Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 526

Greater than Gatsby

As a born peruser, I have a thing for lists, and a penchant for ranking my favorites in the subjects that interest me: my favorite Beatles bootlegs, Islay whiskies, birds, ghost stories. I rank my favorite books, too, and my favorite works by individual authors, but with books in particular, people tend to go with the same old-same old. Many favorite-book lists—like the ones I see on social media—are regularly comprised of 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, and, very often, The Great Gatsby. Now, maybe Harper Lee really only wrote one really good book (we may not hear the end of that for a while) and maybe that goes for J.D. Salinger, too. But that’s not even close to describing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary trajectory.

Sometimes I’ve had occasion to ask a professed Great Gatsby lover or three which other works by Fitzgerald they liked. Not infrequently, the answer reveals that they have never read anything else. I’d get replies like, “Nothing. Does he have any other novels?” or “When you’ve read Gatsby you don’t need to read anything else by the man. It’s that perfect.” I find this odd. If there was a record album you loved so much, say by Ella Fitzgerald, you’d naturally want to check out something else by her, maybe track down the entire discography. If that’s true for a singer named Fitzgerald, why not also a writer?Now, I love Gatsby, a novel that’s as much a very long short story—at 47,000 words—as anything. As Fitzgerald did with Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” a poem he could never read without weeping, I’ve committed large stretches of The Great Gatsby to memory, such that I can be strolling about my day and basically press play in my mind and listen to it. But Gatsby is not even close to Fitzgerald’s best work, and it is the one that has damned the rest of his output to oblivion in some ways. It had the right energy, the right length, the right accessibility, and it came from the right time period. It also had, from one point of view, the great luck to come back from the dead like it did, and acquire its informal title of the Great American Novel. Gatsby has its status, as does the man himself, but all of the Fitzgerald-based focus has gone to it, and away from everything else.Fitzgerald died 75 years ago, on December 21, 1940, and spent the bulk of the final year of his life writing a series of extended fictional vignettes for Esquire known as the Pat Hobby stories, and a novel—which was to have been his fifth—he never completed called The Love of the Last Tycoon.Fitzgerald was 43 years old, trying to make a go of it in Hollywood as a screenwriter and script-repairer, though the place never suited him, nor he it. In fact, for all of his time there, he nabbed but one screen credit, for 1938’s Three Comrades. He channeled his setbacks into Pat Hobby, a 49-year old scriptman whose heyday was the silent-film era, and who tumbles from one humiliation to another. Esquire ran the stories at a rate of one a month, with Fitzgerald pleading for more cash from time to time—the pieces earned him a relative pittance compared to his fiction rate during his glory run—as his peers basically shook their heads and pitied him.The Hobby stories are under-read, but they’re not top-drawer Fitzgerald. But Tycoon is, and may well offer, even in its truncated form as edited for publication by Edmund Wilson, as much as Gatsby. The latter had the brilliant framing device of narration that was technically first-person, but also fairly omniscient without really seeming to be, something so unlikely and ingenious that when Fitzgerald hit upon that idea, that voice, that perspective, he must have known he was pretty much all done, even if he didn’t have a full chapter completed. Because that device was the car, the vehicle for the story: All he had to do, at that point, was get in and do what he most naturally did, which is to say, fashion page after page of perfect prose that could easily double as poetry, whilst illuminating all of the back corridors of human yearning, with a touch of humor when needed, and an understanding of how tragedy functions, at the level of the quotidian, that few writers have ever possessed.Tycoon is the finest book this country has ever produced on Hollywood and movie-making, and on what it’s like to be a genius. The genius of Tycoon is motion-picture producer Monroe Stahr, whom Fitzgerald thought of, at first, as his version of Irving Thalberg, the so-called boy-genius producer who died young, as Stahr does, and as Fitzgerald soon would.The first-person-as-omniscient-narrator bit doesn’t come off quite as smoothly, but the emotion is more bracing, the wisdom more lived in; Fitzgerald, by the time he was writing Tycoon, had gone spelunking down his share of abysses, always coming out more broken, with fewer prospects and less hope. But he was also a better artist, a better writer, a guy who could beat the snot out of you with just how much better he could write a sentence than you ever could on your best day of best days.I’ve never believed, save in one case, that you have to live something or experience it to write about it well, to write about it as though you lived it a thousand times over. Prior to composing The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane had never set foot on a Civil War battlefield. Later on, he came East, walked out to the middle of one, and said, in effect, “Yep, got it,” and walked off again. Genius is different, though. To write about the burdens of being one, as Fitzgerald does with his Monroe Stahr, I think you do have to be one. And Fitzgerald writes Stahr from the inside out. This isn’t Fitzgerald transposing his own life—he didn’t do that nearly as often as the summaries of his work suggest—but rather sidling up to a fellow genius, and saying, effect, “I get it, and the cross is heavy, but we need to create, as I have created you.”In his late correspondence, Fitzgerald would make asides about how little he had left to give, how his reputation was probably forever lost, mixed with plans to help it bounce back; but there would also be more clearheaded, plainly declarative statements that he had gotten to a new level. There had been that metaphysical click that the genius waits for, that he knows is coming, when everything slows down and freezes in place. Then it’s a matter of walking around at one’s leisure, and simply recording what hovers before the eye.The Love of the Last Tycoon—and the working notes that accompany it—is one of my mainstay book recommendations, and it rarely lets anyone down. So check out Tycoon! If you truly love The Great Gatsby, you’re pretty much screwing yourself over if you’re not reading the other Fitzgerald works that, when you do come upon them, will have you saying, “It’s not Gatsby but this is better, maybe the best one; no, wait, this other one here is even better than that last,” and so on and on. Let’s take a look at three to get started.“Winter Dreams” (1922)You sometimes see the term “perfect” qualified—as in, this is so-and-so’s most perfect film—which isn’t technically correct, but it’s hard for me to read this story and not think it’s the most perfect one Fitzgerald ever wrote. Sentences, depending upon where they fall, the rhythm of the one that precedes them, the timbre of the one that follows, are tasked with different responsibilities. Fitzgerald was a master of understanding these dispensations, and “Winter Dreams”—a story about a young man whose tragedy is that he has lost the ability to feel loss, save for the ability to feel that one very specific form of loss—begins with a bravura long sentence that doesn’t feel long at all:

Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green’s father owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear—the best one was “The Hub,” patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island—and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

The sentence doesn’t feel long because it runs downhill, so to speak. That is, you don’t have to stitch up clauses set far apart (like you would with, say, Henry James), retracing backwards to find an interlocking verb. This is pure flow.

But there’s a subtle misdirection in that sentence, a slight change in meter, with the “and” that transitions out of the portion in between dashes leading into what would be a straightforward declaration were we to encounter it outside of this setting. That closing rhythm, though, which is like a single beat, lodges in the mind, and Fitzgerald brings it out later for the conclusion of the story, where we now get a series of those beats:

“Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”

It is a story, really, about the difference between existing and living. Fitzgerald knew pain. He also knew that the ability to feel it is far more necessary and human than pain’s absence.

Tender Is the Night (1934)Fitzgerald’s final completed novel (with its title sourced from Keats’s “Nightingale”) was the one he seemed to esteem the most. The glamorous Dick and Nicole Diver live in the South of France. He’s a brilliant psychoanalyst, she’s his former patient he once treated for a mental collapse. He has an affair with Rosemary, an actress; we learn that Dick married Nicole as some ill-conceived attempt to bring stability to her life. Suffice it to say, Nicole has her own affair, Dick ends up all alone, crushed and gutted, a man without any means to gain traction to get back into the world, or back to being himself.Now, this is not the book you want to read, perhaps, to bring you cheer at the beach, but Fitzgerald’s prose was never better. I’d put it up against anything Proust wrote, at the level of the sentence. Fitzgerald’s sentences could hang on the wall at MoMA, if one did such a thing with sentences. The name Dick Diver is a pun on “cocksucker,” which is, in the terms of Tender is the Night, a man devouring himself. In an inscription of the book made for a friend, Fitzgerald declared that while Gatsby was a tour de force, it was Tender Is the Night that, for him, was the real confession of faith—a faith in finding something paramount on that journey inwards, and the faith that one will make it back out again.The “Crack-Up” essays (1936)If you read a number of the exchanges between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, you’ll see what a dick the former could be. Fitzgerald worshipped him, though, and always—well, almost always—wanted his approval, whereas Hemingway couldn’t resist getting a boot in when Fitzgerald was down. And down he was at the age of 39 when he wrote the three personal essays that fall under the heading of “The Crack-Up.” The first begins:

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once.

From there, Fitzgerald goes on to examine just how messed up he thought himself at the time to be. He thought he was done, that he was at best a cracked plate you could make use of for a late night snack, but not one you’d use for a dinner party. And he was absolutely lambasted by everyone, especially Hemingway, who thought this kind of thing embarrassing, weak, pathetic, unmanly.

I find it so brave, personally, because the more Fitzgerald goes on—and if you can’t connect with at least some of what he says, you’ve lived a far luckier life than I have—the more he rallies. You do get the sense he’s not long for the world—despite his still-young age—but also that what time remains will see the creation of some special works of art. There is also a hilarious pun when a friend offers her counsel, which is well-intentioned but flowery and jejune, to which Fitzgerald replies, “Baby et up all her Spinoza?” You could make a nice Spinoza joke back then.The end of the final essay, “Pasting It Together,” has a spirit to it that was as vital, so far as Fitzgerald’s gifts went, as his command of prose, his ability to evoke, and his grasp of our most human truths. Even the most gifted writers usually just get one such sizable gift. If you are a master of turning a phrase, maybe you’re not a master of plot-making. But if you’re both, it’s even less likely that you have the strength and the will to match, but that was Fitzgerald. The end of this one is so intense that each time I read it I’m ready to pop the Grim Reaper himself, if I could. And then I want to read Tycoon again. And then I want to read a lot of them again.Fitzgerald’s genius has never even been born in the lives of so many Americans (and others) who absentmindedly think that F. Scott was a one-trick-pony called Gatsby. Maybe this year come September, which marks 120 years after his birth, he will get the revival he so much deserves.

Turkey and Israel to Restore Diplomatic Ties

Turkey will restore full diplomatic recognition with Israel after half a decade of animosity. The New York Times reports:

A senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the reconciliation deal had not been finalized, said that Israel would create a compensation fund for the families of those killed on the Mavi Marmara. The Israeli news media reported that the compensation would be about $20 million, but Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the amount had not been set.

Turkey, in turn, would drop criminal charges it has filed against Israeli officers and agree to prevent a leader of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Palestinian territory of Gaza, from entering Turkey. Israel has accused the Hamas leader, Saleh al-Arouri, of orchestrating attacks against Israelis in the West Bank from a base in Turkey.

The two countries would also return ambassadors to each other’s capitals and would discuss building a pipeline to bring natural gas from Israel to Turkey, the Israeli official said.

The Turkey-Israel kiss and make up shows us two things. First, Turkey’s worries about Russia are again pushing it toward the West. This is a pattern that is several centuries old and that led, among other things, to British and French support for Turkey in the 19th century and Turkey’s entrance into NATO in the 20th. It continues now in the 21st.

Second, Israel’s gas reserves are giving the country new regional clout, as we have been predicting they would for some time. And along with Israel’s recent cooperation on a Red Sea-Dead Sea canal with Jordan, that comes as promising news for the regional economy and for peace.

How Colleges Contribute to Racial Isolation

Many outside observers, particularly conservatives, have scoffed at claims by campus protesters that minority students face pervasive discrimination on campus. After all, aren’t racism and prejudice at all-time lows, and aren’t college campuses the most tolerant and inclusive places in the world? In a recent essay for Defining Ideas, the publication of the Hoover Institution, James Huffman turns this narrative on its head, writing that many colleges’ ostensible embrace of diversity—their affirmative action programs, their multicultural housing, their ethnic studies major programs—actually amount to a type of discrimination, and a reason many minority students feel they are being treated differently from their peers:

Can there be any surprise that students of color feel as if they are treated differently from white students when their admission to the university is very likely to have been influenced by their race? When they, and only they, are often invited to campus a week early, purportedly to bond with their fellow students of color and to give them a head start on college? When one of their first experiences on campus is some sort of gathering with other students of color? When they are directed to the campus office of diversity or minority affairs as a place for counseling? When they are invited to join the Black or Hispanic or Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian student union? When they learn they can major in Black, etc. studies? […]

There is nothing subtle about the most pervasive form of racial discrimination prevailing at most American colleges and universities today. It is done in the name of lifting up those who have been discriminated against in the past. But there should be little wonder that the intended beneficiaries of this allegedly benign discrimination feel themselves isolated and treated differently. By design, universities have isolated them and treated them differently.

Huffman’s essay offers an original and well-reasoned perspective on the campus unrest; read the whole thing. One perverse aspect of the situation that Huffman doesn’t touch on is the way that racial isolation on campus creates a vicious cycle. Students protest that they are being treated differently, and administrators respond by creating more segregated facilities and more race-based programs, s response which in turn heightens the sense of isolation.

The leftwing identity politics approach to combating racial prejudice—diversity training and multicultural centers—has not worked. If anything, it has made the situation worse. College administrators that are actually interested in making all students feel integrated into the campus community should look to evidence-based approaches, like fostering a sense of common identity among all students, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation.

London and Beijing in Rights Row

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the UK in late October, the Brits were criticized for overlooking Beijing’s record of political suppression. At the time, we explained that this isn’t exactly new: London has been accused of putting profit over human rights in the Orient since it encouraged the opium trade. Yet this week has seen an unusual row. Reuters:

China on Thursday lashed out at Britain’s belated criticism of its security officers’ pushing of diplomats at a rights trial, in an unusual public sign of disagreement between countries supposedly enjoying a “golden” era in ties.

Plainclothes security officers on Monday shoved diplomats, journalists and protesters away from a courthouse in Beijing where prominent human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was on trial.

As many as 11 diplomats from countries including the United States, Germany, Britain and France had gathered to observe the trial, but were refused entry by the police.

Britain has told China the “physical mistreatment” of diplomats and journalists in Beijing was unacceptable, a Foreign Office representative said in a statement issued by the British embassy in Beijing.

Some like to claim that Britain isn’t being sufficiently tough on China (see Reuters’ use of the word “belated” for a sense, or the link above). There’s truth to the criticism, but we’re sympathetic to Britain’s goals: It’s important to defend one’s own personnel from disrespectful treatment, as in this case, but in general excessive hand wringing over China isn’t very productive (see, for example, the mess our self-righteous protestations exacerbated in Thailand). Post-empire Britain needs to ensure London is the world’s financial capital, and it needs Beijing for that. Furthermore, if there’s a Brexit, Britain will need a diversified trade portfolio. There’s little point in jeopardizing these things for the sake of ineffective and likely counterproductive rhetoric.

In the long run, the best way to improve human rights in China is to bring it into an American-led world order, not to castigate it at every opportunity. The West should stand by its values, and be careful about encouraging China, or giving them too much leeway. But we should also recognize that China isn’t going to change simply because we tell it to. The specifics of that balancing act will vary in different Western countries, of course. But, for the moment, Britain looks like it’s on to a promising approach.

The Prove Trump Right Act of 2015

As if dying to prove Donald Trump’s allegations that current immigration law is a conspiracy of the elites against the masses right, Congress has put a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would dramatically increase the number of H-2B visas. The Hill reports:

Congressional leaders quietly slipped the provision into the 2,009-page funding bill, with rank-and-file lawmakers only discovering it Wednesday morning. The move immediately sparked protests from across the political spectrum.

The provision could more than triple the number of H-2B visas for foreign workers seeking jobs at hotels, theme parks, ski resorts, golf courses, landscaping businesses, restaurants and bars. The move is intended to boost the supply of non-agricultural seasonal workers.[..]Sessions estimates the number of H-2B visas will soar from 66,000 to 250,000 because of the language in the omnibus. He took to the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon to protest the maneuver.

The H-2B, and its high-tech cousin the H-1B are, as we have written before, indenturement by another name. The worker who holds them cannot leave his or her job without having to leave the country. This gives management enormous leverage, and depresses wages. In some cases it leads to outright abuses. Meanwhile, Americans lose out on employment opportunities or are fired to make room for the newcomers, and the country as a whole is deprived of the talents and commitment to the national community that new immigrants on green cards or a citizenship track would have brought. It’s a lose-lose—except for the employer.

If you want to know why Trump keeps enjoying success despite every outrageous comment, look to measures like this. The Congressmen who inserted this provision might talk a responsible game, but their actions, in the eyes of a Trump supporter, reveal their true intentions. And the AFL-CIO came out in opposition to the measure as well. This lends credence to the notion that Trump’s natural base of support is the “radical middle,” exactly the sort of blue-collar, non-college-educated workers that feel most threatened by immigration and the state of the economy as a whole right now.None of this is exactly a secret, which raises the question of just what the Congressmen involved were thinking. Could they just not help themselves?

Mexico Defies Prices and Makes Oil Progress

With oil well below $40 per barrel and every sign pointing towards prices staying low through next year, you’d be excused for thinking stories about countries tapping more of their oil reserves would be in short supply. Indeed, the sizable oversupply of crude in the global oil market is throwing the viability of projects around the world into doubt. But there’s a bright spot south of the border, as Mexico successfully auctioned off every one of the 25 oil contracts on offer earlier this week. Reuters reports:

Peak oil production from the 25 onshore fields will reach 77,000 barrels per day and attract investment of $1.1 billion, Energy Minister Pedro Joaquin Coldwell said in a tweet following the auction. Mexican officials had said they would consider the auction a success if at least five contracts were awarded. […]

Among the 14 consortiums with winning bids, there were a dozen small Mexican oil companies, marking a dramatic shift for a sector long dominated by state-owned Pemex.

77,000 barrels per day is a drop in what today is a bucket that’s fairly overflowing, but the auction’s relatively small scope aside, this is still a significant step for Mexico. The country’s state-owned oil company—Pemex—oversaw stagnating production in the decade leading up to President Enrique Peña Nieto’s reforms, but there’s hope now that private firms can inject new life into Mexico’s energy landscape.

Low oil prices will certainly make it more difficult for Mexico to make the kinds of strides it hoped to in the immediate aftermath of these reforms, but the groundwork is there for it to join the United States and Canada in the North American energy boom.

Information Overload or a Search for Meaning?

Ours is said to be an Age of Distraction, in which the frenzied pace of technological change makes it difficult if not impossible to focus and concentrate on challenging books and texts. In universities many academics argue that the constant culture of browsing on the internet has undermined students’ interest in serious deep reading. It is also frequently asserted that our capacity for attention is also constantly challenged by the relentless production and flow of information. Information anxiety expressed through the idiom of Information Overload is frequently represented as the normal state of affairs of life in the 21st century.

Since Richard Wurman published his best-selling book Information Anxiety in 1989, agonizing about Information Overload-related pathologies has become a regular topic of cultural commentary. Often the flow of digitally mediated information is expressed through the metaphor of a flood, with the implication that if most of us are not literally drowning we are least overwhelmed by it. It is often asserted that businesses are “drowning in data” and that creativity is difficult if not impossible “when you’re facing a flood of information.” Apparently, Information Overload does not merely inhibit creativity. It is also held responsible for a variety of afflictions connected to the distracting effects of exposure to “too much information.”In line with Western society’s therapeutic sensibility, apprehensions about information overload are often articulated in terms of a medical diagnosis. The language of psychology and increasingly that of neuroscience is deployed to legitimate the claim that the digitally driven explosion of information is harmful to people’s health and well-being. The recently invented term “information fatigue syndrome” offers a diagnostic category to capture the sensibility of a cultural malaise. Its main symptom is that of poor concentration, which is apparently the outcome of the overloading of short-term memory. Another variant of this cultural malaise is what David Mikics, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age , has characterised as “Continuous Partial Attention.” Mikics contends that “kids who grow up with the digital technology are more susceptible to the diseases of constantly divided attention than older generations.” He argued that “multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking.”Often the flood of information is held to be directly or indirectly responsible for what used to be described as an existential crisis of meaning experienced by an individual writer. “What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs, quick takes and fragments, that add up to the anxiety of the age,” wrote David Ulin in The Lost Art of Reading . Numerous other commentators echo this sensibility, illustrating their concerns about information overload with personal accounts. Nicholas Carr, in his widely cited crie de couer, The Shallows , wrote of the anxiety associated with information overload and acknowledges that his own power of concentration has waned to the point that it starts “to drift after a page or two.” In a similar vein, the author and essayist Tim Parks wrote of his struggle to read and decried the “state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction.”Predictably, the numerous infirmities associated with information overload have been seized upon as a business opportunity by the self-help industry. Wurman’s Information Anxiety claims to provide “creative guidance” to readers who are looking for a cure for the uneasiness they experience from being overwhelmed by a surfeit of information. Books like The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, Information Overload: Practical Strategies for Surviving in Today’s Workplace, Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, or How to Focus: How to Stay Focused in the Age of Information Overload So You Can Zero in on Your Success offer both a diagnosis and a treatment for an existential condition that supposedly confronts us all.A Short History of Too Much ChoiceIt could well be that 21st-century society is experiencing a sense of disorientation about how to manage too much information, and it could be that new technology does indeed have distinctive effects on our brains. But our ancestors expressed similar concerns, and it won’t do to dismiss those concerns simply by assuming that they were wrong but we are right. There may be something else going on here, which has less to do with the volume of information we can expose ourselves to if we choose and more to do with self-knowledge about our purposes and knowledge frameworks.My research into the history of reading shows that since the invention of writing people have been concerned about the capacity of people to handle and process the content of the written text. Ancient societies such as Greece and Rome did not need digital gadgets, global interconnectivity, or Big Data to raise concerns about the perils of information flows. It was Plato, writing through the mouth of Socrates, who first raised the alarm about the risks that emanate from the circulation of information communicated through the written text. Socrates was apprehensive about the potentially disruptive consequences of the technology of writing. He asserted that unlike verbal communication writing is indiscriminate in that it does not choose its audience, but “roams about everywhere.” Writing does not discern between readers who can understand and benefit from a communication and those who will become misled and confused by it. He warned that writing reaches those with “understanding no less than those who have no business with it.”1 In line with the paternalistic worldview of his era, Socrates assumed that in the wrong hands a little knowledge was a threat to social order. He also famously predicted that once people became reliant on written texts it would have a deleterious effect on their memory.One did not have to be an ancient Greek to think this way. One could also be an ancient Jew. The rabbis were for a time very reluctant to commit to writing the Oral Law, the tradition of scriptural interpretation that eventually became the first part of the Talmud: the Mishnah. Then the same thing happened again: A later generation of rabbis resisted committing to writing the oral interpretation of the Mishnah, which later became the second part of the Talmud: the Gemorrah. And their reasons were not all that different from those of Socrates. They believed that knowledge was by nature dialectical and could only emerge from living discussion. If knowledge were put in writing it would die and ossify, and hence be prone to mislead later generations.Plato’s concern with the flow of information was directly related to his preoccupation with the capacity of people to discriminate between texts that were morally worthy and those that were not. Fear about the effect that written information could have on people’s outlook was channeled through the perception that there were far too many texts and manuscripts in circulation. Too many books were taken to mean too much choice, which in turn raised questions about which text could be trusted to possess genuine authority.That is one reason why, from ancient times to the modern era, moralistic advice on reading has tended to warn against the habit of unrestrained reading. The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, in his letter to Lucilius written between 63 and 65 CE, advised that the “reading of many books is a distraction” that leaves the reader “disoriented and weak.” Again, this sounds a lot like the earlier rabbinic tradition, which holds that it was King Solomon himself who lamented, “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Seneca further asserted that “you must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.” Seneca’s advice continued to widely advocated by century self-help manuals down to the late 19th century.Seneca’s call to limit the habit of reading to a few books anticipated the current tendency to associate too much information with a disordered spirit and a distracted mind. That Seneca believed that the reading of too many books “tends to make you discursive and unsteady” at a time when the availability of reading material was relatively limited suggests that what he feared was not its quantity but the capacity of people to gain meaning from it. His perception of a Roman mind overloaded by too many books can be interpreted as a sublimated expression of his concern with people’s capacity to process and gain meaning from their contentThe idea that there is “too much information” predated not only the invention of the internet but also of the printing press. Ann Blair in her study, Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, noted that, although the “dominant reaction to printing was one of great admiration for it as a ‘divine invention’,” there were also lots of complaints about its disconcerting impact on society. She contends that “by the mid-sixteenth century comments on the impact of printing often focused on the vast and cumulative increase in the numbers of books being written and printed.”2It was the arrival of the printing press that provoked the reaction that directly anticipates the current discussion on information overload. It is at this point that the flood metaphor emerged as an idiom through which disquiet about the publishing of new sources of information was often expressed. In 1526, the Dutch humanist philosopher Erasmus asked if there is “anywhere on earth” which is “exempt from these swarms of new books?” He complained about the “flood” of new books and condemned them for their “foolish, libellous, mad, impious and subversive” consequences.3 More than a century later the French Huguenot historian Henri Basnage de Beauval (1657–1710) articulated similar fears when he spoke of the Republic of Letters being submerged by “a new kind of flood and overflow of books.”4The unease provoked by the growing number of books published with the help of the technology of printing was often linked to the conviction that their sheer number would make it difficult for people to discriminate between sources of essential truth and knowledge and those that misled the reading public. The problem of choice was represented as a serious challenge to the early modern mind. Rene Descartes (1596–1650) personified this attitude. He took the view that the need to consult so many books to gain knowledge was an inefficient use of time.In 1600, Barnaby Rich, an English writer lamented that “one of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world.”5 The perception that the proliferation of published texts had significant downsides was fairly widespread by the 17th century. By this point, there was already seen to be a glut of printed texts; according to one English critic they were “begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of scholars.”6 The sentiment that far too much was published has always expressed insecurities about the human capacity to understand and gain meaning from the surrounding world.It was around this point that there was an explicit recognition of the relationship between the production of knowledge and information anxiety. In 1605, in his The Advancement of Learning, the philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon stated that “in spacious knowledge there is much contristation, and that he that increaseth knowledge increaseth anxiety.” The close association that Bacon drew between the development of knowledge and information anxiety indicated that perhaps he intuited that the development of science might raise as many questions as it answered.An examination of the information revolution that succeeded the invention of printing indicates that what was at stake was not so much the quantity of texts but the challenge of choosing and discriminating between them. The sudden availability of a growing number and variety of topics raised the question of how readers could cope with the explosion of new publications and information. Perceptions of an information overload emerge when society lacks an authoritative philosophical and intellectual paradigm through which sources of information and knowledge can be interpreted. In Europe the contestation of intellectual authority in the centuries following the Reformation created the conditions in which information overload was perceived as a problemGrowth in the number and diversity of publications raised questions about the capacity of readers to discriminate between the authoritative and valuable books and those that had little intellectual or moral worth. Educators were at a loss as to how to guide the reading of their students. In her study of the culture of teaching in the early modern era, Rebecca Bushnell argued that “more than any other factor, it was the startling proliferation of knowledge and of books themselves that shaped the early humanists’ development of their curricula.”7 What bothered humanist teachers was that “books might affect the young with ungodliness or bad style.” The educator Juan Luis Vives lamented “the number of books is now grown so immense” that “not a few are seized by terror, and a hatred of study, when they confront in every discipline the volumes requiring inexhaustible labour to read.”8 Educators and their pupils had become conscious of the fact that it was not possible to read everything. With so many books to choose from, directing or guiding the choices and activities of readers became a major enterprise.Complaints about an abundance of books or information were often sublimated expressions of the unease associated with the contestation of the intellectual authority of texts. With authors offering competing versions and interpretations of the “truth,” readers were confronted with the constant challenge of deciding what is and what is not worth reading. The contestation of intellectual and moral authority, which coincided with the expansion of printed texts, was often perceived through the prism of information overload. For European societies, which were “founded on the mastery of long-lived textual traditions” in both philosophy and religion, the “printing of new and newly recovered opinions posed with renewed intensity the difficult problem of reconciling conflicting authorities.”9Apprehensions about the availability of too much choice often mutated into disquiet about the physical and medical consequences of information anxiety. According to some 18th-century moralizers, the availability of an excessive number of books was responsible for causing mental upheaval among readers, which in turn unsettled their minds. A new problem of cognition was discovered linked to technological change, which created the conditions for the kind of “unsettled reading” that Richard Steele of the Guardian criticized as far back as 1713 because it “naturally seduces us into an undetermined manner of thinking.”In the late 18th century, the Bristol physician Thomas Beddoes lashed out against the distractions caused by information overload. Beddoes railed against the tyranny of “quick desultory reading” which, he insisted, disoriented the mind. Preoccupation with cognition was influenced by a growing tendency to perceive distracted and inattentive reading as a major cultural problem. Beddoes argued that his era was suffering from chronic information overload—“all those pamphlets and periodicals, novels and newspapers befuddling the brain! ‘Did you see the papers today? Have you read the new play—the new poem—the new pamphlet—the last novel?’ was all you heard: You cannot creditably frequent intelligent company, without being prepared to answer these questions, and the progeny that springs from them.”The Meaning of InformationA brief review of the experience of history indicates that the awareness of too much information is a highly subjective one. Such perceptions emerged a long time before society was drowning in information; indeed, it did so at a time when the availability of written text was relatively limited. The sentiment that there is “too much” information was underpinned by the understanding that there were limits to the capacity for the absorption of the written text and the ability to interpret and gain meaning from new sources of information. Both historically and today, therefore, the real issue confronting society is how to give meaning to information—in other words, how to use information to create knowledge. The phrase “too much information” is directly related to the question of distinguishing between what is essential and what is of minimal importance, a task that, alas, does not come easily to everyone. It is through the process of selection and of interpretation that that any given quantity of information ceases to be experienced as a burden and can be transformed into authoritative and meaningful knowledge.The current usage of terms like Information Age, Information Overload, or Information Explosion is significant because of its focus on abstract quantities of data. The existing tendency to quantify data and reduce it to bytes, characters, or column inches overlooks what is of concern and of use to people, which is information about something specific that is related to some purpose. In previous times the question of evaluation, selection, and ultimately the authority of knowledge was more explicitly addressed by those concerned with too much information. In the present era there is a palpable hesitancy about making judgments about knowledge and truth; that, above all, is what produces the difficulty of knowing what is worthy of our attention and focus and what is not. So long as a person’s engagement with the flow of information takes on a peculiarly passive quality, a sense of overload, anxiety, distractibility, and frustration are inevitable.This passive and hesitant orientation is most disturbingly expressed through a growing tendency to accommodate the supposed problems of attention and distraction inflicted on people by the forces unleashed by Information Overload. In higher education the conviction that undergraduates no longer possess the attention span to read serious books has gained widespread influence. In her recent book, Sherry Turkle, the well-known sociologist of digital culture, cites university students saying that “we are not as strong as technology’s pull.”10 Unfortunately, many academics have acquiesced to the apparent loss of students’ power of concentration by replacing books with handouts of key passages or with “stimulating” visual material. As Turkle noted, “even academically ambitious students rebel when they see a reading list that includes more than one long book.”11 No doubt this accommodation to “fractured attention” is justified on the grounds that it constitutes a response to the workings of information fatigue syndrome in higher education.The principal response to the anxiety about Information Overload has been a technical one, namely, trying to improve the processing and management of information. But the development of new techniques of storage and retrieval of information does not relieve their users of the burden of interpreting it and understanding what it means. To gain meaning is a cultural accomplishment, not technical one. Unfortunately, Western society has become estranged from the messy business of engaging with meaning. This sensibility is vividly captured by the oft-repeated idiom (‘That’s too much information!”), so common that it’s now often communicated in texting simply by thumbing out “TMI.” This idiom is often used playfully to warn about “over-sharing” personal details or inappropriate sentiments. But the very fact that the ambiguities of everyday encounters are expressed through a language that quantifies personal communication (“too much”) and reduces it to abstract information speaks to a culture that all too readily assigns people the role of passive victims of information overload.The corollary of Information Overload is the phenomenon of what Nico Macdonald, a British writer on digital culture, has characterised as Paradigm Underload. Macdonald notes that the problem facing society is not the quantity of information but the conceptual tools and paradigms with which to “filter, prioritise, structure and make sense of information.” Unfortunately, without a paradigm, the meaning of human experience becomes elusive to the point that the worship of Big Data displaces the quest for Big Ideas.

1See Plato, Phaedrus, 275.

2Ann Blair, Too Much to Know, Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010), p. 48.3Erasmus is cited Blair, Too Much to Know, p. 55.4Cited in Blair, Too Much to Know, p. 58.5Cited in Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (W.W. Norton, 2010), p. 168.6Sir Thomas Browne, cited in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ‪The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 19.7Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 1996).8Cited in Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, p. 118.9Blair, Too Much to Know, p. 57.10Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power Of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press, 2015), p. 211.11Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, p. 69.

Elite Intermarriage on the Rise

A fascinating new paper by Robert Mare, a sociologist at UCLA, gives a first-of-its kind picture of trends in “educational homogamy” (the tendency of people to marry others with similar levels of education) over the course of the twentieth century. The result is what Mare calls a “great U-turn.” Educational homogamy was very high at the turn of the 20th century (the Gilded Age), then “declined to an all-time low for young couples in the early 1950s, and has increased steadily since then.”

High levels of education-based assortative mating are likely both a cause and consequence of economic inequality. It’s a cause because children born to two highly educated parents have more resources at their disposal than two children born to less-educated parents, and it’s a consequence because a wide social distance between groups may make them less likely to intermingle. Regardless of its relationship with economic inequality, however, it’s clear that the steady rise of educational homogamy is indicative an ever-more siloed elite (a group that, in our opinion, is increasingly out of touch with non-elites, and increasingly beholden to establishmentarian groupthink).

The irony here is that a partial cause of this trend is the rise of meritocracy. Today, women are more likely to go to college and peoples’ wages are more tightly correlated with their education, which increases the incentive to marry someone of a similar educational status. These developments are related to the end of class-based privilege and the rise of a fairer, more egalitarian system. And yet, a byproduct of our hyper-meritocracy is an ever-more pronounced system of educational assortative mating that makes our society more stratified and more unequal.

World Wakes Up to Possible Atrocities Imminent in Burundi

Months of mainstream media reporting on Burundi have tried to downplay the deep fissure between some Hutus and Tutsis in the country. Globally, the Hutu-Tutsi rivalry has sparked repeated waves of atrocity, murders, full on genocide, and round after round of civil and international war. And it is getting harder and harder to continue the game of denial about these tensions in Burundi. The wall has cracked, as U.N. officials have issued dire warnings. VOA reports:

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein opened an emergency session of the council by describing escalating atrocities, intimidation, and hate speech in Burundi, saying it harked back to that country’s “deeply troubled, dark and horrendously violent” past.

“Burundi is at bursting point, on the very cusp of a civil war…  The time for piecemeal responses and fiddling around the edges is over.  The situation in Burundi demands a robust, decisive response from the international community,” Zeid said […]The U.N. secretary-general’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Adama Dieng, said there were clear warning signs in Burundi of potential atrocities. [… Dieng] said Burundi appeared to be “on the verge of a descent into violence that could escalate into atrocity crimes.”

We at TAI have been warning about this possibility for months. Unfortunately, that’s been the exception rather than the rule in the media. While Burundi’s political unrest has had a whiff of tribal/ethnic characteristics from the start, that has provoked a “Lord Voldemort response”: The media has been terrified that naming the problem will feed the problem. But the result has been mealy mouthed reportage that doesn’t tell readers what is actually going on—or actually at stake. Nowhere but in Africa would coverage that is this flabby and deceptive would be tolerated so long by major outlets.

Something to keep an eye on: What will Samantha Power, currently the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., do or say? Power is the author of A Problem from Hell , an influential account of the Rwanda genocide, and made her career advocating for the responsibility of powerful states to intervene to prevent genocide (sometimes called the “Responsibility to Protect” principle, or R2P). Now it may be her turn to face the next round of Hutu-Tutsi violence in the Great Lakes region. But she does so serving a non-interventionist President. How tied will she find her hands? How loudly will she speak out?

Smog Choking Some of Asia’s Biggest Cities

Beijing’s air pollution problem has been well documented, and its persistence in recent years earned itself the ominous moniker of the “airpocalypse.” Though we hadn’t heard much in the media about this problem in 2015, alarm bells were rung once again last week when the Chinese capital issued its first-ever “red alert” over air quality concerns, effectively shutting the city down.

But the capital isn’t the only Chinese megacity enshrouded by dangerous pollutants. As Reuters reports, Shanghai is now dealing with its own smog crisis:

On Tuesday, a curtain of grey smog fell over Shanghai, China’s business capital with a population of over 20 million. It limited visibility and drove the city’s air quality index (AQI) above 300, a level deemed “hazardous” on most scales and which can have a long-term impact on health. […]

The smog prompted Shanghai authorities to issue a “yellow alert,” the third-highest level warning, and to advise elderly, young and sick residents to remain at home, avoid outdoor activity and keep the windows closed.

A red alert in Beijing and a yellow alert in Shanghai—two foreboding color-coded alarms in as many weeks. But air quality concerns aren’t exclusive to China. As Reuters reports, India is cracking down on large diesel vehicles in its own capital city of New Delhi in an attempt to get a handle on endemic smog:

A Supreme Court decision on Wednesday to alleviate the smog-choked capital has unsettled India’s car industry, which says an uneven, haphazard policy makes it hard to plan investments and allows damaging regulatory arbitrage across states. […]

According to the World Health Organization, 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in India. To combat this, the government is debating policies including reducing cars in Delhi or offering cash to drivers who scrap old vehicles. […]On Thursday, according to measurements taken by the U.S. Consulate, Delhi registered an air quality index of 393 – well over the 301 level that marks “hazardous” levels. But Kolkata was “very unhealthy” at 212 and Mumbai “unhealthy” at 172 – all higher than Beijing, which was at 151.

These air pollution problems are going to get worse before they get better. As the Northern hemisphere heads into winter, colder months will spur demand for heating and increase coal consumption. China has tried to hide the depth of this issue with phony numbers, but this December denizens of some of Asia’s biggest cities are being reminded again of the dangers posed by toxic smog.