Alan Jacobs

Humanists can be private educators and public spies. But the latter role is far too rare, because humanist intellectuals do not see themselves as practitioners of daily life. Their disparagement comes largely from their own isolation within the institutions that reproduce them, a fate many humanists despise out of one side of their mouths while endorsing it with the other. The humanist corner of the university becomes, in Palmquist’s words, “just a safe haven for half-witted thinkers to make a comfortable living.”

The humanities needs more courage and more contact with the world. It needs to extend the practice of humanism into that world, rather than to invite the world in for tea and talk of novels, only to pat itself on the collective back for having injected some small measure of abstract critical thinking into the otherwise empty puppets of industry. As far as indispensability goes, we are not meant to be superheroes nor wizards, but secret agents among the citizens, among the scrap metal, among the coriander, among the parking meters. We earn respect by calling in worldly secrets, by making them public. The worldly spy is the opposite of the elbow-patched humanist, the one never out of place no matter the place. The traveler at home everywhere, with the luxury to look.

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I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.

I may enable comments again someday. But what I really want to do is fundamentally redesign the commenting experience. Most comment systems are practically designed to create stupidity. I know there’s a better way. But that’s another post.

I think we’re witnessing a fascinating shift in online culture. The era of hacker handles is over. We’ve grown out of it the same way I grew out of Pink Floyd. (Even though I still listen to Animals occasionally. It’s the sheep.) The internet is not a second life anymore, it’s your first one. You don’t slip into a pseudonym when you use the phone, why should you be someone else online? Hacker handles were training wheels, and they’re off the bike now whether you like it or not.

This doesn’t mean that there will be no anonymous or pseudonymous conversation on the internet. There will always be a need for anonymous speech, just as there’ll always be a need to pay in cash. It’s just not up to giant multinational corporations to provide that for us, nor should we trust them to do so.

The theologian T. F. Torrance tells about an incident that happened in 1944 after an assault on San Martino-Sogliano. Torrance was serving as a stretcher bearer in the conflict, and he encountered a dying soldier, 20 years old, named Private Philips. The soldier was near the end, laid out on the ground, and eager for some spiritual comfort as he passed away. Torrance leaned down, and Philips said, “Padre, is God really like Jesus?” And Torrance said without hesitation, “Yes, God is like Jesus.”

The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not.

The rapidly changing practice of personal curation only serves to highlight how difficult the job of museum curators is. The British Museum has over seven million objects in its collection, but only a fraction can be selected for display, and each of those needs to be carefully presented and explained according to a coherent story that attempts to explain or highlight a message. That’s why A History of the World in 100 Objects was so popular – because it was so exquisitely curated. Another impressive feat was accomplished by the Museum of Modern Art last moment when it opened its newest exhibition, Talk to Me. Unlike its other collections of objects, Talk to Me includes dozens of purely digital objects – websites, games, designs, stories – all narrowed down from a near-unlimited number online to a small enough selection for visitors to comprehend.

But we don’t have two years; we barely have two minutes to curate ourselves every day, and even then we can’t control what photos and videos and blog posts we might be tagged in. The firehose of media that expresses our lives online is only growing stronger, and our ability to control it becoming weaker. Soon, we’ll all have to contend with rawer, more unedited depictions of ourselves being seen by potentially billions.

Either we’ll learn to get over it and become more accepting of others quirks, flaws, and foibles and hope that they will do us the same favour in turn – or we’ll have to figure out a way of shutting off that firehose, Facebook and Google be damned.

Edwards begins his book with an anecdote about a meeting he had with Page back in 2002. Bruised by the founder’s tendency to dismiss or ignore his suggestions, Edwards comes to Page’s office to offer an olive branch and try to ingratiate himself with his prickly boss. ‘I know I haven’t always agreed with the direction you and Sergey have set for us,’ he says. 'But I’ve been thinking about it and I just wanted to tell you that, in looking back, I realize that more often than not you’ve been right about things.’ Page looks up from his computer screen, a befuddled expression on his face. 'More often than not?” he replies. “When were we ever wrong?’

In other words, you did finally understand America.