period. There’s no question there are more of them, and they’re more global, and they take off more quickly. They’re also more complex and relate to virtual communities rather than real ones. I think it’s because of global interdependence. We live a global period, and there’s a huge temptation among people to believe there is a master plan, because otherwise the suggestion is we’re interdependent and the world is chaotic — and that’s a mindfuck.
Not to be vulgar about it, but Aaronovitch seems unaware of the pleasures of a good hard mindfuck. That heady sense of disorientation is what conspiracy theorists get off on. Like science fiction, their close cousin, conspiracy theories dress up boring real-world facts in a dizzying fantasy.
Seriously though, no matter what you think of them, conspiracy theories signal that under the hood all is not right with the modern world. If you think they’re ridiculous, then vast numbers of people are about as foolish as medieval peasants. And worse, they’re willfully ignorant. But if you subscribe to conspiracy theories, then vast numbers of people are not just stupid but suckered. They’ve been had by powerful, shadowy players, often the very ones they trust most. In this way, conspiracy theories are sort of like religious fundamentalisms: either the world is seriously damned or it’s seriously diseased because so many people think it’s damned. By the way, would it be paranoid of me to suggest that this resemblance is not coincidental?
Conspiracy theories are now so common and so varied that the time seems ripe for a new academic niche: ‘interdisciplinary conspiracy studies’ or something. It could draw on psychology, anthropology, literary studies, history, sociology, philosophy, etc. When academics colonize a new subject the first step is always, in the parlance, to ‘problematize,’ to declare that each case involves a number of very complex factors.
Well, there certainly are different kinds of conspiracy theories. Early death-related theories are always very sentimental: the world took JFK, Marilyn, and Diana because they were too good for it. On the other hand, a world where Elvis or Tupac aren’t still alive is simply too much for some people to take. Then you have your opiates of the masses, which salve legitimate discontent. Hence the belief that the CIA manufactured AIDS and crack as weapons against gays and blacks. There are also techno-conspiracies—fluoridated water and airplane contrails and the like–which play on our fear of technology penetrating our personal space. The so-called Big Lie is a conspiracy theory propagated as part of a real conspiracy: Hitler’s Big Lie was accusing Jews of an even bigger one. Finally, there are neurosis-like theories, which people turn to as a way of hiding from themselves: basically, you can’t admit, even to yourself, that you’re creeped out by Obama’s complexion, so instead you insist that you’ve managed to sniff out his foreign birth.
Of course, the hallmark of modern conspiracy theories is the cover-up. The principal conspiracy is less to do something than to get people to believe something. The authorities are always on it, and the official story never needs to be taken seriously because it’s just what they want you to think! Hitler and Goebbels were remarkably prescient about the power of the lie so outrageous it has to be true, but they erred in thinking that the lie had to be sustained by a repressive state. There are lots of lies of that survive and replicate perfectly well without state support. These are lies that implicate the powers that be, lies that are strengthened (or even proved true!) by official attempts to regulate or dispel them.
The standard line about conspiracy theories is that they arise from a desperate, frustrated need to find order in an increasingly chaotic world. That’s true enough, but it doesn’t cut very deep. Nowadays what belief doesn’t come from such a need? We’re human beings: pretty much everything we do is an attempt to stave off chaos of one kind or another. Nor is it very helpful to simply berate conspiracy-believers for believing stupid things. For one thing, a lot people believe a lot of stupid things: conspiracy theories are a drop in the bucket. For another, the tendency to believe conspiracy theories shares common DNA with healthier mindsets.
Like discredited scientific theories, conspiracy theories don’t just come out of nowhere. They have their roots in perfectly sensible thinking. They often expose genuine mysteries. For example, the man behind Shakespeare’s plays is a real mystery. But the mistake is to think that the mystery is simply biographical: the inscrutability of genius would remain even when the biography is settled. And don’t forget that petty conspiracies are not all that uncommon. For generations tabloids and celebrities have thrived on a conspiracy to deliver “unauthorized” photos and inside dirt. Viral marketing and celebrity sex tapes are the latest forms of this, but certainly not the last. More broadly, we have been taught to look for hidden lines of dependence and responsibility: shopping at Wal-mart supports sweatshops; proceeds from marijuana sales go directly to al-Qaeda; eating meat makes you complicit in the industrialized torture of billions of animals. We have been taught how political ideology and economic interest can warp our vision of the facts. We have been taught to ask “Cui bono? Who benefits?” and conclude that those who benefit from a situation must also have engineered it.
People have a natural aversion to being duped. It’s painful and humiliating. It’s possible to avoid being duped by simply never believing what anyone else tells you. But then you’d probably wind up believing lots of false things. But in our world truth has been devalued. We think: “no one has a monopoly on truth, so what’s the point? Isn’t truth relative anyway” The effect of this is that many people would much rather be wrong all the time than be duped even once. Like Milton’s Satan, they would rather be wrong on their own terms than right on someone else’s, especially those of the powerful.
This does more than simply lead people into willful ignorance. The emphasis on rooting out hidden intentions sets the bar for wrongdoing too low. We start to think: “if there was no conspiracy to do X then there is really nothing to be done about it; if it wasn’t intentional it can’t be corrected and no one can be blamed for it.” But of course this is a false choice. Was there a conspiracy to deceive the American public into supporting the Iraq war? If that means ‘did Cheney and his inner circle knowingly deceive people about WMD?’ then the answer is ‘no.’ But that doesn’t exonerate them. It’s not an either-or. It ignores the fact that people and institutions are guided by forces far deeper and more subtle than intention. One way or another, Cheney and others acted to create a climate in which invasion was a foregone conclusion.
In a related way, Aaronovitch is mistaken when he thinks the choice is between intelligible conspiracy and unintelligible chaos. That may be how conspiracy theorists see things, but then again that’s part of their problem. It’s simply a false choice. It’s not that things are either designed by someone or else pure chaos. There are, increasingly, features of our society that are ordered, but not consciously designed. No one intended for the stock market to crash, but it wasn’t random either. The military-industrial complex didn’t kill Kennedy, but its influence is in society is real. The war on drugs isn’t intended to incarcerate black males, but it wouldn’t be so popular if it didn’t have that effect. Conspiracy theories don’t so much create order out of chaos as humanize the vast impersonal forces that shape our lives. They put a face on or, more accurately, behind complex phenomena.
So there is a kind of subtle truth to conspiracy theories, and this is probably why post-modern writers like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo are so fascinated by them. In any case, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as mere stupidity. For we are all more or less in the same boat. There are phenomena that are neither intentional nor chaotic, yet because we evolved for a simpler world we naturally gravitate toward thinking that things are one or the other. There is a middle ground, but we simply don’t yet have the full intellectual resources to make sense of it. It may be that conspiracy theorists aren’t dumber than the rest of us but simply less willing to tolerate this lack.
How not to defend the humanities
“To say ‘X is a gifted writer but he is a political enemy and I shall do my best to silence him’ is harmless enough. Even if you end by silencing him with a tommy-gun you are not really sinning against the intellect. The deadly sin is to say ‘X is a political enemy of mine therefore he is a bad writer.'” – George Orwell, “Literature and the Left”
The idol of our age is, if not money, then certainly economic efficiency. It’s the first and last criterion in setting public policy. The ultimate aim is always jobs, development, not falling behind the Chinese. In this feverish climate those who study and teach the humanities–literature, philosophy, art, classics, etc–find themselves under high pressure to account for their activities as anything other than a useless, irresponsible extravagance.
Understandably, then, people were cheered by Mark Slouka’s pro-humanities essay in Harper’s. This is a mistake, though. Slouka saves the humanities from one false master–economic necessity–only by submitting them to another: political virtue. The humanities are valuable, he says, not because they produce good employees but because they produce good citizens. They teach the kind of empathetic but tough, open-minded but rigorously critical thinking that democracy demands of its citizens. Slouka says of the humanities: “They are inescapably political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty.” The humanities produce the one commodity that is essential for a healthy nation: an engaged citizenry.
But though the product has changed, you’ll notice that it’s still production that matters. The value of the humanities is instrumental. It’s not the things you learn about–Homer, the mind-body problem, impressionism, etc.–that matter. Those are almost irrelevant. What really matters is the method, not what you learn but the process of learning. The humanities have thus been sold to a new master. Civics, the new master, is certainly kinder and gentler, but captivity is still captivity. It scars the slave even after the lash has been put away
I don’t mean to suggest that Slouka has been completely unhelpful. He makes a good argument, which is to say: it will be useful in defending humanities education before cost-conscious boards, business-minded parents, and other skeptics. It’s a political argument designed to appeal to a wide and varied audience, many of whom are temperamentally dispose to be hostile toward the humanities. It’s proper home is the arena of policy.
It must not leave that home. It would be a grave mistake to construe Slouka’s thesis as a general account of what is ultimately valuable in the humanities. It would be a mistake if humanists starting using it justify their work to themselves. That is to inject politics where they have no place, to politicize the humanities, and so deform both.
In Orwell’s time, politicization meant bringing heated political passions into the classroom, excluding writers whose politics you disagreed with, and so forth. Some of that still goes on, but not much. Nowadays politicization occurs in a subtler but no less dishonest form. With a few exceptions, we now refuse to exclude writers because of their politics. Tolerance is after all a political virtue. That’s fine. The problem is when we deflate the rest our intellectual and aesthetic ideals to match. Afraid of appearing politically intolerant, we retreat to the position that the real lesson in every text is, as Slouka says, never any particular truth but rather “the reasoned search for truth.” This doesn’t silence writers so much as castrate them.
The solution, obviously, isn’t to go to the other extreme and turn Great Books into a state religion, put in a constitutional amendment endorsing Shakespeare or Langston Hughes or something. That is to improperly inject humanistic ideals into politics. We need to simply recognize that our humanistic and political principles are separate entities. Life, as always, is a matter of striking a compromise between these principles, and a great many others, but only confusion can result from thinking that there is only one principle in play when there are really two.
On Slouka’s most basic point, I am in complete agreement. I have no doubt that the humanities improve democracies. But I also have little doubt that the humanities improve economies. This puts us under no obligation to think that their real value lies in their service to either politics or economics. If anything the real value of the humanities is what should be invoked to explain the remarkable fact that they improve poltical and economic conditions wherever they are honestly pursued.
Technical difficulties
My hardware is corroding so new content will be delayed, hopefully not too long. Sorry!
Lasers or witchcraft?
I.
Tact aside, why should we give a fig what primitive tribes think? For that matter, why should we care about the beliefs of our own primitive forebears? Why pay attention to the ignorant, the confused, the superstitious, the unenlightened, the benighted and the backward? We have string theory, vaccines, and lasers; they have witchcraft.
Well, there are worse hobbies, I suppose. We might collect fallacies just as we collect butterflies or antique bottle-caps. And primitive beliefs have a certain pedagogical utility. We can scare our children with them: “study your logic, you don’t want to end up like the Azande tribe.” Finally, don’t forget that looking down on others gives a real boost to one’s self-esteem!
But none of this is taking primitive beliefs seriously, and deep down we know that we should. We have a nagging sense that we are not all that different. Just as our bodies bear the marks of our primitive biological origins—what Darwin famously called ‘the indelible stamp’—so too perhaps our advanced intellects share certain features with those of primitive peoples. The atavistic features have merely been altered and augmented, not discarded. The scientific revolution was no separate creation. And even if we are miles ahead on the path of intellectual evolution, who knows how long that path is? In the grand scheme of things, our advantage may be negligible. Primitive peoples might see our technology as the work of beings of a higher order, but that doesn’t mean we should too.
What could it mean, though, to take primitive beliefs seriously? It certainly cannot mean debasing our own ways of believing and knowing—those simply work too well to be qualified or abandoned. No one seriously thinks that we should teach shamanism in place of science. Any answer that would have us simply adopt a neutral stance toward primitive beliefs and our own is going to be a non-starter.
Perhaps it would help to draw on other, more familiar situations. Is it like taking other people’s aesthetic and gustatory tastes seriously, as when two people respectfully disagree about the merits of Dali or foie gras? Or like case where competent physicists disagree about, say, the black hole information paradox? How the situation between Democrats and Republicans? Perhaps, but note that these are all cases where disagreement is occurring more or less within a single belief-system. (However bizarre their customs, your political opponents aren’t that far gone.) So these cases needn’t tell us much at all about conflict across belief-systems, and they probably don’t.
This, then, is the real issue: short of demoting our own belief-system, what can it mean that other belief-systems should be taken seriously? It’s a really hard problem, and the post-colonial politics surrounding it only make it harder. Partly because of this, people are resort to very blunt tools to get their points across. The conviction that primitive beliefs should be somehow taken seriously gets twisted into the hyperbolic claim that those primitive beliefs, in legends, witches, and spirits, are in every sense just as good as modern science.
Thus are the battle lines regrettably drawn. The question becomes not “How can we respect other belief-systems without demoting science and common sense?” but rather “Should we demote them: yes or no?” Paul Boghossian’s book Fear of Knowledge (Clarendon, 2006, 137 pp.) intervenes in this narrower, polarized debate on the side of science. He wants to show that the arguments of certain philosophers, Richard Rorty in particular, purporting to show that we should demote science to one belief-system among them, really show no such thing. I’m inclined to think Boghossian’s counterarguments are correct and a valuable contribution as far as they go. My concern is that they don’t really get anywhere near the important question, the question of how we can sensibly take primitive beliefs seriously, not whether we should. You might read Boghossian’s book and get the impression that the relevant issues about science and primitive belief have been settled, at least till we have compelling reason think otherwise, when in fact the important questions have hardly even been tackled. This shortcoming is all the more serious in a book designed to present the issues to the general reader.
II.
One way philosophers and lay people alike have traditionally tried to honor the thought that primitive beliefs should be taken seriously is with the thesis that all facts are socially constructed. Thus, we have our facts, they have theirs. It’s with this proposal that Boghossian begins his assault.
“Facts are socially constructed”: there are two ways of thinking about what this might mean. You might think of facts as akin to artifacts, that is, throwing sticks, sculptures, and the like. Or you might think of facts as akin to fictional entities, that is Sherlock Holmes, Middle Earth, etc.
The facts-as-artifacts view faces problems. Surely there were facts about dinosaurs long before we came along to fashion them! And if we can construct the fact that the earth is 5 billion years old, other people can in principle construct the fact that the earth is only 5,000 years old. But how can it be a fact both that the earth is 5 billion years old and that the earth is only 5,000 years old?
The facts-as-fictional-entities view avoids these problems. For dinosaurs to pre-date us, it simply needs to be part of our accepted story that they do. And if we say the earth is 5 billion years old and others say it’s 5,000, well that simply means that the two groups tell different stories about the same thing—no contradiction there.
Actually, these two problems are just a sideshow to the main issue, which is that either way socially constructed facts need to be constructed out of something. It could be other socially constructed facts, but not all the way down. At bottom, the basic building blocks have to be absolute facts, that is facts that are NOT socially constructed. For example, if facts about dinosaurs depend on the facts about what our dinosaur-story says about dinosaurs, what do those facts depend on? Either they don’t depend on anything and they’re absolute or they depend on further facts about some further story, which are themselves dependent on some further story, and so on all the way down. But this latter possibly is hard to even comprehend. Alternatively, if facts are akin to artifacts, how are they made? Most plausibly, the same way other artifacts are made, by artfully arranging pre-existing materials. Indeed, the way philosophers typically argue that facts are socially constructed is by arguing that there is set of pre-existing absolute facts which we then group in ways that suit our particular needs while others group them in a way that suits their needs. For example, when we talk about giraffes, the concept ‘giraffe’ is basically just a convenient way of grouping together a bunch of basic facts, say facts at the subatomic level, in a way that makes sense for us. If there were intelligent amoebas, no doubt they would find other, very different groupings convenient. But either way both of us would be choosing from among the same set of basic, absolute facts constructed by neither of us.
Faced with these problems, perhaps it’s not so much that primitive beliefs are just as true as our own as that they are just as rational: they make just as much sense even if they’re false. You can make this idea more precise by noting that we justify our beliefs by adverting to epistemic principles, principles about what it is correct to believe on the basis of which evidence. To give you the idea, a relatively simple epistemic principle might be something like: “If it seems to you that there is a dog before you, and you have no reason to believe otherwise (you haven’t taken a hallucinogen, are not in funhouse, etc.) then you are justified in believing that there is a dog before you, with the caveat that new evidence may require you to revise this belief.” We arrive at beliefs about what is true by applying, if only implicitly, principles that tell us when a belief is justified. More importantly, our only access to the truth, assuming we have such access at all, is via the particular epistemic principles that we accept.
So we have our epistemic principles and the primitive tribes have theirs. At this point, though, doubt creeps in: whose are the right ones? Is it possible to show ours correct, theirs incorrect? Well, we can’t just step back and ask whose principles yield beliefs that are really true, for the only access we have to the truth is via the principles that we accept, and it’s not yet clear that those principles are indeed the correct ones. Similarly, we can’t just step back and ask whose principles are rational. For principles tell us not just what is true but what is rational or justified, so the only access we have to what is rational is again via the principles that we accept. But as before it’s not clear that those principles are the rational ones—in fact, that’s precisely the question we’re trying to answer!
It now looks as though there can be no common ground between us and the primitives. Neither of us is able to justify our respective principles to the other. What’s worse, neither of us is able to justify our respective principles to ourselves. The most we can do is repeat to ourselves that they are principles that we accept, and no matter who is saying it, that’s not saying much. We are each safely, sadly cocooned in our own belief-systems, equally isolated from reality and from each other.
Boghossian thinks he has a way out of this predicament. He thinks we can after all justify our own principles over those of the primitives. This is because it’s actually perfectly kosher to use your principles to justify themselves, but only provided you don’t have legitimate reason to doubt those principles in the first place. And, Boghossian thinks, simply seeing that primitives have different epistemic principles gives us no legitimate reason to doubt our own. What would give us grounds for doubt is if those primitive principles were to yield a science and technology more impressive than our own, but they clearly don’t. Again, lasers…or witchcraft?
III.
It’s easy to come away from Boghossian’s book with a kind of empty confidence. You’ve been reassured on issues about which you never in serious doubt. Whew, you don’t really have to give credence to Zuni creation myths! Meanwhile the real issues remain untouched. It’s almost certainly true that we have no reason to doubt our accepted belief-system, at least where this means doubting in the straightforward “fact or falsehood?” sense. But this just shows that the doubt we feel belongs to some other, more elusive category. For we certainly do feel doubt of some kind when we see that there are radically different, if unenlightened ways of seeing the world. How could we not? But Boghossian’s book invites us to simply dismiss this feeling instead of bringing it into the light. This task is important but, as I say, it’s also extremely difficult. Most of our well-worn metaphors will probably have only limited utility. The most useful vocabulary may be that of organic rather than constructed things. Perhaps what it’s closest to is seeing that the human species, however special, is still just a race of apes. As with every other creature, God never touched us. But properly viewed this fact doesn’t debase us and it doesn’t elevate chimps into peers either. Likewise our science is not touched by Promethean fire—nothing is—but this doesn’t reduce it to the level of mere opinion, and it doesn’t raise superstition to the level of science either.
Books vs. Twitter
George Packer expresses disquiet about the information overload now being fueled by twitter and blogs:
The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world.
It’s attracted a number of responses (Matthew Yglesias, Ta-Nehisi Coates) and counter-responses (Jonathan Chait).
I think the terms of the debate need to be clearer all around. What exactly is most valuable about books and book reading? Once we have a tolerable answer, then we can ask whether New Media threatens it and, most importantly, whether we should care.
As Yglesias’s response brings out, it’s not enough just to say, blandly, that reading books has great intrinsic value. Lots of things have great intrinsic value, many more by far than any of us has time for. Devoting ourselves to one necessarily means taking time away from others, so it’s no objection to Twitter simply that it takes time away from something else.
To avoid this, Chait sharpens Packer’s critique a bit. Twitter doesn’t just occupy our time when we let it–it eats our time up whether we want it to or not. Twitter also shortens our attention spans to the point where we lose our appetite for valuable long-form writing.
That’s helpful, but only slightly. If correct, it tells us the mechanism by which New Media erodes book-reading but not really why this is cause for alarm. The cheerleading futurist can still ask “What’s so super-special about a long attention span?”, and he’ll have a point. True, there’s probably something in itself worthwhile about having a long attention span, but surely the value of books isn’t just that they build up our cognitive faculties. It’s the other way around, of course: having a long attention span is valuable primarily because it lets you reap all the other valuable fruits that books hold out to you. It’s just a nice side-effect that the more you do of this, the easier it gets.
I won’t even attempt to say what the real value of books is. I will say, though, that it’s probably a mistake to think of this as a question about the medium as a whole. Most books are bad books with less real value than a thoughtful one-paragraph blog post. When people talk about the value of books as such, they’re most often talking about the value of good or at least ambitious books (see Packer’s allusion to Kierkegaard), books that attempt to answer questions that cannot even be framed in the public, quickfire forum of electronic media. If we’re going to defend books, we need to think harder about what such questions are and why they’re worth taking seriously.
The argument of ‘Days of Heaven’
[Note: This is a cryptic, idiosyncratic attempt to sum up the argument of Terrence Malick’s cryptic, idiosyncratic movie Days of Heaven. It probably won’t make any sense if you haven’t seen the movie, and might not even if you have. Sorry, but I really wanted to avoid spoiling the movie twice over, with information and with pedantry.]
We think that beyond this there is another world, the one we’ll flee to when this one goes up in flames. We peer at it from across the border, looking to get fixed up. We watch it like we watch the fish in an aquarium, dreaming. If only I could come up with one big score. If only I could touch her hair, then everything would be all right. Then I’d carry that magic within me.
But the other world is just as artificial and just as impossible to inhabit. It can’t be traded for. We can try to buy it. We can try to mint what we have into a common currency, but there is no such thing. This only hollows everything out, impoverishes it, helps the fires along.
This side of death, there is no other world. Not the prettified, made-up world of dancing girls. Not the world of Woodrow Wilson’s armies, the world that is finally made safe for democracy. There is no Eden to go back to, no Utopia to aspire to. What happiness there is is in the seams, between things both good and bad, not beyond them. We find it at the end of a hard day, in the calls of animals, in the rush of new sights, and in the release of pain and frustration that comes when we go beat the heck of out some tree.
axe, pen, & bell 