Work, [Adam] Smith points out, is a reciprocal process: Workers form goods, and are, in turn, formed by their labors. Smith worries about the fate of people whose work, say, consists of drawing out wire, or straightening it, or cutting it, hour after hour, as in the famous first example of the division of labor, the pin factory, discussed in the opening pages of Book I. His anxieties center on “the understanding,” a broad and flexible concept in Enlightenment thought that could include a number of mental faculties, including memory, imagination, and reason. All of those faculties are on Smith’s mind here, but he is especially apprehensive about workers’ declining capacity for rational thought:“The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.”
cunning
“Cunning” is a very interesting word. What follows comes largely from rummaging around in the OED.
Long ago it could mean little more than “quite knowledgable” — as when Richard Rolle, in the fourteenth century, refers to “Clerkes of grete cunnyng” — though it more typically acknowledged some kind of physical skill or dexterity, as when the Psalmist says, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” See also this description of the boy David: “I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely person, and the Lord is with him” (1 Samuel 16:18, KJV).
But gradually, over the centuries, it began to take on a certain coloration, that of rare and hidden knowledge or skill — thus the “cunning men” or women, the healers that I write about in this essay. Cunning folk may not be formally educated, but they possess much lore or local knowledge, and are capable of exercising wise discernment and tact in their healing art. What they do is not easy to learn or easy to teach; it’s not readily formulable in any commonly-shared language.
Which surely is what leads to the pejoration of the term: the use of “cunning” to mean something like manipulative or deceitfully malicious. Thus Francis Bacon: “We take Cunning for a sinister or crooked Wisdome.” And Tolkien says that Saruman means “man of cunning” — originally in the neutral sense, but as he becomes corrupted by Sauron, in the Baconian sense.
And yet cunning can also be a necessary tool for the marginalized, the oppressed, the threatened — the weak. Emerson says, “Nature has endowed some animals with cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld.” When Stephen Dedalus, at the end of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pledges to practice “silence, exile, and cunning,” he must do so because his powers are slight in comparison with the great forces (religion, nation, family) with which he must contend if he wants to fulfill his calling as an artist.
The kind of cultural repair I am inviting my readers to participate in requires the cultivation of cunning men and women — but woe be unto us if our cunning becomes corrupted. The path from a necessary guile to “a sinister or crooked Wisdome” is not a long one. It is interesting in this context to note that William Tyndale’s translation of 1 Corinthians 2:13 directly juxtaposes the positive and negative connotations of the word: “which thinges also we speake not in the conynge wordes of manes wysdome but with the conynge wordes of the holy goost.”
Let’s face it: we largely privilege Shakespeare more than other writers today because it’s always been that way.Or perhaps because his writing is so brilliant that it deserves the attention and devotion given to it. In fact, it hasn’t “always been that way” — it took a century or more for Shakespeare to be perceived as significantly superior to his contemporaries — but maybe it’s that way now for reasons other than the power of crowd behavior. That people gradually realized the greatness of Shakespeare because Shakespeare is indeed great ought to be one of the options on the table, and it’s slightly comical how terrified scholars are of entertaining that possibility.
Spotify isn’t just trying to become the biggest name in podcasting (which has heretofore been, but may no longer be, Apple). They’re trying to usurp podcasting as we know it — one of the last and brightest bastions of the open, simple, private, transparent internet — and turn it into a privately-owned, gated, complicated, invasive, utterly closed platform. Spotify is trying to do to podcasting what Facebook did to “having your own website”.
this vs. The This
C. S. Lewis, from The Discarded Image:
If the reader will suspend his disbelief and exercise his imagination upon it even for a few minutes, I think he will become aware of the vast re-adjustment involved in a perceptive reading of the old poets. He will find his whole attitude to the universe inverted. In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.
You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous.
Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration…. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely.
Let’s set aside the question of whether “medieval man” really existed in the way that Lewis suggests — whether this vision was as widely shared as he seems to have thought. Certainly it was the aspiration of many of the greatest thinkers and poets of that era to ground our experience in this sense of the cosmos as a harmonious and coherent structure — one in which (let me stress the point) none of us never need be lonely.
Now I want to move from from that vision through some commonplaces of intellectual history, commonplaces that tend to be used in crassly general ways but remain useful. So: the collapse of this Medieval Model left many people disoriented – “New philosophy calls all in doubt," as John Donne famously wrote — and that in turn led to a variety of attempts to to tether us to some firmament with cords strong enough to prevent us from floating away and becoming lost in the cosmos. Perhaps we are grounded by our faith in God, or by our belief that we are among God’s Elect; or perhaps we seek a humbler grounding in our understanding that like other human beings we are rational and sociable and can on the basis of those traits construct a modern moral order. But when all of these projects to one degree or another founder, when they fail to gain complete assent, we find ourselves at the outset of what we now call the the Romantic period with a sense of lostness and loneliness.
What I want to emphasize here is the radically divergent ways in which the dominant figures of the Romantic era sought to address that lostness, that loneliness. On the one hand, we have intensely material visions — for instance, the “stately pleasure dome” of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, “girdled round” with great walls and towers, within which lay “gardens bright with sinuous rills, / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.” On the other hand, we also have visions like that of Hegel, in which the material world gives way to Spirit, perfect in its Absolute abstraction. Here, this dome, this tree; there, the universal This. Rival visions of how we might flourish. We need not wander lonely as a cloud because we are grounded, tethered, connected — but connected to what? Aye, that is the question.
I am now describing Adam Roberts’s new novel The This, which, as is usual with Adam, is positively fizzing with ideas, in such a way and to such a degree that any description of it cannot convey its hyper-associative wovenness. So when I say that the contrast I have just described is what the novel is fundamentally about, that is both true and untrue. It’s a novel and not a treatise, a story and not an argument. But still, one important thing the book says to me is that our current mixture of Feels about social media — our excitement at being connected with others and our dread of being absorbed into the Borg — our desire for solidarity and our fear of being coerced into some lockstep collective — our imagining of some near-future Singularity as somehow at once a consummation and an annihilation — all this is an extension of the rival visions of our ancestors of 200 years ago. We are all Romantics now. Still.
And while I think that is correct, I also want to note that Plato saw all this coming a long, long time ago. It is indeed what one of his most famous dialogues is all about. Nobody shows this more vividly than Martha Nussbaum, in her brilliant reading of the Symposium (originally a journal article, reprinted as the sixth chapter of The Fragility of Goodness). Here is how she summarizes the contrast between the (proto-Hegelian) views of Socrates and the earthier Romanticism of Alcibiades:
Socratic knowledge of the good, attained through pure intellect operating apart from the senses, yields universal truths and, in practical choice, universal rules. If we have apprehended the form, we will be in possession of a general account of beauty, an account that not only holds true of all and only instances of beauty, but also explains why they are correctly called instances of beauty, and grouped together. Such understanding, once attained, would take priority over our vague, mixed impressions of particular beautifuls. It would tell us how to see.
The lover's understanding, attained through the supple interaction of sense, emotion, and intellect … yields particular truths and particular judgments. It insists that those particular intuitive judgments are prior to any universal rules we may be using to guide us. A lover decides how to respond to his or her lover not on the basis of definitions or general prescriptions, but on the basis of an intuitive sense of the person and the situation, which, although guided by general theories, is not subservient to them. This does not mean that their judgments and responses are not rational. Indeed, Alcibiades would claim that a Socratic adherence to rule and refusal to see and feel the particular as such is what is irrational. To have seen that, and how, how, Socrates is like nobody else, to respond to him as such and to act accordingly, is the rational way to behave towards another individual. Nor does it mean that this love neglects the repeatable general features in which Socrates is interested: for Alcibiades sees Socrates' virtues and is moved by them. But his knowledge sees more, and differently; it is an integrated response to the person as unique a whole.
I think Adam is right to suggest, in The This, that the particular ways we experience this divergence of ideals are highly indebted to (or are simply a continuation of) the Romantic era; but its roots go much deeper. Also, I think Adam and I take the same side in this apparently eternal debate, though with certain differences that I won’t get into here because SPOILERS.
There’s so much more to say about this wonderful book! But I have to stop there. I enjoy all of Adam’s novels, but this is one I’ll be returning to — perhaps on this very blog. Do please read it!
the low bar
An excellent post by John Siracusa (a) outlining the most elementary features that the UI of any video-streaming service should have and (b) showing how rarely (if ever) the existing services meet that low bar. This is something that I think about almost every day: How absolutely incompetent the coding is of the streaming services I use. And in my experience music services are almost as bad.
(Apple’s purchase of Primephonic last year gave me a tiny bit of hope that I’d eventually have an app that allows me to listen to classical music without, for instance, having to deal with truncated and hence incomprehensible track listings for classical music — but I’m still waiting for Apple’s version of the service to be released, and am not confident that it ever will be.)
More generally, it seems to me that UI design in software has been getting worse over the past decade, and I wonder why that is. For instance, Amazon’s Kindle software, on every platform, is buggy, and seems increasingly to be focused more on trying to sell me books than on making my reading experience a good one. Yet another reason — there are several — why I’ve almost completely stopped buying Kindle books, though I still use the device for reading, e.g., Project Gutenberg books. But confusing or inappropriate UI design is not solely the province of Amazon — it seems to be becoming endemic. That’s impressionistic and anecdotal, to be sure; if I weren’t preoccupied by other things I’d try to support my claim. But hey, just read Siracusa’s excellent post.
A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks. If you can remember the number of the Kennedy administration executive order about reducing troop levels in Vietnam, then you’re probably a crank — that EO plays a big role in Kennedy-related conspiracy theories, so it’s conspiracy theorists who know all the details.
More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation” is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would resolve political disputes. Both David Neumark and Arin Dube know far more than you or I do about the empirical literature on minimum wage increases. Nonetheless, they disagree. It is simply a heavily contested question. Relative to Neumark, the typical progressive is wildly misinformed about this subject; relative to Dube, the typical conservative is wildly misinformed. And lots of political disputes have this quality — most people don’t know that much about it, but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question. That’s why it’s a live debate.