Alan Jacobs

more changes

In all the mountain ranges of commentary on [the Gospel of] John — the all but endless attempts to explain John’s alleged dislocations, his stops and jolting starts, his glaring clarities and sudden fogs — I have met with no sustained attempt to see the heart of John’s final draft as, specifically, an old man’s book. Yet an arresting case can be made for its being the product of a single large but aging mind, a mind at hurried final work on the scenes and words of its distant youth — now precise and lucid, now vague and elliptical in its movement, all its memories screened through the thought of intervening years.

Can it be that we tend to overestimate the influence of language partly because we so often underestimate the intelligence of other people? Think about common arguments on the lines of ‘if you call something X, people will believe it’s X just because of the name.’ We rarely hear, 'If you call something X, I will start believing it’s X just because of the name.’ I obviously know better. But others don’t. This type of overestimation has a long history. One of the earliest discussions of the influence of language on thought was an essay by the Bible scholar Johann David Michaelis from 1760, which won the prize of the of the Prussian academy. In it, Michaelis explains that if, for example, one gave completely different names to two vegetables which are in reality quite similar, 'the people’ would never suspect that they are similar. He’d obviously not heard of clementines, mandarins, tangarines, and satsumas.

freakyfauna:

Transition No. 13, 1928.

Magazine cover by Pablo Picasso.

Found here.

What, then, are we to make of the two books Kelly has penned here? I remain extremely torn. I feel that the opening and closing portions of What Technology Wants are almost too silly to be taken seriously. Yet, the meat in the middle is absolutely beautiful, inspiring, and enlightening stuff.

So, here’s what you do: Wait for the paperback version of What Technology Wants to be released (since it’ll be far easier for you to rip apart), and then tear off pages 1-70 and 270-360. What you’ll be left with is a terrific 200-page book that I can wholeheartedly recommend!

When interviewed while he was researching this book, Kelly, who describes himself as a devout Christian, declared that technology ‘is actually a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.’ And the last chapter of What Technology Wants is steeped in this bizarre neo-mystical progressivism. 'If there is a God,’ Kelly writes, 'the arc of the technium is aimed right at him.’ For Kelly, our artifacts, too, reflect the divine: 'We can see more of God in a cellphone than in a tree frog.’ (Were I religious I’d argue the opposite: no human technology can make a new frog from the raw material of flies, something that frogs do regularly.)

When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window. Social media acts as a kind of truth serum, as Marshall Kirkpatrick likes to say: This is how the masses of people talk. This is how the masses of people write. Not moonlighting bloggers. Not the 20 million NPR listeners. But the other 300 million people trying to LOL their way through boring days at office jobs or in Iraq.

I think we confuse the ability to see what everyday writing looks like – and probably has for a long time – with a change in how people write. Toss in that the traditional (usually religious) practices and sayings around serious topics like death or childbearing have lost valence, and you get people just saying what comes to mind. It’s not always pretty.

Professor Gleason was a bumbling biologist whom, due to his generous and ovoid physical proportions, we students had nicknamed ‘The Egg.’ He seemed to be totally baffled by his own course material, and managed quite capably to convey this bewilderment to the class, so that none of us knew what the hell was going on. I once went to his office with great trepidation to ask him to explain a challenging concept. When I arrived there he had his back to me as he stood before an elaborate apparatus of glassware, ringstands, tubes, and clamps. I recall thinking, Well, how about that? Still waters run deep. He does know what he’s doing after all. When he turned to me, however, he was stirring a cup of coffee, brewed on the intricate set-up. One day he took us down to the banks of the Hackensack River for a field trip. We helped him get the large motorboat into the water, and then the ten of us students looked on from the bank as he worked away at the engine, yanking the pull repeatedly to get it to start. He hadn’t noticed that the boat had begun to drift away, and we had no intention of alerting him. We all watched in silence (and with rising anticipation of a canceled class) as The Egg worked at the engine, his crablike arms too short to extract the pull all the way. Within ten minutes he had drifted out of sight. So we went home.

changes to the System

A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found a decided link between celibacy and good grades. Among high school students who earn mostly A’s, 32 percent have had intercourse, compared with 69 percent of their peers with D’s and F’s. And on risk-taking measures like consuming alcohol or using condoms, the better students were also the more cautious.