Standing back and getting out of the way and letting things take on a life of their own is not a variety of moral reflection, though it makes sense as a way to think about a wildly successful product. The total and exclusive focus on the tool at the expense of its ecosystem, the appeal to the zeitgeist that downplays the producer’s own role in shaping it (“whatever happens is … ”; “feeling the direction”), the invocation of the idea that technology is autonomous (“these things take on a life of their own”)—these are all elements of a worldview that Lewis Mumford, in criticizing the small-mindedness of those who were promoting car-only travel in the 1950s, dubbed “the bankruptcy of social imagination.”Should we hold Ford Motors responsible for the totality of its impact on our lives, or just for the part that deals with liberation and autonomy? Perhaps it would set the bar too high to hold it accountable for pollution, congestion, and the disappearance of public space. But Apple’s brand, its lofty conception of itself, has been built on the idea that it is not a company like other companies. It was Apple that insisted that it wants to think different, and that it is not dominated by “suits” who care only about its quarterly earnings. So it is Apple who set this bar so high—and Apple that seems to have fallen short of it.
Much has been made of the Internet’s ability to resist such control. The network’s technological origins, we are sometimes told, lie in the cold war–era quest for a communications infrastructure so robust that even a nuclear attack could not shut it down. Although that is only partly true, it conveys something of the strength inherent in the Internet’s elegantly decentralized design. With its multiple, redundant pathways between any two network nodes and its ability to accommodate new nodes on the fly, the TCP/IP protocol that defines the Internet should ensure that it can keep on carrying data no matter how many nodes are blocked and whether it’s an atom bomb or a repressive regime that does it. As digital-rights activist John Gilmore once famously said, “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”That is what it was designed to do anyway. And yet if five phone calls can cut off the Internet access of 80 million Egyptians, things have not worked quite that way in practice. The Egyptian cutoff was only the starkest of a growing list of examples that demonstrate how susceptible the Internet can be to top-down control. During the Tunisian revolution the month before, authorities had taken a more targeted approach, blocking only some sites from the national Internet. In the Iranian postelection protests of 2009, Iran’s government slowed nationwide Internet traffic rather than stopping it altogether. And for years China’s “great firewall” has given the government the ability to block whatever sites it chooses. In Western democracies, consolidation of Internet service providers has put a shrinking number of corporate entities in control of growing shares of Internet traffic, giving companies such as Comcast and AT&T both the incentive and the power to speed traffic served by their own media partners at the expense of competitors.
It’s the opportunity to engage with these issues and many others that excites me about taking up my new position of professor of contemporary thought at Brunel. I have been a vocal critic of the burgeoning of creative writing programmes in British universities, and while teaching some aspects of literary composition under the aegis of the school of arts, I will be formulating and presenting course modules for the school of social sciences. I’m interested in such things as reading and memory in the digital age, the practice of pedestrianism as a form of urban study and political activism, the cultural supremacy of the so-called psy professions, and, of course, that perennial sawhorse: whither the novel?I realise that the above may make it sound as if I’m more concerned with what I will get out of teaching these students, rather than what they may get out of me – but actually I believe the two are pretty much the same thing. The encounter I described at the outset took place at the University of Kent, and the multifarious debate engaged – or so the tutors told me later – their students proportionately. There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour – if I believed in progress I suppose that’s what I’d call it.
The thinker who has done most to expose the theological aspirations of secular politics, and especially its infatuation with some version of providential design, is John Gray. Like Critchley, Gray thinks of modern politics as “a chapter in the history of religion". What begins with the millenarian thinking of the Hebrew scriptures finds its expression in the bloody utopianism of the Jacobins, the Nazis and Stalin. Here, the book of Revelation is the surprising template for modern political action. “What is essential to neoliberal millenarian thinking is the consolidation of the idea of good through the identification of evil, where the Antichrist keeps assuming different masks: Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and so on,” Critchley writes. For Gray, the reason to expose the theological underpinnings of political discourse is to exorcise its power. Only tragic pessimism can free us from the violence of the theologian’s ambition. But there are no votes in tragic pessimism. So the bloodshed continues.
One of the difficulties with targeting religion, as some secularists do, is that as a concept it’s incredibly fluid. What do we mean by “religion”? You often hear people saying about Muslims, “They want to have honour killings; they want to have female genital mutilation.” But that isn’t Islam. That kind of thing has happened in many cultures, some of which were Christian or pagan. Honour killings happened in ancient Greece. This is a very complex phenomenon, at the borderline of culture and religion. One of the difficulties with seeing religion as the problem is that any understanding of the relationship between culture and religion just disappears.
This last detail, though, brings me to Goldstein’s fundamental problem with progressive homeschoolers. She argues that by keeping their kids at home, parents passively reinforce social segregation, allowing students at low-income schools to fall even further behind due to the absence of positive “peer effects.” I have sympathy for this view. But, truth be told, the minuscule number of secular home learners nationwide is dwarfed by the huge population of liberal parents who do everything in their power to get their kids into the best public schools possible, moving their families to more competitive districts, those desirable zip codes, and perpetuating inequity in the process. According to Goldstein’s logic, real progressives should, instead, be enrolling their offspring in the worst possible public institutions in order to improve them, and while that sounds good in theory, I’ve never met a single parent doing such a thing. Instead most liberal parents are desperate to help their children climb to the top of the meritocracy—to the top of an exclusionary pyramid that, as I discuss in my essay, has largely been rigged in their favor all along. How liberal is that? One of the virtues of unschooling, of the radical philosophy that underpins it, is that it calls the entire hierarchy into question.
Next month I will be giving a couple of lectures in which I will try to articulate the relationship between my Theology of Reading book and my Pleasures of Reading book. My argument will develop from this image and its text. I am perfectly serious.
“Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good,” [Craig Koslovsky] says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks. “Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night.”That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness. This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight.
With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes. In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed. London didn’t join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe’s major towns and cities were lit at night. Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
None of this offers even a start to the question of why people keep buying and presumably reading an interminably long, frequently repetitive and intermittently gruesome Iron Age rendition of Bronze Age combat. One reason, obviously, is that had Homer existed (in spite of his deconstruction by Wolf, and in spite of his substitution by Parry/Lord), he would have been the star pupil of any creative writing course. They teach a variety of tricks and techniques for different kinds of writing, but Homer uses absolutely all of them: the Iliad begins in media res with the action underway, and instead of a tiresome summary of the first nine years of the war, necessary context is supplied by scattered flashbacks; it starts, moreover, with a quarrel on the Achaean side that is a fast way of introducing its two principal protagonists, Agamemnon and Achilles, each acting out at maximum volume to reveal his character immediately; the indispensable enlistment of emotions to make us care for the characters’ fates is fully accomplished, on both sides, most strongly perhaps for Hector as he parts from his infant son and desolate wife for a day of combat, but also for the teenage fighter who grasps Achilles’ leg in a futile plea for mercy in Book 22, and many others; the build-up of tension leading to a great climax is relentless, and achieved not once but twice, first in the long delayed return of Achilles to combat, preceded by dramatic renditions of the bloody losses his absence had caused, and then in the duel between Achilles and Hector, all the more dramatic because of the final loss of nerve of Priam’s most valiant son. On top of that, there are the production values, as Hollywood calls them: lots of special effects ranging from the habitual falling-star incandescence of the gods to the extraordinary revolt of the river god Scamander against Achilles, who had fouled the river with bleeding dead bodies (he would have drowned in a thunderous flood had not the gods intervened); the gorgeous Cecil B. DeMille battle scenes written as if seen from above, sex scenes all the more erotically charged because they are inserted between dramatic peaks and, throughout, the reciprocal balancing of the inevitable human tragedy of mortality with the tragicomedies of the cavorting gods.
For Vedantam and Inskeep, the local nature of Twitter is not only notable, but somehow fails to be “democratic,” an analysis that seems unhinged from any useful political theory. But beyond this, there’s a whole social-media news-analysis paradigm reflected in Inskeep’s framing. Twitter here is supposed to exist in another world: a nebulous cyberspace of unbounded freedoms. But most of us already know that the Internet is at best a broken utopia (the only kind we’re ever likely to get).“Wellman is finding that Twitter isn’t flat,” Vidantam says—as if Tom Friedman’s chimerical “flatness” (the analytic value of which has proven to be nil) is the only possible quality of transformative political agency. In last year’s revolutions, it wasn’t flatness that gave social media its power. It was its hyperlocality, its novel blending of intimate communities and witness at a distance.