come_to_think

Reading:  Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

Jim gave it to me last November.

I suppose that if Jobs & I had ever had the misfortune to meet, he would have called me a douchebag and I would have called him a son of a bitch.

He was an artist -- that is, a person with a compulsion to make nice things.  Traditionally, they are things that the artist can make with his own hands, and his main problem is to be able to spare the time to work on them.  Jobs, however, needed to make pretty electronic hardware, which meant that he had to go into business, which meant that other people were among his tools.  That is a dangerous situation for someone with a passion for control, but being a businessman made him beholden to employees, stockholders, customers, and so on, and they limited his control and thus the amount of harm he could do, while allowing him to do quite a lot of good.  In contrast, people of that temperament who become architects are sometimes empowered to be nuisances to the occupants & neighbors of their buildings for many years; and we are fortunate indeed that few such people manage to become politicians.

I do not know much about computers or about business, and I am actively hostile to mass entertainment, so a lot of the details passed me by.  However, one example of his notorious contempt for his customers is particularly vivid for me:  He wanted to leave the arrow keys off the keyboards of his computers, to force people to use the mouse for navigating on the screen.  He was beaten back on that one, but continued to be furious about his defeat.  Now, mice are excellent tools for some purposes, and Jobs deserves credit for making them widely available.  (I remember, when the first Apples came out, seeing one on display in the Harvard Coop, and being impressed with how quickly children taught themselves to draw & edit pictures.)  But going back & forth repeatedly between mouse & keyboard is a pain, and if you mainly use one, you may very reasonably prefer to be able to forget about the other.  Some years ago I toured a company that sold fonts, and had provided its designers with beautiful workstations.  I watched one of them tweak a character on his screen, using the mouse.  When he needed to insert a label, he called up a little QWERTY grid on the screen and danced on it with the mouse.  I asked him if he had a keyboard, and he wheeled one out from under his desktop.  It was too much trouble to use it.

With me, it is the other way around.  My main reason for buying a computer in 1986 was editing, and tho my Sun 3 came with a mouse, I regarded it as something for emergencies only.  Later on, when the Web appeared, I used the mouse more, tho recently I have acquired a browser (Conkeror) that allows me to use the keyboard for most browsing as well.  And indeed, I could probably live without the arrow keys without recourse to the trackball, because I spend most of my time in Emacs, which has Ctrl & Alt codes for cursor motion, and they are readily accessible from the home keys on the Kinesis keyboard.

Of course, there are times when chutzpah is much to be applauded.  On a sales trip to the Soviet Union in 1985, Jobs expressed admiration for Leon Trotsky -- first, to his personal KGB agent, and then, when that had proved objectionable, in a speech to university students.  God bless America!  I also enjoyed the following:

The chief financial officer of Lucasfilm found Jobs arrogant and prickly, so when it came time to hold a meeting of all the players, he told Catmull, "We have to establish the right pecking order." The plant was to gather everyone in a room with Jobs, and then the CFO would come in a few minutes late to establish that he was the person running the meeting.  "But a funny thing happened," Catmull recalled.  "Steve started the meeting on time without the CFO, and by the time the CFO walked in Steve was already in control of the meeting."

The biter bit!

H. L. Mencken, who was born in 1880, published in 1931 his musings on the progress of technology in his first half century, and in particular which invention he was most grateful for.  While conceding that telephones had become indispensable, he also noted that they were "the greatest boon to bores ever invented", and he similarly disposed of the radio, the phonograph, the movies, and the automobile, before settling on the thermostat, to which he had converted during W.W. I & to which he devoted two whole pages of praise.

In a similar spirit, looking back on the past 74 years, I suppose the computer might be a choice; however, it is not really one development, but a congeries of interpenetrating inventions: not only fast arithmetic, but cheap long-distance communication, video displays, satellites, and so on.  If I had to choose one well-defined improvement, I think it would be plastic bags, which (IIRC) became cheap & widely available in the 1960s.  Before then, if you went shopping, you usually carried off the merchandise in a paper bag without handles, which you had to put your hands under, so that your arms were aching when you got home.  If you were packing a suitcase (respectable people didn't use backpacks), there was no convenient way of segregating things of different sizes or uses; now, you can put things in bags that reveal their contents, and pack those.  If you wanted to put leftovers in the fridge, there was nothing for it but to put them in something that later had to be washed.  If you were going hiking or (worse) boating, there was no good way to pack things so that they wouldn't get wet.

Most wondrous of all, plastic bags may well deserve the credit for the spectacular decline in insect pests during my lifetime.  I spent most of my childhood in prosperous suburbs with bourgeois sanitation, but everybody made continual war using flyswatters, flypaper, and Flit guns.  In those days, garbage was put out for collection without wrapping, in battered galvanized-iron cans with loose-fitting lids & (soon enough) rusty holes.  The results were not as bad as in Mencken's reminiscences of the 1880s, when Baltimore had horses, backyard privies, & open sewers, but the change since then has been almost as spectacular.  I still maintain a flyswatter, but occasions for using it are down to one or two a year.  So late as 1960, when I lived in Cambridge, MA, I used to have to kill half a dozen mosquitoes before I went to sleep.  (I could slap them in the dark with fair efficiency when they got near my ears.)  These days, in Malden, a mosquito bite is a rarity.  The improvement in public health due to cheap sealing must be considerable.

Sure enough, TANSTAAFL.  I hear that there is by now a considerable floating island of plastic bags somewhere in the Pacific, and it's not good for the fishes.

It was warm enough today to sit & read for a while in Fellsmere Park, tho it was rather blowy.

I like the word "blowy".  I got it from Orwell's diary.  I like "broody" too, but I don't get to use it, because I have no hens.

Happy Birthday!  %^)

Reading:  Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)

It is comforting to read a book that proclaims good news in complete accord with my prejudices.  Professor Pinker has written a massive treatise arguing that there is such a thing as moral progress and that we have seen a great deal of it over the last few centuries and most particularly in my lifetime (I am just old enough to remember W.W. II).  There are a great many statistical graphs, mostly having to do with killing (that being the easiest kind of wickedness to quantify), but the book also chronicles the decline of other forms of cruelty.  It then considers, with due caution, various possible causes of the change.

I have not yet read any reviews of this book, but I dare say they will mostly be hostile.  People who have put a lot of effort into combatting this or that evil have a vested interest in the continuation of the combat and a reasonable suspicion of any news that might tempt them to let down their guard.  Professor Pinker is at pains to demonstrate that his arguments have no such intent and need have no such effect, but is unlikely to satisfy such people.  Also, this is a matter in which all questions are party questions, and those who read this book with the idea of pressing it into a leftist or a rightist mold will find it to be exasperatingly off message.  Finally, those who extrapolate from headlines will find the thesis simply incredible, for wickedness is a large part of what the news media have for sale ("If it bleeds, it leads").

On 9 December 1972, after hearing a few libertarian Republicans tell each other horror stories about poor blacks, I wrote in my journal:

...The plain & dangerous fact is that American society has no use for these people; it is not exploiting them....  The danger that they pose to the ruling class (us) is not that they will deprive us of their negligible productive capacity, nor that they will participate in a successful rebellion, but that they will tempt us to kill them.  We are technically & morally capable of such a thing....

Such a operation would pay for itself in a couple of years in reduced welfare costs.  What will prevent us from carrying it out is not prudence, but our bourgeois inhibitions against killing.  Fortunately, these seem to be getting stronger rather than weaker, at least in the upper middle class.  The Vietnam war has been prosecuted with less than Christian regret, but at least the level of hypocrisy is far higher than in W.W. II, and that is important.  Hypocrisy delineates the shifting shoreline of decency: where its range is large, the beach has a shallow slope, & the prospects for rapid change are great; when the typical position shifts outward, we have more ground to stand on.  Now [N.B. 9 December], we do not bomb Hanoi; then, we bombed Hiroshima.  Now, we say we are trying not to kill civilians; then, we were proud of how many we killed.  That's where the boundary is now.

But in the lower middle class it is probably moving the other way....  [I]t is easy to imagine a barber or a druggist hearing a black intellectual prate about "genocide" & murmur "Good idea." as he switches channels.  People will do what is expected of them if they get the chance.  Will they get the chance?  It would take something like a fascist revolution; for the present upper middle class occupies the governmental bureaucracy & the communications industry pretty securely, and the lower middle class is demoralized & disorganized.  The Wallace vote is an index of their hopes, and it will bear watching.  They, not the black lumpenproletariat, are the most dangerous class over the next decade.  After that, they will be as obsolete as cottonpicking slaves, & as grateful for welfare.  (Exactly as grateful.)

Governor Wallace, IIRC, said "The American people want a government that's mean".  It turned out he was overgeneralizing from his friends in Alabama.  More recently, our previous vice president, attacking the present administration, called the antiterrorist effort "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business".  It is conceivable that he is right: that we really do have to give meanness a new lease on life in order to protect ourselves against suicide bombers.  But I think it far more likely that he was merely appealing (a little desperately) to his tough, mean, nasty, dirty constituency, and will be disappointed at the measure of it.

Reading: Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells

Read because Wells was a presence in my family (I read some of his sf while a child, and I recall a book of his stories bearing a picture of him with a twinkle in his eye), because the book was widely praised (by Orwell & others), and because of a striking quotation in Russell & Russell's charming picture book On the Loose, which I have liked for forty years.

The narrator, brought up as a servants' child in a stately home of England, is taken in by an uncle who makes a fortune in patent medicines and parlays it into an immense speculative empire that eventually crashes.  He is criminally liable & dies in exile.  The nephew helps him now & then, and uses some of his money for experiments in the new science of aeronautics.  The action takes place around 1910, but is topical insomuch as we have recently been reminded that the busy rich can be a greater economic & moral burden on society than the idle poor.  Thus, it is helpful in describing how human beings, not initially or ever entirely depraved, can get trapped in that kind of behavior.  The moral is not their wickedness, but the decadence of Western civilization (in 1910!), which encourages wastefulness in general.

Most of the book, however, is not concerned with the uncle's machinations, which are described rather sketchily, but with the nephew's & some others' love affairs, a subject on which I am ignorant & anesthetic.  There are also a couple of adventures:  The nephew attempts to rescue his uncle from bankruptcy by stealing some valuable ore from Africa, which, being radioactive, rots the boat & sinks it.  He also flies his uncle to France in an amusing hybrid of dirigible & airplane.

The book did not hang together well for me, tho it must have for people more familiar with the milieu & with neurotypicals.  The best part, for me, remains the passage I read in 1970:

But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour's eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because they couldn't, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very few were kept "fit" by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.

As is well known, if you put three mirrors at right angles to each other, a ray of light entering the corner will be reflected back in the direction it came from.  The people we sent to the moon left some devices of that kind there, with the result that we can do lidar on the moon and measure its motions exquisitely.

I have wanted for a long time to put such a thing in an upper corner of my room, so that if you look at it from anywhere, you'll see your face upside down.  1-ft mirror tiles, available on the Web from various suppliers, are just the thing, but I worried about how to mount them.  Then it occurred to me that they wouldn't have to be mounted on the ceiling; they could rest on one of my tall bookcases.  So I ordered some, and put them together with duct tape, in such a way that the bottoms & tops of the vertical mirrors are flush.  The top mirror, being unsupported at the outer corner, sags a little, so that it looks as if you had four eyes; but an inconspicuous strut, consisting of a 12-in. stretch cut from a coathanger, takes care of that.

The tiles come in boxes of six, so I have three left over.  Anyone in the vicinity who wants to make a retroreflector is welcome to them.

I just finished rereading Kipling's Captains Courageous, one of the great books of my life.  Here is part of a letter I wrote to a friend after I first read it, >30 years ago.  I was in a commune in Virginia at the time, and she had left it.

I see I was somewhat unfair to Kipling; I know a little more now about his experience with America & his attitude toward women.

*

10 December 1979

...

The week before my last letter...I read for the first time Kipling's Captains Courageous, which was on a chair in the Octagon Room.  It had a powerful effect on me: I cried several times while reading & rereading certain passages, and the experience colored my atmosphere for most of a week; I kept singing sea songs & mooning over it.

The book itself (in case you haven't read it) is a vivid & interesting period piece, impressively American when one considers the paucity of Kipling's experience with its subject.  It also provides further data on his ferocious misogyny (the villain is the hero's doting mother) & infatuation with unsavory adventurers (there is no doubt in my mind that the plural in the title is meant to put the hero's father --- a "captain of industry" --- in the same class as the sea captains who get their chance to make the boy grow up because the father has been too busy).  But my main response was to be reminded of how terribly anxious I am about not being grown up: being spoiled, having missed adversity.  The book aroused this anxiety (of course) directly thru its plot, but also indirectly and perhaps more powerfully & instructively thru its subject matter, in that it always gives me pause to be reminded of how terribly dependent I am on People Who Do What I Can't Do.  (Cf. Orwell, "Down the Mine"; Stewart, Storm; etc.)  And not just for necessities --- however defined --- but for codfish balls, at a time when Chesapeake Bay crabs were 25¢ a dozen.  Of course, fishing is not so dangerous these days, but I suppose I could calculate how many people like me it takes to kill another miner by keeping their rooms another degree warmer.  It makes me sick to hear people snigger at the power company, i.e. at people who go out in thunderstorms & rig cables so that we can have music to milk cows by.  Kipling knew the type: "Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep."  But he didn't just shame people; he offered them a socially useful escape from the shame:  Just pass the "If" test with a score of 85% or higher, and you can say "I'm pulling my weight, and I could pull yours if I had to."  Even if you do it under duress, you still get full credit.

Socially useful, but so was Santa Claus.  The real question is whether either the shame or the relief ought to be afforded any intellectual respectability.  Let us see.

I'll consider the "powerful & educational" point first, tho in the meantime (it is now 14 December...) it has occurred to me that its interest is magnified for me by its being a distraction from Kipling's direct attack on my kind.  A spectacular power the market system has is to collect the tiniest wants of a multitude & concentrate them on a few, exacting the devotion or sacrifice of their lives.  This power is of great social value.  A thing like the New York subway system, for example, could actually be built on the mere plausible expectation of a billion nickels one at a time.  But the power to concentrate is also the power to crush; the market makes a crowd of all of us, like those crowds that, every year or two, kill some of their number by trying to get thru a doorway.  (It happened a lot at bomb shelters during the war.  When I read about that rock concert in Cincinnati, I reflected that I had thought of this metaphor several times during the previous week.)  In the book, the captain's wife "hated the sea s if it were alive & looking", but of course it was the market that was alive & looking, looking thru her eyes & finding its creations good.  Kipling mentions how much her house cost --- well up in the middle class, I supposed.  Gloucester lost 100 men a year, more or less, and the price of fish adjusted itself to bring another 100 in & support the charities that squabbled over their broods of widows & orphans.

Who were the people thus drawn over the margin?  They had to have guts, and from that a good 2/3 of virtue follows.  But they must have been a little crazy to strike such a bargain (the craziness --- money-worship --- being a kind that was held in even higher & more general esteem then than now), and they must have been made more than a little crazy by the consequences of having struck it.  It is remarkable that the normal response to "cognitive dissonance" --- to exaggerate benefits & scorn costs when both are large --- was altogether quenched in those people.  On the contrary, in their songs, ceremonies, & conversations they dwelt endlessly on the terrible price they were paying, & not at all on what it bought them.  And indeed, it is easy to imagine that after a few seasons' collective victory over danger & deprivation, the resulting high morale (at least for the men) became the main reinforcer, and the money almost an embarrassment.  (O... used to have on the wall of his room an old sea map with the motto "You have to sail --- you don't have to live".)

There is a stupid, sentimental taboo against such reflections these days.  You are not supposed to "blame the victim", tho that is precisely what you have to do if you mean to understand oppression.  People are sometimes exploited thru their virtues, but it is generally more profitable as well as more dignified to utilize their vices.  Look around you.

However, one must not stop there.  I can believe that (probably for reasons related to capital --- I have no head for economics and can never work out the details) it was impossible for one boat to make its own tradeoff between safety & income; it would have had to be done for the industry as a whole, & would have meant raising the price of fish & lowering the catch.  Ways of doing that come crowding in to the decadent 20th-century capitalist mind: a cartel, a strong industry union, occupational-safety laws, or (perhaps simplest) compulsory insurance.  I dare say they have all been tried; at any rate, fishermen too have rock&roll while they catch the last of the fish, and the prices are such as to purge most customers of any residual shame.

What a pity!, Kipling would say: another machine for forcing people to grow up has been dismantled.  He has a point, but he only pricks us with it; he does not see the issue whole, & therefore has only written a somewhat preachy adventure story rather than a tragedy.  Has anybody in fact written the tragedy?  There is a great deal in print about Wealth, but generally, it seems, propaganda about this or that benefit or cost.  Wealth makes possible a civilized & generous style of life for large numbers of people who could not make it as saints.  The pursuit of it induces people to take risks & to keep accounts, and thereby to practise two cardinal virtues: courage & a sense of scale.  (One of Screwtape's silliest lies is his statement that we cannot be tempted to virtue.)  Wealth also makes people soft, smug, & picky; the pursuit of it makes them narrow & ferocious.  The growths & decays of these good & bad effects in a given person are all interdependent & messy.  Noticing them all would no doubt be instructive, but most moralists find it more edifying to ignore two or three quarters of them.  Either the pursuit ennobles but the success corrupts (romantics like Kipling), or the other way around (socialists), or the whole thing is good (capitalists), or the whole thing is bad (Christians --- I mean ones that believe Christ).

Of course, the point itself has been disputed, most emphatically by Skinner..., who believes that good engineering can render adversity useless.  The Marxists, I think, also believe something of the sort.  And no doubt, indeed, a good deal can be done to grade & minimize the risks.  But I am inclined to agree with [Bertrand] Russell that sanity (or at least --- shall we say --- dignity) is impossible without a lively & intimate appreciation of the fact that most of the world was not made for us & is out of our control.  _Too_ lively, tho, and you're dead; yet the lesson can scarcely be learned under control!  That is another tragedy.  [Whoever] has grown up, and [whoever] has not, both need their consolations --- alcohol & cynicism, as Mencken says.

But whether one has or hasn't is one thing, and whether one is hung up on the fact is another.  I belong to that queer minority...to whom this question is continually active in determining self-esteem.  Indeed, it seems likely that I'll start worrying about getting old before I stop worrying about being grown up --- rot before I ripen, like those dreadful persimmons & avocados from the supermarkets.  Somehow (perhaps Adler has a theory) the question was made very important for me, and yet society, unlike Kipling, provides no straightforward way of answering it --- no rite of passage.  (A very characteristic fantasy I thought up about 20 years ago is: everyone, at the age of 16, has to take an exhaustive 2-week exam in Competence for Happiness.  Those who fail are shot.  That, I thought, would give the human race the requisite for high morale it lacks most: exclusiveness.)

Until this year,...I mainly defended myself against this anxiety by proclaiming that the very notion of maturity was morally valueless & useful only for bullying.  This year, however,...I...found that it had its charms.  In particular, it seemed to me that altho [certain people] had been on the whole nicer & more lovable than I, I had an obvious point of superiority to them & it deserved a name.  How can we make sense of this?

I think there are two fundamental beliefs that every mammal starts with & that one may reasonably expect an intelligent one to get over as [he or she] grows older: (1) one or two people are going to take care of me, & (2) they are infallible.  Both disillusionments are hard, & whether we avoid them or accomplish them we generally require a good deal of self-deception for comfort.  Thus (1) most of us manage to spread our dependence over a patchwork containing selected individuals for limited uses, plus various artificial & natural abstract institutions, plus ourselves.  But we usually try to persuade ourselves that nothing has really changed, by deifying (i.e. mommy-daddyfying) this or that piece of the construction, or endowing the whole thing with a spurious personality.  Hence the popularity of gods & gangsters & various mixtures.  And (2) most of us realize that the fabric doesn't cover everything & even our parents didn't really.  But we realize it as seldom & as dimly as we can.

So what I say to Kipling is: self-reliance is only one aspect of the task of diffusing & acknowledging one's dependence; it can even be overdone.  And what I say to me is: in view of the frightfulness of the process, honesty is a necessity but also an impediment, and I have in the main used it as an impediment.  Nor am I about to stop.

I have been rereading a book, preparatory to citing it in a future LJ posting, that makes use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT --- the test in which a person is shown pictures and asked to make up stories about them).  I took the test several times when a child, and remember one or two of the pictures and my responses.  I had forgotten, tho, something the book mentions: that one of the "pictures" is completely blank.  I suppose the idea was that you were to make up a story without any prompting; at any rate, I suppose that was what I did at the time.  On imagining it now, tho, I immediately came up with two literal-minded responses:

1.  Since nothing is depicted, an empty universe (the vacuum) is intended.  It is currently speculated, however, that the vacuum is unstable, and is bound to decay into an exceedingly dense world that explodes & then condenses into stars & planets, some of them inhabited by organisms that give & take tests.

2.  This patch of white represents the field of view of a man staring at a featureless whitewashed wall.  He has been told to face it, but has not been told to close his eyes.  In a few seconds, he will be shot in the back of the neck.  His body will be removed, and the wall will be scrubbed & whitewashed again.