Alan Jacobs

As instructors naturally become aware of their students’ attachment styles—this is an anxious student who is in my office every day, or this is an avoidant student who never calls me—you think about how you can tailor your advising style to meet their needs.

In everyday thought and speech we have reasons, intentions, feelings. In brainspeak we have synapses, firing patterns, neurotransmitters. For the mechanical materialist, the latter causes the former – and in his routine use of causal language Damasio reveals himself as just that. This is why the weakest part of the book is the concluding chapters, where he extends his central principle of homeostasis to embrace human history, society and culture. But it is possible to be a non-reductionist materialist. The language of mind and consciousness relates to the language of brains and synapses as English does to Italian; one may translate into the other, though always with some loss of cultural resonance. But we do not have to assign primacy to either. Long may pluralism reign, and we conscious beings continue to employ our minds and brains to enhance our understanding of both.

As to a practical “freedom to connect” policy agenda, “we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression,” Clinton averred. The Obama administration will therefore experiment, adopting a “venture capital–style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training” in projects designed to sustain an “Internet that is open, secure, and reliable.”

One danger such a pathway presents is that it may lead to incremental, government-led rulemaking, as if what is required to secure freedom of speech and assembly on the global Internet is some international version of the Federal Communications Commission. That would be deeply questionable, judging by the FCC’s embarrassing history in the United States, and the history of similar regulatory bodies worldwide. It is a story marked mainly by collusion with monopolizing industry and government, as well as the suppression of innovation and speech. Before the United States devotes itself to the civilizing mission of Internet freedom abroad, then, it might be wise to think more deeply about what it will take to protect the “freedom to connect” at home.

Moby: The reason I started making music really young is that no other art form affected me as powerfully. I was a latchkey kid who didn’t have a ton of friends and was bad at sports, so that gave me a lot of time to sit in my living room, listen to records and play guitar. And I don’t know how to do anything else, which I think is a key component for success. It really helps if you only know how to do one thing, because then you have no fallback plan.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Collini is hearing people urging others to be civil, and mis interpreting it as a demand that they stop arguing. The two demands, however, are utterly different, and one can’t sustain a rational dialogue without the virtue of civility. A demand for delicacy and caution is not a demand for silence, it’s a necessary aspect of making speech flourish. Because Collini is right about the goal for which we should strive - a community of rigorous and open argument - it seems unfortunate that he is not attuned to the problems of civility often faced by unpopular minorities who are making new demands. Arguments are not abstract propositions in the air. They are human performances towards other humans, in which the choice of vocabulary, the tone of voice and the look in the eyes all matter for whether the performance is virtuous or vicious. So we should seek the goal to which Collini points us, but pursue it with all our ethical and emotional wits about us.

I did however glean some of Ariely’s bigger picture ideas:

• Most people cheat a little, but very few cheat a lot.

• If offered the incentive to cheat most people will not jump at the chance immediately. Keep offering them the opportunity, however, and eventually they will do so. Ariely and Szalavitz call this the ‘What the hell effect’.

• Across a range of areas - school, law, sex, game, tech, work - men are more likely to be dishonest than women. If, however, a woman is dishonest in one area, she is more likely to be dishonest in all areas than a man.

• Ariely and Szalavitz have no evidence to suggest that people are less likely to cheat an individual than they are to cheat an institution or company. The idea of “sticking it to the man”, says Ariely, is probably just a cover for our own selfishness.

I chose not to write about the nitty-gritty of the current technical situation for a simple reason: I don’t really have anything to add to what the honest-to-goodness experts have to say. I know more than enough about the technical ins and outs of nuclear power to speak intelligently about related policy issues, but the situation at the reactors is complex and opaque. Even bona-fide nuclear engineering experts have severe limits to their ability to predict where things are going. A disturbingly large fraction of the people currently opining on television and radio, though, aren’t even experts on nuclear technology. They are policy experts who apparently can’t say no when people ask them to go on TV and talk about the technical ins and outs of the unfolding situation.

Today, however, it isn’t culture per se that is a “principle of authority” but increasingly the algorithms to which are delegated the task of driving out entropy, or in Matthew Arnold’s language, “anarchy.” You might even say that culture is fast becoming—in domains ranging from retail to rental, search to social networking, and well beyond—the positive remainder resulting from specific information processing tasks, especially as they relate to the informatics of crowds. And in this sense algorithms have significantly taken on what, at least since Arnold, has been one of culture’s chief responsibilities, namely, the task of “reassembling the social,” as Bruno Latour puts it—here, though, by discovering statistical correlations that would appear to unite an otherwise disparate and dispersed crowd of people.

But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.

There is an analogy here with the Christian interplay between divine providence and human free will. For the Christian, I act freely when I strangle the local police chief; but God has foreseen this action from all eternity and included it all along in his plan for humanity. He did not force me to dress up as a parlor maid last Friday and call myself Milly; but being omniscient, he knew that I would, and could thus shape his cosmic schemes with the Milly business well in mind. When I pray to him for a smarter-looking teddy bear than the dog-eared, beer-stained one who sleeps on my pillow at present, it is not that God never had the slightest intention of bestowing such a favor on me but then, on hearing my prayer, changed his mind. God cannot change his mind. It is rather that he decides from all eternity to give me a new teddy bear because of my prayer, which he has also foreseen from all eternity. In one sense, the coming of the future kingdom of God is not preordained: it will arrive only if men and women work for it in the present. But the fact that they will work for it of their own free will is itself an inevitable result of God’s grace.

There is a similar interplay between freedom and inevitability in Marx… . Marx does not think that the inevitability of socialism means we can all stay in bed. He believes, rather, that once capitalism has definitively failed, working people will have no reason not to take it over and every reason to do so… . Just as for the Christian human action is free yet part of a preordained plan, so for Marx the disintegration of capitalism will unavoidably lead men and women to sweep it away of their own free will.