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"Undiscovered public knowledge" seems an oxymoron. If "public" than why "undiscovered" --means the knowledge that once was known by someone, recorded, properly interred in some documentary vault, and left unexamined.
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(This is the first of three posts about my semi-serendipitous summer reading; here are links to posts two and three.)

This last week I was seized by a strange mania: clean the office. I have been in my current desk and office since 2011 (when a major renovation disrupted it for some months).  It was time to clean --spurred by notice that boxes of papers would be picked up for the annual certified, assured shredding. I realized I had piles of FERPA-protected paperwork (exams, papers, 1-1 office hours memos, you name it).  Worse: my predecessor had left me large files that I hadn't look at in seven years, and that contained legal papers, employee annual performance reviews, old resumes, consultant reports, accreditation documentation, etc. Time for it all to go!  I collected six large official boxes (each twice the size of a paper ream), but didn't stop there: I also cleaned the desk; cleaned up the desktop; recycle odd electronic items, batteries, and lightbulbs; forwarded a very large number of vendor advertising pens to cache for our library users ("do you have a pen?"). On Thursday I was left with the moment-after: I cleared it all out: now what?

The "what" turned out to be various articles I had collected and printed for later reading, and then never actually read --some more recent, some a little older. (This doesn't count the articles I recycled as no longer relevant or particularly interesting; my office is not a bibliography in itself.) Unintentionally, several of these articles wove together concerns that have been growing in the back of my mind --and have been greatly pushed forward with the events of the past year (Orlando--Bernie Sanders--the CombOver--British M.P. Jo Cox--seem as distant and similar as events of the late Roman republic now, pace Mary Beard.)

"Undiscovered public knowledge" seems an oxymoron (but less one than "Attorney General Jeff Sessions").  If "public" than why "undiscovered"?  It means the knowledge that once was known by someone, recorded, properly interred in some documentary vault, and left unexamined and undiscovered by anyone else.  The expression is used in Adrienne LaFrance's Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, published in The Atlantic, December 1, 2016.   Her leading example is the fascinating story of the Antikythera mechanism, some sort of ancient time-piece surfaced from an ancient, submerged wreck off Antikythera (a Greek island between the Peloponnese and Crete, known also as Aigila or Ogylos).  It sat in the crate outside the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for a year, and then was largely forgotten by all but a few dogged researchers, who pressed on for decades with the attempt to figure out exactly what it is.

The Antikythera mechanism has only come to be understood when widely separated knowledge has been combined by luck, persistence, intuition, and conjecture.  How did such an ancient time piece come about, who made it, based upon which thinking, from where?  It could not have been a one-off, but it seems to be a unique lucky find from the ancient world, unless other mechanisms or pieces are located elsewhere in undescribed or poorly described collections.  For example, a 10th-century Arabic manuscript suggests that such a mechanism may have influenced the development of modern clocks, and in turn built upon ancient Babylonian astronomical data.  (For more see Josephine Marchant's Decoding the heavens : a 2,000-year-old computer--and the century-long search to discover its secrets, Cambridge, Mass.: DaCapo Press, 2009: Worldcat ; Sacred Heart University Library). Is there "undiscovered public knowledge" that would include other mechanisms, other clues to its identity, construction, development, and influence?

"Undiscovered public knowledge" is a phrase made modestly famous by Don R. Swanson in an article by the same name in The Library Quarterly, 1986.  This interesting article is a great example of the way that library knowledge and practice tends to become isolated in the library silo, when it might have benefited many others located elsewhere. (It is also a testimony to the significant, short-sighted mistake made by the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and others, in closing their library science programs in the 1980s-1990s just when such knowledge was going public in Yahoo, Google, Amazon, GPS applications and countless other developments.)  Swanson's point is that "independently created fragments are logically related but never retrieved, brought together, and interpreted." The "essential incompleteness" of search (or now: discovery) makes "possible and plausible the existence of undiscovered public knowledge." (to quote the abstract --the article is highly relevant and well developed).  Where Swanson runs into trouble, however, is his use of Karl Popper's distinction between subjective and objective knowledge, the critical approach within science that distinguishes between "World 2" and "World 3."  (Popper's Three Worlds (.pdf), lectures at the University of Michigan in 1978, were a favorite of several of my professors at Columbia University School of Library Service; Swanson's article in turn was published and widely read while I was studying there.)

Popper's critical worlds (1: physical objects and events, including biological; 2: mental objects and events; 3: objective knowledge, a human but not Platonic zone) both enable the deep structures of information science as now practiced by our digital overlords as well and signal their fatal flaw.  They do this (enable the deep structures and algorithms of "discovery") by assuming the link between physical objects and events, mental objects, and objective knowledge symbolically notated (language, mathematics). Simultaneously Popper's linkage also signals their fatal flaw: such language (and mathematics) is or are used part-and-parcel in innumerable forms of human life and their languages "games," where the link between physical objects, mental objects, and so-called objective knowledge is puzzling, in addition to a never-ending source of philosophical delusion.

To sum up:  Google thinks its algorithm is serving up discoveries of objective realities, when it is really extending the form of life called "algorithm" --no "mere" here, but in fact an ideological extension of language that conceals its power relations and manufactures the assumed sense that such discovery is "natural."  It is au contraire a highly developed, very human form of life parallel to, and participating in, innumerable other forms of life, and just as subject to their foibles, delusions, illogic, and mistakes as any other linguistic form of life. There is no "merely" (so-called "nothing-buttery") to Google's ideological extension: it is very powerful and seems, at the moment, to rule the world.  Like every delusion, however, it could fall "suddenly and inexplicably," like an algorithmic Berlin Wall, and "no one could have seen it coming" --because of the magnificent illusion of ideology (as in the Berlin Wall, ideology on both sides, as well, upheld by both the CIA and the KGB).

This is once again to rehearse the crucial difference between Popper's and Wittgenstein's understandings of science and knowledge.  A highly relevant text is the lucid, short Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, (by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Harper Collins, 2001; Worldcat).  Wittgenstein: if we can understand the way language works from within language (our only vantage point), most philosophical problems will disappear, and we are left with puzzles and mis-understandings that arise when we use improperly the logic of our language.  Popper: Serious philosophical problems exist with real-world consequences, and a focus upon language only "cleans its spectacles" to enable the wearer to see the world more clearly.  (The metaphor is approximately Popper's; this quick summary will undoubtedly displease informed philosophers, and I beg their forgiveness, for the sake of brevity.)

For Wittgenstein, if I may boldly speculate, Google would only render a reflection of ourselves, our puzzles, mis-understandings, and mistakes. Example: search "white girls," then clear the browser of its cookies (this is important), and search "black girls."  Behold the racial bias. The difference in Google's search results points to machine-reproduced racism that would not have surprised Wittgenstein, but seems foreign to the Popper's three worlds.  Google aspires to Popper's claims of objectivity, but behaves very differently --at least, its algorithm does.  No wonder its algorithm has taken on the aura of an ancient deity: it serves weal and woe without concern for the fortunes of dependent mortals. Except . . . it's a human construct.

So, Swanson's article identifies and makes plausible "undiscovered public knowledge" because of the logical and essential incompleteness of discovery (what he called "search"): discovery signals a wide variety of human forms of life, and no algorithm can really anticipate them.  The Antikythera mechanism, far from an odd example, is a pregnant metaphor for the poignant frailties of human knowledge and humans' drive to push past their limits. Like the Archimedes palimpsest, "undiscovered public knowledge" is one of the elements that makes human life human --without which we become, like the Q Continuum in Star Trek: Next Generation, merely idle god-like creatures of whim and no moral gravitas whatsoever.  The frailty of knowledge --the it is made up of innumerable forms of human life, which have to be lived by humans rather than algorithms-- gives the human drive to know its edge, and its tragedy.  A tragic sense of life, however, is antithetical to the tech-solutionist ideology of the algorithm.

(Continued in the second post, Undiscovered Summer Reading)

Navigating the shoals of evaluative entanglement requires complex thinking and a certain level of lived experience. There is no app for this. But there is a course, and I recommend Including Ourselves in the Change Equation whole-heartedly to anyone who really wants to change.
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Back on January 5 (doesn't that seem like another age of Middle Earth by now?), Cal Newport wrote about what he termed "evaluation entanglement:

  • Evaluation entanglement. Keeping your productivity commitments all tangled in your head can cause problems when a strategy fails. Without more structure to the productivity portion of you life, it’s too easy for your brain to associate that single failure with a failure of your commitments as a whole, generating a systemic reduction in motivation.

Newport was writing in the context of New Year's "productivity tweaks," or what were once called resolutions. They usually go by the boards in a few days or weeks.

So far as I can tell, Newport borrowed "evaluation entanglement" from the physics of entangled states (Newport is a scientist) and description/evaluation entanglement in the work of Hilary Putnam (Newport is also a philosopher) --and both of these clusters disciplines are pertinent and informative for Newport's primary intellectual interest in computer science, distributed algorithms that help agents work together.  

Putnam's work on fact/value entanglement liberated "thick ethical concepts" that lie under sentences such as Nero is cruel from the straightjacket of notions of fact and value judgement, so that Nero is cruel can express a value judgement and a descriptive judgement at the same time.  The entanglement of facts and values is a characteristics of those many statements that" do not acquire value from the outside, from the subject's perspective, for example, but facts that, under certain conditions, have a recognizable and objective value." (Martinez Vidal, Cancela Silva, and Rivas Monroy, Following Putnam's Trail, ISBN 9789042023970, 2008, page 291)

Newport's point is simpler, but lies in the shadow of Putnam's entanglement of facts and values: a person can associate her or his single failure in one element or commitment (to productivity, in this context) with the failure of his or her commitments as a whole --and that this pervasive sense of value can generate "a systemic reduction in motivation."  In other words: I want to be productive in manners or projects A, B, C, and D, "and if I fail at C, I fail at the rest, and my life rots."  The fact of failure with C generates an evaluative entanglement that describes my whole life.

A life so described needs to be described in much thicker terms, however.  Such failure is very rarely simple, straightforward failure.

This is where the work of Robert Kagan and Lisa Laskow Lahey at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is very helpful.  They have focused on immunity to change: both individual's immunity, and organizational immunity.  In their book Immunity to Change, and their large online class (I hesitate to call it MOOC) Including Ourselves in the Change Equation,  they explore and describe the significant difference between undertaking technical means to solve adaptive challenges --when change is not simply a matter of altering well-known behaviors and thought, but involves adapting thinking and finding new mental and emotional complexities at work.  

Based upon adaptive theories of mind and organizational theories of change, Kagan and Lahey take their students on a journey of thinking new thoughts, or telling their stories in a new way --literally, changing the narrative in such as a manner that both visible commitments to change, and corresponding hidden, competing commitments that block change, can reveal a person's (or organization's) big assumptions about the world.  By holding up those big assumptions to the light of understanding and reflection, persons can question effectively and adaptively whether such assumptions in fact are valid.

I took this course last Fall, and found it to be a very rich experience.  I won't reveal what my own visible commitments, hidden competing commitments, and big assumptions were --only to say that I was working on a life-long issue that affects every relationship and commitment in my life.  My goal for change and understanding was something that definitely passed the "spouse test" --"oh yeah, that's you one hundred percent."

Kagan's and Lahey's metaphor one foot on the gas, the other foot on the brake pretty well summed up what I had been finding in attempting changes in my life and character.  That metaphor invokes neatly an "evaluation entanglement" -- both a descriptive judgement and value judgement in the same phrase.  The "thick ethical concept" is a philosophical way of telling a story --telling a narrative of your own life (or your organization's life) that frames the descriptions and the values in a certain way of thinking.  Adapting such thinking to new complexities, and changing the story by expanding and deepening it, is the core structure that liberates a person, and changes and organization, from taking one example of failure as "failure of your commitments as a whole." Such increasing mental complexity and adaptive thinking is critical to avoid "generating a systemic reduction in motivation."  There's nothing that defeats a person or an organization quite like the experience of seeking change but blocking change at the same time, one foot on the gas and the other on the brake.  What is produced is a great deal of heat, significant atmospheric pollution, very little traction, and no progress.

Navigating the shoals of evaluative entanglement requires complex thinking and a certain level of lived experience.  There is no app for this.  But there is a course, and I recommend Including Ourselves in the Change Equation whole-heartedly to anyone who really wants to change.

American Values Religious Voices: 100 Days. 100 Letters "has brought together a diverse group of scholars to write letters to [the executive and his] administration, and our elected officials in the House and Senate. These letters articulate core American values that are rooted or reflected in our various faith traditions
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American Values Religious Voices: 100 Days. 100 Letters "has brought together a diverse group of scholars to write letters to [the executive and his] administration, and our elected officials in the House and Senate. These letters articulate core American values that are rooted or reflected in our various faith traditions."

The scholars joined the founder of this idea, Rabbi Andrea L. Weiss, Associate Professor of Bible at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City.  She felt that the words and actions of the campaign and its aftermath call into question fundamental values that has long defined this country and culture.  She and the writers are hopeful that their observations will spark ideas and insights about what it means to be an American, and to contribute to our national discourse.

The group is non-partisan, and characterized by a sense of relevancy and urgency.  The contributors show the kind of diversity that makes us who we are as a nation: religions, races, generations, genders, ages, political viewpoints, sexual orientations, and geographic location.

Join with me in subscribing to these letters (form in the footer of the campaign's home page.  As of today (January 22) three letters have been written and sent, by Rabbi Weiss, John Kutsko, Director of the Society of Biblical Literature and Professor of Biblical Studies at Emory University, and Eric Barreto, Weyerhauser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Will this campaign make any difference?  To the current incumbent, perhaps not.  It is vital for the rest of us to stand up, however, and show both the clarity and restraint that are the best values of all those who work in higher education, whether as teaching scholars or in other roles.

Please also write to express your support, to [email] -- this is a vital witness at a perilous time in our country's history, and time when we need to re-affirm the key values of religious diversity, principled argumentation, respect for facts, respect for differences of point of view, and humility.  (And see Frank Bruni in the January 22, 2017 New York Times regarding humility.)

The Hapsburg, Viennese (1900s) central problems of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression are all involved --in a remarkably similar manner-- in the political and social events that crystalized in 2016 in America.
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Events during 2016 (and not just the US election) have caused me to re-assess my work and many of the assumptions of my life, from the ground up.  What do I mean when I say I'm a Christian, and how does that really come out in my life?  What are my fundamental commitments?  How do I identify myself as a reflective, thoughtful person in a culture that has no room for reflection, thoughtfulness, and a most casual disregard for basic matters of truth?

So I began to start again, to re-examine authors and composers that have affected me the most from my beginnings: with the Greeks; the Greek New Testament; the writings of John Calvin and Karl Barth; George Herbert, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot; J. R. R. Tolkien; Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein; J. S. Bach; Johannes Brahms, to name a few.  (I am very aware that those are entirely European and male, but I have to be honest about how and what I learned, and when, and who I am.)

As regards Wittgenstein, I also have returned to renew my reading of German, with Hermann Hesse's Demian in a dual-language edition, and to the intellectual world of 19th- and early 20th-century German-language writers and thinkers, especially in Vienna.  Hence I returned to Wittgenstein's Vienna, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (Simon & Schuster, 1973), a book that still holds up well more than 40 years later.

The authors mount a multi-pronged argument, that difficulties regarding communication, language, and expression arose in late Hapsburg, fin de siècle Vienna that became ripe for philosophical investigation, and that these difficulties were shared across a wide spectrum of artists, musicians, writers, physicians (including psychoanalysts) and scholars --almost all of whom knew each other, at least socially.  The central figure is the now-not-so-well-known Karl Kraus and his scathing critique of Viennese bourgeois and aristocratic life and social realities (almost all of which were officially denied), and the loose circle of Krausians such as Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos (architecture), Artur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Robert Musil (literature), Arnold Schoenberg (music), Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoscha and Egon Schiele (art).  Musil satirically dubbed a semi-fiction empire of his fiction in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) "Kakania," a play on the  kaiserlich-königlich or kaiserlich und königlich, expressions that provided status indicators in the complicated social hierarchy of the time, and equally concealed the dishonesty and deceit at the core of the Hapsburg state.

Janik and Toulin articulate their central thesis most clearly:

We have spotlighted the problem of language in Hoffmannsthal, because this serves to introduce and illustrate our own central hypothesis about Viennese culture --namely that to be a fin de siècle Viennese artist or intellectual, conscious of the social realities of Kakania, one had to face the problem of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication. . . . . By the year 1900, the linked problems of communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression had been faced in parallel in all the major fields of thought and art. . . . So the stage was set for a philosophical critique of language, given in completely general terms. (page 117 and 119, with authors' emphasis)

Janik and Toulmin then examine how this task presented itself to thinkers such as Ernst Mach, the Kantian traditionalists, and the "anti-philosophers" following Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and (to some extent) Mauthner.  They will then place Wittgenstein (the early, of the Tractatus) in this context.

These central problems of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression are all involved --in a remarkably similar manner-- in the political and social events that crystalized in 2016, although tendencies toward strident nationalism, racism, and the remarkable coarsening of political and social communication were well apparent decades before.  Social media have created a post-factual communication of deceit which is routinely denied by the networks' owners' who benefit from the confusion and monetarized deceit.  American society faces a number of problems that simply cannot be addressed given the terms of communication and expression before and in 2016.  Like the creaking, only-semi-functional Kakanian state, the American state and culture is a shaken, badly sagging structure (and infrastructure), and it does not require unusual foresight to anticipate any number of future disasters, whether ecological, political, social, cultural, or military.

Like the blissfully ignorant inhabits of Kakania in the early 1900s, we 21st-century Americans may all have completely missed the ominous and destructive potential of our times, in large part as a function of inauthentic language, expression, and communication gone wild.  Our language and media have lost their mooring in authentic use and useful social understanding of justice.  I will be reading more Wittgenstein, and more about him, and writing here.  We may be facing, as found Karl Kraus' writings, Die Letzte Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Humanity).

Wolf proposes and defends a “fitting fulfillment” view, that what can truly give meaning to one's life is an activity that one feels answers a deep internal need for engagement and has a certain kind of objective worth to others. Why does it matter? --because meaning can give shape and direction to one’s life that transcends simple self-interest or universal, objective good. Wolf proposes that such a life can have objective value, but also recognizes a need for modesty (“Who’s to say? The elites?”).
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Meaning In Life cover imageMeaning in Life, and Why It Matters, by Susan Wolf.  With Commentary by John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly, and Jonathan Haidt.  Princeton University Press, 2010.  143 pages.  ISBN 978-0-691-14524-2.  Sacred Heart University Library BD431.W77 2010

A colleague who noticed Meaning in Life on my desk asked, “Really? Is there any?”  Influenced by this book, I responded, “Yes there can be, but you have to think carefully.”  Susan Wolf carefully formulates an enlightening and at least partially persuasive case that yes, there can be meaning in life, and if you feel your life has none, you should reflect on that.  This long review takes a careful look at her thinking, because her questions cut to the core of a liberal arts education (see the closing remarks, below).
 
The book is a kind of symposium.  Wolf’s two essays (“Meaning in Life,” and “Why It Matters”) are followed by responses from four distinguished scholars: John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly (philosophy), and Jonathan Haidt (psychology), to whom Wolf then replies.  This give the entire work a texture, range, and collective impact beyond any one or two essays.
 
Wolf starts by righty questioning the two predominant models that we often have in the background when we evaluate our actions (or the actions of others): the egoistic perspective (it’s in my self-interest) or impersonal perspective, “from the point of view of the universe.”  But there are situations where either model or both are unconvincing, and as models of motivation and practical reason they seem to leave out a lot of the many motives and reasons that shape our lives.  These could be “reasons of love” or “reasons of pleasure” that will be distorted if pressed into an iron grid of self-interest or universal disinterestedness.  A proper reason of love will be directed towards a worthy object of love, and when the idea of meaningfulness is introduced, can give reasons for finding meaning beyond duty or love.
 
“Love” as “being gripped by” or actively engaging with a valuable object, to promote and protect it, is an apt example of Aristotle’s endoxic method, agreed-upon “things which are accepted by everyone, or by most people or by the wise.”  But what are those things? 
 
One prominent “fulfillment” view (popularized by Steve Jobs, whom Wolf does not mention) is that it does not matter what you do with your life as long as it is something you love: “Follow your passion,” figure out what turns you on, and go for it. (p. 10)
 
A second view says that a truly satisfying life involves something that is “larger than oneself,” a two-fold view of something independent of oneself and has its source outside of oneself.  Wolf uses excellent examples: Sisyphus has a meaningless existence objectively even if he magically believes that he is fulfilled by eternally rolling a rock uphill.  Spending a life smoking pot, conceivably an independent good with its source outside of oneself, does not contribute any benefits to anyone else.
 
Wolf proposes and defends a “fitting fulfillment” view, that what can truly give meaning to one's life is an activity that one feels answers a deep internal need for engagement and has a certain kind of objective worth to others.  The feeling of being occupied with something of independent value, that takes one out of oneself, is vital to our social natures and a certain human tendency to try to see oneself of an external point of view. (Nagel’s “view from nowhere” or Gods-eye point of view). This subjective desire is balanced with a sense of objective value: meaningfulness is a matter of active and loving engagement in projects of worth.
 
Why does it matter?  --because meaning can give shape and direction to one’s life that transcends simple self-interest or universal, objective good.  Wolf proposes that such a life can have objective value, but also recognizes a need for modesty (“Who’s to say? The elites?”) and she acknowledges that great care and reserve must be taken when assessing aesthetic, idealistic, and essentially private projects.  Weeding a garden might be very meaningful to a dedicated gardener but meaningless to someone who finds it a chore. 
 
Wolf returns to her insight that “much of what we do is not obviously justified by either morality or self-interest.”  She names various activities that by those criteria only would appear irrational or mistaken.  She then rejoins, “Yet to regard them as morally valuable, much less as morally better than alternatives, is to puff them up in a way that seems both pompous and hard to sustain.” (p. 50)   By comparing and contrasting meaning with self-interest and morality, Wolf sustains “reasons of love,” but with great modesty, and recognizes that her argument needs an idea of objective value.  “One can find the question, What has objective value? intelligible and important while remaining properly humble about one’s limited ability to discover the answer and properly cautious about the uses to which one’s partial and tentative answer may be put.” (p. 63)
 
The subsequent four comments focus upon particular questions, applications, and examples.  Koethe asks whether artists can have meaningful lives even when they are almost unknown, possibly delusional, or troubled by disturbing psychological compulsions.  “It is difficult to distinguish (from the viewpoint of an artist) between successful achievement of serious aesthetic aims and the delusion that one has them, and they’ve been achieved.” (p. 71) Is that life meaningful or wasted?  If it is art, is it significant?  “Even if (delusion or self-deception) jeopardizes my ability to derive satisfaction and comfort from a life based on aesthetic commitments . . . it is simply a predicament I have to live with.” (p. 73)
 
Adams raises the complex and morally important example of Claus von Stauffenberg’s project of rescuing Germany from Nazism, culminating in his attempt to assassinate Hitler and lead a coup d’état in July, 1944.  He failed, but “did Stauffenberg himself, in the end, find his life meaningful because of his project, despite its failure?”  It was certainly an objective value independent of himself, recognized by others,
but it did lead to feelings of fulfillment?  He was described on that evening as looking “indescribably sad.”  Stauffenberg recognized the moral ambiguity of patriotic love, which has inspired both admirable achievements and enormous wrongs and follies. (p. 82) He could see a path that held at least a slight hope of leading to a better future.  Those who shared his insights (and, in some measure, the plot) also recognized meaningfulness even in defeat, most famously Dietrich Bonhoeffer, peripherally involved but nonetheless convicted and executed (my example, not Adams’).  On the day of his death, Bonhoeffer was reported to have said, “This is the end –for me the beginning of life,” not simply a proclamation of Christian faith, but an assessment of his own life at the moment he faced torture and death.  It is important to recognize “a very important kind of positive meaningfulness in life that responds to objective goods with motives of love that are not impartially moral motives.”
 
Nomy Arpaly questions the necessary role Wolf claims objective worth has in providing meaning in life.  What appears as worthless (a “goldfish nut” wholly devoted to her goldfish) may be more circumstantial: a mentally disabled person may find great meaning in such activity. A plethora of values complicates the case, there is no “top” moral value among values. Is there a truth about which love to value when loves conflict?
 
Jonathan Haidt asks whether the ideas of vital engagement and hive psychology can help solve the problem of objective meaning.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written about vital engagement as “a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance.”  The quality of the connection is vital; but does Wolf really need a theory of objective value?  Hive psychology suggests that social sciences (and philosophy) have been plagued by methodological individualism, but if the fundamental unit of psychology is not the individual but the group, then perhaps the modern, independent sense of self is an anomaly.  As Enlightenment bees we busted out of the hive and burned it down, and the great challenge of modernity is to find hives for ourselves. “We can co-create or join into, something larger than ourselves.”  The challenge we face is to choose the right kind of hive, and why it matters that we choose rightly. (pp. 100-101)
 
Wolf’s response is nuanced.  She maintains an interest in objective meaning, but recognizes its difficulties, and that no one is thereby authorized to assess it decisively on behalf either of oneself or others.  Haidt’s response suggests that there may be a reconciliation of objective value and subjective interest in the larger structures and sets of activities that a meaningful life can create (examples: sports, games, the arts).  Value emerges from from the interests and commitments of people who share such activities, and this recognizes a continuum of value upon which a sense of a meaningful life may lie.  Through concepts of objective value and subjective fulfillment we can come to understand some of our longings and sources of satisfaction, and properly assess some of our moral and evaluative intuitions, ask questions, and form hypotheses.  These concepts allow us to move closer to examining what kinds of projects and what kinds of lives are (or can be) meaningful.
 
Christopher Eisgruber, the President of Princeton University, asked each incoming first year student (class of 2018) to read Wolf’s book in the summer of 2014.  He then discussed this “pre-read” with students in Princeton’s residential colleges through the subsequent year.  He chose it for two reasons, because “it is a superb example of engaged, ethical writing, and I hope that it will introduce the freshmen to the kinds of scholarship they will encounter at Princeton,” and because “a key point in Wolf's argument pertains to the objectivity of value and why it matters; that question is important, and it inspires lively argument among undergraduates.”
 
The question of meaning in life, and why it matters, is at the heart of a liberal arts education, whether at Princeton or elsewhere.  It would be interesting to converse with Wolf in the context of the “Catholic Intellectual Tradition” examined and queried at Sacred Heart University, because there are important points of convergence and divergence.  Certainly, that tradition is concerned with assessing the whole of life, and might also be in need of Wolf’s salutary reminder to reflect modestly when assessing what might make another’s life meaningful (or wasted), and prudent caution about the uses to which one’s partial or tentative answer might be put.   Theories of objective value can be linked superficially with theological claims of revealed value, a confusion that does neither intellectual tradition any good. Wolf’s question is important from any Christian point of view, whether Catholic or other, and this book is a remarkable conversation both in its scope and its lack of pretension.  Her book engages questions that many undergraduates seem inclined to avoid, but could nevertheless frame the engaged insight that is the point of the liberal arts.

 

 

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalinithi. Foreword by Abraham Verghese. New York: Random House, 2016. 228 p. Paul Kalinithi was a neurosurgeon, writer, husband, father. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died about 24 months later in March 2015. This book became his focus in the last months of his life —a rare, movingly honest, literate, and beautifully written account of facing death and living.
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When Breath Becomes AirWhen Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalinithi.  Foreword by Abraham Verghese.  New York: Random House, 2016. 228 p.

Paul Kalinithi was a neurosurgeon, writer, husband, father. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died about 24 months later in March 2015. This book became his focus in the last months of his life —a rare, movingly honest, literate, and beautifully written account of facing death and living. OK, I wept when I read this, not because much of it is sad, but because all of it is so beautiful.

Paul swam in the deep end of the pool: in the incredibly exacting work of neurosurgery and neuroscience —a surgery which is meant to heal the body but unavoidably also amends the soul, a person’s very sense of self. This weighty responsibility has to be met by physicians with equal courage, tenacity, knowledge, and stamina —excellence in all things, αρετή in the true Greek sense. When Paul, such a physician, then had to become a patient, the roles shifted to courageous colleagues more than a simple reversal. His oncologist (“Emma”) was uncommonly gifted, and preserved for him an ability to choose his identity, his future, and his life at a time when too often the illness can strip those way. Paul quotes Becket, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” And he does.

In physical, embodied words, this book is beautiful to hold as well --beautifully produced.  The Monotype Bell font renders the text crisply and without weight.  Since the book is about having a body subject to disease and death, its physicality is important.  Reading it on a digital device would be definitely second-best, but good enough if that is the only choice (for those who are very ill or with impaired vision).  The care shown in the production of the volume perfectly corresponds to Paul's drive for excellence and humane expression in all his works.

This book is about facing death and remaining time to be alive —which is everyone’s situation, whether shorter or longer. Paul’s illness allowed him keep this in focus in a way few achieve. He really was remarkable, a force of nature in his prime, blazingly intelligent and impossibly well-read, with a keen sense of humor that only partially reveals itself. His intelligence, education, and experience as a neurosurgeon distilled into wisdom. When I come to that “someday” when life and mortality are both clearly in focus for me, I will reach for rather few books. This will be one of them.

The two books are Five Minds for the Future (2006) and Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (2011). Rather than simply becoming out of date, if anything these books are more urgent than ever.
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During this thoroughly depressing season of American life, I have been re-reading two books by Howard Gardner, the professor of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. I was privileged to spend a morning with him this past March at the School’s Library Leadership for a Digital Age professional education forum. I was impressed again by his humanity, long-range vision, and insight that people are rarely either at their best or at their worst.

FiveMindsForTheFutureThe two books are Five Minds for the Future and Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed. Five Minds was originally published ten years ago, and Gardner added a substantial new introduction to the paperback edition of 2008. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed was published five years ago, and he added a new introduction to the paperback edition of a year later. Rather than simply becoming out of date, if anything these books are more urgent than ever.  Disciplined, respectful, creative reflection: what could be more foreign to the spirit of 2016?

Five Minds alludes to Gardner’s famous work on multiple intelligences, but takes a different approach to minds which are made up of varying mixtures of intelligences and connections. The disciplined, synthesizing, and creative minds figure most prominently in education, whether formal or informal, and form the great content of many people’s work, whether mental or physical. The respectful and ethical minds, by contrast, figure the “how” of life, both to members of a group, and to other human beings in relationship (the respectful), and in relation to the wider impact of behavior and work on society (the ethical). What makes work “good,” both in a technical sense and a moral sense? The respectful mind elucidates personal morality and reciprocity; ethical work elucidates citizenship and the “common- wealth” in an eighteenth century term. Of course this brief summary elides a great deal of content, context, and subtlety.

TruthBeautyAndGoodnessCoverTruth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed extends this work: the five minds addressing the classical virtues and their uneasy transition into a digital world.   Gardner defends these classical questions against the determinism of free market theory (in which value tends to equal price), neurobiological determinism (in which truth is a result of genetic controls), and “hard” post-modern relativism, according to which truth, beauty, and goodness are inherently unattainable, and merely cloak the acquisition and exercise of power. Gardner’s extended defence and arguments are not easy to summarize. Suffice that these are fundamental to a respectful, ethical human society and in a hyper-connected, fleeting, digital world become more important than ever as anchors for human flourishing.

In a broad sense Gardner pushes back against radically reductive economic, neuro-psychological, or radically skeptical currents that would dislodge the major claims of liberal arts education. “Liberal arts” as a term never appears in these books, and yet implicit in his convictions lies a strong claim that in fact the unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates’ foundational claim). The great peril of unreflective, technological, market-driven capitalist society is not that it does not know enough to function, but that it cannot reckon what it does not know –greatly to its undoubted, eventual undoing. A reflective mind is a necessarily modest mind.

What does this have to do with an academic library? Everything. If a neo-liberal university is exclusively driven by utility –what sells? –what do users already know they want to use? –what is the return of utilization for price? –what keeps them paying tuition so they don’t move to a cheaper competitor, or away entirely? Then the question of minds simply goes out the window. In that view, a disciplined, synthesizing, and creative mind only matters if it can make money and further the aims of the organization’s management. Respect and ethics means only doing work that is good enough, behaving in the right way, and not being too nakedly self-centered or opportunistic. In that case, the library becomes simply a managed environment for stenographic repetition of known thoughts.   Concepts of truth, beauty, goodness –however tenuously re-worked—are simply beside the point, lovely luxuries for those who can flaunt high-end educational branding.

If on the other hand a university can find a way to articulate the fundamental values of reflective thinking in an unthinkingly reactive, pompous, and dis-respectful era, then the library has a place as a center for self-directed engagement with potentially transformative truths. In such a context the library enacts the university’s mission of nurturing sound learning,  new discovery, and the pursuit of wisdom by creating the physical and intellectual space where a biology student can become a biologist (just one example).  Gardner’s books have everything to do with the why of librarianship. David Lankes has been quoted that a room full of books without a librarian is just a room full of books, but an empty room with a librarian is a library. (Of course the latter case is really easier to do with at least a few books.) That focuses on the why of librarianship: it is what librarians do; the library is all the people (librarians and readers) and their thinking, not just their stuff. The librarian’s and the user’s actions can transcend their self-interests. They can create and re-create their minds for a respectful and creative future.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.
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Deep WorkDeep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport. New York:  Grand Central (Hachette), 2016.  296 p.  ISBN 978-1-4555-8669-1 $28.00 list

Cal Newport became a guru of study hacks after publishing Study Hacks, two other books, a dissertation, and six articles.  Clearly “do as I say and as I do,” he knows his subject.  Deep Work extends his thinking to sharper critique of the glut of social information that distracts many people.

Newport is especially sharply critical of Facebook (including the new Facebook headquarters building), Twitter, and the well-recognized Fear of Missing Out (FOMA) that can drive compulsive distraction and seriously erode the quality and quantity of work.  His critique is well-sustained, but its claims to be counter-cultural or disruptive are overblown: numerous other writers have critiqued the culture of distraction, including Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, and Sherry Turkle.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.  Deep work is “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits.  These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”(p. 3)  By contrast shallow work is “noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”)(p. 6) His hypothesis: "the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare . . . [and] valuable . . . . The few who cultivate this skill with thrive."(p. 14)  His goal: to help you be one who can work deeply, a noble aim.   His examples are not always convincing, however.

His leading example (which opens the book), Carl Jung’s creation of Bollingen Tower as a retreat for his writing, is more multi-faceted than Newport suggests.  Jung retreated to his tower to write without distraction, but based in large part on his interaction with patients in Zurich.  Later Newport identifies Jung’s “bimodal” pattern, contrasting the Tower with Zurich, a “busy clinical practice,” “gave and attended many lectures,” “active participant in the Zurich coffeehouse culture,” all suggesting to Newport the hyper-connected, digital-age knowledge worker: “replace ‘Zurich’ with ‘San Francisco’ and ‘letter’ with ‘tweet’ and we could be discussing some hotshot tech CEO.” (p. 107)

I think this is a serious, ideologically-driven misunderstanding of Jung’s life in Zurich, and life's work.  Jung’s own writings are filled with episodes, instances, and cases from his practice in Zurich.  To suggest that Jung’s work in Zurich was “shallow work” devalues his clinical practice and Jung’s whole motivation for developing depth psychology and disputes with Sigmund Freud.  The ideas and art work Jung picked up in his Zurich life provided some of the critical raw material from which he fashioned his singular and valuable insights in the Tower.  Suggesting that Jung’s beautifully written letters are the work equivalent of contemporary tweets is simply preposterous and and fundamentally misconstrues Jung’s life’s work.  Valuable as Jung's deep concentration in the Tower was, it never would have amounted to much without his corresponding life in the city.

Newport's other examples (Adam Grant, Jack Dorsey for example) probably work better, but tend towards the two-dimensional.  This valuable book has to be read with caution.

Cal-newport-media-kit-smallIn the end, I am left with the uneasy sense that Newport’s beloved “deep work” is really what computer scientists do.  (He is an associate professor at Georgetown.) His concept of deep work is less applicable to those whose work is primarily leading people and organizations.  I know in my own work as a library director that sometimes I have to work on a project uninterrupted.  Some interruptions are shallow, but some definitely deep: the work I do listening to coworkers, helping them develop their ideas, skill and insights, indeed pushes my cognitive and emotional capabilities, improves my abilities, is hard to replicate mechanically, and (I hope) creates value.  Every encounter with a colleague is not deep work, but I always have to be alert to the moment when it turns deep, sometimes on a dime.

I completely accept Newport’s critique of the numerous, superficial distractions of social media, e-mail, and news, and the confusion of busyness with productivity.  But his concept of deep work needs broadening and humanizing. This seems to be the work of a very confident and highly creative young professor appropriately characterized as brilliant, creative, and important, but whose very brilliance and confidence may have drawn him towards an unnecessarily narrow conception of generosity, significance, and depth of insight.  I wonder how his ideas will change over time, work, and experience.  I would really like to find out, because it will be important.

Library work is inherently collaborative: even solo librarians aren’t really solo, but depend on the work of librarians elsewhere. The collaboration of learner and teacher can be deep work, even when that teacher is not formally a classroom instructor. Cal Newport's book pertinently describes and advocates for deep work.
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I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted Work (Grand Central/Hachette, 2016), and it is challenging and invigorating.  As a historian of Christianity, much of what he says resonates strongly with the writings from religious communities of varying types: those Benedictines who work outside the cloister, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Society of St. John the Evangelist, for example.

I realize those are all very different emphases of Christian spirituality.  In common, however, is a desire to find balance between the active and contemplative life —neither simply to leave the “shallow” world absolutely (in contrast with, for example, Carthusians), nor simply to surrender any meaningful deep work and wonder.  Newport writes (briefly) about honing a skill with craft (for example, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, coders, or teachers) and the connection of meaningful, skilled work with the sacred —the world of luminous, shining, wonderful things.  He speaks from an intellectual background formed by Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class As Soulcraft, Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, and Herbert Dreyfuss' and Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining.

I’m not yet finished with Newport’s book, but I’m an engaged reader, and with such books I take my time.  Newport has reminded me vividly of the first professional library job I had (at Drew University, 1986-1992), when computers were coming into academic libraries, but e-mail, the Internet (not yet graphical), and the culture of distracted busyness were in an early stage, compared to the present.  Working with less distraction, I did in fact get more done, and more happily —one reason that I remember that job as perhaps the most satisfactory job I have had as a librarian.

I have heard it said that as academic librarians, “our interruptions are our business,” and that may be true when fielding requests for help from our students and faculty.  But they’re asking for help less than they used to, and the days of the reference question that ends with a verification of fact are long past.  Now questions have much more to do with process: how do I use this database?  How do I cite this in APA? How can I tell if an article is really peer-reviewed? —just to cite facile examples.  Academic librarians must admit, I believe, that the principle interruptions we endure most days do in fact come from each other: the relentless stream of e-mail, and the distractions of social and news media.

In January I heard Jim Honan of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education reflect on a phrase he took from a librarian in New York State, “Our data does not do justice to our story.”  What is our story as a library, what is our value proposition: how does what we do matter, to whom, and how do we do it?  Responsible and apt answers to those questions have to go beyond the shallow work of day-to-day institutional librarianship to the deep work of the field.

Do academic librarians have “deep work” to do, or is it all in the shallows?  Newport defines deep work (page 3):

Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.  These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Do academic librarians do any of that?  I must answer yes —but in metaphors or images that differ from the kinds of deep work that Newport seems to presuppose as a computer scientist and mathematician (his work concentrates on distributed algorithms, designed to work through and among interconnected processors).

Librarians fundamentally connect learners (inquirers) to sources of information and knowledge —learners who are taking responsibility for their own learning.  As such a learning-centered library is necessarily a polymorphous, polyglot, multifocal place (physical or digital place, or both at once).  The new value that librarians create (to use Newport’s words) will reside in the minds of those inquirers with whom the librarians interact.

The value proposition of libraries ultimately lies in improving the skill of independent learners to set their own terms and extent for learning, to take responsibility for what they know, and want to know —both know cognitively, and know how to do.

The strategies librarians employ —how are they going to do this— involve both interactions with learners and intellectual resources and tools.  This is the truth behind David Lankes’ contention that “a room full of books is simply a closet, but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library.”  A library is fundamentally what librarians do more than what they have.  The academic public, of course, usually sees it the other way around.

Academic librarianship suffers in spades from the major distractions that impede deep work(pages 53 et seq.).  Newport’s “metric black hole” afflicts most of the field: not only is it nearly impossible to measure what makes an academic librarian effective or distracted, it is hard to measure the impact of this professional work in the first place.  The ACRL has undertaken significant initiatives to show the value of academic libraries, but none of the strategies or paths so far are completely persuasive.  

This difficulty with metrics leads to following the paths of least resistance: absent the clear and compelling evaluative mechanism of a bottom line (or other metric), librarians (among other workers) tend to choose the behavior that is easiest and easiest to rationalize at the time.  Being a librarian means doing what other librarians do, even if that’s not very deep, and how would you know that, anyway?

Hence, in the absence of clear indicators of what is really means to be valuable and productive, like other workers librarians can make busyness a proxy for productivity: do lots of stuff in a visible manner (hey! look at us over here in the library!).  So it has to be valuable and productive, right?

I haven’t yet finished the book, so I don’t want to give the appearance of reviewing it.  I have a question for Newport, however.  Is his operational concept of deep work in the book in fact overly determined by the kind of deep work he does as a computer scientist?  If he were a linguist, a psychologist, or a  performing artist, would he have written the book differently?

By no means to I wish to trivialize his work (either computer science, or this book).  Newport’s leading example of deep work is Carl Jung and
the tower he built near his rural house in Bollingen Tower a two-story stone house with a private study (not very far from Zurich).  Jung would go there to write undistracted, unlike his busy practice, family, and cafe life in Zurich.  Without question “the Tower” was crucial for Jung’s thinking and writing, producing the remarkable insights and books that not only took on Sigmund Freud, but changed depth psychology and real people’s lives.  His work was “deep” in every sense.

Newport tends by implication to characterize Jung’s work in Zurich, by contrast, as shallow.  Newport sympathetically  and consistently characterizes shallow work as significant and unavoidable —the everyday work of professional duties and communications that require attention, but not deep engagement.  In his several examples of Richard Feynman (physics), Adam Grant (business and work behaviors), or Rick Furrer (blacksmith), Newport associatesdeep work  strongly with isolation and often solitary craft —whether craft of steel, wood, or words (writing), and shallow work with all the other stuff.

Yet much of Jung’s work in Zurich was anything but shallow.  His numerous cases show up all over his writings, and his deep analyst-analysand encounters inform every page of his writings.  His challenge to Freud and Freudians required not only courage and persistence, but skill —a skill that cannot be characterized as “shallow” in any sense.  Newport never characterizes it as shallow explicitly, but the implication remains strong; while he writes explicitly, “don’t work alone,” he encounters conceptual and definitional difficulties when associating deep work with collaboration.  Although Newport describes Jung's pattern as "bimodal," his description cannot help but privilege the deep over the "shallow," even though without Zurich there would have been no Bollingen (and vice versa).  Is it not possible in each place Jung was engaging differing and distinct Gestalten or formulations of deep work?

How does this pertain to librarians? Library work is inherently collaborative: even solo librarians aren’t really solo, but depend on the work of librarians elsewhere.  The collaboration of learner and teacher can be deep work, even when that teacher is not formally a classroom instructor.

Newport’s concept of deep work is not flawed, but it needs to be broadened and adjusted for several lines or other metaphors of work —I’m thinking about librarians and parish clergy, lines of work that I know personally and best (there are many others, of course).  Such adjustments cannot --must not--detract from clarity or pertinence.  Librarians almost certainly do spend too much time on e-mail and connectivity of fairly trivial sorts —for example, the rush in the recent past for librarians to tweet their work even though the very medium of Twitter tends to trivialize it.  It is very easy for librarians to mistake busyness for productivity.

Telling the library’s story, showing its value proposition and strategy can be deep work.  Deep work requires librarians not to confuse busyness with productivity, and not to follow the safe paths of least resistance and sheer habit.  Librarianship is a craft, service both to the living and the dead, collaborating with both learners and resources.  It can be a variety of soulcraft.  (I never forget that I hold a degree from Columbia University’s School of Library Service.)  Clearing the mind for this deep work does in fact afford a glimpse of the sacred trust of learners, traditions, and change.  Newport’s book gives librarians' deep work a robust boost, a clarion recall to mental clarity.  I'm privileged and happy to be able to continue reading it.

Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion. I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.
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. . . Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion.  I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.

I’m a librarian and a book person (who’d have thought?) and therefore probably against the grain of American culture right now.  Books have been enormously influential in my life; they gave me an outlet, vision, and ambition when I was very young, and (some of them) have continued to challenge, delight, and astound me ever since.  Some books I count as old friends, and its a diverse lot: Lucretius, Søren Kierkegaard, Frederick Buechner, Karl Barth, Flannery O’Connor, Robertson Davies, Nora Ephron, Peter Brown, P.D. James — probably my educational and professional background shows there,  and some (like Brian Greene) I don’t understand very well.  I continue to read both printed books and digital texts; my current project is John Eliot Norton’s Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven.

To sum up a counter position: A “book person” is an anachronism: the world is digital, information moves at blazing speed, and care, nuance, and precision are luxuries of the past.  Readers have become users; teachers have become suppliers, and students have become customers.  The competition for attention drowns out the sustained attention any book requires, and the mark of the contemporary is multi-tasking, even though humans have been shown to do that very badly.  Instead of nuance, we have media scolds and bludgeons; instead of discussion we have talking points and position papers; instead of reading we have scanning or surfing.  Is it any wonder that we wind up with in a bitterly contentious, polarized society marked by increasing, sharp differences between the very rich, the poor, those caught in the diminishing middle, —where everything is on the market, and humans are either the customers or the product?  Disruption is the word of the moment, nevermind whether it is a well-establish and solidly argued social good or simple mediocrity —that it’s disrupted is enough to draw the line between the tired old and the shiny new.  Aaron Bady’s sharp questioning of Clay Shirky reveal how possible futures become taken for inevitable outcomes, and the slippery proposition that those outside any institution, profession, or work are bound to understand it better than its practitioners.  “Open is open” seems to end all discussion, period.  It is alleged, if you are part of “closed” (read “old) system, you couldn’t possibly understand.

Printed books are an “old” format bound for disruption, right?  Turns out: not so fast.  People continue to want them, and sales remain strong, despite Amazon’s assault on bookstores.  (And I do mean assault.)  The “friction” (or difficulty) of obtaining a print book —you have to go somewhere to get one: library, bookstore, or online— is also a friction for the publisher (lately restyled as the “intellectual property owner” —but that’s another blog entry).  Once published and sold, a print book can’t be disappeared in an Orwellian or Statist (Fascist) manner.  Case in point: last summer the merger of Penguin and Random House led to the disappearing of 1,400 Random House digital books from the SHU library catalog —the terms of the deal seems to have indicated that the new management (mostly from Penguin) would not continue the contracts with digital book aggregators (in our case, eBrary Academic Complete).  Suddenly links didn’t work, and a few weeks later records displaying them were deleted from our library system.  Had we purchase those 1,400 books as printed, the library would still have them available.  At least a few of them are bound to have been of enduring value and related to SHU’s curriculum (it was Random House, an “old” and “quality” publisher).  Now we have to pay more —either acquire print copies, or find where they are available digitally.

This doesn’t get at why books really matter, of course.  I’m thinking of academic books: scholarly books, and high-quality books for the wider market (such as Robert Caro’s everlasting biography of Lyndon B. Johnson).  What matters is not their format, but their content, their intellectual, nuanced exploration and exposition of a subject.  Format is not incidental, but neither is it crucial.

Books are critical to education and the life of a culture because of the sustained attention required to write and to read them.  Books are critical because they encode or contain thinking that can become part of a public discourse —can be challenged, confirmed, critiqued, welcomed, despised, all the possible outcomes of seriously considering a proposition or an argument.  A book sticks around in a stable form so that the author cannot suddenly alter  its contents to suit latter convenience, prove herself or himself right, or respond to critics.

Books are destructible, and tyrants have long sought to destroy them.  Book burnings became a badge of totalitarianism in the 20th century.  But otherwise all the copies of a book are hard to destroy.  A widely distributed supply and market system made it highly likely that somewhere, somehow, a copy might survive.  This has mattered in the face of tyrant, and it matter most during the period when so many texts went underground during the great disruptions of the early Middle Ages.  This list of ancient authors who survived to be read later on the basis of a single copy is a long list, and includes works by Aristotle, Lucretius, and Tacitus.

The idea that books as a technology of learning are obsolete takes a very short view.  To be sure: some books are obsolete: who bothers to look up past market prices for securities in a printed volume?  A much longer view sees the value in the conversations among and between generations.  Partisans of the “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution need to know what those original views are; partisans or a more evolutionist view need a sense of difference over time, of intervening realities and developments.  At the far end of this this longer horizon is the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand’s striking question: what are we doing that could make any difference 10,000 years from now?  (See The Long Now Foundation)

A neo-liberal university in which the customer (students + parents) is king may be able to “satisfice” their information needs by simply pulling random hits from a casual Google search.  That sells students and learning short, perhaps disastrously short.  Learning is more than simply a private good to be parceled out to those who can pay.  I believe in books, because books give witness to thinking that might propell such a university away from a view which spells long term disaster for learning, for universities, and for free society.