Alan Jacobs

To [Milton’s Satan] belongs the journeys, the politics, the battles, a growing insupportable self-knowledge that will, eventually, diminish him to almost nothing. He travels to encounter and corrupt his opposite numbers, the counter-heroes Adam and Eve – united where he is solitary, ignorant where he is knowing, happy where he is miserable. Their meeting will result in the poem’s second and very different fall, raising Adam and Eve separately and for different reasons to tragic stature. Out of its disaster, as out of Troy’s burning, we see them at the beginning of an odyssey. Their final “wandering steps and slow” will walk them out of the poem and into history, an untold journey leading humanity – eventually, eventually – into the embrace of a lost beloved.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks living in a monastery, largely to complete a book chapter (now uncompleted) but also to commune with God in the run up to Christmas. The guest house is about 300 yards from the chapel, yet that hasn’t stopped me from never entering it. I’ve spent most of the time curled up in a warm bed reading Margaret Atwood’s latest novel and watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond (I love that guy). The monks tell me that this is nothing to be ashamed of, that I’m here to rest as well as worship. But monks are like that: they never complain, never criticize.

[W]e are in a sense living through a cultural war in which some who’ve chosen, say, more leisure and prestige are waging a symbolic struggle against those who’ve chosen more income — the object is to devalue the accumulation of material possessions, to characterize it as “greedy,” etc. Indirectly, the proximate goals are to extract more tax revenue to finance public sector work that, in some but not all cases, offers relative stability if not very high cash incomes. Naturally, risk-averse people and people who are inclined to embrace the “greed” narrative are more inclined to sort into public sector work while risk-taking people who, say, like the idea of achieving some modicum of economic stability for their families by building their private wealth will be more inclined to sort into lucrative private sector work. But a risk-averse individual may nevertheless be a very privileged one in terms of cultural capital, while a risk-taking individual might be much less so.

Writer’s block — or, maybe more accurately, a writer’s expressive frustration — has many presenting symptoms and many causes, but it is at root language-related. Versions of creative stasis may afflict those who practice in other fields — painters and composers can find themselves short of ideas or inspiration — but the situation is not quite the same. Certainly we never hear anything comparable affecting statesmen, lawyers, coaches, electricians or pastry chefs. This affliction afflicts self-anointed users of language, writers, and because their medium of choice — or compulsion — happens to be the universal medium of consciousness and communication, it takes on a metaphysical inflection. If language is the distinctive human feature, its single greatest evolutionary feat, then writers are in a most privileged and vulnerable situation. In the movement from ape to apex, the engaged — successful — use of language, literary expression, represents the latter. It follows then that a frustration or failure in its use must be seen as something more sweepingly indicative as well. The fact that any true success is rare and difficult is not consoling to the person who is failing in the attempt.

Comedy … is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much greater breadth and depth than classical comedy. Greater in breadth because classical comedy is based upon a division of mankind into two classes, those who have arete and those who do not, and only the second class, fools, shameless rascals, slaves, are fit subjects for comedy. But Christian comedy is based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, therefore, whatever his rank or talents, can claim immunity from the comic exposure and, indeed, the more virtuous, in the Greek sense, a man is, the more he realizes that he deserves to be exposed. Greater in depth because, while classical comedy believes that rascals should get the drubbing they deserve, Christian comedy believes that we are forbidden to judge others and that it is our duty to forgive each other. In classical comedy the characters are exposed and punished: when the curtain falls, the audience is laughing and those on stage are in tears. In Christian comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven: when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together.

Another theme of Kahneman’s book, proclaimed in the title, is the existence in our brains of two independent sytems for organizing knowledge. Kahneman calls them System One and System Two. System One is amazingly fast, allowing us to recognize faces and understand speech in a fraction of a second. It must have evolved from the ancient little brains that allowed our agile mammalian ancestors to survive in a world of big reptilian predators. Survival in the jungle requires a brain that makes quick decisions based on limited information. Intuition is the name we give to judgments based on the quick action of System One. It makes judgments and takes action without waiting for our conscious awareness to catch up with it. The most remarkable fact about System One is that it has immediate access to a vast store of memories that it uses as a basis for judgment. The memories that are most accessible are those associated with strong emotions, with fear and pain and hatred. The resulting judgments are often wrong, but in the world of the jungle it is safer to be wrong and quick than to be right and slow.

System Two is the slow process of forming judgments based on conscious thinking and critical examination of evidence. It appraises the actions of System One. It gives us a chance to correct mistakes and revise opinions. It probably evolved more recently than System One, after our primate ancestors became arboreal and had the leisure to think things over. An ape in a tree is not so much concerned with predators as with the acquisition and defense of territory. System Two enables a family group to make plans and coordinate activities. After we became human, System Two enabled us to create art and culture.

The question then arises: Why do we not abandon the error-prone System One and let the more reliable System Two rule our lives? Kahneman gives a simple answer to this question: System Two is lazy. To activate System Two requires mental effort. Mental effort is costly in time and also in calories. Precise measurements of blood chemistry show that consumption of glucose increases when System Two is active. Thinking is hard work, and our daily lives are organized so as to economize on thinking. Many of our intellectual tools, such as mathematics and rhetoric and logic, are convenient substitutes for thinking. So long as we are engaged in the routine skills of calculating and talking and writing, we are not thinking, and System One is in charge. We only make the mental effort to activate System Two after we have exhausted the possible alternatives.

But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT [Information and communications technology] - a subject seen by its detractors as teaching clerical skills rather than any real understanding of computing. And it seems school children are getting that message too because the numbers studying the subject are on the decline. The answer, according to the firms and organisations calling for change, is to put proper computer science in the form of coding on the curriculum. And it looks like they’ve found what could be a great slogan for their campaign. ‘Coding is the new Latin,’ says Alex Hope, co-author of that Next Gen report which kicked things off. 'We need to give kids a proper understanding of computers if they’re to compete for all kinds of jobs.’

There’s now an App Store for the Mac to match that of the iPhone and iPad, and it carries the same battery of restrictions. Some restrictions, accepted as normal in the context of a mobile phone, seem more unfamiliar in the PC landscape. For example, software for the Mac App Store is not permitted to make the Mac environment look different than it does out of the box. (Ironic for a company with a former motto importuning people to think different.) Developers can’t add an icon for their app to the desktop or the dock without user permission, an amazing echo of what landed Microsoft in such hot water. (Though with Microsoft, the problem was prohibiting the removal of the IE icon—Microsoft didn’t try to prevent the addition of other software icons, whether installed by the PC maker or the user.) Developers can’t duplicate functionality already on offer in the Store. They can’t license their work as Free Software, because those license terms conflict with Apple’s. The content restrictions are unexplored territory.

I really enjoyed doing this interview with Sarah Green at Harvard Business Review for their podcasting series. The title “The Myth of Monotasking” is based on the idea that the brain doesn’t know how to monotask, in fact the term “multitasking” doesn’t really mean much of anything when you think about it carefully since virtually everything we do as humans involves coordinating multiple cognitive tasks all happening at once. This interview helps straighten out some of the confusions around that mushy term and, I hope, helps lower anxiety about how well we are or are not doing against some mythical standard of sustained, focused attention. Bottom line: the mind wanders a lot because the mind’s task is to wander.

Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though occasionally a character may be tossed between good and evil, like Gollum, it is self-interest, rather than conscience, that makes him tip back and forth. Betrayal and temptation happen; inner doubts do not. Gandalf and Aragorn never say, as even the most patriotic real-world general might, “I don’t know which side I should be on, or, indeed, if any side is worth taking.” Nor does any Mordor general stop to reflect, as even many German officers did, on the tension between duty and morality: there are no Hectors, bad guys we come to admire, or Agamemnons, good guys we come to deplore. (Comic-book moralities, despite their reputation, are craftier; the “X-Men” series is powerful partly because it’s clear that, if you and I were mutants, we would quite possibly side with the evil Magneto.)