What the Computer People Don’t Realize

Featured

Mar 12

A stray but incisive remark in Arthur Schlesinger’s The Crisis of the Old Order nicely captures the challenge posed by the deterioration of that more recent “old order” known as the twentieth century. Speaking of John Dewey and other thinkers who were drawn in theory but not by sensibility to communism, Schlesinger says they “cared deeply about individual freedom . . . . but this faith in freedom was more a personal conviction than an organic part of their political thought. They had made an implicit assumption of freedom when what they needed was an explicit theory of the conditions which made freedom possible.”

If I may be so bold as to take it slightly out of context, what Schlesinger describes here is not so much the personal failing of a few intellectuals as the typical mistake that everybody makes when the established ways break up. Those who come of age in that order may come to know freedom, but they do not necessarily come to know the “conditions that made freedom possible,” which for them have always been in the background and not obviously connected to the sense of being “free.” Education theorists talk about the “hidden curriculum” – the informal attitudes and practices that aren’t part of the actual curriculum, but make the actual curriculum work as it does. Schlesinger’s “conditions” are like the hidden curriculum behind the explicit curriculum of freedom. Their significance is hard to appreciate until they disappear, at which point the explicit curriculum stops working. People try to fix the problem by changing the curriculum, not realizing that it’s not the curriculum that’s the problem. This makes the problem worse.

The word “crisis” is overused, but it seems clear enough that we are living through something like a transition between one order and another, and that we are all scrambling to defend our “personal convictions” about freedom and justice and equality and the like against the surprise attacks of fellow citizens who suddenly do not seem to share those convictions. We are relentless in our focus on these political enemies and their attempts to use “crisis” as an opportunity to tear down our own values in order to impose their own. And our political enemies are quickly becoming our enemies, plain and simple: not opponents in a game, but threats to our identities and even to our lives.

It is not surprising that in times of transition, the frantic defense of personal convictions inspires ideological innovation. People are developing a lot of new “curriculums” lately. This is not a bad thing, and there is plenty of exciting new thinking on both left and right (or beyond left and right). It’s much more interesting to think about politics when the political order is dying than when it is in the prime of life. But the danger that faces us is the same one that Dewey, in Schlesinger’s estimation, failed to overcome: that in our enthusiasm for taking this opportunity to revise the curriculum in pursuit of our convictions, we will ignore the hidden curriculum that made those values real, and that our revisions will for that reason be unrealistic and unhelpful, if not actively harmful to our own cause.

My general view is that a lot of our loudest disputes about our most fundamental values are so much froth on the surface of a technological revolution that has radically reshaped the background conditions that we could all take for granted until what seems like five minutes ago. We are making implicit assumptions of freedom, or justice, or equality, or whatever, when what we need are explicit theories of the conditions that make freedom (or whatever) possible in the digital age, the age of the Internet, the smartphone, and the chatbot.

This means that we first need explicit theories of the conditions that made freedom possible before the digital age. These will be conditions that we not only would have taken for granted, but that we would not have even been able to see as “conditions,” since they were simply the result of not having these new tools at our disposal, rather than being the intended (or unintended) product of human action. I think, for example, that an important part of what we (or at least we Americans) call “freedom” comes from the simple, everyday experience of having pleasant encounters with strangers that build up a shared sense of social trust. I feel much freer in a place marked by that sense of trust, and that sense of trust is nurtured by that kind of interaction. The possibility of that kind of interaction depends on many different “conditions,” such as generally shared prosperity. (It is hard to have a “pleasant encounter” with a panhandler, because both parties are painfully aware of the gap. Probably the same with a billionaire, but I’ve never met one.) But perhaps it also depends, to a larger extent than we appreciated, on the inability to avoid such encounters. Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about going to the post office to get a stamp, and how his wife wondered why he bothered.

“Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great-looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, I don’t know. The moral of the story is, that we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

Even then (I don’t know when he told this story, but he died in 2007), Vonnegut could have avoided having that “hell of a good time.” But he grew up before it was so easy to do so, and anyway, he was a man of strong convictions who was also very good at “farting around.” So it was easy for him to say no to the easy way. He was a man shaped by earlier conditions and still capable of the freedom those conditions secured. But “the computer people” have achieved quite a lot since then, and it’s easier than ever to avoid a good time. And as more and more people are shaped by the new conditions, there are fewer strangers on the street for the remaining Vonneguts to ogle and holler at. Indeed, the possibility of being ogled and hollered at is considered an excellent additional reason not to go to the post office when you could just order envelopes online. Eventually, the old order comes to be remembered as a time not of freedom but of its absence, of privileged old men invading other people’s private space. Maybe that lady didn’t want to tell him what kind of dog it was. Maybe, before the digital age, there was no freedom!

The fact that nobody outside of Silicon Valley really believes that anymore is a good sign for our political future. Even young people are wise to the scam, and the bitterest political enemies tend nowadays to agree that all these shiny new devices have generally made things worse. It gets harder every day to “assume freedom.” Conditions have changed but not for the better; we feel less free, not more, and everybody is nostalgic for the old order of “the before-times,” including people who weren’t alive then. That Vonnegut story is all over the Internet. But it’s not enough to agree that the real enemy is the monopoly that profits by addicting everybody to the thrill of political enmity, and it’s not enough to tell stories, even if stories are vital. We also need, as Schlesinger put it, “explicit theories” that tell us where to draw lines in the digital age. Lines are being drawn: the spreading bans on phones in schools, and on social media use by children, are good news. Schools are certainly more free when they return to the “hidden curriculum” of the older order, when students weren’t “studying” on iPads. But there is obviously just as much danger as hope in this necessary work. Everything I’ve said here can be easily twisted into arguments for drawing the lines in ways that diminish rather than restore or enhance our freedom. Censorship and blackouts are not what I have in mind.

This is why we need explicit theories: logically coherent accounts of the specific conditions of the predigital age that supported those freedoms that we can now see deteriorating, with a view to developing a new hidden curriculum for the digital age that does not make the problem worse. Without such theories, we’ll go on producing a lot of very interesting curricular innovations intended to protect our cherished values, and a lot of those innovations will end up undermining those values, because we’ll draw the lines in the wrong places. That’s not the new order we want.