Read this on O’Reilly Radar: Andy Oram getting to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC:

I hooked my friends through the idea of an irreversible political shift. Not a regulatory regime that could be dismantled like the agencies responsible for civil rights, or a mandate that could be defunded like federal housing initiatives–no, in this case a movement integrating the public into government functioning, and that therefore creates an external constituency that helps to perpetuate the system; an ecosystem of non-governmental organizations that will react precipitously and aggressively if the government tries to shut them out.

Every day I’m more convinced that everyone’s first instinct to plan and sell solutions will become one of those thing-of-the-pasts; a century from now historians will pick apart the immodesty of our age. I can imagine them writing

They thought they had the economy under control because they acted quickly not to make the same mistakes that were made at the dawn of the Great Depression. But they were blind to their own mistakes — or rather, that was their mistake…

Our institutions — both in politics and business — are too exposed to the inevitability of human error. It isn’t mistakes we need to be rid of, it’s the notion we can ever be rid of mistakes that needs to be eliminated.

Science is one model to emulate (read on fallibilism). Silicon Valley is another (which I’ve discussed at length).

Those models accommodate mistakes. They have processes for quickly mobilizing to learn and keep moving forward, building on mistakes rather than grudging or sweeping them under the rug.

Oram covered this in his post:

Jeff Jarvis listed, as one of his four key elements of change, the ability for government to fail without risk of recrimination. David Weinberger approached the same theme from a different direction, talking about how all wisdom is provisional, emerging, and scattered. Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck–who will be speaking tomorrow–have repeatedly made similar statements in the context of bringing the innovation culture of the Silicon Valley to the area around Foggy Bottom.

In my first ramp-up blog for PDF I talked about a four-part cycle for successful public/government collaboration. Perhaps we need to start the cycle earlier, or add some kind of parallel cycle, to recognize that the public has to make the commitment asked by Jarvis: the promise to show forbearance when the government fails and to grant it a mandate to do innovation.

The point is that everybody will fail eventually, organizations and institutions will fail, rules will fail, all plans and designs will fail…

The important thing is to make sure that when people and institutions do finally fail, there will be enough viable alternatives nearby to take over their key roles and resources.

I’m not just talking about “too big to fail” banks and other organizations. I’m also talking about the people in them — in both politics and business.

Too few people have too much much power and attention concentrated around them. When they screw up we should be able to say, “Well let’s try something else for a while,” not “this person’s career is finished and now we’re starting all over again with new leadership.”

Related posts from BrianFrank.ca:

• Cisco and the Internal Economics of Organizations
• Ex Industrialism
• ‘Selfless’ and ‘Selfish’ are Both Myths
• The Silicon Valley Model
• Our Society of Overachievers

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Modifying Homer Simpson’s famous quip about alcohol, technology is “the cause of – and solution to – all of life’s problems.”

The same force that’s generating the flood of information is also producing tools to direct it into more manageable channels. The standard examples (to make sure we’re all up to speed on basics here) include RSS feeds and feed readers, user-elect aggregators like Digg and services that recommend content based on your interests and past likes (e.g. StumbleUpon, Pandora, Library Thing, iLike, etc.).

And then we find ourselves on a treadmill, still facing the same problem, still making an effort to address it but not getting any closer to solving it. These applications and services don’t necessarily reduce the volume of information; they may even increase it by making it flow more efficiently.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this paradox is FriendFeed, which works by aggregating all of a person’s online content (pictures, videos, events, blog posts, bookmarks, tweets, shared items, comments, etc.) from the various social applications into one feed, which in turn is aggregated with the feeds of other people to be followed by friends, fans, voyeurs, etc…

Even some of the most prolific users of social media complain that FriendFeed is very noisy and just adds to the burden of being online. As with anything, it all depends on what you do with it. FriendFeed represents an issue that encompasses the entire web: we’re just beginning to appreciate its capabilities and master the new kinds of soft skills needed to use it effectively.

Recall one of the key points made in Part I: “The most effective ways to use computers and cell phones are in an ongoing process of being discovered… an ongoing experiment, or adventure that’s always in beta.”

The people who thrive in web related enterprises are successful largely because they know they don’t know how their projects will turn out. Great hackers and entrepreneurs know they’ll be learning on the fly (and more, more, more, more, more, more, more…). They expect to encounter unexpected setbacks (if they “expect” anything at all) that will require nimble adaptations. And they persist largely because of these risks, not just despite them.

This lesson about innovation and education is the soil in which all subsequent lessons about making something on the web must be sown. Without it there can be very little growth. Without it, to paraphrase a remark from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, we see things “through the spectacles of the preceding age,” like military strategists who are “magnificently prepared to fight the previous war.” By the time these designs and plans are executed they’re already becoming obsolete.

I wonder if this is true of the recent report commissioned by the Associated Press, “A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption.”

The report includes some interesting points and valuable insights, but it seems to harbour some deeply embedded, tacit assumptions about news that keep its thinking lodged in the past. Its findings seem to validate my belief that the whole conceptual map for dealing with news needs to be redrawn. While they pick up on some landmark features of the present, they fail to orient them in a way that leads to the future.

Among the present findings is that “news is connected to e-mail.” This could simply be a technical matter: news and email happen to “come in small snippets of information” and share the same medium of delivery. Many of the subjects in the ethnographic research found themselves looking at headlines that happened to be handy when checking Yahoo Mail or their PDA.

But what the report fails to address is that email is essentially a kind of news; it’s tricky to draw a clear distinction between them – which isn’t to say we should not make a distinction, it’s only to point out that the AP report doesn’t, and therefore misses valuable insight.

It could be argued that the degree to which news differs from email is proportionate with the degree to which news fails to capture people’s attention and interest. If you want to know why people don’t care about “The News,” write down your definition of what makes it different from personal messages and conversations: the same statement can be modified to answer either question.

The notion that News exists on a plane apart from people’s actual lives is the core assumption of the old media that needs to be discarded. Here we find the “spectacles of the preceding age” worn by folks reared in old media organizations.

One could be forgiven for not noticing that the conventional distinction between The News and our actual lives is itself largely a result of technology (language, the printing press, broadcasting) that developed just as helplessly as it is now being broken down. As this recent column for Editor & Publisher states, “journalism is inherently fused with technological evolution.” The News of old was as much of an ongoing experiment as the web – or rather, the web is simply the latest iteration.

Society in general has been an ongoing experiment, and the evolving means of communication has always set the basic pattern for every age.

A recent article in Slate argued that the value of newspapers has been the “social currency” they provide for our actual lives. News items were like tokens to exchange with people encountered in the course of daily business.

At the peak of newspapers’ influence, everyone could assume that almost everyone else would be familiar with some of the content from that day’s paper – “that picture of an egg frying on a city street the paper published; or a comment about a movie review or comic strip; or an opinion about local government based on a piece by a political columnist” – and new relationships developed according to what was said about these common points of reference.

Now the way information is proliferating and diverging into various channels, we don’t all share the same social currency, and it’s increasingly difficult to find shared points of reference. Without common references, it’s difficult to generate conversation with new contacts and get a sense of who they are, and then it’s nearly impossible to establish trust and build relationships – not to mention communities.

This function is increasingly being distributed through online social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace. The information in people’s pages and profiles (including the lists of people who are already friends) is the new social currency… or is it?

David Warsh’s most recent article at Economic Principals argues “That Newspapers Are [Still] the Central Banks of Social Currency“:

“Central banks exist by dint of government monopoly; newspapers owe their special franchise to their owners’ willingness to put capital at risk in a particularly tricky game, the creation and management of public opinion through narrative,” and “the naïve view that newspapers don’t matter much any more is contradicted every time a big story comes along.”

To add my own bit to Warsh’s metaphor, much of the social networking sphere is a fast-paced-yet-going-nowhere derivatives market. Automated tools for aggregating, recommending and rating mostly keep the sub-prime content moving fast enough to save anyone from truly bearing the burden of ownership – the cost of actually having to think – or so we let ourselves assume.

As we have witnessed over the past year in financial markets, this high-volume/high-efficiency set of practices is not sustainable. We need to build social capital that holds real value despite ups-and-downs in the cultural market.

Obviously we can’t turn back time and undo the technological advancements that put us in the position of having to cope with so much information. The best strategies for dealing with it will emerge from the advancements themselves (while building on the social capital they inherit from the past, and staying open to advancements that will continue to evolve).

The most important development isn’t merely the technology itself but how it affects our mental models: the notion of threading information – as in blogs, discussion forums, and mini-feeds on Facebook – is a very useful metaphor to help us make sense of personal identity and social relationships in our complex modern world, both on- and off-line.

Begin with the concept of a “lifestream,“ as it is discussed in this recent ReadWriteWeb post. The best example of a lifestream is probably a personal feed on FriendFeed (e.g. mine, which I admit is a poor example), but anybody on Facebook has a kind of lifestream too – albeit not one that can be managed or viewed as effectively as via FriendFeed.

A lifestream is a continuous record of the events of one’s life. These events don’t have to be all that meaningful or important, and most of them are excruciatingly mundane – a fact that critics begrudge and use to argue that lifestreams are stupid – but it seems obvious to me that the first step towards making one’s life more meaningful is to get a sense of all the associated information in an orderly way, which is something that lifestreaming can help do.

When all we can see is what’s happening at a given moment, we tend to follow the crowd: we fail to develop the ability to think, work, learn, and live apart from that crowd. But when we can view our own actions playing out over time in one continuous thread, as in a lifestream, we get a better idea of who we are (or perhaps aren’t). Then we can stop following the crowd from fad to fad and ground ourselves via sustainable personal identities, each with our own respective knowledge, skills, styles and voices that nobody else can duplicate.

The thread metaphor is especially valuable when we try to make sense of the relation between personal and social aspects of living, or the relation between “the individual” and “the group.”

The value of self-reliance is not merely personal or individualistic. When we each cultivate distinctive talents and personal mastery for ourselves, our society becomes richer and more robust: the greater degree of variety of knowledge and competence is present in a group, the more likely the group is to survive and thrive via emerging challenges and opportunities.

Hence a social fabric develops as our many personal threads distribute evenly accross the full range of experience – not tangling too close together nor leaving too many gaps, but each tending to find an individual niche with just enough wiggle room. And it’s just as important that our threads should all continually stretch towards the future, learning and growing via new challenges, rather than going in circles, or falling slack and getting tied into knots.

My proposal for the role of news is to provide the perpendicular threads that weave our lives into a coherent fabric. Without these common cross-references it’s difficult to maintain an even distribution. Without obective threads being weaved laterally, the fabric may disintegrate into separate bunches, tangles, and braids.

News and personal information (like emails or Facebook notifications) aren’t separate things; they’re more like two lines intersecting (to modify one of William James’s great metaphors). The intersecting point of any given event is neither just news or just personal information, but is referenced by properties of both.

As we communicate through the course of the day, we each have an individual responsibility to continually weave information into the fabric of our world – interpreting each moment into information that can be exchanged both laterally via social/news threads and vertically in the form of personal identity and meaning, leaving some aspect of the thread open, stretching towards the future.

I’ve doubtless made some ridiculous and risky suggestions in this essay, but rather than just being a target for criticism, the speculative ideas herein should be treated as a parts of a working experiment, as well as an actual demonstration of the ideas discussed (not just talk, but action too).

I can’t prove all of my claims, but what’s important is they now occupy a section of my personal thread, or identity. Regardless of whether these claims turn out to be right or wrong, I’ll learn something – about the world and about myself – and move a little closer to finding my niche in a richer, more robust social fabric.

One more thing the AP report, A New Model for News, got right but didn’t work out more thoroughly: building connections is “a job for both people and machines.” With all the hype about technology it’s easy to forget about improving ourselves, rather than merely improving our machines.

The rest of this thread is open.

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New technologies aren’t just threatening old media, they may be the best chance old media has to save itself.

I’m saying this as a fairly conservative and skeptical person. I admit I’ve been largely unimpressed with the content, functionality, and aesthetics of most of what’s out there in blogs and other social media. (My nuanced position is expressed here, treated satirically here, and mentioned here as part of a larger argument.)

Regardless of whether the vast majority of blogs are juvenile and self-absorbed, or unusable, or ugly (or worse), there is still a great deal of undeniable value being generated, and there is immeasurable potential for more. Don’t let the content bias you against appreciating the power of the medium.

As Daniel Drezner (a blogger with real academic creds) wrote in an essay about public intellectuals in this new media era, to argue that “distasteful, disposable and demented material” in many blogs discredits the entire form “would be like arguing that Hustler discredits Harper’s as an appropriate venue for publication, or that America’s Next Top Model ruins Charlie Rose as a place for informed debate.”

The word “blog” should not be mistaken to refer to a kind of online diary full of personal groans and digressions. They may have been born that way (and that description may still be valid for most), but the word has evolved into a technical term used to designate a method of archiving and syndicating/distributing automatically across the web — which is increasingly setting the tone for how all news and commentary is published online.

In the mainstream media, major newspapers and magazines are in the process of not just including blogs, but designing their online presence around them. For example:

• The National Post has recently been redesigned so that many of their non-blog news items and comment columns are posted via their blog system.
• Respected policy magazines like The Atlantic and The New Republic display prominent sidebars on every page listing updates to their various blogs.
• Portfolio, the sharp new business magazine from Condé Nast, incorporate a few of their blogs (eg) as key assets, listing current posts directly below featured stories on the homepage.

As sources for news and other kinds of content proliferate, newspapers are struggling to stay at the centre of public discourse. Some might call it a crisis, but I see it as more of an opportunity for progress.

Which isn’t simply to say that newspapers have always been faulty — I happen to love reading newspapers and magazines, and it has only been in the past year that I’ve moved away from reading “the paper” to getting most of my content online — but to assume that “papers” will forever be preserved in some past or present form is a fantasy. Anything that isn’t in a process of growing or improving is going to get consumed by forward-moving forces.

I don’t take progress for granted any more than I assume legacies will persist. In the late 90′s there was considerable hype about a new economy with new rules until the tech bubble collapsed in 2000/2001. A lot of people from the old-school thought that disaster would discredit the entire movement, but it didn’t — at least not any more than the housing/finance collapse of last year discredited the notion of home ownership.

Through the bust we were able to learn what was actually viable online. A few companies like Google, eBay and Amazon kept growing; a new generation of startups was emerging, bringing back a sense of enthusiasm, focusing on new set of paradigms that were referred to (controversially in some circles) as Web 2.0.

The biggest mistake concerning the web has been to conceive it as merely a more efficient way to do things that were already done offline. We limit ourselves by thinking of websites as paperless catalogues, paperless newspapers and paperless books; computers are not just paperless typewriters, paperless filing cabinets and paperless mailboxes. The most effective ways to use computers and cell phones are in an ongoing process of being discovered. It’s an ongoing experiment, or adventure that’s always in beta.

Consider Facebook, which was conceived (or at least named) after old-fashioned student directories, but quickly went far beyond that static model. The value of Facebook isn’t that it stores contacts and photos, but that it generates streams of fresh experience for users.

It requires a conceptual leap to get from the static to the dynamic mindset. You can’t just begin with existing ideas of static building-block and then add motion to them (like vehicles on a highway, or if you like, an “information superhighway”), you need to overcome those blockish notions altogether and get immersed in the living, breathing, undulating system. The metaphors we use now are streams and clouds.

Rather than thinking of blogs etc as strange, try thinking of how strange and ineffective their forerunners are. Much of the “news” in a newspaper needs to be updated and revised before it even reaches your door — for example, Olympic medal standings. Printed news doesn’t flow very well with actual events.

And why do I need the whole paper when I don’t even read the whole thing? Why can’t I opt out of life & leisure and most of sports in order to get more news, commentary, and business? And maybe my neighbour only wants weather, a few local stories, a few of the biggest national and international stories (to be notified if an election is called or if a major war breaks out), no business news except all of the news that affects his industry and a report of how his investments are doing, all of the news about his favourite hockey team and no news about sports he doesn’t care about, and maybe a few quirky anecdotes to exchange at work.

The new ways of delivering news online are able to flow and stay current with ongoing events while dynamically addressing the customized needs of different people. Rather than simply posing a threat to newspapers and TV, blogs and other new media online might actually save “the news” by making it more effective and relevant to our lives and the world in general.

We’re not there yet, and effective progress isn’t guaranteed; new technology might defeat its own purpose if we don’t take responsibility for making it function effectively. We need to be open to the unexpected value created by new media while building on the value generated by the old media.

Read Part II…

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The notion of ‘will to relevance’ has been appearing in my notebooks since March 2005; as one of my oldest and most important background concepts, it’s overdue for at least a semi-articulate public treatment.

I’m preserving the grammatically incorrect phrasing in order to authentically convey the original purpose and spirit of the concept; it’s an artifact of my extended intellectual adolescence, and by looking at it as it was, it provides a fairly honest account of why and how I arrived at such an idea.

It was the answer (or so I believed at that time) to a problem that had obsessed me on and off since my early high school years: What motivates us? Why do we do what we do? What makes us happy — or at least satisfied? I didn’t just want an inventory of motivations, I wanted to know the secret of human nature.

A second year university course in political philosophy pointed me to Nietzsche’s concept of will to power; and for several years I referred back to that as a provisional solution — but not one that was ultimately satisfying.

Perhaps I wasn’t satisfied because I didn’t fully grasp Nietzsche’s meaning — not to mention the more difficult ideas that are more rightly associated with him — and tended to conceive it with excessive overtones of Hobbes and Machiavelli (thanks to first year political philosophy), who themselves were also simplified by interpreting “warre of every man against every man” too literally and narrowly.

I literally interpreted “power” as meaning objective power over people and things; altruism was thus conceived as a “selfish” kind of act with a selfish purpose (i.e. good deeds are performed in order to feel superior to others, or to make others indebted for future favours in return).

Come to think of it, popular simplifications of Freud’s concepts of unconscious repression and sublimation may played a role in my early thinking as well.

Needless to say I wasn’t keen about that “selfish” formulation of human nature for very long. But nor was I ok with rejecting (or even ignoring) it merely because it was unpleasantly cynical. I was still very much open to the possibility that people gain something by being altruistic; I refused to accept the lollipop land fantasy that people are just nice and good (while others are just evil) without asking questions — as if no explanation would be needed or even wanted.

As my thinking matured (and as I actually read more of Nietzsche, rather than just adorning my thoughts with misappropriated Nietzschean slogans), I began to rely less on over-simple dichotomies (like good-evil, selfish-unselfish) to start my own “revaluation of all values” — “beyond good & evil.”

I may not have realized it at the time, but my intellectual project was being supplied by metaphors from the internet — and more importantly, from the social web, or “Web 2.0.” The old dichotomies were inspired and perpetuated by mechanical metaphors — collisions and friction, turning gears, pressurized steam, etc — so it’s perhaps inevitable for us to conceive a new theory (or at least attitude, or vocabulary) of human nature using the marquee technology of our age.

The problem with the simplified good-evil accounts of human nature is that they treat people as hard, static, well-defined mechanical units — wealth maximizing machines — whereas our behaviour is affected by all kinds of dynamic, ongoing, subjective processes and interactions that are difficult to define and control.

So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation from domination and control to connectedness and meaning. Mind you, connectedness and meaning may just happen to manifest itself as domination and control, but connectedness may also manifest itself as altruism, etc.

In my original notebook entry from March 1, 2005, I wrote that “the tendency of individuals persists to an (unknown) end of maximum social relevance — peer-level connections.”

Google’s search engine (especially PageRank) acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.

And it isn’t just the search engine itself. Witness all the effort that goes into maximizing websites’ “relevance” to increase and sustain traffic. It isn’t just search engine optimization: consider the absurd amount of friending on MySpace, whereby people accumulate tens or even hundreds of thousands of “friends”; or witness bloggers jockeying for “authority” ratings on Technorati by exchanging links and RSS feed subscriptions (which, if you read any of the countless blogs devoted to the topic of how to make your blog popular — another absurdity — too many bloggers seem to value stats far more than actual readers).

But relevance means more than just maximizing connections and links, it’s also about optimizing the appropriateness, context, integrity, vitality, richness, and reciprocity of those relations: it’s about how effective and alive our connections are. The value of the subjective relevance of “1000 True Fans” may be far greater than the value of the objective relevance of 10,000,000 “friends” in MySpace, or “authority” points on Technorati…

Briefly turning the discussion back to political philosophy, consider that authoritarian dictators may have a lot of objective relevance, but their subjective relevance may be fairly low. In fact, ‘the mass’ they rule over could be conceived as a single connection — and a fairly mechanical one, lacking vitality, richness, and reciprocity.

So authoritarian dictators (and “greed is good” capitalist fanatics — the type responsible for Enron and other debacles) find themselves on hedonic treadmills — a term used by happiness researchers in reference to the endless pursuit of immediate gratification, often with diminishing returns, as experiences that once seemed to be ultimate achievements (e.g. becoming president, or earning $1,000,000, or making 1,000,000 “friends” on MySpace) turns out to be hardly satisfying at all (e.g. compared to being declared emperor, or making $1,000,000,000, or being discovered by a record label on MySpace).

Likewise for all the people living under an authoritarian regime, or even working in a large organization, or just temporarily part of an audience assembled around a common central or frontal focal point (e.g. attending a movie, a concert, or a lecture): subjective relevance is low because it lacks reciprocity and integrity, and the context of events may not match the individual’s character: there are connections, but not connections that distinguish any individual from any other.

The most vivid demonstration of the will to relevance may be the popularity of Facebook — especially the social applications such as iLike. Through Facebook people can experience a continuous stream of relevance that is appropriate, contextual, integral, vital, rich, and reciprocal — personal.

But Facebook still falls way short: it tends to favour the immediate and superficial — becoming another hedonic treadmill: the more we use it, the more we need it (or otherwise, the more we use it, the more we get sick of it — call this the hedonic merry-go-round).

The happiness literature (I’m thinking specifically of positive psychology) seems to indicate that happiness most consistently correlates with more sustained activities and engagements, like religious belief and marriage/family, that eventually generate more relevance than we put into them at a given moment because we’ve already invested in them for so long. This supports my thesis — a thesis I developed shortly after reading Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness and following some of those intellectual leads. [Correction made Aug. 9.]

Religious belief is perhaps more interesting. It may be suggested that religious people are happy because they are integrated into a support community, or they tend to live less stressful lives; but consider how much relevance may be experienced by a true believer: every event is potentially another reminder and justification of their belief — another reciprocation, another refinement of context, another degree of richness. There may be some interpretation required to make events fit the beliefs (or vice versa), but that active requirement is largely what makes the relevance so gratifying — by engaging in a kind of ‘rapport with the universe.’

There is another way to develop this kind of broad and deep relevance without being religious in a traditional way: the love of learning.

Mihalyi Csikzsentmihalyi’s work on ‘flow’ suggests that the highest quality of experience occurs “when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable, so it acts as a magnet for learning new skills and increasing challenges.” A condition of flow isn’t necessarily a condition of happiness, but it tends to generate happiness and motivation.

When we develop new skills and work up to new challenges, we’re not just experiencing relevance, we’re also making it easier to find and manage relevance in the future. Learning means investing in relevance — which means investing in long term happiness — with no ceiling or cap.

Think of video games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band. These might seem to be good examples of activities that generate flow: they’re challenging, framed by clear objectives, and occupy one’s full attention. They gradually work players up to greater challenges… but we find there is a treadmill here as well: there’s a ceiling to how far a player can go: eventually the game runs out, and most of the skills learned become largely useless — i.e. irrelevant.

The only “skills” the video gamer retains after finishing the game are improved dexterity and familiarity with a bunch of tunes. Apart from what may have been gained socially, the gamer would be marginally more prepared for other video games and marginally more prepared to learn how to play real guitar. In reference to the latter, they would have gained far more (even just in terms of dexterity and ear) if they spent the same number of hours on the real instrument instead.

Compare someone who invested their time learning to play a real guitar: there is no such ceiling or cap on re-investing this kind of learning. Even if a person ‘beat’ every other guitarist on the planet (as if it could be merely a competition), there would still be countless opportunities available to apply their skills to new challenges: songwriting, producing, teaching, running a record label, marketing guitars, designing gear, learning other instruments… not to mention interacting with a lot of interesting people, who might introduce unexpected opportunities and challenges.

More importantly the real musician has a degree of freedom not available to the gamer. The gamer has no relevance without the game; gamers rely on a steady supply of new games (even worse than the hedonic treadmill: sitting at the end of a hedonic conveyor belt).

Whereas real musicians may become autonomous creators of relvance and meaning: they actually live music. Like the religious believer, every event is potentially another opportunity to co-create their own experience. In the musician’s case this means providing an accompanying soundtrack — or at least rhythm, or melody, or harmony — even if it is silently heard in the musician’s own mind.

Music perhaps provides an even better metaphor for the will to relevance. Rhythm, melody, and harmony are kinds of relevance: tones have specific relations and effects, strings cause each other to vibrate when the right overtone is sounded, rhythm forms a background of reference on which duration is regulated and measured, while melody organizes time into discreet units and coherent wholes.

And then there are the very real, non-metaphorical effects that music has on our emotions — how rhythms can make us move, harmonies can change our mood, melodies can conjure memories and desires… and have you ever noticed how infectious it is — how naturally it connects people? Music can thus be conceived as a kind of medium or ether in which our lives are suspended and stirred with others.

Another such medium is language. Language is what optimizes the relevance of all these thoughts; it connects my ideas to those of Nietzsche, Csikszentmihalyi… and you. Maybe you’ll post a comment. Maybe later we’ll talk about it — or you’ll talk about it with someone else — or you’ll blog about it, bookmark it, or link to it.

Consider how your next move might affect your relevance. Can you afford to reflect on this a little longer, digging deeper, perhaps investing in long-term ability to generate your own subjective relevance? Or should you quickly move onto something else that you can comment on and link to quickly, perhaps moving you up incrementally in the immediate game for objective relevance with Google, Technorati, Twitter, and Digg?

Yes, language is so powerful that even Google is powered by it. Or should I say, “language is so relevant…”

There’s still much more to be said on this.

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Last week I was checking out the new Alltop aggregator and noticed the title, Pragmatism and the Future of Product Design on the Critical Mass’s Experience Matters blog, posted by Dave Robertson.

As with the topic of my last post on frank’snotes, I was excited to find other people discussing what I’m passionate about (I mean pragmatism and its potential for the future… well, I suppose I like product design too, but it isn’t so rare to find someone writing about product design on the web).

Robertson’s inspiration came from this post by Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones, which suggested that an impending economic downturn, demographic shift, and increased environmental sensitivity would bring an “era of pragmatism and restraint,” and that “[r]ather than being a pessimistic forecast, I see this as cause for hope. Events are converging to force us to take steps that are entirely necessary and overdue.”

Robertson’s response to the diagnosis was to propose “getting back to really understanding what customers need” and delivering sustainable products “that have ‘just enough’ features,” which are developed through “human centred research and design skills.”

“Human centred research and design” is a nice encapsulation of what pragmatism is about; it’s a variation on the original sense of the word, but not in a totally unrelated and meaningless way, as so much of the word’s common usage tends to be.

Pragmatism originates from philosophy, specifically American philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th century. It is deceptively difficult and subtle. In fact, its first proponents made clear that pragmatism was not ‘a philosophy’ in the systematic or doctrinal sense, but simply a method – barely more than a rule of thumb – for making ideas clear in the endless way of seeking truth.

In order to resolve the ongoing feud between rationalism and empiricism, the old pragmatists argued that truth is in the making, truthfulness is continually something to be decided by the future: always consider the potential effects or consequences of holding an idea to be true. They promoted the importance of subjecting knowledge to possible falsification, sharing it among an open community, and relating it closely with experiencing and doing.

These notions are largely second nature for people working in the progress-oriented fields of business, technology, and design. Perhaps without ever facing pragmatist ideas explicitly, pragmatism is tacitly the essence of their work – just as it was for the pioneers of American industry and commerce, continuing through subsequent generations of innovators and leaders.

So people who are successful as practitioners and executives (in the widest meaning of the term) hardly need to be convinced or instructed in pragmatist ways of addressing challenges and opportunities: they just ‘get’ it.

But this intellectually naive attitude only works for limited number of years – a number that seems to be getting shorter and shorter.

It isn’t so much that ‘practical’ people don’t rely on abstract theories; they rely on theories that are every bit as abstract as those promoted by even the nuttiest of professors; ‘practical’ people just manage to keep their theories be ‘off the books’ – outsourced to the institutions and conventions that form their working environment.

The ‘practical’ life is not a rejection of theorizing; it is rather an acceptance of an unknown combination of certain older theories that helped form present conditions and values.

You might not care to read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, or Dewey, and you might disdain people like me who do, but your attitude and values are every bit as saturated with philosophy as mine are, because the ideas those philosophers had (and the list of philosophers could go on) have been bred into the social conventions and institutions that we all inherited. And in this way, the person who reads philosophy is more sceptical of philosophy than the person who thinks it’s a waste of time: the latter trusts philosophy blindly, or at least lets philosophy go unchecked, whereas the former tries to stay above or outside of it.

Eventually the institutions and conventions we are accustomed to are surpassed by new ones. As the ground shifts, our old inarticulate assumptions may become irrelevant, and perhaps even misleading. Questions and doubts arise that call for an explicit response — a ‘stiffening’ of one’s ideas, to stand up to new challenges — or at least questions about the mysterious sources of assumptions and conventions. (How do people ‘just get’ stuff? And why do they ‘just get’ that stuff specifically, as opposed to something else?)

Up until then, the ‘practical’ person has owed their success largely to a willingness not to be distracted by such questions and doubts. So much of one’s early career is about doing what’s expected, getting along with conventions, focusing all of one’s attention and energy into the most immediate projects, not allowing future or ‘big picture’ issues to get in the way of getting things done on the ground, in the present.

So I’m going to use a business metaphor and say that ‘practical’ people, in a sense, ‘lease’ the theoretical frameworks in which they work and live, rather than buying into them directly. This allows them to focus on what they’re good at – getting things done – by providing mobility and freedom from the risks and responsibilities of ownership.

Accountants (for example) can’t afford to worry about a pipe bursting or a roof leaking at tax time; they need to focus on their business and let the property owner take care of the facilities. And most businesses will eventually grow and contract; such periods of change are precisely when a business can least afford to be distracted by peripheral concerns. It’s usually preferable to pay an outside specialist (or if your company is large enough, a sibling company) that can take care of all the real estate, facilities, groundskeeping, and property matters so you can focus on doing what you’re actually paid to do.

Now consider that we also work and live on conceptual grounds, in conceptual facilities that need to be regularly maintained and occasionally renovated or reconstructed.

By ‘conceptual grounds’ and ‘conceptual facilities’ I mean all the ideas, theories, assumptions, expectations and conventions that surround us, including all of our assumptions regarding the aims of enterprise, conventions of success, rules and unwritten codes of conduct, cultural values and norms, vocabularies and points of reference, the meanings of words (such as ‘true,’ ‘right,’ ‘good’), favourite metaphors and models, objective methods and techniques, subjective preferences, even the supposed ‘meaning of life’ — anything we can’t see or touch that nonetheless influences our actions and decisions.

In general, a person’s conceptual facilities include all of their thoughts, knowledge, and ideas. More importantly, ‘conceptual facilities and grounds’ refers to the ways in which those thoughts are organized. (Here I’m going to use both ‘thoughts’ and/or ‘knowledge’ to include anything that functions in the mind, including facts, know-how, ideas, perceptions, conceptions, insights, theories, unconscious assumptions – and even feelings and desires, et cetera. Eventually I’ll be more specific, but there’s no point excluding anything at this early stage.)

Everything we do is saturated in thought and suspended in language (to borrow an insight from Niels Bohr). We can’t do anything without some kind of conceptual framework or background, and we can’t do anything with these frameworks and backgrounds without words and symbols to represent and manage their many components. These conceptual facilities and grounds are just as important to working and living as are our physical environment and material tools: they influence everything we do, and we can never get completely outside of them.

But in comparison to physical facilities, our conceptual facilities tend to be largely neglected; we can’t see and touch them in quite the same way (or rather, we can’t see or touch them at all), so they’re difficult to recognize and grasp – doing so requires yet another set of conceptual facilities and tools. This is especially true of those conceptual facilities that touch deeper (or ‘higher’) and more general levels of life.

Discussing thoughts and knowledge in this way – as if they exist on a separate level or in a ‘conceptual sphere’ – is a practical necessity but it’s not necessarily true. It takes advantage of a metaphorical, heuristic, pragmatic instrument to make these complex ideas more clear, distinct, communicable, and manageable.

This in itself demonstrates the point of my essay. Pragmatism means working with concepts to develop “for now” solutions to theoretical problems with practical bearings — in order to develop even better solutions, which will eventually replace the current ones, and on, and on, and on, with no distinct end.

As William James said, by following the pragmatist method, “Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets one at work.”

This may seem to contradict my earlier claim that new kinds of challenges may need to be addressed by ‘stiffening’ our ideas. But pragmatism doesn’t call for a rejection of all rationalizing, it doesn’t mean we may not occasionally have to ‘stiffen’ a theory in order to find clarity, it simply calls for a new “attitude of orientation”: “The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories’, supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

Now if looking towards fruits and consequences happens to be most effectively done using principles, categories, and supposed necessities as temporary facilities and tools, then it is pragmatically acceptable to do so – as long as thinking doesn’t get re-oriented back towards “first things” in the process, mistaking our instruments as the supposed aim.

On the other hand, pragmatism shouldn’t be mistaken as an excuse to walk away from theory and logic altogether: that would assume that pragmatism is a priori the best way of thinking, that our best practices are already worked out and settled – which is exactly the kind of assumption that pragmatism goes after.

To take pragmatism as absolutely the best practice would present it as an absurd contradiction: an absolute principle that advocates rejecting all absolute principles must itself be rejected.

Whereas if we appreciate pragmatism as an attitude, then there is no such contradiction: the pragmatist formulation of truth-in-the-making is an announcement by the pragmatist individual that they have already grown beyond absolute reliance on principles; their mind has matured enough to move about on its own legs; principles have become internalized as a part of that movement instead of being external supports. Pragmatism means taking ownership of one’s own conceptual facilities and grounds, taking them into account, putting them ‘on the books’ as assets.

This is by no means a cop out. There’s a lifelong debt the pragmatist must pay. To get away with saying that “truth is in the making,” you’ve got to actually keep making it, you’ve got to keep working with it and maintaining it, continuing to buy into it – like paying a mortgage. Owning your own knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment.

If you claim to be a pragmatist but don’t take this attitude of ongoing ownership, responsibility and work – continually updating, maintaining, and buying into your conceptual facilities – if you become too carefree about the pragmatist contradiction (i.e. if you say, “Truth is in the making, the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth, so never mind all that intellectual stuff at all”), then someone’s going to call your loan, and you’ll lose your claim to owning your own knowledge.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. You can walk away from “all that intellectual stuff” and be practical if you like, but you can’t claim it’s because of any knowledge, principle, or rationale.

If you walk away from the truth and truthmaking altogether, you can only claim specific practical or arbitrary reasons: you could claim you simply feel like doing so, or you could say it’s because you’re already in the habit of letting others take care of theoretical concerns, or you could say it’s because you’re just going along with everybody around you, or you could claim that your decision is based on some immediate necessity or benefit (i.e. “I don’t have time for that. There are other things I should be doing”), but any general rationalization of the decision not to care about theory and truth would be absurd.

I’ve heard ‘practical’ people make general statements about the superiority of “practice vs. theory,” but it’s just plain stupid to give theoretical reasons for not being concerned with theoretical reasoning.

Theory is itself a kind of practice; it is not opposed to practice. Being concerned with theoretical knowledge, truthmaking and thought does not necessarily mean being impractical. Theory is a different, more general kind of practice aimed at designing and maintaining the conceptual facilities through which we work, learn, and live.

In general, theory is the practice of using language to make our ideas manageable and clear, in order to more effectively make sense of experience. Like any other practice, it can be done with varying degrees of competence. Mastery requires sustained practice through a variety of challenges.

Language and action are generated from two different sets of neural hardware. A kind of indirect translation or mediation has to occur between them, so that a theory can’t simply be turned directly into real action, it must be entirely remade from the ground up; conversely, action can’t simply be turned into theory, it must be entirely remade according to the nature of the linguistic realm.

And because of the time and energy required to master the demands of either realm, it is rare to find someone who has genuinely mastered both of them, and most people who thrive in one tend to avoid the other.

(There are many people who are perpetually ‘too busy’ finishing concretely practical tasks to ever stop and think or talk about what effects all that work will eventually have, seeming to intentionally avoid having to face the mysterious sources of their habits, beliefs, and assumptions articulately, even if that means ‘digging into a deeper hole’ instead of confronting a major problem. On the other hand, there are many people – and I’m one of them – who are perpetually planning, speculating, criticizing, and theorizing, always finding newer ideas before the current idea can be executed, seeming to intentionally avoid ever implementing those plans and theories, even if it means letting opportunities slip away.)

Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with neglecting theory for the sake of focusing on concrete action; but there is something wrong with presuming to own knowledge that you never had to pay for and don’t actively maintain.

This ‘intellectual vagrancy’ is dangerous because it puts blind trust in mysterious and unaccountable sources. When things start to change or go awry, intellectually vagrant individuals (or organizations) get tossed about by circumstances, and have almost no recourse but to hope the system becomes somewhat stable soon so they can find another bit of shelter to crawl into.

By ‘intellectually vagrant,’ I have in mind a specific type of businessperson who does whatever they can for the sake of short-term results. What sets them apart from other more honest executives and practitioners (or ‘tenants,’ who admit they don’t care to know and ‘lease’ their conceptual facilities), is that vagrants actually claim to know their actions are grounded in philosophical rightness, or ‘truth.’ Here I’m thinking especially of certain gross simplifications of pseudo-Darwinian ethics – i.e. “everything is governed by the profit motive,” “greed is good,” “eat or be eaten,” et cetera. Paradoxically, what intellectual vagrants know tends to represent an excuse not to learn any more, nor to ask hard questions, nor give any consideration to other viewpoints.

The big problem with such false claims to owning knowledge is that honest practitioner-tenants get fooled into working and living in the same derelict conceptual facilities, which aren’t properly maintained. When the pipes burst and the roof starts leaking, nobody’s going to fix it. At best, problems might get a temporary patch or cover-up, which may keep the facilities operational and seemingly in good order; but they might get repaired in a way that makes them less sustainable and profitable in the long run, so that one day the whole thing could just collapse all at once, leaving nothing behind, maybe even bringing others down with it. (Think of Enron.)

Of course, to say these collapses leave nothing behind at all is an exaggeration. They often leave behind infrastructure, resources, and knowledge to benefit former competitors, successors and other emerging enterprises. At the very least, such collapses educate its survivors and observers, who may learn something from the mistakes, and might even find a few good ideas that were brought down along with all the impoverished ones.

But it is important to recognize that knowledge – like any other kind of resource or infrastructure – is most beneficial when it can be integrated into a larger system. Events are most educative when they confirm, refute, or refine knowledge we already have.

Without existing knowledge, events will occur to us merely as a few disconnected stories and facts – which will probably be soon forgotten without a context to relate them to. Someone who had never thought much about business (or ethics, or culture, or psychology…) could not learn much from the Enron fiasco, or the tech bubble, or the more recent turmoil. Without having an existing set of ideas about the context in which they occur, such events don’t teach us much.

Whereas someone who already knows a lot about an event’s context might learn enough from it to fill a whole book – or even a whole academic career.

To fully understand events, it’s especially important to work out articulate assumptions, expectations, or speculations about how things might turn out in the future – before they turn out – and why you think that way. By doing so, the future becomes a scorekeeper – a source of objective feedback as to the validity of our ideas and the effectiveness of our conceptual facilities. The future then helps us overcome the subjective weaknesses in our knowledge, notifying us to ideas and assumptions that need to be improved, refined, expanded, updated, opened up, or shut down.

This is what I mean by taking ownership of knowledge. Learning like this is literally a kind of investment – putting ourselves into something, building a self-sustaining venture that can potentially grow beyond ourselves – whereby we eventually “make our ideas work for us.”

So now I can finally return to the point of this essay, which was initially inspired by those two blog posts – one that speculated there might be a “coming era of pragmatism,” and the other that built on that to suggest such an era would demand a more human centred and sustainable approach to product design.

Though it isn’t exactly clear to me whether this is roughly what Ho and Robertson had in mind, my suggestion for an “era of pragmatism” is essentially to make production more intelligent, and intelligence more productive.

For the coming era to be genuinely pragmatic, people in business must think of their work as being part of an intellectual venture, rather than merely a commercial and social one. The business enterprise must be conceived as a laboratory; products must be conceived as experiments, which are conceived so as to confirm, refute, or refine hypotheses; and these hypotheses must be organized and related to one another, with far-reaching general implications.

It is already fairly common to treat products as hypotheses and prototypes; there are always questions that only the products (or services), when put out in the market, can answer themselves: “Will people buy this product? How much will they be willing to pay for it? Will consumers use these new features? What other uses might consumers use these features for? What will people think of how it looks?…”

Now we need to push into a deeper (or ‘higher’), more general level of questions: “Why do people buy (or not buy) this product? What does consumer behaviour tell us about human nature in general? What does it tell us about nature in general? Why do people love buying stuff so much? Why do we love making it so much? Why are we asking all of these questions?…”

I’m not saying that people in business don’t already consider some of these kinds of questions in their work. What I am saying is we should not shy away from the more theoretical questions. We should consider these questions more seriously as an essential aspect of our work.

As I said at the start, to not care about philosophy is to trust it completely. Every person and every organization should have somebody they trust, whose job it is to account for the sources of ideas and assumptions — like a ‘conceptual accountant,’ or conceptual groundskeeper.

But this isn’t just about adding another job title or department to your organization. This calls for a whole new attitude, a whole new culture. I’m talking about a total integration of work and school – business and university – which burnishes all distinction between the two.

[The following section could use a lot more work. This is where I'm stretching myself a bit further into territory I don't belong. Read on to see how/why.]

I mean that people who design products and services should aspire to do world-class academic research — and make world-changing scientific breakthroughs — as part of the design process, not just in obvious disciplines like business and engineering, but in anything that relates to human factors, even philosophy (think of ethics and epistemology: questions of what it means to be ‘good’ and ‘true’ will always continue to come up in any circumstance, and the more facilities we have to address these questions, the better).

It might sound kind of crazy, and obviously it will take years – even decades – to harmonize the different mindsets and develop the kind of education necessary to power such an enterprise, but it is far more down to earth than it might initially seem.

Consider the recent article on Edge.org by Nicholas A. Christakis, a sociologist who uses Facebook to study social networks (read here also). I hope it’s alright to steal a whole paragraph from Christakis’s “Social Networks Are Like the Eye,” Edge 238:

“We are thus at a moment where a leap forward in the methodology for the study of social networks has been made, firstly by building on past work. But secondly, we are at a moment where — because of modern telecommunications technologies and other innovations — people are leaving digital traces of where they are, who they are interacting with, and what they are saying or even thinking. All of these types of data can be captured by the deployment of what I call “massive passive” technologies and used to engage social science questions in a way that our predecessors could only dream of. We have vast amounts of data that can be reapplied to investigate fundamental questions about social organization and about morality and other concerns that have perplexed us forever.”

Business organizations have a wealth of resources available to study human behaviour; they may not know how to use the data to rigorously test hypotheses and develop principles and theories, nor how to design features in order to generate better data that could generate better theories and better understandings, but they’re precisely the very same organizations who need those better theories and better understandings!

If companies have both the most resources and the most need for conceptual facilities, then why wait for the folks at Harvard to figure this stuff out? Become Harvard. Become better than Harvard.

(And note that the American research university is itself not very old — about as old as the automobile, the telephone, and the motion picture — and has never really stopped changing. I see no reason to believe that there won’t soon be another evolutionary leap in higher education, like the one that created the new kind of research-driven schools, like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago in the late 19th century.)

[Something that didn't really occur to me while I wrote this -- which is so glaringly obvious now, embarassingly obvious (I can't stress that enough) -- is how much fusion of university research with business has already occurred in engineering and natural science disciplines: computer science, biotech, medical research, genetics, et cetera. I was so focused on social and human disciplines that I momentarily forgot about the growth of research parks and the many private ventures started by university affiliated researchers to manage and market their intellectual property and patents. This oversight by no means diminishes my case; I seem to have underestimated it myself. So let me say again (with even more confidence this time): social sciences (or 'human factors') disciplines will be the great late-bloomers, who finally discover the methodologies they've been seeking since they began, which I hope will bring both clarity and relevance (along with rigor) and finally generate the respect around campus they've always deserved. I'm going to pursue this in future revisions.]

Maybe most companies don’t want to (or aren’t able to) be distracted from their core business to develop their own conceptual facilities. Maybe most companies are better off ‘leasing’ their conceptual facilities from others. But this new enterprise that I’m proposing would work best if some businesses (or at least some people in, or from those business) get involved.

Now I could be more direct in my pleas; I could suggest that some kind of change in this regard will happen, eventually. And in the process, somebody could get pretty far ahead of everyone else. So do you want to be involved, or do you want to let the changes sneak up on you?

The funny thing is, whether I’m right or wrong, I’m still right. My whole point is that we have a responsibility to check and challenge other people’s ideas: if I’m wrong, I’m asking you to explain how I’m wrong. And if you’re able to explain how I’m wrong about this, then you will have demonstrated that I’m right — “for now.”

All playing aside, all I ask is that you invest a little more in ideas, or in thinking about ideas.

Think of how much life goes by without being harnessing for educational or intellectual use. There are ways to turn anything towards more generative, sustainable, and manageable ends. All experience is in a sense learning experience, but it is predominantly undisciplined and unproductive; we tend to let most things come and go without effecting us or our ideas and habits.

Meanwhile, we allow ideas and habits become important parts of our lives without accounting for them. We learn some of our most influential habits, preferences, and beliefs by accident. Most people have no clue how these were formed, nor would they know how to evaluate or correct them. When these habits, preferences, and beliefs are challenged, people will stand up for “who they are,” they’ll go to war over “what they believe,” but they are hardly able to make any account of the sources of their identity or beliefs, nor make the even the minutest adjustments needed to turn a destructive confrontation into a generative conversation. Instead, most people are content merely to be “who they are,” and “agree to disagree” with anyone who’s different. This goes nowhere.

The ultimate good of pragmatism is not profit or truth; the ultimate good of pragmatism is social. Pragmatism is the attitude by which individuals humanize the organizations and institutions where they work, learn, and live. As these institutions become more humane, it becomes easier to be humane ourselves. As we “unstiffen our theories” we are better able to communicate and collaborate – resolving differences, overcoming challenges, and addressing new opportunities, both in our private lives and as part of larger public enterprise.

A ‘pragmatic plasticity’ is required to be both tough and soft – rigid at times and malleable at others. On one hand we need to use hard facts and rules to avoid or overcome subjective excesses. On the other hand, the desired aim of life is subjective well-being and freedom.

So I’m going to suggest a couple of terms to describe two complementary aspects of the pragmatic approach to working, learning, and living: ‘open objectivity’ and ‘tempered subjectivity.’ Tempered subjectivity is the supposed end, and open objectivity is the means to that end.

Open objectivity recognizes that we can’t accomplish anything together unless we have hard structures and facts to serve as common points of reference. When disputes arise, we need to be able to say, “Well, let’s see how X turns out, then we’ll know if either one of us is right.” But this is no way to enjoy life; merely knowing what’s right and following hard rules is not the whole point of living, so this objectivity needs to be open-ended, incomplete, liberating.

The point of working, learning, and living in those objective structures is to develop enough personal knowledge and competence so that we’re not totally bound by those structures. The aim is to learn how to make spontaneous decisions and evaluations that are just as fair and effective as those calculated by objective instruments. This is what I mean by tempered subjectivity, whereby free thinking has been (in)formed by objective structures and facts, and those structures and facts are always readily available to keep thinking from wandering back towards past mistakes.

Creative freedom is both experienced as enjoyable in itself and serves practical necessity – just like owning your own home. At its simplest, a good and happy life is about having the freedom (which, don’t forget, also means having security and stability) to enjoy spontaneous moments of beauty, discovery, laughter, and love.

At the same time, emergencies and surprises inevitably occur, whether we want them to or not, and these cannot totally be accounted for by objective means in advance. The most effective response to new realties is performed by people who have been trained to just know what to do without being paralysed by analysis.

Ultimately, a society of human minds is smarter than anything we could ever design. But our minds can’t function without conceptual facilities, and these facilities are designed. If they’re designed poorly, we think poorly; if they’re designed well, we think well.

And if we think well – which is to say, in a way that is creative, tempered, organized, generative, alive, and accountable – then the rest of our wants and needs will cease to be problems. When thinking is done well, all living becomes a positive, creative, fulfilling, vital experience.

Visit openconceptual.com for more info. Email me at bd.frank@gmail.com or comment at frank’snotes.

[Thanks to a suggestion by Adrian, I'll be publishing a PDF of this and my other essays. It might take a few days because I tend to start tinkering too much when I do stuff like that. Expect it this weekend (by March 9). Email me if you want updates.]

[Another update: March 9 has come and gone by a few hours and the PDF isn't gonna happen, yet. I started fixing up a couple of parts that I wasn't happy with... and one thing led to another, and now somehow I've started to touch on Locke's ideas, among other things (that I shouldn't be 'touching' without more care and research). Needless to say, the forthcoming draft will not be shorter or lighter than this one, but it will be more comprehensive and include more citations, examples and explanations.]

No related posts.

I was inspired to write this by the introductory essay in Lewis Lapham’s ambitious new periodical, Lapham’s Quarterly, which is about “finding the present in the past, and the past in the present.”

“Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.”

That may seem like a contradiction; it might seem that history has more to do with preserving the past while delaying or avoiding the future. Admittedly, this is often true: some people abuse history as an excuse to turn away from the present and the future — the position criticised by Nietzsche in “The Use and Abuse of History.”

So what about the use of history? Jacques Barzun answered this question with characteristic simplicity and directness: “The use of history is for the person.” Obvious enough, but it’s apparently easy to forget, perhaps especially in the education system.

Studying history is about educating oneself for the present and future, not just preserving or restoring the past. According to Barzun, history provides something that neither science or art can: an intuitive sense for “continuity in chaos… attainment in the heart of disorder… purpose.” Science denies this sense, while “art only invents it.”

You could argue that science does provide a sense of purpose, and that art provides it in a really genuine way as well, but consider that such ways are essentially historical. Science and art have histories (and biographies) like every other human endeavour; it is mainly through history and biography that they converge and become meaningful (or just useful) to living persons.

It might be difficult to recognize the importance of history in this regard because it’s so deeply involved in our habitual ways of thinking; we tend to take it for granted, calling it good old common sense, which demands no further elaboration.

If I read it correctly, Barzun’s argument is that history is common sense which has been educated and refined through conscientious research and composition; history is common sense becoming a more comprehensive “logic of events.”

History is like science in that it involves discipline and produces falsifiable results; we can objectively evaluate the merits of historians and their works by checking their accordance with trustworthy facts and practices. But history is not as severely limited by methods and formulas as science. History foremost serves (and is served by) actively thinking minds.

We might say that all scientific and artistic achievements begin and end as history. All scientists and artists begin with some kind of common (or historical) sense – an “untaught knowledge of how the world goes”; when this sense is violated – by some fact or event that defies it – scientists and artists are moved to make an account of it. If the account is successful, then it will occupy a place in the history of human achievement; even after it is surpassed by later successes, even after it is proved false or has been replaced by other styles, it is still potentially useful as history.

This is perhaps most apparent in biographies of scientists and artists; history humanizes what may otherwise be inaccessible or uninteresting. History reassures us that Newton and Shakespeare didn’t come from some superhuman realm, bringing fully formed talents and infallible ideas without context; it reminds us that the great natural philosopher struggled through mistakes and self-doubt like anyone else might, and even the great poet owed as much to circumstances and history as he owed to intrinsic genius.

History helps us to associate and connect. Emerson described history as a record of the “works of universal mind” – a continuous intellectual enterprise – access to which is available to anyone who would “read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life in the text.”

“What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand,” and “all that is said of the wise man…describes to the reader his own idea, his unattained but attainable self.”

The “unattained but attainable self” is the organ that both uses and makes history – or uses history to make history – to live more creatively and effectively.

People don’t merely live, we tend to live for something, or towards something. Many people (too many?) are content to live and work towards objects that already exist – acquiring prize possessions. Other people are compelled towards objects that don’t exist yet – opportunities to discover or create something new. Instead of pursuing existing objects, such people seek to fill gaps where they feel something could or should be (suggested by facts or events that defy common sense).

These “gaps” might take the form of scientific anomalies and inconsistencies, such as the theoretical differences between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity.

Michael Polanyi described scientific discoveries as beginning with “solitary intimations of a problem, of bits and pieces here and there which seem to offer clues to something hidden. They look like fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole… its content is undefinable, indeterminate, strictly personal.”

There is at least one major problem that every person must face eventually: the future – or more specifically, who to become in the future.

We have a sense of who we might become, but it may be unclear and uncertain. In this way, Emerson’s “unattained but attainable self” is like Polanyi’s “unknown coherent whole.” The future is a kind of problem (or opportunity) to be resolved and accounted for. Even those who “leave it to fate” by saying “whatever happens, happens,” aren’t avoiding the problem; they merely resolve it in a lazy and uncreative way, by filling the gap with a dud.

In a way, such people actually aspire to be ineffective and out of control. They generate a passive ideal from their intuitive sense of life as having no purpose – or at least insufficient purpose for willing and responsible engagement – and this becomes their main assumption about life: their horizon of attainability stops at ineffectiveness (or helplessness).

But a more active and conscientious exposure to history, which goes beyond immediate experience and common sense, introduces many facts that contradict and challenge the notion of helplessness. History provides examples of great accomplishments and accounts of how they occurred, which invariable involve some combination of active attention and personal will.

These facts thus poke holes in idealizations of helplessness, creating new problems to be resolved, which hopefully lead to a more vivid sense of purpose: “How can you say that whatever happens, happens, when history demonstrates that what happens largely depends what people do?”

So history can be used to demonstrate that life means the purposeful act of living, not merely something given to passive recipients. As Barzun said, history’s use is to provide an intuitive sense of purpose, or “attainment in the heart of disorder.”

José Ortega y Gasset, a philosopher who was obsessed with history, calls this notion of personal becoming a “vital project”: “The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is – a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality.” In other words, each person is “something which is not yet but aspires to be.”

Steven Pinker has used these statements by Ortega as an example of the “blank slate” argument, which he opposes – and which I think Ortega would oppose too. Ortega was writing metaphorically; he was exaggerating to make an ambitiously metaphysical point about the creative aspect of humanity, which distinguishes us (without separating us) from the rest of nature.

Ortega compensated elsewhere by going too far in the other direction, suggesting that our aspirations and preferences are given to us, exaggerating the innate biological factors into an almost Platonic realm of “eternal” forms and ideals. Here’s an example, which somewhat demonstrates Ortega’s principle of a vital project:

“In the slumbering depth of the feminine soul, woman, when truly a woman, is always the sleeping beauty, waiting amid life’s forest to be awakened by the kiss of the prince. In the depth of her soul she bears, unknowing, the pre-formed image of a man – not an individual image of an individual man, but a generic type of masculine perfection. And, always asleep, she moves like a sleepwalker among the men she meets, contrasting their physical and moral figures with that of her pre-existent preferred model.”

As you can see, Ortega wasn’t afraid to amplify some claims for literary (perhaps laughable) affect. As with Nietzsche, it is fairly easy to find a few quotes and phrases in his work to give colour to all kinds of radical positions, without bothering to read more deeply for his underlying message or purpose.

Now it strikes me that this itself is a demonstration of our relationship with the world, and thus our sense of the future. You can’t get a fair account of Ortega’s purpose from the few phrases that you might receive from people like me and Steven Pinker; neither can you get a fair account of life’s purpose from the few impressions you might happen to passively receive. We must continually work it out for ourselves.

Life presents a lot of information – far more than we could ever actually recognize and manage – from which we select only what interests us, or what concerns us, or what defies our existing knowledge, or what we feel is actually worth our attention. From these limited selections we compose an account of life.

As any decent scientist will tell you, the truest accounts tend to be generated from the largest and most diverse samples. A survey that carefully selects 100,000 people from a representative cross-section of society will be far more useful than a survey of subscribers to a special-interest magazine, or an arbitrary survey of people who happen to be walking through the local mall on a weekday.

As in science, an effort must be made to generate fair and diverse samples for our historical or common sense accounts of life. In some cases this calls for restraint, cutting off impressions that might be too biassed or unrepresentative; in other cases it means going out in search of new impressions to help fill in gaps – and studying history is one of the most effective ways to find more facts and impressions. Above all it involves active attention and personal will; care and conviction; discretion and aspiration; responsibility, respect, resourcefulness, and resolve.

The analogy with survey samples isn’t quite accurate: historians don’t actually use their entire “sample” the way statisticians do; even after a first round of selections have been made, there’s still far too much information to cope with, so some facts and impressions are selected again to be brought into the foreground of the account.

We do the same thing through common sense: the mind naturally selects some impressions for the foreground, tacitly ignoring the rest as peripheral. Even someone who possesses vast knowledge – a “broad sample” – doesn’t actually use much more knowledge in specific situations than someone who has much less to select from.

But a large supply of knowledge increases the quality and relevance of those few facts and impressions that can be used. Here a better analogy might be a person’s wardrobe: people with a lot of clothes don’t actually wear more at any given time; the benefit of a large wardrobe is to have just the right thing to wear for a specific occasion.

Another version of that analogy is that a person with more clothes is better able to incorporate new articles into their wardrobe:

“The more historical knowledge we have, the more we can learn from any given piece of evidence; if we had none, we could learn nothing.”

So wrote R. G. Collingwood, another philosopher of history, who went on to claim that “historical thinking is an original and fundamental idea of the human mind” – something innate or a priori – “an idea which every man possesses as part of the furniture of his mind, and discovers himself to possess and in so far as he is conscious of what it is to have a mind.”

For both Collingwood and Ortega, it isn’t just the past that compels us to study history, but the present and the future. For Collingwood, the study of history begins here and now – or at least we begin by “using the present as evidence for its own past… and any imaginative reconstruction of the past aims at reconstructing the past of this present, the present in which the act of imagination is going on, in which the here-and-now is perceived.”

Ortega goes farther, claiming that “life is an activity executed in relation to the future; we find the present or the past afterwards, in relation to that future.” More specifically, “it is when I find in the past the means of realizing my future that I discover my present.”

Returning to the wardrobe analogy, imagine finding a great new pair of shoes (or a jacket, or a hat, or suspenders, or whatever) – they seem to be what you’ve always been looking for. But before making your purchase, you’ve got to think back to what you already have in the closet that might match. If you don’t possess anything that works with those green shoes or pink suspenders, then you lack “the means of realizing your future,” and the present transaction comes to an end.

Remember that I began this essay with a quote from Lewis Lapham about “defending the future against the past.” By claiming the past is something we need to defend against, I take it he’s referring to ideas and habits we inherit blindly – the rigid conventions, misleading assumptions, outmoded methods, and ungenerative ideals that promote ignorance, passivity, and helplessness.

These ideas probably exist (and persist) because they’ve been useful: at some time they served a purpose, or helped people find “attainment in the heart of disorder.” But ideas, like everything else, have limited lives; eventually they need to be managed, updated, or replaced.

When ideas persist beyond their original purpose, they don’t just become useless, they become worse than useless: they’re an additional burden or constraint, making it even more difficult to make sense of present problems and opportunities.

Arguing this point, Ortega wrote that we grow into a “network of ready-made solutions” before we’re even aware of the problems they’re supposed to solve. As a result, “when we come to feel actual distress in the face of a vital question, and we really want to find its solution… not only must we struggle with the problem, but we find ourselves caught within the solutions previously received and must also struggle with them.”

The best way to avoid this may be to study history: to appreciate our inheritance, and to begin to understand the complex ways in which ideas and conventions have evolved.

Earlier in his career (much earlier), Barzun wrote that history’s greatest weakness, “its uncertainty and inability to put things into neat bundles,” was also its greatest strength, “its great advantage over ready-made systems.” History keeps thinking alive: “Its difficulties force the student’s gaze to discern in each event and person its unique character, to mark and remember its own shape. It is a discipline that strengthens individual judgement and keeps bright the points that connect imagination with present reality.”

Emerson, as we might expect, was much more poetic in expressing this need:

“What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man.”

That “light by which man is truly man” is the sense of life’s incompleteness; it selects and brings into the foreground those “solitary intimations of a problem… fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole,” a compelling mystery which we call the future.

Notes:

This essay is dedicated to Jacques Barzun (presuming this is worthy of such a dedication), whose 100th birthday is tommorrow: Nov. 30, 2007.

If I hadn’t arbitrarily bought A Stroll with William James in a used bookstore two summers ago (and then spotted The Modern Researcher a few days after that, and A Jacques Barzun Reader hours later) I would never have found the proper discipline or encouragement to write.

I highly recommend learning more about Jacques Barzun’s work. Here’s the Wikipedia entry, with links… a recent New Yorker article… and… and… more… a site and blog dedicated to his 100th… and another site.

Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence is amazing… A Jacques Barzun Reader touches on most of his essential points… Simple & Direct and The Modern Researcher are invaluable… and that’s just a beginning…

Quotes in this essay are from: Barzun, Clio and the Doctors and Of Human Freedom; Collingwood, The Historical Imagination; Emerson, “History”; Lapham, “The Gulf of Time” in Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2008; Ortega, History as a System, What is Philosophy?, and Man and Crisis; Polanyi, Meaning.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions or comment by email: bd.frank@gmail.com.

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