On books, ideas and hypertext
Communicating ideas that matter
By Joe Miller
A boss of mine used to describe me as “a linear thinker.” I’m sure she meant it as a compliment. I certainly took it as a compliment, too. I studied philosophy. Linear arguments are kind of our stock in trade.
Postmodernism made me nervous.
The more time I spend on the web, the less sure I am that linear is a compliment. The internet — the hyperlink — enables forms of writing that just aren’t practical on the printed page. It moves the nonlinear essay out of the realm of stuffy academic discourse and onto the tiny pocket computers we all carry around.
Of Kondo and condos
A few weeks ago I donated several boxes of books to the library. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve done this now.
- A mountain of paperbacks when I moved from a large house in middle-of-nowhere North Carolina to a small apartment just outside of Charlotte.
- A full three-quarters of my philosophy books when I called it quits after five years as a philosophy professor.
- Still more paperbacks when my wife and I moved in together.
- Hundreds more when we later moved into a Manhattan shoebox.
- A bag here or there every time I get into the mood to organize.
From a collection that once numbered in the thousands, only a couple hundred remain.
Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied
Scholarship takes time. In a recent podcast, Maria Popova, creator of Brain Pickings, sums it thus:
The true material of knowledge is meaning. The meaningful is the opposite of the trivial, and the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia. The only way to glean knowledge is contemplation, and the road to that is time. There’s nothing else. It’s just time. There is no shortcut for the conquest of meaning. And ultimately, it is meaning that we seek to give to our lives.
Popova echoes a long tradition in Western philosophy, one that begins with Socrates’ “the unexamined life is not worth living” and continues through John Stuart Mill’s “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
Later in the same interview, Popova happily endorses the hard work of teaching people what they need, even when it’s not what they want.
Don’t say, ‘I wish people wanted this.’ Sure, it’s great if the market already wants what you make. Instead, imagine what would happen if you could teach them why they should.
The average person is unreflective, always eating a cupcake on the run rather than slowing down and enjoying a good plate of roasted asparagus. Meaning and knowledge are found in leisurely contemplation.
Talking about books you haven’t read
One of my favorite insights from Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read is the counter-intuitive claim that someone who truly loves books would never dishonor them by reading one of them.
Time spent reading a single book is time not spent on all the millions of other books. Non-reading, for Bayard, is not the absence of reading. It’s a reflection on literature. It’s an understanding of how a book is situated in relation to other books.
Bayard’s is an intellectual’s take on books, one that’s informed by having read thousands upon thousands of books already. His is the belief that relationships between texts are more important than the texts themselves.
It’s the recognition that ideas live, not in texts, but in the spaces between texts.
The book as fetish
I mean, fine. Nearly every book in this picture is out of copyright, so you can grab them for free from just about anywhere on the internet. Trinity’s rare and valuable books aren’t shelved in the touristy parts of the library.
Dreher’s photo and tweet are book loving as performance art.
It’s 99% of what passes for erudition on Quillette and the rest of the “Intellectual Dark Web.” Nor is it an appeal that’s limited to right-leaning pseudo-intellectuals. You see it in the avalanche of “You’ll pry my books from my cold dead hands” reactions to Marie Kondo.
Google is rotting our brains
As popular wisdom would have it, the internet has given us all the attention span of a gnat. If you can’t say it in 1̶4̶0̶ 280 characters, no one will read it. Here’s Popova again:
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it.
Laziness strikes again. We simply lack the moral fortitude to do the hard work of understanding.
And where do we find such character?
Right now, I rarely read the internet at all. I spend most of my days buried in book piles and letters and diaries and old philosophy books and what not.
The brave few, armed with old musty books, taking up a cultural stewardship that has been all but abandoned in favor of chasing listicles. Popova calls this a generational reparenting that focuses on “caring for these bygone thinkers, while at the same time imbuing the present generation with their hand-me-down wisdom and their most enduring ideas.”
The confidence that we know what others need even when they themselves do not is an ever-present siren song for scholars.
Generational reparenting rolls from the tongue, a lovely turn of phrase with far less connotative baggage than the paternalism favored by bygone thinkers.
The confession of John Joseph Miller
I suppose I count as a scholar. At the very least, I’ve most of the outward trappings of one. Large diplomas bestowing increasingly pretentious titles. A doctoral dissertation slowly gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. Several articles in academic journals. Lines on my CV with the words “assistant professor of philosophy” in them.
- I’ve never read Plato’s Republic all the way through.
- I once owned — though never cracked the cover of — Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
- I successfully defended a dissertation on John Stuart Mill without reading all 33 volumes of his Collected Works.
Yet I can — or could once upon a time — explain Plato’s cave to undergraduates, situate Kant’s views on aesthetics within his larger architectonic, and publish peer-reviewed interpretations of Mill.
Scholarship isn’t reading every last scrap of text. Scholarship is drawing new ideas from the texts you have read.
Texts and hypertext
If ideas are found in the empty spaces between text, the hyperlink is the means of reifying those spaces.
As Mandy Brown has written in a brilliant post now sadly lost but for the perfect memory of the Wayback Machine (emphasis added):
The hyperlink, with its super simple structure — a direction and some characters of description, which could be as straightforward or as subversive as you wanted — did get off the ground, and it is indeed marvelous. The ability to follow links down and around and through an idea, landing hours later on some random Wikipedia page about fungi you cannot recall how you discovered, is one of the great modes of the web. It is, I’ll go so far to propose, one of the great modes of human thinking.
Tracing the invisible links between texts is difficult work. It’s why scholars and researchers spend months pouring over texts, sweating through drafts of papers, trying on and discarding avenues of research.
Not everyone has the time, the patience, the aptitude for such things. The long research outputs — the book or article or report — painstakingly reconstruct those arduous journeys through the spaces between texts.
The hyperlink is a shortcut. A wrinkle in text, taking readers directly from one text to another by way of a realized idea. In making the invisible visible, hypertext democratizes a kind of thinking that was once available only to the few.
Fahrenheit 451 and the horrors of booklessness
To the bibliophile, life without books is a horror beyond imagining. Indeed, dystopian tales of a bookless future have power precisely because books occupy such a central place in our world.
Books transform readers in ways both big and small. Each book leaves its mark. Each shapes us into the persons we are.
But it’s not the physical object that changes us. It’s the text inside. The ideas we wrestled into existence. The tears we shed. The frustrations we felt. Books shape us as surely as teachers, as friends, as lovers.
Those changes remain with us, even when the teachers, the friends, the lovers do not.
The general public
There’s a reason that policy is (largely) the province of academics and scholars and researchers. Policy is hard work. The people who produce policy are those lucky enough to work in the sorts of institutions that pay them for the time required to wrestle ideas from between texts.
Democracy also matters. If democratic society is to work properly, its citizens have to make informed decisions.
We could insist on “generational reparenting,” on a paternalism that insists on forcing the interested public to start behaving more like scholars if they want to join the policy game.
Or we could use the internet to do the work of creating links for people.
Maybe most of the general public really is content to scan a list of “The 20 Most Expensive Paintings in History,” to borrow one of Popova’s more dismissive examples. But perhaps we as communicators can link that listicle to a short video that reduces Thomas Piketty’s 800-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century to a three-minute animation.
Maybe we’ll even try to make it comprehensible to someone playing it at 2x speed.
The world doesn’t improve because more people take pictures of themselves reading Piketty in especially picturesque libraries. It doesn’t get better if those same people put his doorstop of a book onto a shelf and refuse to part with it.
The world gets better when people act on ideas that matter.
Even if they saw those ideas in a tweet.
