Alan Jacobs

newhousebooks:

Cover, tourist brochure for Madurodam, a miniature city in The Hague. Undated.

There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children living in a remote village in northern Australia.

Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan, has been studying the young people’s speech for more than a decade and has concluded that they speak neither a dialect nor the mixture of languages called a creole, but a new language with unique grammatical rules.

The language, called Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, is spoken only by people under 35 in Lajamanu, an isolated village of about 700 people in Australia’s Northern Territory. In all, about 350 people speak the language as their native tongue. Dr. O’Shannessy has published several studies of Light Warlpiri, the most recent in the June issue of Language.

“Many of the first speakers of this language are still alive,” said Mary Laughren, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not involved in the studies. One reason Dr. O’Shannessy’s research is so significant, she said, “is that she has been able to record and document a ‘new’ language in the very early period of its existence.”

You ask me for my thoughts on the Cuban question. I regret they are at present unformed as I have spent the past month wrestling with the seating plan for the All Souls Dinner. Freddie will not be happy unless he is at high table. I know I ought to be able to find a way of making this happen, but sometimes the Kantian “ought implies can” is fallible. I have also not had time to commit my apercus on the construction of the Berlin Wall to print; it is, of course, a great honour to have such a landmark named in recognition of one’s achievements, but I am not sure I have done quite enough yet to be worthy of such a legacy.

The problem Judaeo-Christianity is supposed to address is human shortcomings, the cost of which becomes more horrifying by the decade. But how can a privileged, self-satisfied American (say, a Yale professional student—or, um, me, writing books for publishers in Manhattan, New Haven, and Boston), without special intervention, grasp the life-giving idea of sin, in a modern culture designed to hide even basic cause and effect? Isn’t the task, then, to shock that person out of his complacency, not with stories of hell (which he’ll sneer at as mere stories), but just by inducing him to look around and persuading him that he, like everyone else, is a sinner, but could bear to acknowledge it because he also has hope? That’s the basic evangelical mission.

This realization is, to me anyway, a source of great joy: I think our new Great Awakening will be from a deep and deadening sleep. Technology makes previously laborious, choice-heavy acts quick and easy and concentrates our minds simply on doing more of them. Highly automated, super-convoluted marketplaces hide what goods and services cost, in every sense of that word. The media’s presentation of things going wrong normally stimulates no responses but Schadenfreude and the impression that experts are fixing whatever fragmentary, temporary difficulties—and these must comprise all difficulties, right?—they notice between commercials. Politicians and pundits fast-talk past how our functionaries actually do things like “securing our borders”—and past every other big question. And work is so complex and rushed and competitive that a pompous busy-ness fights against any curiosity about the generality of current sin, which is that other people’s distant, disregarded agony gives us huge benefits, so that we can effortlessly do evil and yet feel good. To my mind, the fundamentally alarming thing isn’t that someone trained to face the suggestion of his own and his society’s sinfulness with disbelief or indignation doesn’t understand or accept a metaphysical principle. It’s that he doesn’t even have a grip on physical reality.

But it is the concept which runs alongside the constant and essentially unconsented gathering of data which is most mendacious: the contention that privacy is a luxury, a bygone; an unnecessary and even regressive notion in a technological age of openness and a hinderance to the safeguarding of a just society. It is precisely in a technological society that privacy emerges as a central, vital plank of legitimate democratic function. It might be different if openness were universal, if we could scrutinize the choices of our leaders and hold them to account; if we could get unvarnished access to information about the things we buy and the services to which we subscribe, and know the probable consequences of our decision rather than be soothed with pablums and misdirections; if we were encouraged and enabled to participate in the creation of the world, rather than sidelined as the governed, the consumers. But this is not an era of radical transparency across the board. It is not an era of growing direct democracy. It is the era of transparency for the masses, of autocracy dressed as liberty. The powerful are concealed by law and contract, and by power. The rest of us are exposed and encouraged to think of this exposure as freedom.

One of my minor hobby horses is defending some of Shakespeare’s earlier plays that are frequently given short critical shrift, particularly two early comedies. Strip away your expectations about The Taming of the Shrew and you will find a genuine love story, about two dark and damaged characters unexpectedly finding each other, and love, in what appears to be a most unlikely match with one another. And step back from the familiar but still workable farce of A Comedy of Errors, and you will find a play structured very much like the late romances, and striking many of the same deep chords.

There is a significant psychological price to being constantly aware of the variety of ways in which your activity might be tracked. To be blunt, it makes you feel crazy. That is why, if you want a quiet life, you shouldn’t make friends with security analysts: they tend to get drunk and describe the ways in which your phone can be turned into a listening device until the skin on the back of your neck starts to crawl, because it’s their job to know about such things. There is a non-zero cost to this sort of awareness.

In a choice between paranoid vigilance and easy participation, few choose paranoia. It’s just easier to change your behaviour. A friend who works in computer security told me that “the most important censorship happens between your head and your keyboard”. Self-censorship is significant in a world where, increasingly, as the tech journalist Quinn Norton observes, “falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same: it looks like typing”.

If debating the Enlightenment has become tedious, one reason is that it has produced so many exercises in what old-fashioned religious believers still describe as apologetics – the defence of a pre-existing system of belief. Some of the many recent defences of the Enlightenment are better argued than others. What all of them have in common is that they aim to silence any doubt as to the truth of the creed. Mixing large doses of soothing moral uplift with hectoring attacks on those who wilfully turn their backs on the light, these secular sermons lack the flashes of humour and scepticism that redeem more traditional types of preaching.

Adamant certainty is the unvarying tone. Yet beneath the insistent didacticism of these apologists there is more than a hint of panic that the world has not yet accepted the rationalist verities that have been so often preached before. If the Enlightenment really does embody humanity’s most essential hopes, why do so many human beings persistently refuse to sign up to it?

But what was the actual impact of coffeehouses on productivity, education and innovation? Rather than enemies of industry, coffeehouses were in fact crucibles of creativity, because of the way in which they facilitated the mixing of both people and ideas. Members of the Royal Society, England’s pioneering scientific society, frequently retired to coffeehouses to extend their discussions. Scientists often conducted experiments and gave lectures in coffeehouses, and because admission cost just a penny (the price of a single cup), coffeehouses were sometimes referred to as “penny universities.” It was a coffeehouse argument among several fellow scientists that spurred Isaac Newton to write his “Principia Mathematica,” one of the foundational works of modern science.

Coffeehouses were platforms for innovation in the world of business, too. Merchants used coffeehouses as meeting rooms, which gave rise to new companies and new business models. A London coffeehouse called Jonathan’s, where merchants kept particular tables at which they would transact their business, turned into the London Stock Exchange. Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, a popular meeting place for ship captains, shipowners and traders, became the famous insurance market Lloyd’s.

And the economist Adam Smith wrote much of his masterpiece “The Wealth of Nations” in the British Coffee House, a popular meeting place for Scottish intellectuals, among whom he circulated early drafts of his book for discussion.

E-mail isn’t that different from mail. The real divide, historically, isn’t digital; it’s literary. The nineteenth century, in many parts of the West, including the United States, marked the beginning of near-universal literacy. All writing used to be, in a very real sense, secret, except to the few who knew how to read. What, though, if everyone could read? Then every mystery could be revealed. A letter is a proxy for your self. To write a letter is to reveal your character, to spill out your soul onto a piece of paper. Universal literacy meant universal decipherment, and universal exposure. If everyone could write, everyone could be read. It was terrifying.