Epideictic Rhetoric as Acknowledgement: Rhetorical Heroism and Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

My presentation at this weekend's Pennsylvania Communication Association Conference at The Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley.

Writing about a presidential campaign that is still unfolding is a risky business; every word can be construed as an endorsement of one kind or another. From the outset, let me say that this presentation’s interest in Barack Obama’s speech on race in America should not be taken as an endorsement of his candidacy. Rather, its interest emerges from the simple recognition that Obama’s rhetorical gifts—the likes of which American public discourse has not seen for decades—have drawn attention of many, and that this attention, as well as the considerable disagreement as to what those gifts mean, calls for critical assessment.

The day after Obama spoke in Philadelphia, the editorial board of the New York Times recognized his speech not only for its eloquence but also for its ability to acknowledge the complex reality of race in America. But how should we, as rhetorical scholars, regard his speech? What can it teach us?

This presentation is not a line-by-line analysis of the speech but a reflection on its philosophical and ethical significance, the work it does—or perhaps could be doing—to respond to the ethical call of the public sphere. Its work begins by categorizing Obama’s speech on race in terms of what Aristotle describes as epideictic, the ceremonial rhetoric of praise and blame. Such a categorization seems at first glance to be a strange one, since we are accustomed to seeing epideictic as a sort of catch-all category that deals with the fancy—and often empty—words spoken at ceremonial occasions.

Yet, in many ways, Obama’s speech, occasioned by the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in their various ways brought race to the foreground of his campaign, is indeed an example of epideictic rhetoric. While he certainly mentions his association with Wright and distances himself from his pastor’s controversial comments, Obama’s objective seems to be understanding and expanding the moral dwelling of American public life—what the Greeks would call its ethos—in light of the question of race. Obama seems less interested in exonerating himself or in offering policies to span the racial divide—activities that we would associate with forensic and legislative rhetoric, respectively—than he is in inviting both his critics and his supporters to a new and more constructive public conversation about an issue that continues to divide American public life.

In The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement, Michael Hyde places this sort of communicative labor—what he describes as rhetorical home-making—under the category of epideictic. Epideictic, he contends, invites a community to participate in a new understanding of the world rewoven from its public traditions, sense of identity, and moral texture. Because of its capacity to broaden this public moral texture to include those who have been marginalized, Hyde places epideictic at the center of what he calls rhetorical acknowledgment.

Drawing both from the tradition of the Old Testament and from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, rhetorical acknowledgement emerges from an existential, pre-communicative awareness of the suffering other: that in eating there are always those who go hungry, that when we belong there are those who will never “belong,” and that we are always our brother and sister’s keeper. To those who call “Where art thou?” in the dark, rhetorical acknowledgment, through the power of epideictic, constantly responds: “Here I am!”

Hyde believes that this epideictic of acknowledgement is a difficult road, carrying the constant risk of contradiction, conflict, and futility. He describes the willingness to embrace this risk as rhetorical heroism. A society without rhetorical heroes is for Hyde a society without an ethos, and a society without an ethos is a society without a home, unable to acknowledge its interconnectedness or articulate the moral obligations of its people to each other. As postmodern American society contends with the very homelessness that Hyde describes, his work encourages us to look for rhetorical heroes, not only in our politicians but also in ourselves.

Hyde’s emphasis on rhetorical acknowledgement and rhetorical heroism is important because it encourages us to encounter Obama’s speech on race on deeper philosophical ground, recognizing race as perhaps the greatest struggle for rhetorical acknowledgement in American history. W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us of how white Americans have struggled (and often failed) to recognize not only the humanity but also the very existence of persons who have lived behind the veil of their black skin, and how black Americans have struggled to articulate what this lack of acknowledgement, this invisibility, has meant.

In interesting ways, Obama enters—one might say embodies—this very crisis throughout his address. As someone with black skin, he identifies with those like Rev. Wright, who are frustrated and angry with American society’s inability to acknowledge America’s racial past. But as someone with a white grandmother who used racial slurs to condemn those who look exactly as he does, he recognizes that he cannot reject those who are frustrated with their own diminishing prospects in a globalized economy. In a Levinasian move, he embraces the contradiction inherent in this experience and, more important, refuses to resolve it. “These people are a part of me,” he says. “And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Here, Obama’s understanding of race in America (and, perhaps, America itself) is embedded in the acknowledgment of the existential contradictions inherent within the American experience: between black and white, individual and whole, freedom and responsibilty, self and other. In embracing these burdens, he invites a new political space defined not by cynicism and despair but by the audacity of hope, in which which our engagement with difference and the American Revolution are acknowledged as being one in the same. With Hyde as a guide, we might read the audacity of hope as the audacity of acknowledgement, a politics that begins in the heroic recognition of the contradictions inherent in a homeless world.

Obama’s speech did not, could not, “fix” American race relations, any more than it could lay the issue of race to rest within his own campaign. Yet, Hyde reminds us that to demand such results from rhetorical acknowledgement—or of epideictic, for that matter—is unrealistic. Rhetorical acknowledgement exists merely to open public spaces, and the glory of rhetorical heroism is not applause for the individual but for the tradition that is presented anew. Public life still requires us to enter those public spaces and engage that tradition in constructive ways. That is what forensic and legislative rhetoric are for, and it is unclear whether, for all Obama’s epideictic grandeur, he would be able to marshal those rhetorical resources as president. Yet, while people may disagree as to his candidacy, his speech on race shows the possibilities of epideictic for American public life. When the ethical call of the public sphere is one of homelessness and division, the epideictic of acknowledgement may invite a new beginning.

College education vs. certification

College is expensive, and many students, educated at an ever-expanding network of traditional colleges, technical schools, online programs, and diploma mills, don't receive an education worth the extravagant amount of money that they pay. At least, this is what Charles Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.

Murray's solution: Certification exams to level the playing field, allowing students from a variety of educational backgrounds to verify that they have achieved the standard set of knowledge and skills necessary to participate in the economy.

For a neoliberal like Murray, who researches for the American Enterprise Institute, this is a shocking admission. No less than Milton Friedman rejected the idea of certification barriers as being economically inefficient, because they artificially restrict the supply of certified workers (e.g., lawyers) to a select few who have the wherewithal to cross the certification barriers. And by restricting supply, certification both raises the costs of those services and often forces those who are have not been certified but who are otherwise perfectly able to provide those services out of the market altogether.

Murray's point, of course, is not that certification is perfectly efficient but rather that it is more efficient than the experience of earning—or failing to earn—a bachelor's degree, which now serves as a highly variable (and, for Murray, often misleading) basic qualification for the job market.

Higher education does vary in quality, as do students. But does that mean that we need a certification system? Should the certification process be company-specific, industry-specific, or somehow controlled by the state? And what constitutes "certification" in the first place? Murray favors a nationalized approach:

No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.

But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.

Yet, in making a proposal for nationalization, Murray is violating his own neoliberal logic. The strength of neoliberal economics is its recognition that the marketplace, not the state, needs to be in control of a people's economic destiny. Creating a series of nationalized tests would not reduce the educational bureaucracy but merely re-create it under a national banner. What is more, the decision as to what constitutes certification and education is removed from the hands of individuals and companies, and this presents significant problems in a diverse country that can't decide whether or not something like evolution should be taught.

What if one group objects to a particular body of knowledge as being immoral? What if a company's needs are different from the rest of the industry, requiring a more complex set of examinations? How will certification standards change? What would this mean for education itself, once it is pursued merely as a set of "skills" instead of an intrinsic pursuit of a well-rounded life? And how can we quantify "transferable skills" like organizational abilities, the ability to learn, or interpersonal sensitivity?

In addition, in citing Microsoft as an example, he ignores the ways that many companies, particularly in the technology sector, already police themselves through arduous interview processes and certification standards for their own products. This is the grassroots effort that a neoliberal would admire, because it preserves the freedom of individuals to choose how—or whether—to prepare themselves for work and of companies to decide what those qualifications should be.

The Daily Show

This weekend, the New York Times ran an article by Michiko Kakutani on Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show," noting a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that found he was tied with Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, and Anderson Cooper as the fourth most admired newscaster in America.

Which should come as a surprise, since he isn't technically a newscaster, or even a journalist.

One can see the success and cultural importance of "The Daily Show" as signaling the death of serious journalism and the death of the American public discourse. Of course, there's some merit to these concerns, and Stewart would probably share them. But one can also see "The Daily Show" as reflective of a broader trend in cultural production and engagement. The state of American public discourse, in this view, isn't any worse than it has been in the past, but is merely changing, and in many ways "The Daily Show" can be viewed as a constructive response to these changes.

I say this for three reasons:

First, "The Daily Show," unlike the emotivistic exchanges that often dominate American popular culture, can be seen as operating from the same standpoint of humane cultural criticism that has been central to Western intellectual life since Montaigne. For example, "for all its eviscerations of the administration, 'The Daily Show' is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology," Kakutani writes. "A sane voice in a noisy red-blue echo chamber, Mr. Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who, as he made clear in a famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s 'Crossfire,' parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches."

Stewart's commitment to constructive discourse—a commitment that allows him to say "why I grieve but why I don’t despair"—reflects a sentiment that Montaigne would share.

Second, "The Daily Show" reflects the ways that information needs are changing. "The Daily Show" is not a news program but a program in which information is discussed and made understandable. That "The Daily Show" is understood to be the only news source of many young Americans is a problem. But the program assumes that people already know the basic headlines; it fact, it wouldn't succeed as a comedy show if it didn't. Rather, it makes its money by condensing the echo chamber of contemporary media—from 15 TiVos, no less—into an intelligible, meaningful half-hour.

Third, "The Daily Show" shows that humor is a tool for the constructive engagement of social problems. Of course, laughter can sometimes be deconstructive and cynical, designed to humiliate the other or mask a sense of destructive bitterness. But Stewart's program works because it uses humor to ask questions about the constant stream of cultural production in which American life is situated. But Stewart's questions are more subtle and are interested in finding a place to stand within the confusion. Cynical humor laughs at the darkness, constructive humor seeks to find a foothold to climb out of it.

Postmortem on Hillary

Joshua Green of The Atlantic has written a postmortem on the Clinton campaign. It's fascinating reading, and it shows the ways that communication campaigns can explode. But it also affirms what I've thought for some time: that running for presidency itself is a far better display of presidential capacity than the specific policies that the candidate endorses or any perceived "experience" for the position. "Two things struck me right away," Green writes after reading the hoards of interoffice correspondence preserved by the senior campaign team.

The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

Yet, I feel for Clinton and her team. They did have a plan, and it was a good plan. The problem was that it wasn't good enough, and no one could figure out how to crack the Obama code. (And to be fair, I'm not sure how I would have cracked the Obama code, either.) But in the moment of confusion, Clinton made the biggest mistake of all: She started beating her staff.

In the hours after she finished third in Iowa, on January 3, Clinton seized control of her campaign, even as her advisers continued fighting about whether to go negative. The next morning’s conference call began with awkward silence, and then Penn recapped the damage and mumbled something about how badly they’d been hurt by young voters.

Mustering enthusiasm, Clinton declared that the campaign was mistaken not to have competed harder for the youth vote and that—overruling her New Hampshire staff—she would take questions at town-hall meetings designed to draw comparative,” but not negative, contrasts with Obama. Hearing little response, Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes. She complained of being outmaneuvered in Iowa and being painted as the establishment candidate. The race, she insisted, now had “three front-runners.” More silence ensued. “This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,” she snapped, and hung up.

Not that the staff didn't deserve a beating, of course, but here they needed a sense of direction and leadership that only Clinton herself could have provided. She was the one who hired Mark Penn, she was the one who ultimately decided on the direction of the campaign, and she needed to be the one who righted it. But she didn't. And so she lost.

She could have won, but this campaign is not about competence in running the federal bureaucracy but about vision. Americans are uncertain about the new world where they now find themselves: a world of terrorism, a shrinking middle class, a plugger economy, and environmental uncertainty. They don't want a policy wonk who can give them better policy programs. They want a visionary who can help them understand what those policies and programs mean. Or, as Obama put it: “It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems. But what is also true if we cannot inspire the country to believe again, it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have.”

Obama has given his vision, but McCain still hasn't. And if he can't, he'll have a Hillary problem, too.

Heroes, justice and “The Dark Night”

From the August 8, 2008 issue of the Pittsburgh Catholic:

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” says Harvey Dent, the Gotham district attorney and “white knight” of this summer’s blockbuster hit, “The Dark Knight.”

“The Dark Knight,” of course, is full of violence and disturbing imagery, and in no way can it be considered a Catholic film, or even a Christian film. Yet, as Dent’s words reflect, the film asks an important question: How can we live in a world where radical injustice flourishes?

The same question vexed the prophet Jeremiah as he looked at the corruption of ancient Israel. “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares,” God says to him. “If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city” (5:1).

The fact that Jerusalem fell during Jeremiah’s lifetime shows how well the prophet’s search went, but Jeremiah’s failure reflects the gravity of the Christian understanding of the problem of justice: Because no one is without sin, no one can be considered truly just.

But if no one is just, where does that leave us? Batman and the Joker offer two different responses. For the Joker, the fact that no one is perfect is a constant invitation to show how imperfect people are. Everything becomes an experiment, in which he searches “good” people for their fatal flaws and then uses those flaws to destroy them.

The Joker is the ultimate cynic. For him, the values that tie a society together are just a whitewashed façade begging to be destroyed. “I took Gotham’s white knight, and brought him down to our level. It wasn’t hard,” the Joker says with glee. “All it takes is a little … push.”

The Joker is a disturbing character, not only because of his cruelty and insanity but also because he represents an increasingly prevalent element in contemporary society.

This weekend the New York Times Magazine published an article about hackers whose misanthropic hatred leads them to use the Internet to explode other people’s lives. [See earlier post.] One young man, the article says, was molested as a child, and so he channels his rage by engaging in emotional violence—harassing the parents of deceased children, for instance—to show people how rotten he thinks they truly are.

He defends himself by saying that it’s just how he has fun. So what if people’s lives are destroyed? After all, didn’t those worthless hypocrites have it coming?

As the Joker would say, “Why so serious?”

Or as Bruce Wayne’s servant Alfred would say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

On the other hand, Batman reflects another answer. For him, the fact that justice is so rare and easily lost makes it all the more precious. Justice is a cause to be served, not a set of meaningless hypocrisies meant to be destroyed.

Following the path of justice in a cynical society is never easy. Jeremiah was mocked, harassed, beaten, imprisoned, and thrown down a well and left to die. And in the film, Batman is shocked at the level of hostility that his pursuit of justice causes among the people of Gotham. Ironically, the just man, in going against the grain of an unjust society, may be considered to be the antithesis of justice.

Yet, for all the back-dealing politicians, self-serving journalists, and two-timing cops, the people of Gotham, in the end, prove themselves worthy of Batman’s trust. This is the moral turning point of the film, the reason why the Joker loses and Batman wins.

And perhaps this moment of hope is the film’s answer to Jeremiah’s challenge. People sin, but their sinfulness never annuls their human dignity. The just person survives in the hope that as long as they struggle for justice and do not fall prey to cynicism, even the worst among us may show their true beauty and dignity as children of God. And that true justice—perfect justice—is not of this world, but eternal life.

On being Byronic

The Atlantic website has posted a 1953 article by Jacques Barzun on the relationship of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron to the adjective that bears his name. As it turns out, nailing down the relationship between how the real Lord Byron—who was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," as Lady Catherine Lamb famously said—and our interpretation of him is just as difficult as finding out what, precisely, "Byronic" really means.

The great men of the past whose names have given an adjective to the language are by that very fact most vulnerable to the reductive treatment. Everybody knows what "Machiavellian" means, and "Rabelaisian"; everybody uses the terms "Platonic" and "Byronic" and relies on them to express certain commonplace notions in frequent use.

The matter-of-fact tone of Barzun's opening line reminded me that much has changed since 1953. "Machiavellian" and "Platonic" are still in much use, but "Rabelaisian"—meaning "a style of satirical humour characterized by exaggerated characters and coarse jokes"—is much less so, perhaps depending on whether one has read Bakhtin recently. And the fates have been even less kind to "Byronic." A quick Google definition search of the term yields only a single, decidedly unhelpful entry—"Lord Byron (as in Byronic hero)"—that suggests that the word is perhaps as ill-used as it is misunderstood.

One of the interesting things about this particular essay is its awareness of how the relationship between the signifier "Bryonic" and the poet that the term signifies is constantly complicated and multi-layered. Does it refer to a "concentrated mind, and high spirits, wit, daylight good sense, and a passion for truth—in short a unique discharge of intellectual vitality"? A romantic, melancholy disposition borne of privilege and boredom? An active life as "a noble outlaw"? A wanton, pansexual eroticism? A scandalous, misunderstood existence as a self-imposed outcast? A sense of cynicism borne of out of an experence of real—or imagined—tragedy?

Of course, anyone who has been through high school or watched teen programming recently recognizes the contours of the Byronic sensibility, even though the posturing and angst of adolescence is never directly attached to the term. What makes the Byronic sensibility interesting, though, is the way in which the term has transcended the narrow confines of a dictionary definition to become a sort of genre of its own. There is only one way to be Machivellian, Platonic, or Rabelaisian, but being Byronic is as varied and complex as one wants it to be. And Byron himself would not have wanted it any other way.

deeplydisturbing.org, .com, and .net

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the famous dystopian book (and later movie with Malcolm McDowell) about youth culture run amok, is one of the most disturbing takes on postmodern life, not just because its content is disturbing but also because it has proved remarkably prophetic. While we may not be obsessed with Beethoven ("Ludwig van, baby!"), there's a certain eerie similarity about the trends in violence and popular culture that Burgess depicts and contemporary life, such as the use of "manscara" in Great Britain.

Take, for instance, this graffiti that showed up spray-painted on the side of the Carnegie Library in Oakland:

Kinda funny, yes? Actually, vandalism is apparently the new poetry. The vandals have apparently read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and it's on a library, so it's ironic, so I guess that makes it OK.

But perhaps the most disturbing trend is the growing presence of "trolls" on the web, people who perpetrate acts of emotional violence on the web for fun. As Mattathias Schwartz writes in The New York Times Magazine:

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

The nadsat of the troll culture is a language of mysanthropic hatred that finds its jouissance in cruelty. But it's all in fun, so that makes it OK, too:

Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.

Welcome to the new fun.

My vote is for Schopenhauer

Beginning today and ending on August 5, the world's philosophers are converging on Seoul, South Korea, for the twenty-second World Congress of Philosophers, a gathering held every five years. Now, I'm used to hearing about philosophy conferences and symposia, where professional philosophers gather to share their latest work and learn from each other, but this is something different altogether, because a "congress" has governmental and legislative connotations.

And this, according to the World Congress of Philosophers website, is precisely what the event is about:

The first World Congress to be held in Asia, the Seoul Congress presents a clear invitation to rethink the nature, roles, and responsibilities of philosophy and of philosophers in the age of globalization. It is committed to paying heed to the problems, conflicts, inequalities, and injustices connected with the development of a planetary civilization that is at once multicultural and techno-scientific.

The topics are serious, and so is the intent. As Julian Baggini writes in the Guardian:

The official line seems to be that the world somehow needs philosophy if it is to deal with its great problems. In the first of four "congratulatory addresses," Han, the prime minister, said he thought it could help both environmental problems and the fight against terror. Lee Jang-moo, the president of Seoul National University, claimed it could teach us "the direction in which to steer the human destiny." Such hopes for philosophy are shared in high places: Koïchiro Matsuura, the director general of Unesco, told the congress, via video, about how Unesco was committed to fostering the teaching of philosophy around the world. He wasn't just being polite: Unesco even has a "philosophy strategy."

While we need, as Hannah Arendt aptly put it, "to think what we are doing" now more than ever, there is a sense of elitism here, a sense that philosophers, by their professional training, are entitled to speak and perhaps—as the name "congress" implies—even to rule. The philosopher king may be Plato's ideal, but it also suggests that ideas are somehow separate from the practice of daily life and from those not suitably "trained" to engage in complex thought.

But as anyone who studies rhetoric knows, ideas always have consequences, and people of all ages, educational levels, and IQs trade in ideas on a daily basis. To abstract intellectual life into the realm of the intelligensia both neglects this fact and, perhaps more important, keeps philosophers from learning about the fullness of the human experience—which, in the end, is ultimately what philosophy is about. Julian Baggini again:

If philosophy is indeed important, it is because it is not the preserve of philosophers. The professionalisation of the subject has disguised this once obvious fact. In the UK, for example, it is often thought philosophy is not an important part of the culture, but it's actually all over the place: in serious journalism, the work of thinktanks, and in ethics committees. It's just not usually called "philosophy." Indeed, if you want to be taken seriously, you'd be advised not to use the p-word at all. Oliver Letwin, for example, has a PhD in philosophy and has published a book on the subject, but he once told me in an interview that it would hinder, not help him, if more people knew this. (Sorry, Olly.)

So if we are to rethink philosophy, we should rethink first and foremost what it is and how it does and should inform wider debate. Those who have earned the title "philosopher" need to both accept that those who have not are equal participants in such a discussion, which also means being more willing to engage as equals in it.

Ode to Scrabulous

Apparently, the law has caught up to Scrabulous, the free, on-line version of Scrabble currently played by as many as 594,000 people every day on the social networking site Facebook and ranked number 15 on PC World's 100 Best Products of 2008.

Hasbro, who owns the copyright to Scrabble in the United States and Canada, filed a lawsuit against the creators of the game, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta, on July 24. This morning, American and Canadian visitors to Facebook expecting to play (yours truly included) found that their access had been blocked.

The story began in January of this year, when Hasbro approached Facebook and asked them to remove the application from the site. That strategy failed, since Scrabulous was neither developed nor owned by Facebook but merely placed there by the Agarwalla brothers like thousands of other applications posted to the site.

Scrabulous, like the millions of other applications floating around on the web, as something of an experiment. The only difference was its massive popularity. Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, remarked in January that the Agarwallas were making something like $25,000 a month off of advertising revenues, and this success, while a pittance in comparison to the value of Facebook itself, was enough to spark the attention and the ire of Hasbro. "The early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, 'do no evil' kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing," wrote Cellan-Jones.

But the Scrabulous-Scrabble fight is more than a David-vs. Goliath story. It's about old media and new media technologies, and the ability of companies with popular traditional brands to maintain or even extend those brands in new media. In a way, the Hasbro lawsuit misses an opportunity to find new fans, create new markets, and sell more products. Hasbro shouldn't be suing Scrabulous. It should be buying it.

Reading in the age of the Internet

Yesterday, the New York Times published a feature article on the changing reading patterns of the younger generation.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

The issue isn't that young people aren't reading, but that they're reading in different ways.

Reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Whatever side one takes on the relationship between literacy and the Internet—and there is significant debate as to whether these young people are even "literate" at all—the changes that the Internet has brought to reading habits are here to stay, and they reflect more fundamental changes in what constitutes a "text."

In a world defined—some would say "disciplined"—by the technology of the printing press, the eye is taught to follow a line of printed words, one after the other, from beginning to end. But the Internet creates a new type of textuality defined by what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls the rhizome. In botany, a "rhizome" is a root plant that creates dense networks of shoots and nodes. Unlike a tree, whose root structure is much more centralized and hierarchical, rhizomes are dynamic and decentralized. Instead of fulfilling a prearranged "plan," they "happen."

Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 1980 collaboration A Thousand Plateaus applied the rhizome to reading. Breaking with "arborescent" reading patterns, they used the metaphor to view texts not as linear arguments that need to be grounded and followed methodically from beginning to end but as dynamic entities that can be entered, understood, broken apart, and repackaged in a multitude of ways. In what would have been a radical move for the time, they remarked that their book wasn't intended to be read straight-through, and they invited readers to pick and choose what they wanted to read and discard the parts they didn't find useful.

Though they may not have known it at the time, Deleuze and Guattari were describing the cultural and intellectual condition of the Internet age, in which knowledge isn't created by a single author and centrally disseminated but is a common project built by many hands.

Of course, this transition is both a blessing and a curse. While the new intellectual culture of reading and textual engagement is dynamic and playful, it also runs the risk of losing track of its grounding. Part of the joy of traditional reading lies in the ways in which it forces readers to go through parts that are at first glance "unnecessary" or "boring" but contribute to the understanding of the whole. Deleuze and Guattari, grounded in the tradition of Western philosophy and metaphysics, may have found the rhizome a welcome release, but for a younger generation who may never sit down and read the ideas that they bounce back and forth on-line, the freedom of the rhizome may be experienced as a sort of intellectual chaos.

Are superhero films the westerns of the new millennium?

In today's New York Times, A. O. Scott wonders whether the superhero genre—which has spawned five blockbusters so far this year—has almost run its course. And what with Seth Rogen, of all people, slotted to star as the Green Hornet in 2010, and the big screen adaptation of The Watchmen—the trailer of which I barely understood—set to open next year, he may be right.

I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that “Iron Man,” “Hancock” and “Dark Knight” together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline. In their very different ways, these films discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists.

To tell the truth, in watching "The Dark Knight," I pitied Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, because it really seemed that any sequel, and there will undoubtedly be a sequel, to the film would be completely inadequate in comparison.

Scott's solution to the problem is to urge the genre to move away from the visual and into the moral. The endless cavalcade of action set pieces is tiring, he says, but what is more tiring is how stuffed each film is with themes and ideas that are superficially exposed but never sufficiently treated.

Instead the disappointment comes from the way the picture spells out lofty,serious themes and then ... spells them out again. What kind of hero do we need? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? How much autonomy should we sacrifice in the name of security? Is the taking of innocent life ever justified? These are all fascinating, even urgent questions, but stating them, as nearly every character in “The Dark Knight” does, sooner of later, is not the same as exploring them.

And yet stating such themes is as far as the current wave of superhero movies seems able or willing to go. The westerns of the 1940s and ’50s, obsessed with similar themes, were somehow able, at their best, as in John Ford’s “Searchers” and Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo,” to find ambiguities and tensions buried in their own rigid paradigms.

The difference between a classic western shown on AMC and films like the "Searchers" or "Unforgiven" lies in ability of the latter to understand the "rules" of their "game" to such a degree that, like jazz musicians, they find spaces for improvization and exploration. They understand convention—indeed, they have to know the conventions of the genre far more thoroughly than pictures that repeat them by rote—but are not bound slavishly to it.

And they can go deeper than other films because the vocabulary of the genre enables them to invite audiences to treat complex and often controversial problems. During the Iraq War, for instance, the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica turned around the problem of suicide bombers and insurgency. Can superhero films, which are now almost as ubiquitous as westerns and space operas, manage the same transition?

Don't you make me plug in my toilet!

The Post-Gazette had an article this week about a man in Cecil Township, Washington County, who is prepared to go to jail instead of plugging into the local sewer system.

In reading the article, I sympathized with the man, to a point. Should people be forced to buy into public utilities—often at great cost—that they do not want? Should I be forced to purchase cable, for instance, if I do not want to own a television? This is not necessarily an idle question, nor is it a wild libertarian one. As more and more people become sensitive to environmental concerns like energy usage and water conservation, they may choose to live "off the grid," not only to save money but also to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and seek a more environmentally sustainable means of living.

But there is another question, too. To what degree are persons obligated to support assets and programs that the community has undertaken for the common good? Electricity systems, sewage systems, and other utilities are expensive community assets that provide for the common good even if one does not want to use them. Even Mr. Williams, the curmudgeon in the story, benefits from the improvements to public health and property values that a sewage system provides. Is he, then, not obligated to support these initatives? What are his obligations, if any, to the common good of his neighbors, who don't want a septic system that could leak into their backyards?

It's all about the enthymemes

When he wrote about rhetoric in ancient Greece, Aristotle noted that the most powerful forms of rhetorical reasoning took the form of what he called enthymemes (en-tha-MEEMs). An enthymeme is a syllogism in which one of the premises is suppressed and intuited by the audience.

For instance, while a traditional syllogism goes something like this:

Premise 1: Socrates is a human.
Premise 2: All humans die.
Conclusion: Socrates will die.

An enthymeme goes like this:

Premise: Socrates is a human.
Conclusion: Socrates will die.

The enthymeme is powerful because it incorporates the audience and their beliefs into the argument. In supplying the premise from their own understandings of what they believe or know to be true, the audience validates the argument as being "obvious." In recognizing this aspect of discourse, Aristotle was trying to account for how so many arguments seem "rational" and mysterious at the same time.

Aristotle's observations extend to other areas of discourse. Humor, for instance, is deeply enthymematic. Puns are funny because they depend on our previous knowledge of what the misused word should be. Observational humor is funny because quips about human experience depend on our common understanding of human existence. And so on.

But just as enythmemes explain why we should find something funny, they also show why we don't find something funny—or why something that is funny to someone can be offensive to another. Enthymemes work because, by definition, they presuppose a level of agreement between the speaker and the audience. If we don't share the language, we miss the puns. If we come from different social backgrounds or cultural expectations, we miss the joke. In controversial issues—particularly issues of race, sex, religion, and politics—the background of shared opinions and beliefs that humorous enthymemes assume is uncertain, and so would-be comedians need to take care in framing their jokes. That's the challenge and risk of being funny, and why high-profile comedians make the big bucks.

Which brings up the curious case of this week's cover of The New Yorker, which attempts to poke fun at the myths surrounding Barack Obama and his wife:



The cover created a firestorm of controversy, including denunciations by both candidates and a petition drive condemning the cover. In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd thinks that this firestorm means that Obama can't take a joke, but something bigger than Obama's purported humorlessness may be in play.

Simply put, the folks at The New Yorker forgot to take enthymemes into account. They obviously don’t take those myths seriously—and I wouldn’t expect them to—but their New York parochialism perhaps led them to assume that no one takes those myths seriously. The "humor” of the cover depends on that assumption.

But the editors guessed wrong. The reaction from both the Obama and McCain camps suggests that those myths are far more serious and the assumptions that the white American public has about Obama are far more unsettled than the art editors at The New Yorker think. Indeed, Obama's race remains an issue for many white Americans, who are still confused as to whether or not Obama is a Christian or is or is not the anti-Christ. Rhetorically, that is the issue with the cover. As Aristotle would have reminded The New Yorker, it's all about the enthymemes.

You'll still know nothing 'bout me

In the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg writes about having a recreational MRI to see how his brain was "mapped" or "wired." With his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, he writes of his concerns about having his reactions to various pictures recorded:

What if the sight of Golda Meir provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if the sight of David Ben-Gurion provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if it turned out that I actually feel disgust at the sight of Bruce Springsteen? To think of all the money I’ve wasted on concert tickets and T-shirts. Most worrisome, of course, was the matter of my wife. Inappropriate activations could have lasting consequences.

Goldberg doesn't much to worry about, because it turns out that the findings of his little exercise are far from clear. While some results seem more obvious than others, the "facts" don't speak for themselves. Rather, they require interpretative intervention to become meaningful. A person has to insert himself or herself into the facts to explain what those facts mean, to transform the results from "data" to "knowledge." For instance, a picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad creates an unexplainably dramatic reaction, requiring a psychiatrist to search for an explanation.

“Perhaps you believe that the Israelis or the Americans have the situation under control and so you’re anticipating the day that he’s brought down.” He asked me some questions about my view of Jewish history, and then said: “You seem to believe that the Jewish people endure, that people who try to hurt the Jewish people ultimately fail. Therefore, you derive pleasure from believing that Ahmadinejad will also eventually fail. It’s very similar to the experiment with the monkey and the grape. It’s been shown that the monkey feels maximal reward not when he eats the grape but at the moment he’s sure it’s in his possession, ready to eat. That could explain your response to Ahmadinejad.”

Or whatever. The insertion of a person into the process instantly compromises it, because we're no longer talking about data in isolation but data that has become embedded in a web of human biases and understandings. Of course, the biases and understandings in question are those of an expert relying on a body of peer-reviewed scientific research, but they are still problematic because they are still mediated by human thought. In a nutshell, the lesson of Goldberg's experiment is that our thoughts and motivations are far less open to "impartial" scientific observation than one may think. In today's New York Times, David Brooks notes recent genetic research suggesting that there aren't DNA "triggers" for such things as happiness or aggression.

For a time, it seemed as if we were about to use the bright beam of science to illuminate the murky world of human action. Instead, as Turkheimer writes in his chapter in the book, “Wrestling With Behavioral Genetics,” science finds itself enmeshed with social science and the humanities in what researchers call the Gloomy Prospect, the ineffable mystery of why people do what they do.

I think Sting said it best:

Lay my head on the surgeon's table
Take my fingerprints if you are able
Pick my brains, pick my pockets
Steal my eyeballs and come back for the sockets
Run every kind of test from A to Z
And you'll still know nothing 'bout me

Run my name though your computer
Mention me in passing to your college tutor
Check my records, check my facts
Check if I paid my income tax
Pore over everything in my C.V.
But you'll still know nothing 'bout me
You'll still know nothing 'bout me

Fish's sense of intellectual wonder

This year marks four centuries since the birth of John Milton, writer of Paradise Lost (synopsis; entire), and Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University and one of the most highly regarded Milton scholars in the world, still can't get enough of the poet whose work has been a constant source of intellectual wonder.

All of this was predicted in 1674 by Samuel Barrow who said to the future readers of the poem, “You who read “Paradise Lost”… what do you read but everything? This book contains all things and the origins of all things, and their destinies and final ends.” How did the world begin? Why were men and women created in the first place? How did evil come into the world? What were the causes of Adam’s and Eve’s Fall? If they could fall, were they not already fallen and isn’t God the cause? If God is the cause, and we are the heirs of the original sin, are we not absolved of the responsibility for the sins we commit? Can there be free will in a world presided over by an omniscient creator? Is the moral deck stacked? Is Satan a hero? A rebel? An apostate? An instrument of a Machiavellian and manipulative deity? Are women weaker and more vulnerable than men? Is Adam right to prefer Eve to God? What would you have done in his place? Wherever you step in the poetry, you will meet with something that asks you to take a stand, and when you do (you can’t help it) you will be enmeshed in the issues that are being dramatized.

In an academic world that is often driven by political posturing, rampant tenure-track careerism, and cynicism, Fish reminds us that wonder should be driving the pursuit of knowledge and higher education. Scholarship isn't about answers. It's about questions, questions that constantly ask us to see and hear in new ways.

Political update

An interesting slide show of updates of Norman Rockwell's famous "Four Freedoms" paintings.

And the campaign quote of the day:

Mr. McCain’s campaign also faced criticism last month when his new Web site carried the slogan, “A Leader We Can Believe In,” seen as similar to Mr. Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In.” And House Republicans were embarrassed in May when it turned out their new catchphrase, “The Change You Deserve,” had been used to market an antidepressant drug.

Nice. Going well.

Bad economics as population control

There was an interesting cover story over the weekend by Russell Shorto in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on the rapidly falling population in Europe. In a nutshell, the birthrate across Europe has dropped throughout the continent to well below what is considered to be the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children per woman. In southern and eastern Europe, the birth rate is 1.3 children per woman.

Demographers describe the new phenomenon as "lowest low" fertility rates. If the trend continues, Shorto suggests, Europe by midcentury will be a shadow of its former self, and the continent will have to confront a variety of daunting—and for some, disturbing—social and cultural changes. In a way, P. D. James's novel Children of Men, which was recently turned into a film starring Clive Owen, reflects the sense of apocalyptic crisis that is dawning upon the continent.

Depending on who you ask, any number factors are causing the decline. P. D. James's novel, unlike the film, draws deeply on Christian imagery to suggest that the falling birthrate is, at root, a spiritual problem. Indeed, as Shorto notes, many of Europe's Christians seem to agree:

After arguing for decades that the West had divorced itself from God and church and embraced a self-interested and ultimately self-destructive lifestyle, abetted above all by modern birth control, they feel statistically vindicated. “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,” Pope Benedict proclaimed in 2006. “Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.”

Certainly, a sense of European spiritual malaise—a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of "why bother?"—could be at work here.

But what is interesting about Shorto's piece is that he suggests that there are other factors in play. While many women in Germany and Austria are indeed preferring to remain childless, many European women actually want to have more children than they currently have. "Women were asked how many children they would like to have," Shorto says, "the average result was 2.36—well above the replacement level and far above the rate anywhere in Europe. If women are having significantly fewer children than they want, there must be other forces at work."

What are these forces? Demographers are noticing is that childrearing is not only a spiritual question but is also an economic one. That is, the conditions of life are such that they are not permitting women to have the children that they want to have. The costs—not only the direct financial costs of raising a child but also the opportunity costs of staying out of the workforce and the relational costs that children bring to bear on the family—are prohibitively high.

Shorto notes that Scandanavia and the United States do not share in Europe's decline in birthrate, but for different reasons. Scandanavian countries have an extraordinary broad network of social welfare that eases the costs of childrearing. The United States, while far less extensive in its welfare system, is far more socially and relationally flexible.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. [Arnstein] Aassve [a Norwegian demographer] put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

Shorto's article is important because it reminds us that societies need to find ways to permit women to have and welcome children, and that this effort is only partially a spiritual one.

Pro Publica

Last night, The News Hour on PBS did a story on ProPublica, a non-profit news organization that provides pro bono investigative journalism to newspapers and other new media outlets that have had to lay off their reporting staffs because of budget cuts. News outlets, particularly newspapers, are struggling to meet their bottom lines, and so they are increasingly turning toward cheaper forms of news, like opinion journalism, that are much cheaper to produce than hiring a staff to do actual reporting. ProPublica is attempting to offer a higher-quality alternative.

In a way, ProPublica is attempting to fill a void that has often been filled by public relations organizations, who in their role as press agents have created, pitched, and placed news stories for years, often anonymously. In the 1980s, video news releases produced by public relations and advertising firms provided packaged stories to television news programs, and in recent years, governmental agencies have taken up the practice as well.

VNRs are a controversial practice. The stories may sometimes be good, but they typically offer a distinctly biased version of events. When they are placed in newscasts—often with neither unediting nor comment—viewers are often unable to tell the difference between slanted coverage and actual journalism. As a result, the increasingly widespread integration of news organizations and public relations firms often makes things easier for news providers but more difficult for news audiences.

Where does ProPublica fit in? When it debuted in 2007, the New York Times reported that while the staff was top-notch, it was created and supported by philanthropists with liberal connections. In addition, its mission announces a distinctly democratic—perhaps liberal—bias:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. We strive to foster change through exposing exploitation of the weak by the strong and the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

Bias, of course, isn't a problem, since everyone has a bias. The problem is unannounced bias, in which biased coverage purports to be completely neutral. ProPublica will have to be careful in how it announces the investigative coverage it produces, not only for the sake of its own reputation but also for the industry as a whole. In a media landscape in which public relations firms, advertising agencies, activist groups, corporate communicators, and non-profit reporting organizations will increasingly compete with traditional news providers, perhaps ProPublica's greatest service will be to show how quality coverage should occur in a decentralized, chaotic, virtual world.

Xenophobic race-baiters, unite!

A few months ago, after watching an insipid History Channel documentary on the anti-Christ of Revelations, it occurred to me that the fundamentalist description of the anti-Christ—that he would be charismatic, come from nowhere, inspire a devoted following that captivated the world, etc.—bore some serious resemblances to Barack Obama.

Of course, in no way, shape or form do I think such a portrayal of Obama is accurate. In fact, I think it is, in a word, kinda nuts and is driven not by religious conviction but out of a xenophobic fear of Obama's "Otherness"—i.e., his race, his name, his non-Western roots. In fact, one could see this xenophobic fear of Obama as reflecting a deeper racial prejudice that is no longer socially acceptable to air in public.

Anyway, when I noted the connection, I became curious, and so I Googled the phrase “obama antichrist” to see what the Religious Right was thinking about it. It turns out that the weblog Wonkette apparently did a similar search in October of 2006 and found only 16,000 pages on Google containing the two words. At the time, Dick Cheney was a far more popular target, with 169,000 pages. This was during the heated mid-term elections, which means that the epithet of "antichrist" was probably used by Democrats, not Republicans. The difference, of course, is that the use of the term by fundamentalist Christians is far more explosive.

The day of the Texas and Ohio primaries, things were far different. I Googled “obama antichrist” at about 9:00 in the morning and got 292,000 pages. Then, in preparing to email some friends about my find, I Googled it again at about 10:30 a.m. and got 382,000. Something, it seems, was brewing, and it has continued to brew.

Since then, the number of pages associating Barack Obama and the End of Days have ebbed and flowed with his chances. Today, when I searched the terms, the number surpassed one million for the first time.

Some of these pages are humorous ones, but many more, like this one, aren’t.

While this is far from a scientific survey, in many ways, the growth of the association between Barack Obama and the demonic on Google seems suggestive of a larger trend, particularly among Christian evangelicals, that occasionally bubbles to the surface.

This leads to some serious questions, not about the eschatological significance of Barack Obama—after all, the antichrist has been everyone from the pope to Colonel Sanders (whose chicken has to be demonic)—but about the tactics that the Religious Right could use later on during the general election. If you want to mobilize evangelical voters, and you don’t care how you do it, you can create a grassroots campaign naming him as the antichrist and warning about the demonic regime he will institute once elected. (This is not unusual. John Guest, the leader of a evangelical megachurch in Pittsburgh, where I live, called John Kerry “Satan’s candidate” in 2004.)

Time will tell.

Haunted by Google?

Last weekend, I received my copy of the June/July Edition of The Atlantic Monthly, arguably the best general interest magazine in the country. I was stunned to find out that the cover story was about the deleterious effects of Google on my cognitive capacities.

Nicholas Carr frets:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The Googleplex is destroying cognition, in short, because it makes us intellectually lazy. We don't have to think as hard, so we don't.

To his credit, Carr recognizes that his concerns aren't new. In fact, they are precisely the same concerns that Plato had about writing.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

But Carr is still "haunted" by the horror of Google and Internet technology.

In reflecting on the article, I'm still puzzled. What in the world does this handwringing even mean? Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology always changes our understanding of ourselves in unexpected, even perverse ways. But that doesn't mean that we're all going to die. The underlying capacity of human beings--creativity, curiousity, ability to learn and adapt, etc.--won't change. So Google is making us think in different ways. In some ways, it will be better; in some ways, it will be worse.

It's not like a meteor is going to wipe out the planet. Oh. The Atlantic covered that last month.