Alan Jacobs

Interestingly, when smart people feel less alienated, they seem to buy different sorts of books. Instead of condemning American society for not honoring the author’s personality or tastes, the new bestsellers explore the mysteries of human behavior. Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s various books or Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Perhaps once you accept that people really are different — that nobody’s normal and, at least when it comes to food or entertainment or vacations, there’s no one best way to live — you can, paradoxically enough, start to think about the commonalities known as human nature.

The sheer horror of Cicero’s murder and mutilation contributed to its mythic status in later Roman literature and culture. His death was a popular subject for Roman schoolboys practising the art of speaking, as well as for celebrity orators in after-dinner performances. Learner orators were required to deliver speeches of advice to famous characters from myth and history, or to take sides in notorious crimes from the past: ‘defend Romulus against the charge of killing Remus’; ‘advise Agamemnon whether or not to sacrifice Iphigeneia’; ‘should Alexander the Great enter Babylon, despite bad omens?’ Two of the most popular exercises, repeated in countless Roman schoolrooms and at innumerable dinner parties, involved advising Cicero on the question of whether or not he should ask for Antony’s pardon in order to save his own life; and whether, if Antony offered to spare him provided that he burn all his writings, he should accept the deal. In the cultural politics of the Roman Empire these problems were nicely judged – safely pitching one of the most brilliantly unsuccessful upholders of the old Republican order against the man who, as everyone came to agree, was the unacceptable face of autocracy; and weighing the value of literature against the brute force of life-or-death power. There was lustre, too, in the fact that Roman critics almost universally believed that Cicero had died an exemplary death. Whatever accusations of self-interest, vacillation or cowardice they might level at other aspects of his life, everyone reckoned that on this occasion he behaved splendidly: sticking his bare neck out of the litter, he calmly demanded (as heroes have continued to do ever since) that the assassin make a good job of it.

Dinehart, an assistant professor at the Florida International University School of Education, was examining data collected on 1,000 second-graders and comparing it with information collected when they were in pre-kindergarten. She and her research team expected to find that early number skills might predict math achievement and that early language skills might predict who would be better readers in second grade. But they were surprised to find that a 4-year-old’s fine motor writing skill - the ability to form letters, numbers and shapes - was an indicator of stronger academic achievement later on.

What’s just as surprising, says Dinehart, is that the academic achievement by those with better penmanship is seen in both reading and math, and it’s reflected in both teachers’ grades and standardized test scores. Students who received good handwriting grades in pre-K had an overall “B” average in second grade. Their standardized tests scored above average in both math and reading. By contrast, pre-kindergarten students who did poorly on fine motor writing tasks had an overall “C” average and below-average test scores in second grade.

Apple’s dramatic 1984 Super Bowl ad notwithstanding, in reality the interests and loyalties of corporations are divided. On the one hand are the customers and users – also citizens of polities – whose trust is required for long-term business success, and who themselves hold a range of often-conflicting beliefs and values. On the other hand are governments, whose approval and regulatory support is critical if the corporations are to run profitable businesses or gain access to lucrative markets, and who are often important customers themselves. In an ideal world, the government would serve citizens’ interests and ensure that their rights are protected. In the real world, we are not so naive as to assume this is the case, certainly not in authoritarian dictatorships and, depending on one’s political viewpoint, not always in democracies either.

The problem is that our ability to organize and speak out is shaped – often quite subtly – by the Internet service providers, email services, mobile devices, and social networking services. If our communications and access to information are manipulated in ways we are not aware of, and if these companies’ relationships with government are opaque, our ability to understand how power is being exercised over us, and our ability to hold that power to account, will be eroded in a more subtle and insidious manner than Orwell ever imagined.

In the Internet age, the greatest long-term threat to a genuinely citizen-centric society – a world in which technology and government serve citizens instead of the other way around – looks less like Orwell’s 1984, and more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: a world in which our desire for security, entertainment, and material comfort is manipulated to the point that we all voluntarily and eagerly submit to subjugation. If we are to avoid this dystopian fate, political innovation will have to catch up with technological innovation.

That ‘something else’ has a lot to do with the complexities of religious loyalty, as I’ve said. But it also has to do with a basic commitment to the kind of institutional pluralism and tolerance of principled dissent that the United States has always wisely tried to cultivate. And here I find Drum’s overall perspective simply appalling. The idea that the state should only 'tread carefully’ on issues of liberty, conscience and freedom of religion in areas where polling data shows significant support for the position or community in question is a recipe for majoritarian tyranny and government overreach. The logic that he’s applying to orthodox Catholics could be applied just as easily to the Amish, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, and a host of other groups that don’t have the kind of institutional resources that Roman Catholicism can muster in its own defense. Yes, sometimes state interests are compelling enough to trump religious liberties, and defenders of this mandate have every right to make that case. But the argument that the state’s interests can trump religious liberties so long as the group of people being asked to violate their consciences is small enough is not an argument at all. It’s just a raw appeal to power.

“Fail better” is now experimental literature’s equivalent of that famous Che Guevara photo, flayed completely of meaning and turned into a successful brand with no particular owner. Worstward Ho may be a difficult work that resists any stable interpretation, but we can at least be pretty sure that Beckett’s message was a bit darker than ‘Just do your best and everything is sure work out all right in the end.’ And yet it’s only because Beckett’s name is attached to the quotation, and because a lot of people think of him as a sage without quite knowing what he stood for, that it has spread so widely. It wouldn’t have survived as an authorless proverb.

How disturbing you find this probably depends on the degree of your Beckett worship. Maybe he would have hated it if he were still alive. Or maybe he would have thought it was funny. I certainly do. Watching a liturgy from such a gloomy and merciless author getting repurposed to cheer up mid-level executives is like watching a neighbour clear out their gutters with a stick they found in the garden, not realizing the stick is in fact a human shinbone. When Beckett talks about failure, he’s often talking about how language can’t withstand the weight of the meaning you want to put into it, and in that sense his unintended ubiquity is ideal: what better argument for the feebleness of determinate meaning than the tawdry afterlife of “fail better”?

I’ve increasingly felt that digital journalism and digital humanities are kindred spirits, and that more commerce between the two could be mutually beneficial. That sentiment was confirmed by the extremely positive reaction on Twitter to a brief comment I made on the launch of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, including from Jon Christensen (of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, and formerly a journalist), Shana Kimball (MPublishing, University of Michigan), Tim Carmody (Wired), and Jenna Wortham (New York Times).

Here’s an outline of some of the main areas where digital journalism and digital humanities could profitably collaborate. It’s remarkable, upon reflection, how much overlap there now is, and I suspect these areas will only grow in common importance.

I love electronic books, and I think they’re a huge plus in terms of convenience and accessibility. I still think we have a long, long way to go in terms of typography, but it’s the experience which is sticking for me at the moment. When I get home from my crowded tube, I want the intransient, generous, tactile pages of a paper book with deckled edges and a matt cover - just in the same way that I want tea and a lot of cushions rather than a hi-tech office chair. I want my sofa and my wife sitting at the other end of it with her books, and I want her to poke me with her toe when it’s time for us to go and make some dinner.

After a few years of enjoying and thinking about electronic books, paper still has a very specific place in my world - in fact, it has regained some ground. The depthless grey of my Kindle screen and the gloss brightness of the iPad or iPhone are fine and good, but they are not the hearth and home experience. For that, I want paper, with its grain and flexibility. I want to be able to manipulate pages in three dimensions, riffle through them, flick back. I want to be an ape with an object for a while, relax into my physical universe while my mind generates the world of the book.

That may be an artefact of my age; perhaps younger readers won’t have it. But I’m not so sure. It seems to me that one way our digital co-evolution could go is a growing understanding that digital is perfect for a specific set of activities, but bad for others. Much of what we do, especially as a family or in the arena of play, requires the creation of a particular mindset, an experience. And paper is a specific experience, with a set of requirements, realities, advantages and disadvantages.

mwfrost:

Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is snow-covered in its Google satellite images.

A couple of days ago, Victor Mair wrote about some provocative behavior on the part of “Kŏng Qìngdōng 孔庆东, associate professor in the Chinese Department at Peking University, who also just happens to be the 73rd generation descendant of Confucius (Kǒng Fūzǐ 孔夫子 ; Kǒng Qiū 孔丘), or at least he claims to be a descendant of Confucius.”

In the comments, Victor names someone else who he believes to be a true descendant of Confucius, and notes that there is some doubt about Kŏng Qìngdōng’s claim to this status.

Well, I’d like to come to Kŏng Qìngdōng’s defense, at least on the specific and limited question of whether he is descended from Confucius. My standing to make this argument is based on the fact that I also am descended from Confucius. And I can prove it mathematically.