Alan Jacobs

Okay, so, what if, by the time of the Republican Convention, the GOP decides it cannot possibly have Trump as the Republican candidate, and games the floor so that Rubio is made the nominee, and therefore Trump decides he must run as an independent, thereby hoovering up enough funding that he does not actually have to spend his own money to run for President, and Clinton limps to the nomination after having been gummed half to death by the hoary jaws of Sanders in every state, thereby cutting so weakened a figure that Bloomberg now calculates that he can run as a spoiler for Clinton and a counter to Trump, resulting in the most demented Presidential race in my lifetime and creating my new favourite television show?

—Warren Ellis, who sure knows how to imagine FUN.

I wrote this some years ago in a post that has now been taken down — reposted here — but with Umberto Eco’s death the topic is fresh again. Thus this excerpt: 

Have you heard the one about computer operating systems and the Reformation? You probably have. Most people got the story from the Italian semiotician and academic superstar Umberto Eco. In his telling, from an article he published in 1994, it goes like this:

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

More on this interpretation in a moment, but I can’t go any further without commenting that my friend Edward Mendelson — professor at Columbia, literary executor of W.H. Auden, and occasional character in the novels of Alexander McCall Smith — made the point six years before Eco did, and just as wittily and incisively:

In the 16th century the printed book helped make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as farce. Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it is itself the one hope for salvation.

Each of these cults corresponds to one of the two antagonists in the age of Reformation. In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in Catholic Europe, worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with “icons.” All is sound and imagery in Appledom. . . . A central corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices. Infallible doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs in a sealed boardroom. . . .

As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different in the fragmented world of IBM. That realm is now a chaos of conflicting norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control. . . . When IBM recently abandoned some of its original standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan allegiance to IBM’s original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive innovator. Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and imagery. IBM’s screens are designed for language, not pictures. Graven images may be tolerated by the more luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies on the austerity of the word.

My first thought on re-reading Mendelson’s extended metaphor, which I went around quoting for several years after it first appeared, is: How much has changed! It is growing increasingly difficult to remember that IBM was once a colossus striding the earth, and that people spoke of almost any non-Apple computer as an “IBM machine.” In 1988, the major players were hardware manufacturers.

Six years later, when Eco develops the same conceit, there is one subtle but important shift: he doesn’t speak of “IBM” but rather “MS-DOS” — not a maker of computers but an operating system. And this is the path the conflicts would take: not Apple versus IBM, but Mac (conceived more as an operating system, as a way of organizing and presenting data, than as a physical machine) versus Windows.

[embed]https://youtu.be/gaTCLIFcX5E?start=19&end=24[/embed]

Starring James Earl Jones as GOP Establishment and Malcolm McDowell as Trump Supporters

Perhaps we are witnessing a return to a mode of more immediate access that in turn informs a sort of faceless orality—to the sort of thing we might associate with (for instance) social media such as Twitter. Online interactions lose the old alphabetic sequential rigour and logic; they function as emotional rather than intellectual megaphones. Poke your head into online interaction—about the new Star Wars movie, about Doctor Who’s representation of women, about Gamergate, about the 2015 Hugos, anything you like—and what comes across most strongly is that people feel intensely and are moved to express those feelings with a vehemence that cannot comprehend that others might feel just as strongly in a different way. ‘The characteristic mental disorder of alphabetic societies,’ according to Ong, ‘is schizophrenia, but of analphabetic societies it is anger and polemicism. Old oral was very angry.’ I really can’t think of a neater encapsulation of the online culture surrounding genre in the twenty-teens than ‘Anger and Polemicism’. Perhaps we are indeed moving towards a combination of oral choler and typographic flatness. Renaissance and Reformation scholars attacked one another with furious rage over things they believed mattered intensely—God in the world, how we are saved, how we must live. People today employ the same furious rage, and many of the same rhetorical tactics, over the issue of the crossguards on the lightsabre glimpsed, for less than a second, in the trailer to the forthcoming Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens.

— Adam Roberts. "A combination of oral choler and typographic flatness" — that sounds really, really awful and really, really plausible. But I wonder if it's true that this anger arises when people "cannot comprehend that others might feel just as strongly in a different way."  Maybe they comprehend just that, and they simply hate others for feeling differently, and want to punish them for it, and drive them from the field of battle, and pour salt on the foundations of their city. Carthago delenda est.

Charles Williams (1886–1945) was a cult figure in his lifetime, and he remains one. The word “cult” here describes someone who cannot easily be judged by conventional standards of literary taste. His seven novels, compulsive reading for their adepts, fail all the normal tests by which one would judge the merits of a work of fiction. They are ill-constructed, often carelessly written, and the characters are either so lightly drawn as to be indistinguishable from one another, or etched in crude caricature. Yet there is nothing else quite like them in ­English literature, and you can see why C. S. Lewis pressed them upon his friends, why J. R. R. Tolkien, no great reader of modern fiction, found them compelling...

— A. N. Wilson. One of the oddities about Wilson is how often — how amazingly often — he states with great assurance points that aren't true, that are even the opposite of the truth. Tolkien found Williams's novels "compelling"? Here's what Tolkien wrote in a 1965 letter:

I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. whom I met in his company when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels. I doubt if he had read anything of mine then available; I had read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous. (This is perfectly true as a general statement, but is not intended as a criticism of Williams; rather it is an exhibition of my own limits of sympathy. And of course in so large a range of work I found lines, passages, scenes, and thoughts that I found striking.) I remained entirely unmoved.

Not quite an endorsement, much less a confession of being "compelled."

The Chalk Streams of Norfolk with Stephen Fry from Relevant Films on Vimeo.

   A 45 million-year-old flower

I am a graduate of two schools now under investigation by the Department of Education for their failure to address sexual violence and sexual misconduct; I am also a college professor teaching college students. Furthermore, most of my classes are about the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament). These are texts that are, as my students often point out, “pretty rapey.” They are right. Genesis alone contains multiple narratives of sexual violence and violation. Dinah, Jacob’s only daughter, is raped in Genesis 34. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah closely associates sexuality and violence (Gen. 19). Noah is naked before his son, and perhaps raped by him (Gen. 9); Lot is likewise raped by his daughters (Gen. 19). Even the narrative of Tamar and Judah (Gen. 38), often read as a story of comic sexual trickery, raises some uncomfortable questions about sex, power, and consent. This means that when I teach Genesis in a first year course, there are whole weeks when every class meeting involves a different incident of sexual violence.

— here. The Bible's pretty murdery, too.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1000”] Regiomontanus’s Kalendarium (1476)[/caption]

More here.

“We’re frustrated of course to hear it overall characterized as this, quality is dropping overall,” Federighi continued, “because we know that’s not true."

— here. There you have it: The people at Apple know that it's impossible that their software reliability and quality are declining. So we the users are absolutely screwed.