Gigantic Consumption of Empty Whimsies

Below, a future historian looks back on the popular culture of (presumably) the early-mid twentieth century. (From The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse, first published 1943)

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather “chatted” about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly those manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of “writer,” but a great many of them seemed to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.

Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore titles such as “Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashion of 1870,” or “the Composer Rossini’s Favourite Dishes,” or “the Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of the Great Courtisans,” and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as “The Dream of Casting Gold Through the Centuries,” or “Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather,” and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been such people who devoured such chit-chat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and decent education should have helped to “service” this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, “service” was the expression used; it was also the word donating the relationship of man to the machine at that time.

I wonder what Herman Hesse would have thought of blogging.

Interestingly, the titles quoted in the passage look a lot like the articles published by the scholarly elite of the historian’s time (which is supposedly a apex of intellectual skill and purity). Eg. “The Pronunciation of Latin in the Universities of southern Italy toward the End of the Twelfth Century”.

Political Correctness Gone Mad

As a member of Amnesty International, I clench my stomach in annoyance whenever someone writes off this organisation (or any similar organisation) as "politically correct." There is some truth in this kind of dismissal, but there is so much error that it is not at all misleading to ignore the truth completely and concentrate on the mistake. And the mistake here is not just a factual mistake (thought it is often that). These dismissals have their root in a broader and more dangerous mistake, one that we should cut out of our thought before it does too much damage.

Writing off AI etc. as "politically correct" is a double insult. It suggests that the cause is inauthentic, that it serves no worthy end. But it also suggests that the members of the organisation are motivated by desires that are unadmirable, even blameworthy. "Politically correct" brings to mind groups of well-meaning but mean-minded beaurocrats, all getting smugly together in the spirit of middle-class righteousness. The conclusion is that these are not the sort of organisations you should connect with, or even what you would want to associate with.

Now it just so happens that AI and many other organisations like it do contain many people who do worthwhile work for the best possible motives. Even if this were not the case, however, the source of the "politically correct" mistake would be worth talking about. In general, the mistake is to have an emaciated conceptual and explanatory life, and hence to apply the most fashionable phrases in the most unsuitable contexts.

In this particular case, the mistake is to call AI etc."politically correct" not because one knows it to be so, but because one knows it to bear an accidental resemblance to pursuits that are "politically correct" (insofar as the phrase has a clear meaning). The mistake is also to attribute "politically correct" motives to AI members not because they evidently possess such motives, but because people who possessed such motives would act similarly.

Occasionally these fashionable phrases will result in true statements. But this hardly gets around the problem: for those statements are likely to have such indeterminate meanings that they cause more confusion than otherwise; and the speaker is likely to use them without thinking, which is not a good habit to get into. At any rate, the consequence of applying "politically correct" falsely are enough to urge caution in all cases. The consequence is the denigration of causes that society would be well-advised to support, and which have little enough support as it is (what with complacency, ignorance, etc.) without adding intellectual carelessness to the list of deterrents.

Sometimes the problem seems not only that phrases like "PC" are applied vaguely and unthinkingly. It is also that "political correctness" is regarded with such loathing that there is (somehow) no need to do anything more that apply the label to a person or practice. Simply calling a thing "politically correct", without actually showing that it fits this description, is enough to discredit the thing. (I seem to remember that mere accusations of "witchcraft" were enough to blot forever the reputation of a member of certain past societies, regardless of any evidence for or against the accusation. Accusations of "political correctness" seem to have a similar power to them, and a similar absurdity).

Moreover, the vagueness of the term tends to disarm any objections to its use. How does a person respond to a statement that carries a strong tone of disgust but no clear meaning? One response is to differentiate the various meanings of the term, and ask the speaker to say which one they meant to use. Perhaps a more effective response would be to ask the speaker what they really mean to say - and if they can't say it, then there's nothing more to say.

How do these problems arise, and how can we avoid them? They arise partly because certain phrases become popular (which is understandable enough), to the extent that other phrases, which would otherwise offer more accurate shades of meaning, are no longer used (which is dumb). But the other part of the confusion is the vagueness of these phrases: with frequent use they grow meaning like new limbs, until they are as clumsy and hard-to-handle as a baby with five arms.

Hence, one sense of "politically correct" is just "pursuant of healthy social causes." But another is "foolishly self-righteous about minor social causes." And because these senses are not spelt out and differentiated, a cause that answers to the first description is automatically hit with the second. Moreover, the senses are so strangely mixed in the speaker's mind that the association goes unquestioned: it's as if a group who pursues healthy social causes must do so, necessarily, in a foolishly self-righteous manner.

I'm not sure if there is any more precise antidote to this sort of confusion than general intellectual carefulness. Faced with a mis-used word or phrase or explanatory pattern, a community does have a number of options. They could do away with the item altogether, and start anew. Or they could retain the item, but take care when using it to clarify its meaning when misunderstanding is likely.

Either of these routes would send us in the right direction, I think. The former would have the advantage of forcing people to find new ways of expressing the old ideas, and this practice would hopefully lead to a more fine-grained language. But it would mean doing away with terms that may actually be useful when used in the right way. The latter would keep what was valuable in the old items; but it would risk a slippage back into the former, undesirable, usage.

Perhaps there is a middle way, where the offending term is retained, but pared back to a single clear meaning (with members of the community encouraged to fill in the gaps with new, more nuanced terms). But the main problem here is not deciding which route to take, but ensuring that it is taken. It is notoriously difficult to control popular thought and popular language usage: one can legislate, but one cannot very easily enforce (and in many cases there will be ethical objections to the latter). Perhaps the best that any individual can do is to avoid these fashionable errors in their own work, and point them out when they appear in the work of others. Hopefully, writing about them explicitly will help out as well.

GRE Response: Tradition and Modernity

GREs are imminent, and so I have been busy trying to answer deep questions in forty-five minute stretches. Below is an attempt to respond intelligently to the statement: "Tradition and modernization are incompatible. One must choose between them.” My brief essay is the tangle of metaphors and big words, of rough-edged similes and bloated generalisations, that I understand to be the proper form of response to the Issue Question. I have posted the following essay partly because I quite like it, and partly because I need something to put in my “Miscellany” section.


In the present day, perhaps more than in any other era, people are confronted with an immensely fast-moving vision of society. Just as computers double in speed every 18 months, so the length of our historical vision seems to shrink at much the same pace; and the extent of modernisation, as well as its speed, sometimes gives the appearance that it is impossible to avoid without making a great effort to remove oneself completely from the onward surge of technology, fashion, advertising, urbanisation. On the whole, however, this appearance is illusory. The important choices in the present day are not between tradition and modernization but between alternatives that transcend this dichotomy, and require, perhaps, a mixing of those seemingly opposed influences.

As mentioned, in a number of areas of contemporary life there are tensions between modern and traditional forms of living. In the area of communications, for example, the internet and cellphones seem to have supplanted more traditional forms of verbal interaction: and one of the most vivid symbols of the divide between old and new is the rise of the language of texting, which seems to shut off an entire older generation from an understanding of that most basic feature of a person’s social being, their speech. By comparison, the ponderous eloquence and precise diction of, say, a History text, seems ancient and distant.

A closer look at the situation, however, reveals that the divide is not so much a rift as a small depression in the social landscape, and one that is criss-crossed both by tracks and bridges, and by rifts that head in quite different directions. This is hinted at by the example used above: any History student is likely to have an equal aptitude for reading 19th Century prose as for composing text messages in the truncated, special-purpose, modern-day idiom.

In order to see this more clearly, it is worth distinguishing between, and briefly discussing, two different but related ways in which tradition and modernisation. [sic] Firstly, there are a large number of concepts, ideas, activities and questions that do not undergo any essential change over time. The form in which they are manifested might change markedly, even violently, and it is this kind of change that causes us to shudder with fears of rift and apocalypse; but this external change is to the real thing as the change in the color of our paper is to the mathematical verities that are written upon it. Hence Plato wrote on sheets of Papyrus [did he?!], and Daniel Dennet [forgive me: it was the first name that came to mind] writes on a computer, but they address the same questions, have the same goals, and use the same methods. The language of love, too, is unaffected by the changes to the social substrate upon which it is written. Lust, infatuation, pleasure, affection, betrayal: these may have new plots, but they are ancient themes. To be sure, there is a certain amount of necessity involved in choosing between the modern story and the ancient story, but that choice is not the important one.

The second form of compatibility can be located in the complementary relations that exist between the past and the present versions of various activities. Present-day discoveries are the children of early-modern insights (in Physics, for example); present day conflicts can only be fully understood in terms of their historical development; modern cities are the outgrowths from old towns. We may be forced to choose the modern world, but in doing so we also choose the past.

For these two reasons, the divide between tradition and modernisation is not inevitable. To be sure, it is always tempting to ignore those pursuits that have a timeless quality to them, or to ignore the interaction that keeps the past and the present [together]; but human weakness is one timeless feature of modern life that we must try to overcome.