David Foster

Stories and Society

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There’s a promising new Substack, The Story Rules Project, written by Erin O’Connor and Maurice Black. Their subject:  How stories affect the human mind and emotions, and how they can be used to reduce polarization. (I must note that stories can also be and often are used to increase polarization)  There are already several posts well worth reading.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” said Shelley, and indeed, it’s not only written stories that have an impact on how people think and feel, but also poems, music, plays, sculpture cartoons …also video games.  All are ‘media’ in a broad McLuhanesque sense.

I’m reminded again of Neal Stephenson’s book In the Beginning was the Command Line, in which he contrasts explicit word-based (textual) communication with graphical or sensorial communication, and applies this contrast both to human-computer communications and to human-to-human communications.  Here, I will be focusing on that second application.

As an example of sensorial communication Stephenson uses something he saw at Disney World–a hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.

The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll among stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they’ve been done, not as Disney’s engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would–with hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar.

In one place, you walk along a stone wall and view some panels of art that tell a story.

 …a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life surrounded by diverse animals…an obvious allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that dominates the center of Disney’s Animal Kingdom…But it’s rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who didn’t have a PhD in Indian art history.

The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his stupidity.

 The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow back, but now man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other animals in standing around to adore and praise it.

Clearly, this exhibit communicates a specific worldview, and it strongly implies that this worldview is consistent with traditional Indian religion and culture. Most visitors will assume the connection without doing further research as to its correctness or lack thereof.

One thing about the sensorial interface is that it is less open to challenge than is the textual interface. It doesn’t argue–doesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minute–I’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.

Moreover: when you accept a point of view based on written materials, you have a good chance of being able to explain to other people why you hold that viewpoint.  This is much less likely when you are influenced toward a view based on something you saw at a theme park or experienced in a videogame.  In that second case, you are less likely to be able to defend your position in debate…since you really can’t identify exactly why you hold it…and are more likely to respond with anger and a demand to cancel your opponent. I think this explains some of the unpleasant characteristics of present-day political discussion.

So-called “Tunnels of Oppression” have been a thing on college campuses for quite some time…here’s an article I found describing some of them.    The article is from 2008, but additional searches indicate that these have by no means gone away.  These are clearly examples of the sensorial communications mode, which, as I noted above, is less open to challenge than the textual interface. Again, tt doesn’t argue–doesn’t present you with a chain of facts and logic that let you sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minute–I’m not so sure about that.” It just sucks you into its own point of view.  This is propaganda more than it is education.

And in a society in which sensory communication threatens to become overwhelming, shouldn’t one of the primary responsibilities of the university be the preservation of the text-based communication mode and the propagation of the ability to deal with this modality? Don’t “Tunnels of Oppression,” by their very nature, tend to undercut this mission?

Indeed, how many college students today know how to take a proposition and then go to the library and/or the Internet and assemble seriously relevant facts and arguments, pro and con? And is there any evidence that this ability gets any better after 4 years in college? (Or, for that matter, 8 years?)

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Revealing

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About every 3 or 4 weeks, Peggy Noonan’s WSJ column has something worthwhile to say.  The September 14 column was one of those times.  Talking about Biden, she cites ‘Whatever it Takes’, Richard Ben Cramer’s history of the 1988 presidential campaign, which she says presages a great deal of what we observe each day of Mr. Biden, and it is suggestive of the origins of the Hunter Biden problems and allegations.

For one thing, Joe Biden has always been obsessed by real estate and fancy houses, and money was always an issue. On a house he would buy a few years into his first Senate term: “The house is gorgeous, an old du Pont mansion in the du Pont neighborhood called Greenville, outside Wilmington. It’s the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building—hand-carved doorways, a curbing hand-carved grand staircase that Clark Gable could have carried a girl down, a library fit for a Carnegie. . . . And a ballroom—can’t forget the ballroom.” He bid more than he had, “but Biden never let money stand in the way of a deal. He got in the developer’s face and started talking—fast.” He got the house—he always got the houses—and thereafter scrambled to cover its cost.

He wanted it all and had a sharp eye for how to get it. There is a beautiful speech Cramer presents as Mr. Biden’s. He was sitting around a back yard in Wilmington with friends when his sons were young, and Mr. Biden asked, “Where’s your kid going to college?”

His friend said, “Christ, Joe! He’s 8 years old!” Another implied it wasn’t important.

“Lemme tell you something,” Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country. . . . Some people—most people—don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives . . . in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.”

See my related post Harvard and America and the discussion here at Chicago Boyz.

Technology, Regulation, Capitalism, and Innovation

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An interesting and very dynamic presentation from venture capitalist Bill Gurley on the topic of regulatory capture.

Cases that he discusses include municipal wi-fi projects, electronic medical records systems, and Covid testing.

In response to Bill’s presentation, Sophie @netcapgirl says:

it’s lowkey a shame because the origins of the digital era are rooted in a collaborative environment between government & industry (and academia) that are hard to imagine today. for instance, JC Licklider (instrumental in the computer revolution) held positions at ARPA, MIT & IBM

They’re both right, IMO–Bill is correct about malign impact of regulatory capture on innovation, and Sophie is correct about the historical importance of government involvement in digital innovation.


So what conclusions should we derive from this polarity?

 

Of Springs and Cables

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Here’s an essay written by 17-year-old Ruby LaRoca, winner of a Free Press essay contest.   There’s a lot in it, but I was particularly struck by this:

As I head into my final year of homeschooling, I often think about the dilemma in American education, which perhaps should be called the student crisis (it’s also a teacher crisis). Students and teachers are more exhausted and fragile than they used to be. But reducing homework or gutting it of substance, taking away structure and accountability, and creating boundless space for “student voices” feels more patronizing than supportive. The taut cable of high expectations has been slackened, and the result is the current mood: listlessness.

I like that phrase “the taut cable of high expectations.”  It reminded me of something that Antoine de St-Exupery wrote, which I had previously cited in a post and had been thinking about referencing again.

In St-Ex’s unfinished novel Citadelle (published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands), the protagonist is the ruler of a fictional desert kingdom.  One night, he goes to the prison in which a man who has been sentenced to death in the morning is being held. He muses that this man may well contain an inward beauty of some form–perhaps he should commute his sentence?…but goes on to justify his execution:

For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.

The context in which I had been thinking of this passage was the present situation in San Francisco.  Failure to enforce laws–while endlessly searching for ‘inward beauty’ in the perpetrators of a wide range of crimes–had resulted in a relaxation of those springs of which St-Exupery wrote.

Our society at present suffers from both the loosening of Ruby LaRocca’s ‘taut cables’…which act to pull people upward…and St-Exupery’s ‘springs’…which reduce the incidence of disastrous falls.