Constructed Languages

In life we are the servants of language. Words are all we leave behind us. Our relics are only significant by the names they receive. It is the so named Works of the Romans, not any work alone, that inspires wonder – and it is only the name Work which causes us to regard the aqueduct at Nîmes as more wonderful and more attention-worthy, more sympathetic, than any arch of weatherworn stone in Utah’s Zion. The name of Apelles the painter was a byword for excellence in his art for a thousand years after the last man who had seen his pictures was dead.

Language is all we have in common. What we make are only words; what we leave are only names. We were given, undeservingly, an intelligence equal to the span of the world in which we find ourselves; the side effect is that we each become our own world. Only the necessity of communication keeps us from regressing from one another into private languages. Therefore, what can be said in any language can always be said in another – because while not every thought can be communicated, if a thought can be communicated to anyone, it can be communicated to everyone.

Think of how strange it is, that only because you both speak the same language, you can communicate with someone separated from you by decades of age, by country and climate, by sex, by class, by way of life. And think how absurd it is, that someone of your own age, sharing your background and your circumstances, cannot communicate across that shorter distance, if you do not share a language.

It is possible to know things in one language which you do not know in another: not because they cannot be said in both, but because translation is a kind of alchemy, where solve must precede coagula. What you take in whole may not be accessible to you in another language, even if you speak them both, until you have taken it apart in one language, to put it back together in another.

There may be things you can only learn by creating a language: by the act of creation, or by the way the created language fills a gap. The world is not written in the language of mathematics, but in the language we have created for mathematics we have made something that maps to nature’s language. But my concern for now is with languages created for pleasure, not for purpose.

In the canon of constructed languages, Tolkien is the Old Master. Much of the appeal of reading Tolkien is to discover things that he knew, in silvery Quenya and in Sindarin’s rushy breezes, that he did not quite know in English, and could not always translate. Indeed, On Fairy-Stories has the air of a poor translation from a patois of Elvish languages inside his head. And A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna míriel teaches you something without having to see a translation at all; but you can feel that you know it, whatever it means, under branches screening stars.

Tolkien is sometimes derided as pseudo-Biblical in his diction; but this is simply wrong. The powerful cadence of the King James Version is imparted by a plangent alternation between etymologically disparate English synonyms – which, while it has its own majestic effect, misrepresents the straightforwardness of the original Hebrew. But Tolkien is etymologically almost pure: page after page, he goes on in a kind of alternate or underground English, the revenant language of Chaucer, the sleek hull of maiden-voyaging English before it was barnacled with borrowings from Latin and Greek.

This language – a constructed language of a sort, purely by selection – is, even before myth and archetype, the deepest source and means of his power. You do not need to be a linguist to feel the difference in the depth of Tolkien’s English, any more than you need to understand music theory to hear the sadness of a minor key.

Some purposes require their own languages. Mature poetry has its own grammar; vital religions employ their own dialects, even their own languages (and a wise missionary does not translate everything); and every profession must find its own jargon, to ennoble the commonplace or to make commonplace the extraordinary. And every language supports another, floating language, of idioms and proverbs – one which can sometimes be carried over whole into new waters, as Erasmus did in his Adagia, which restored to the Renaissance the floating language of antiquity.

Art, even mimetic art, is still only sometimes the recapitulation of a natural process. Just as often, artistry is the power to throw a natural process into reverse. A picture suggests a story; a title finds a poem; a stain on a wall evokes a picture. The constructor of a language only begins by finding, in the space between real languages, the pleasing or striking form of a new and unheard language. The art is to evolve, from this shadow, the succession of necessities making up the thinkable history that would have formed that language – that would have learned all that that language, and that language only, knows.

Internet or Library

I

Research on the Internet is a meal made of cake and caviar – you may enjoy it, but you cannot live on it. For food to live on, you must go to a library. Minds that live off the Internet acquire a distinctive flabbiness – the strange combination of diffidence in facts, with passionate certainty in politics.

The Internet breaks the book’s proportion of data and information. It is very common, even the rule, for everything on the Internet on a topic – so many thousands of sites, gigabytes of data – to be drawn from the information in one book. A thousand sites may provide only so many tertiary paraphrases and plagiarisms of an original secondary source, itself an oversimplified popularization. How often does a search bring you only page after page all passing around the same unsourced statistics, all retelling the same questionable anecdote? Most of the best of what the Internet offers on any non-journalistic topic is on the level of a good children’s book – just enough to give you bearings; enough to let you ask intelligent questions, but not enough to credibly answer a question with. This is the cake.

The rest of what the Internet has to say about something tends to be astonishingly obscure. You are interested in the occult? Why, then, here is the Alchemy Library. Read Trithemius, study an abstract of Picatrix. Or here is the Twilight Grotto. Study Agrippa, Bruno, the keys of Solomon. Agrippa, they say, had a spirit tied to the collar of his dog; Paracelsus had one in the pommel of his sword. You have the advantage of them – you need not live as a pilgrim, wandering from monastery to monastery, ransacking Europe for books as they did. You may, with Google’s help, set out ignorant in the morning; and by evening, have at least a minor spirit inhabiting your cell phone, whereby you may produce static at will, or induce baldness in telemarketers. Sites like these are remarkable achievements, labors to whose makers I am profoundly grateful. They exemplify the attraction of the Internet. I might, a century ago, have spent a lifetime and several fortunes in pursuit of all the books they make effortlessly available to me. They are of enormous value, though of weightless, portable stuff – caviar.

This range of materials, from broad introduction to narrow trivia, creates an illusion of depth – but the middle is empty. There are gulfs which the Internet will not help you cross. Consider programming – where, if the Internet could suffice anywhere, it ought to excel. How many tutorials will impart a little JavaScript, get you tinkering with PHP? How many blogs teach the esoterica of JavaScript coercion or PHP’s references? But in between, there is the same gulf here as everywhere else. Stop and consider this – it is more than ironic. It means not only that the Internet is not generally sufficient; it is not even self-sustaining. It cannot even feed its own.

The Internet gives us tutorials and trivia; it gives us nothing in between. The problem is that people do not feel a lack. For a whole generation, this is what knowledge looks like. They work through a few tutorials, they memorize a few items of trivia, and think that because they have spanned the extremes, they are experts. Tutorial-level knowledge gives them the illusion of competence; trivia give them rhetorical immunity to any challenge – “If you know so much about it, why don’t you know about…?” “Of course you think so, you don’t know about…” The crackpot who would teach medicine to doctors, science to physicists, and programming to engineers, all from his armchair, used to be the exception; now he is the rule.

II

At some point in any life of study, diverse perspectives become a distraction, and obscure facts become trivia. This turning inward is a sign of intellectual maturity. To fill the mind, you must turn off the computer, you must shut out the world and cloister yourself. Diverse interest alone makes a dilettante; obscure information alone makes a pedant; but a scholar is formed in the library, out of deep and protracted thinking. Yes, a book is a companion, but it is not a follower; it is a guide, like Dante’s Virgil in Hell, from doubt, through danger, into light.

All of this might be obvious if we did not confuse education with schooling. Still, I hope most people will admit that the best student is one who would, and does, learn without a teacher – one who reads. Reading multiplies schooling; and while classes provide leverage for the mind, its substance – if it is to have one – comes from what you learn on your own.

Objection: the Internet is new. It is immature. As it matures, it may grow into something that is a true replacement for the library. But this is wrong. Indeed, as the Internet has matured, it has become less like a library. Increasingly, everything is commented upon, annotated, rated and heckled. Hierarchy has given way to unlayered tagging – which makes it easier to pursue your interests, but conversely makes preconceived interests less flexible – is it progress in cookery if wherever you go, to any restaurant anywhere in the world, you can eat a hamburger, just the way you like it back home?

I love the Internet. I need the Internet. I would be diminished by living without the Internet. But the Internet is not the library of the future. The Internet is becoming ever more and more its own medium, something new and stupendous. The Internet is not trying to become a book; it is trying to become a continuous correspondence, a layered and multivalent conversation, a many-handed game, an acceleration of the social aspect of thinking – but not all thinking is social, and for private thinking, the Internet is not only unhelpful, it is poisonous.

Wikipedia forbids original research; but that is an enforceable policy only because the whole atmosphere of the Internet is already so much against it. Much is made of sites like ArXiv or PLoS, and of their increasing importance at the expense of print journals; but while they take advantage of the Internet, they do not really belong to it. It should command attention how strange an accommodation they are – that writing by and for the most technically sophisticated audiences possible, written on computers, distributed exclusively over the Internet – is still formatted in order to be printed and read on paper. Discoveries asserted in markup are, with rare and casual exceptions, the work of cranks. Hypertext, as Wikipedia shows, is a fine way to knit together existing knowledge – but to add something to that knowledge requires the linearity which can be offered perfectly by paper, but which the screen must disguise itself to imitate.

Enthusiasm for the distributed and egalitarian formation and organization of knowledge – for the network perspective – is good. We should be enthusiastic. It gives us the power to approach the world in a new way, and we do not know what we may yet find. But the network perspective is not complete. Linearity and hierarchy are not the original sins of the intellect. There are real lines, and real hierarchies. The line brings speed – there is power in separation. The road separates us from nature, but finally lets us see more of it. Hierarchy brings confidence: the mechanism of memory is a network, but its operation is hierarchical, always subordinating the abstract and universal to the concrete and particular. In any vital system, the line and the network, the hierarchy and the mass, are found in alternation.

III

To show that a book serves certain ends better than the Internet is, by itself, only enough to justify books as a luxury item. But my concern is for libraries: not the kind that adorn mansions at a stage in affluence a little after a pool, and a little before a garden; but public libraries, the kind where flimsier books have to be armored by special bindings against use and abuse – by impecunious scholars and cheap students; by parsimonious old men looking back, and grubby-fingered children looking forward and up and down and sideways; by the shy seeking connection and communion, and by the face-addled and smalltalk-stupefied seeking respite.

The real justification required is not intellectual, but economic. Granted, books are good; but can we justify the expense of libraries, if we can substitute in the Internet something not quite as good, but good enough?

The production of books is not a problem. It must be hardly a footnote to the paper industry. As long as we have drywall and wallpaper, paper towels and toilet paper, cardboard boxes and bottle labels, fliers and handouts and junk mail, fodder for office printers and copiers – we may have books as well, without much trouble or impact.

But this is moot. Most people are sensible and sensitive enough not to be in favor of disbanding or abolishing the libraries we have. The real question is: should we build new ones? The implicit answer of late seems to be that libraries are like city steam heat: worth keeping up if your city already happens to have it, but not worth the effort when building anew – so that, in the developing world, what is important is to build schools, not libraries; to put laptops into children’s hands, not library cards.

This is pragmatic. A laptop can bypass a corrupt government; a library implies funds requiring stewardship. But there is a questionable assumption involved: that, just as undeveloped regions might do best to skip telephone poles in favor of a wireless infrastructure; so they should skip libraries, and develop a paperless culture. But I think this assumption is better put: if developing regions attract enough medical charities, they can skip building hospitals. Patently, the object of medical charities is to relieve the harshness of life, and ultimately by relieving the harshness of life to allow the institutions to form which will, in turn, build hospitals. Likewise, laptops should set in motion the intellectual awareness and appetite, which will, in time, demand and build libraries.

IV

The Internet increases the importance of the library, as the means of synthesis, consolidation, and continuity in culture. The Internet magnifies diversities of all kinds. It has strengthened every existing group and variety of opinion, and called forth new groups and opinions from vague sympathies and stirrings. But diversity is not an end in itself: the object of the multiplication of individual perspectives is that these perspectives should each somehow add to a shared, universally meaningful sum – they should add to the shared human project.

The Internet by itself is unsteerable – a freedom of assembly which veers into faction; a freedom of expression which veers into vandalism. The faster and more weightless the Internet becomes, the greater its need for books as ballast. Think of a project like Wikipedia; would it be possible without the books which anchor its citations as references? The paragon of the possibilities of the Internet is everywhere dependent on the library.

Or think of politics. Politics on the Internet is a parable warning against the dangers of booklessness. In the absence of books, it has succumbed to faction and vandalism. It is particularly tragic to witness in the United States – which was founded by the bookish – reading books to derive and develop their ideas, writing books to defend their actions. Five minutes with the Federalist Papers or the Debates in the Constitutional Convention or Democracy in America will give you a better idea of, and a stronger sense of a stake in, what America is and stands for, than if you were to read every Internet debate on the subject from Usenet through the blogosphere to Twitter.

Increasingly, I find that the rhythm of my reading becomes an alternation, in which what I read in books raises questions which the Internet answers, and what I read on the Internet conceives needs which books fulfill. This cycle has neither the attraction of technophilia, nor of technophobia; it is not shiny and sleek, it has no smell or patina; it has no brand name or buzz, no ancestry or tradition; but it has certain unglamorous advantages: it is real, and it works. I cannot be alone in having discovered it; I suspect that there are more who quietly belong to both sides, than who openly belong to either – that the rivalry is not only mistaken, but mostly fictitious.

Fable of the Whale and the Squid

A whale once determined to settle between himself and the greatest of squids which was the more terrible, and thereby master of the ocean. So he sought out the terrible squid, and fought it. The deep was full of noise: blasts of killing sound, roars from carving jets of water; and the battle, watched by whales (for the squids did not care) was a jumble of teeth and tentacles, and something white in the lampless deep, and wrapped all around it long clouds of grasping sea-dark.

The whale won. The squid sank away where even whales could not follow. And all whales knew that it was a whale who was the master of the ocean. Then the watching whales left, and the victor – ragged, bleeding, exhausted – swam away alone to rest.

But now there were walls of noise against his sides – stunned, he could do nothing as three young whales tore him apart, to become the new masters of the ocean by killing the old.

Moral: The Ambitious and Successful forget that Ambition is common.

Debunking

Debunking is to science as criticism is to art – not useless, but not the thing itself, and often requiring an approach opposite to what it tries to protect. Debunking is a rhetorical technique; disproof is a logical achievement, or a scientific consensus. In the history of science there is hardly an idea worth noticing that has not met with a wave of debunkings. They rise in jealousy from the center of science, and recede with time, in bewilderment and resentment, to the fringes.

Debunking, like any persecution, only strengthens what it attacks; and debunkers, in the long run, are enemies of science, because they belie its attractions. They portray science as progress through mutual abuse, where only the most smug are worthy to possess truth. Debunkers, by defending science, do all to make science attractive that pundits do for politics.

Debunkers are obsessed with copyediting. Take a scientific paper; confuse the punctuation and capitalization; add exclamation points; put an uncredentialed named on it – they will crush it. Take a crackpot theory; edit it to a scientific style; abbreviate the name (J. Smith); add the name of a university or an institute – they will not even to allow themselves to wonder about it.

Two prominent exceptions, where criticisms are substantial and urgent, are intelligent design and climate change denial. But these are not really pseudosciences; they are themselves debunkings. These two movements have rudely proven that the effect of a debunking has nothing to do with the truth of the proposal, only with the skill, prestige, and power (or powerful alliances) of the debunker.

I do not believe that a debunker can defeat truth in the long run – corroborating evidence in time must strain the skill, undermine the prestige, and sour the alliances of the denier – but it can be held off for a very long time.

In the past, truth opposed in one place has always had somewhere else to win. Until the last few decades there has not been a single, international scientific community and consensus; only several separate national scientific establishments, which have served to correct one another. Only since the end of WWII has there been a single Western scientific establishment; and only since the end of the Cold War (or since Khrushchev, in some degree) has there been a worldwide scientific community. The great disadvantage of this single system is that it is difficult to shame it. For example: the wave theory of light originated in England (with Young), but was not accepted in England until after – through the work of Fresnel – it had been elaborated and accepted in France. At the extreme, in France, Voltaire had to satirize the Cartesian mechanical ether to advance the theory of gravity. Competition between universities can in some degree replace this international competition; but only in disciplines which do not depend on centralized sources of money – only where independent budgets allow for independent thinking.

In the history of science, it is rarely well-known anomalies that necessitate new theories. Remember that Copernicus kept epicycles in his heliocentrism; that Kepler set out not to discover the shape of orbits, but the spacing between them; that Newton “made no theories” for the material basis of gravitation, at a time when the great question was that of the ether – a question which Einstein also fruitfully ignored. Cranks are drawn to easy solutions for most or all problems; scientists are drawn towards mines of new problems. It is easy to multiply after the fact theories of what is, or is not, science. But the behavior of scientists shows only one rule: scientists go where the work is. And while it is unusual for scientists to have to step back, and declare a body of work nonsense (caloric fluid, for example), it is almost the rule that as a new science advances, it goes from vague pretensions of revolutionary importance, to mere usefulness, or even footnote-filling triviality; and that, as theories mature, they surrender their ambitions, and ceasing to be projects of their own, end serving as instruments of old projects.

For the practical recognition of cranks and quacks, it is not necessary for the borders of science to be patrolled and enforced by debunkers – it is enough to avoid easy answers. The question to ask is not some berating, trolling “Why” (“If God designed us, why the appendix, coccyx, recurved spine?” “If global warming is natural, why do so many climatologists think it is not, why do the models overwhelmingly imply it is man-made, why changing patterns of vegetation, glaciation?”) – because these are the same kind of questions that the other side is asking (“If evolution is random and undirected, why such useless complexity, why so many missing links, why dogs can still interbreed?” “If global warming is anthropogenic, why no rush of disasters, why still harsh winters, why no one can agree on what would happen even if it were true?”) – and because the answers would not be scientific: “To keep us humble,” “Institutional veniality, overconfidence, bad records,” “Because so little survives, so little is seen in so short a time,” “Because we’ve been lucky so far.” The right question is simply – “And?” Science needs problems, science needs questions; so science cannot abide easy answers, science cannot settle for dead ends.

Happiness

Happiness is joy at rest. Joy is a reaction, sudden, and fleeting. That is not to say that happiness is joy watered down, nor joy repeated – that would wear you out, or familiarity would diminish each occasion of joy. Rather, joy and happiness are made of the same stuff, of fear and uncertainty. Joy follows their resolution; happiness must be accompanied and fed by them – what we believed was inevitable, what we believed was already rightfully ours, never makes us happy.

Happiness is a human invention. Wild animals know joy by occasions; only pets know happiness. They are mutually exclusive. Joy belongs to a resolution – you are hungry: you hunt, you kill, you eat, you rejoice. Happiness belongs to a balance – you are hungry, there is food, you eat, something reminds you that there might not have been food, and you are happy. If you forget hunger, you cease to be happy – your circumstances are no longer a balance, but a given. Happiness must be reminded. For animals, it is reminded by instinct; for human beings, it must be reminded by memory.

Happiness, remember, comes in bottles, powders, and pills. It can be forced by lowered expectations, by narrowed attention (which values avoiding the depressing over facing the unpleasant), or by a sheer plodding effort no different from any other, which effortfully attains the state to which drugs make a shortcut. What we mean when we say that we want to be happy is that we want the right to be happy – we want an excuse to be happy – we want happiness and self-respect.

There are only two schemes of pleasure in life – the smooth, straight way of happiness; and the rough, winding way of joy intermitted with distress, desperation, and disappointment. These are not absolute commitments – as it is good and necessary for all simply to be happy sometimes, so there would be something distasteful in never choosing to set happiness aside, neither for joy nor for sorrow. It would a self-indulgent and antisocial vice to be always ready to reconcile yourself to the way things are – to smother the itch of discomfort or inconvenience that mothers invention, the restlessness of curiousity or the pain of perplexity that searches out discoveries, the indignation that demands change.

As life and history are a infinity of problems, the only excusable function of happiness is between them – it cannot be allowed to avoid them. Happiness is not something you are, it is something you wear; and like any cloth, it has proper and improper climates and seasons.

Fable of the Hyena and the Comedian

A spotted hyena, having escaped the zoo, walked the streets that night terrified and disconsolate. (He was small, so those who saw him took him for a dog.) He wandered until he heard, from a large building, the sounds of laughter. What could be causing so much terror – what could be frightening so many?

The hyena, approaching the source of the noise, saw through a window that the threat was only a single man. But the man had a terrible voice, as powerful as the trumpeting of the elephants at the zoo. The voice carried through the whole hall and out through the half-open window, into the alley where the hyena watched. It was a terrible and evil voice, full of mockery and cruelty.

The hyena did not know why the people did not destroy him. Perhaps (with that voice) he was too strong for them; but the hyena had nothing to lose. He burst through the window, leaped onto the stage, and before the creature could blast him with that terrible voice – the hyena tore out his throat.

The crowd stayed silent until the hyena had dragged the carcass off the stage and out of the building. Then they started whooping and gasping and murmuring, and the hyena was pleased to have caused so much joy, and to have freed so many.

Later, in the shelter of a storm drain, as he ate his prize, he reflected that he had found his purpose. There must be more of these creatures, and he was the only one swift enough to destroy them.

Moral: Never laugh in front of someone who does not get the Joke.

The Beach

The beach is as different from ocean and from land, as land and ocean are different from each another. It is the third state, the middle path. Ocean is faithless, relentless, and indifferent; we can hurt it but we cannot destroy it. Land is fixed; it is given; grounded, grounding, foreground and background. There are no names for what we trust which do not in some way resolve to the rock-solid trust we give the land – even when that trust is misplaced, given to earthquake zones, floodplains, or coy volcanoes.

The beach is always between, in kind as in place. It is the sea slowed down, and the land sped up. It is solid enough to sleep on, but not solid enough to build on. It flows without tides. Dry, it is liquid-like, cannot be dug out or molded. Wet, it is solid-like, can be built with or sculpted – but when it dries it does not set, it falls apart. Dry, you half-swim walking in it. Wet, it is smooth and hard as pavement. The paradoxes of sand, as a child discovers them the first day at the beach, exhaust all riddles.

Beach air is different. It does not feel like sea air. Here the motions of the air are not answered by a moving deck. On a beach I could never imagine myself on a boat. On a boat, even in still water, I could never imagine myself on a beach. Nor does it feel like inland air. And the sunlight is different. Even in summer, though medically no less dangerous, it feels harmless – it does not seem to burn. Its warmth goes straight to the bone and stays there.

We cannot see what we take for granted; to see at all, we must see anew; and we are never more aware than when we are between – between day and night, between forest and field, between city and country – between sea and land, where the beach makes a permanent twilight, the golden hour of the golden sand. Even between past and present – when the smooth dark horseshoe crabs, leading their slow tails, creep together out of the sea, up from five hundred million years to tell us that on this planet, we are the aliens.

The beach can do well to wake you in this way even in the summer, when you must trip over tourists and vacationers; it can do better, when the crowds thin in the cold; best, when the wind is high and the clouds are thick ahead of the storm, when the sea and sky are full of the same gray restlessness, and you share the beach only with those who know better than to notice each other, who share a mutual irrelevance as they watch the reckless, desperate surfers ride.

Gauss's Nightmare

[N.B. In the early nineteenth century Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, proposed to test whether the Moon was inhabited by intelligent beings by outlining (according to various sources: with flaming oil in a trench; by planting a forest on a plain; by planting a wheat field in a forest; or with an array of mirrors) a colossal right triangle. He expected that if they saw the shape, the people of the Moon would reciprocate it with a similar triangle.]

Planet A

From Letter to Minisalonicaro, Saboditamoni.

Dear friend:

I know not, of course, whether you are right about the appearance of our own Earth from the Moon. Certainly, plants of all sorts do appear green from our proximate position, but it is not impossible that they appear to be some other color when viewed through clouds and vast depths of air. Likewise, it is not impossible that the blues and greens of the Moon represent some other phenomenon, similarly shifted away from its natural appearance.

I might be supported in this by the speculations of our late friend Tamothoditanara, whose doctrine of degrees of rarefaction allows us to speculate that great thicknesses of air might behave quite like relatively slight thicknesses of water. Consider the enormous shifts in color which an object undergoes when immersed in water, and tell me again whether it is indeed likely that the colors which we see through two atmospheres, on the moon, represent what we see at hand to have those same colors…

I must recommend that you abandon this scheme. You may have convinced your prince that it will be worthwhile, but you should remember that princes are fickle and that if the response you expect is not forthcoming, he may choose to exact punishment for the waste in labor and precious oil which you have caused him. The trenches you propose will demand at least as much as a year’s harvest of oil to fill to an adequate level with soaked fuel. Also, as I remember from my visit, the ground in your district becomes very hard and rocky just a few feet below the surface, and it will require much more manpower than you have calculated to dig the trenches.

With all that, I must confess that I do not fear at all for whether you will be able to keep the lines straight over so great a distance, after the feats of surveying which I saw you perform for the laying-out of Tabacoraca…

Planet B

From Of the Marvelous Night of the Burning Shapes,
Archives of Mong Sthro Diocese.

O supremely noble prince! O beloved brother!

I indeed saw, o Brother, o Peer, the Burning Shapes of the Moon but a Month ago, when they inspired the Fear and Admiration of all Men and Princes. O Brother! O Peer! I tremble still to think of that wonder. The Temples of my Country have not ceased to make daily Sacrifices of our most precious Animals to the Moon since it offered that terrible Warning, since it displayed the terrible Shape of the Ax over all over our heads. O Brother! O Peer! I take comfort to know that our Wisest Emperor has offered the wonderful Sacrifice of his foolish General who obscenely demolished the Lunar Temples of Brift Tankt…

Humanism

We are uneasy in this world, half because it is cruel, and half because it is boring. That is not to equate cruelty and boredom, though boredom may reach cruel intensity (as for prisoners, who fear the boredom of isolation more than abuse), and though the cruelest of the cruel are the bored and cruel.

Nor is that to say that the world is in itself boring. But the things that are worthwhile about the world – its scientific intricacy, its aesthetic depth, its spiritual weight – are not the things we naturally see in it. They must be found or found out; introduced by education or example; happened upon, in reveries or shocks; or won, by study or pursuit, patience or passion.

In the long view, of many lives together, or of one life in unity, the intellectual endowments of human beings exceed any particular demand for their use. We do not feel this when we are engaged on a difficult problem. Our powers are tidal – when they go out, we drag, and think the world too much; when they come in, we soar and rush, and call it inspiration. But in the end, there is no such thing as a hard problem; only a problem which happens to be hard in a certain place or time. Every problem that can be solved is, or will be, easy for someone, not because that someone is any smarter than you, but because that someone, knowing what is irrelevant, where the dead ends are, and what it is realistic to expect, will not waste time or effort.

This is easiest to see in politics and economics. A body of voters is more likely to be correct than a cabal of aristocrats; consumers, than planners; educated guessers, than experts. But this wisdom of the demos, the market, or the crowd, is not because the many are even as smart together as a single human being alone; but because, when acting as a unit and addressing a limited range of choices, they stop in the right place. A laser is not brighter light, but light without distractions.

How could it be that the many are better than the one at deciding what policies to establish; at knowing how many widgets to make; at guessing how many beans are in a barrel? Certainly, averaging draws towards the mean, and so filters out the kinds of distortion which, being continuously variable, fit a curve – like variability in strength of eyesight. But people are diverse, and while you can average apples and oranges (as fruits, or spheres, or edibles, or vendibles), you cannot eat an average.

It must be noted that, while a range of secret answers always contains a few absurd outliers (three or a million beans in the barrel), the averaged results will tend towards the real. But this is not a miracle effected by the act of averaging; it is an effect of some people being right, or nearly right, by themselves. The reality of a true quantity creates a distribution over the crowd; the crowd does not, by the distribution, create the quantity.

Individuals’ failings result in part from their weaknesses. They cannot clearly see the beans or the barrel, they do not know how large the beans are. But even when everyone has equal access to the same data – as in the stock market – performance is not therefore equal. No special intellectual ability distinguishes successful investors. Rather, failures in investment are generally caused by over-thinking. That does not only mean thinking too hard, or reaching for the obscure when the obvious suffices; but also the inescapable friction of irrelevant considerations – moral, emotional, sentimental, logical, philosophical, mathematical, scientific, ambitious, charitable, or personal. Even where these are consciously excluded, the discipline required to avoid such constant temptations demands and impels needless, wasteful, confusing, and complicating repetition and recapitulation. The art of haggling is the art of inducing this state – of leading someone in circles until they are dizzy with thinking; so that the easiest to take advantage of, tend to be the most determined to energetically resist it. By thinking in circles we drill ourselves into deeper holes than we could fall into by not thinking.

This is not as strange as it sounds. You must leave room between routine and emergency, or an unforeseen emergency will catch you overstretched. It is admirable to be able to improvise in an emergency; it is foolish to do so from day to day, when the right tool or procedure is available to save time and effort. In an emergency, the wise man finds many ways to drive a nail; but when the emergency is over, the wise man uses a hammer (or a nail gun) like everyone else. Animals built to fight are slow to fight, because they fight all-out; animals that fight habitually do not fight well, because they fight predictably. In war, room for heroes proves bad planning – the best commander is not the one whose soldiers earn the most medals, but whose soldiers do not have the chance to earn medals before they win.

Boredom is one of the human conditions. Belief blunts, even turns, the sharp cruelty of life; but whenever religion tries to address the boredom of life, it becomes fanaticism; and the same is true of politics, which becomes totalitarianism. The opposite of this, whatever the religion or party, is humanism.

Life cannot be all about one thing. It is certainly possible to indirectly refer everything back to the glory of God, or the good of society. And if one takes any thought about life, some such summum bonum, some such qiblah, is inevitable. But even saints and prophets cannot always have God before their eyes; nor philanthropists, humanity. Such hauntedness, such fixity, is a kind of madness – the intellectual equivalent of staring at the sun.

At one extreme, fanaticism and totalitarianism deny boredom; at the other extreme, barbarism suffocates it; between, humanism cultivates it, and all that answers to it. The cruelty in life gives value to what allow us to overcome that cruelty, which are virtues; but virtues are all in some way denials of life – the patience to bear it as something separate to be borne, the courage to risk it as something you could lose. It is the boredom in life which gives value to life itself: to company, conversation, and friendship; to creation, enjoyment, and appreciation; to knowledge, reflection, and wisdom; to everything that provides human beings with the substance of human dignity.

As boredom and cruelty meet each other at the extremities, so do belief and humanism. A beautiful place of worship or devotion is more than the sum of a place of worship and a beautiful place. Still, even then, they must be pursued separately, each by its own law, each with its own end even where both share the same means. But the relationship is not perfectly reciprocal. Belief without humanism is death; humanism without belief is still a kind of life, though a naked one. Disbelief or unbelief is an act of independence which leads to dependence, because it preserves an openness which, like an unwalled city, is open to all; belief is an act of dependence or surrender which leads to independence, because it armors the mind against ambush and siege. This is a distinction of intellectual metabolism. Belief, endothermic, makes its own warmth; but in cities, people are like bees – individually ectothermic, they can yet ball up and shiver against each other for warmth.

Bare life, life unmoving and unmoved, is rightly an object of horror. Life is not need, and life is not fulfillment; life is in between – between hunger and satiety, to eat; between satiety and hunger, to do. We live to live; and life is the question which only life answers. The summit, fullness, and extremity of hope is the idea of a heaven which is but more and better life; and the best thing which can be done with life is to bring about more life. We live to live – and, living, to add to life.

Programming

Programming, though not itself a humanity, can serve as one. Consider Latin. By the end, the justification for Latin’s role as the introduction to liberal learning was less to enable students to read the classical authors in the original with comfort, than by its exacting grammar, and its subtle and exact vocabulary, to form the mind to the tolerance for nuance and habit of precision prerequisite to all kinds of intellectual progress.

In Latin’s case it was a sad diminuendo; but the role is one worth filling. Programming, which begins with the abstract essence of grammar and subordinates and iterates it to depths which language cannot sustain, enforces a power of expression as exact and as subtle as the expectation of literal interpretation can make it.

Any kind of work that approaches perfection by a cycle of degrees intermitted by trial, feedback, and return to the beginning – draft and revision, model and prototype, mock-up and construction – similarly strengthens the faculties at each return; but programming does it fastest, and most bracingly. Any programmer knows how the pain and boredom of protracted debugging leaves a hollow feeling in the brain like a sore muscle, which becomes, after a rest, the certainty of having become a little smarter.

Programming is the ultimate mimesis. Its reach is the reproduction, not only of the world and everything in it, but of all possible worlds. In this way – because to address anything well, a programmer must do so in a way which potentially addresses everything – programming is the only great centripetal intellectual force of our time; and programming is the only profession left where it pays to have a universal mind.

Kenneth Clark, in his essay “The Concept of Universal Man,” usefully defines a universal mind, on the model of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as one which, seeing a natural phenomenon, wishes to understand it; which, seeing a human design, wishes to improve it; and to do all this for humanity’s benefit.

Programming does not, by itself, yield those values; but it gives that power. The willingness to see designs and procedures as expedient and perishable contrivances – not the unanswerable inheritance of wisdom or tradition – is predicated on the ability to extract them from the inertia of their contexts by translating them into a precise and neutral language.

In this way, programming drives toward philosophy. Ada Byron, the first person to understand programming, called herself “a metaphysician and an analyst”; and programmers have never been able to escape philosophy. In object-orientation they created the first experimental metaphysics; and throughout their work, they run into old problems as they work toward the old goal: clear and distinct ideas.

The Stoics required philosophy to show and to resolve definite choices in life; they required the philosopher to be visibly and measurably changed by the practice of philosophy. This should not be confused with a positivist dismissal of word-chopping (though some of the same arguments recur), or a pragmatist tolerance for vagueness as long as it yields results. Programmers are willing to make and adhere to subtle distinctions, even without obvious applicability, as long as they are part of a useful perspective; and they are the more unwilling to leave an idea vague as it proves useful, believing that its refinement can only make it more potent, and more widely useful.

It is suggestive that programmers’ favored literary mode is the essay – which Montaigne created on the model of Stoic discourses.

This resemblance to Stoicism is not accidental; it is so strong that it is two-way. Chrysippus, the father or forerunner of Stoicism, was also one inventor of formalized logic (even partially symbolic). Had the Romans invented computers, he would have stood in the same relation to their computer languages that Boole does to ours.

Such an affinity between a discipline and a school of philosophy is familiar from mathematics. Mathematicians are either Platonists, or not Platonists; and if not, what they are instead is unimportant. Mathematicians, even confessed Platonists, do not support the scheme of the Republic; programmers do not teach the eternal return (or even the infinite loop).

But show me a committed programmer who does not believe in the possibility and necessity of a radical and unconditional independence; who does not at once value loyalty as both the best thing that can be offered, and the least that is to be expected; who does not think happiness only as valuable as it is won through courage, not received as a gift or stroke of luck – or, conversely, who does not find unhappiness or querulousness contemptible in the intelligent, as if they should know better; and you have found an exception to the rule.