The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 13
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture, both broadly construed. This is a brief installment, a meditation you might even say. As always, I hope you’ll find something worth thinking with, if not in my own words then in some of those I happily cite below.
I don’t know why exactly we gravitate to certain writers or thinkers, not just as convenient citations we drop here and there, maybe to add a bit of heft to our own flimsy pronouncements or to have the sheen of their prose shine on our lackluster sentences—but as people, people we want to have in our heads and maybe even our hearts as we think through the business of making our way in the world. I mean, of course I can think of some reasons for this—you are attracted to their ideas; you are convinced by their arguments; their mode of thought resonates with yours; they mirror back to you, in a more respectable or elegant way, your view of things; etc. But in truth, I think it’s something a bit more than all of that, with reasons as varied as those that account (or fail to account) for all of our other friendships, and I hope that, at best, it is not only a matter of these voices ratifying our own thinking, but also a matter of their challenging and questioning it. In other words, I like to think that these voices we invite to the table we set in our minds sometimes snap back at us, dissolve our pretensions, and otherwise put us in our place. Whatever the case, the poet W. H. Auden is, for me, one of these people. He sits next to Hannah Arendt.
I hear him enjoining me from time to time, “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.”
It’s good to be reminded of this. Mostly because while we are all tempted to nod along with the bit about our “crooked neighbor,” whether we feel any obligation to love them or not, we’re less prepared to assent to the crookedness of our own heart, the very one with which we are to do the aforementioned loving. Again, it’s good to be reminded of this, and better still to take it to heart, because, assured of the purity of our own motives, we might very well destroy our neighbor in our unchastened efforts to do good by them.
All of this is true and good to consider, but it’s not exactly the path along which my thinking has been more recently prodded by this particular line from Auden. Instead, I’ve thought about the other way we might take the word crooked. I initially took it in the sense that we intend when we talk about “crooked politicians,” which is to say “corrupt,” “malfeasant,” “no good.” I suppose it is from crooked that we get “crook,” as in Nixon declaring, crookedly, that he is not a “crook.” But crooked also means simply “bent” or “not straight,” as in the shepherd’s crook or hook, which is a staff with a curved end. And the two senses are related. The bend or lack of straightness of the crook suggesting a departure from the straight path as a metaphor for a morally upright life.
The analogy is just that, however, an analogy of meaning and not an identity. So, what is not straight is not, for that reason, also morally suspect. It’s just not straight. Crookedness, in other words, is not necessarily a flaw, nor should it necessarily be imagined as a problem to be solved or a fault to be corrected. Maybe the crooked heart is just the human heart, period—irregular, oddly out of shape, somewhat unpredictable, serpentine, bending in on itself at points, a place where anyone might get lost, even the self for whom the heart is a synecdoche.
Consider Kant’s famous claim that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” In the immediate context, the idea is that human beings are unjust by nature (i.e., morally crooked) and will abuse power for their own good if entrusted with it, which is not necessarily a principle I’m inclined to bet against. But what most strikes me about Kant’s observation is the note of mild exasperation or annoyance that I hear when reading it as part of Kant’s call for a project to discern the laws governing human behavior at scale, a “philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race.”
The short essay in which the “crooked timber” line appears is titled “Idea of a Universal History With a Cosmopolitical Purpose.” It opens with the claim that “whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event are determined by universal laws.” Later in the opening paragraph Kant avers that whatever role human freedom plays with regard to marriage, births, and deaths, “the annual tables of them in the major countries prove that they occur according to laws stable as [those of] the unstable weather.”
I now hear in Kant’s line about the “crooked timber of humanity,” not a sage, even wryly appreciative regard for humanity’s inescapable flaws and foibles as one might find in Chaucer or Montaigne, but an anticipation of the technocrat’s annoyance with the recalcitrant human element, which eludes their total mastery. If only we had sufficient data, we could aim deliberately at the realization of the grand designs of nature for the human race by bringing greater swaths of human activity under predictive administration. As I read him, and maybe I am not reading him well, Kant is here giving incipient expression to the same dream Eliot would warn us about nearly a century and half later, the dream of “systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”
I hear in Kant an adumbration of the spirit that animated the Google engineer’s reply in this anecdote Matthew Crawford recently relayed in his own newsletter:
In 2009, one of Google’s self-driving cars came to an intersection with a four-way stop. It came to a halt and waited for other cars to do the same before proceeding through. Apparently, that is the rule it was taught—but of course, that is not what people do. So the robot car got completely paralyzed, blocked the intersection, and had to be rebooted. Tellingly, the Google engineer in charge of the autonomous vehicle program said some years later that what he was learning from the experience was that human beings need to be “less idiotic.”
For his part, Kant’s younger contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, already dreamed of the day when we would live our lives in the full public view and it would be possible to collect all the data we would need to administer the world for human happiness. “It were to be wished that every man’s name were written upon his forehead as well as engraved upon his door,” Bentham declared. “It were to be wished that no such thing as secrecy existed that every man’s house were made of glass.”
Why? Well, because then “a whole kingdom, the great globe itself, will become a gymnasium, in which every man exercises himself before the eyes of every other man. Every gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible influence on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down.” In fact, we could even dare to hope that “there will be no moral enigmas by and by.” In his (partial) defense, Bentham appears to be arguing that if we could thus tabulate all outward actions, then “there would be the less reason to desire windows to his breast.” But, as we now know, this was wishful thinking, reflecting a failure of know-how rather than any kind of firm principle.
So Auden’s voice chimes in again, this time with “The Unknown Citizen,” the last lines of which report about the unknown citizen,
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Or, more forcefully, Lewis Mumford’s, who already in the early 1960s understood the uses to which the power of computing could (would) be put. Somewhat dramatically, he wrote that it would be like the reinstatement of the eye of the Sun God bearing down on us:
“In the end, no action, no conversation, and possibly in time no dream or thought would escape the wakeful and relentless eye of this deity: every manifestation of life would be processed into the computer and brought under its all-pervading system of control. This would mean, not just the invasion of privacy, but the total destruction of autonomy: indeed the dissolution of the human soul.”
I’m partial to the Eye of Sauron, but I don’t take Mumford to be the sort who was reading Tolkien in the 60s.
While writing this, I remembered that I had once before written about Kant’s crooked timber. Turns out it was a little over ten years ago and resulted in my proposing a corollary: If out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made, then if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it.
In that post I also cited Evgeny Morozov’s critical assessment of the then-current fancy for all things “smart”:
The problem with many smart technologies is that their designers, in the quest to root out the imperfections of the human condition, seldom stop to ask how much frustration, failure and regret is required for happiness and achievement to retain any meaning.
It’s great when the things around us run smoothly, but it’s even better when they don’t do so by default. That, after all, is how we gain the space to make decisions—many of them undoubtedly wrongheaded—and, through trial and error, to mature into responsible adults, tolerant of compromise and complexity.
From a certain vantage point then, crookedness begins to feel a bit like the thing in us that keeps us from being wholly predictable and subject to administration, all that is not regular, uniform, unsurprising, interchangeable. That which requires actual attention to the particularities and peculiarities of our being. That which is inefficient, time-consuming, unquantifiable. What resists commodification. What muddies the logic of a cost/benefit analysis. What is done at whim, for no reason and maybe even for bad reasons. It thus includes the mistakes we must make to learn and grow and mature.
If the crookedness of timber reflects the history of the particular tree from which the wood was hewn, the rainfall on given years, say, or the soil quality or the wind or sunlight it receives—I’m not a woodworker nor do I chop down trees, so, you know, take this for what its worth—then we can imagine that our crookedness likewise reflects our history: the communities we’ve belonged to, the friends we’ve made and lost, the chance happenings, heartbreaks, losses, and triumphs, the stories we’ve internalized about the world and about ourselves. All that has pulled and tugged on us, worn us down, nurtured us, broken us, and lifted us up. That is our crookedness. The crookedness we must learn to love within ourselves and in one another.
Wendell Berry, who at the table in my mind sits next to Illich, gets the final word:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.…
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Read the original article
Comments
By renewiltord 2023-07-2820:583 reply Sympathize with view in article. But straight things can be made from crookedness. Classic example: Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses. Perhaps argue that humanity stripped. I think not.
Of course, meta-problem: how to ensure that is technique? How to ensure exploitation of technique: "you cut" (because I know you can't cut straight).
Still, meaningless for technocrat to feel "annoyance with the recalcitrant human element, which eludes their total mastery". Behaviour such as this is roughly modelable.
First-order planning is "Here is a plan that will work if all will abide". Second-order planning is "Some will not abide. Here is a plan that will work given that". Third-order planning is "Some will not abide. Both the plan and compliance with it will alter the conditions of the plan. This is how the plan works given that." ad inf.
You can hew great stability out of the unstable: A logical network reliable to some degree out of an unreliable physical network. Nothing is perfect: not knowledge (you can only reach some falsifiability), not networks (you can only get some reliability), not even logic or mathematics (since the proof is subject to our human fallibility).
By anttiharju 2023-07-298:57 This reminds me of some game design video/article/talk (don't remember) where a MOBA (League of Legends?) was at least attempted to design in a way that there would be the balance of the imbalance.
It boils down to sure, some playable characters are too strong, but given enough characters to select from, the "meta" will shift around because there'll always be something else to counter whatever the other team chose. There might be a lack of balance in a single match, but across multiple matches, there's no one stable winning formula.
Really wish I had a link to the resource I'm trying to reference here.
> Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses.
Unlike a lot of more complex models, that one really works in practice. Game theory rises to the level of Solomon. Has it ever failed?
It works for uniform cake. The failure mode is when the cake is non-uniform, and the children want different things. In this scenario the top of the cake has two pieces of fruit, a slice of kiwi and a slice of strawberry. It's a soft cake, so the fruit can't be split or cut. Child A cuts the cake into two slices, each with one piece of fruit. Which slice does Child B choose? If you're lucky, A likes strawberry and B likes kiwi, and B chooses what they want. If you're not, A likes strawberry and B is an asshole that doesn't care about fruit, so B chooses the strawberry piece knowing that A likes strawberry, and picks that piece just to ruin A's day. That's over the top, mean and spiteful you say? Have you met children!?
By willcipriano 2023-07-302:48 Don't make a cut you aren't happy with either side of.
By ssivark 2023-07-2913:53 > Game theory rises to the level of Solomon. Has it ever failed?
There’s a reason we study the Prisoner’s dilemma and its failure modes.
With regards to the cake example more specifically, what makes it somewhat trivial is that the state of the world is fully observable, utilities are easily computable (volume of cake), etc.
By s1artibartfast 2023-07-2822:02 I think the author would agree with you based on their conclusion:
>... we can imagine that our crookedness likewise reflects our history: the communities we’ve belonged to, the friends we’ve made and lost, the chance happenings, heartbreaks, losses, and triumphs, the stories we’ve internalized about the world and about ourselves. All that has pulled and tugged on us, worn us down, nurtured us, broken us, and lifted us up. That is our crookedness. The crookedness we must learn to love within ourselves and in one another.
The sad part is that there are plenty of good people. The problem comes down to the system itself. The system selects for crookedness and propagates it.
Evil always has the upper hand in controlling the system because evil people have access to a far broader range of tools and techniques to achieve their goals since they don't need to concern themselves with moral or even legal hurdles. Evil can pull the trigger with ease whereas good hesitates; that's why evil has the upper hand.
Life isn’t like children’s cartoons, where there’s “goodies” and “baddies” and we need to figure out who is who, then lock all the baddies up in jail forever. To quote Solzhenitsyn, “The line separating good and evil passes through every human heart”.
Your philosophy is shared by all the people who committed the most evil acts of the last century. All of them have tried to stamp out the “evil people” in their societies. They only disagree about who the evil people are.
I disagree. There is a spectrum and some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power.
I suspect that many of the attempts at social cleansing are natural (though not necessarily just) reactions to other less visible evils carried out over longer periods of time by those in power. Clearly the Bolsheviks in Russia were not happy people... There was a process that had been occurring for centuries prior which made them unhappy enough to carry out a revolution. It is known that Russia's feudal system had been particularly harsh on peasants for centuries.
The French royals were so detached from the misery which they caused that it seems somewhat unsurprising that they couldn't even keep their heads physically attached to their bodies in the end. Their metaphorical heads were already quite detached from reality before the guillotine made the separation literal.
By vianneychevalie 2023-07-297:292 reply I think you’re mistaken, at least about the French revolution. It was carried out by rich people, looking for more power, making use of a common and regular occurence of popular uprising (Jacqueries, in political science, is the name of those quite common « revolutions »).
Royalty does not necessarily cause misery, Sweden, Spain, the UK are all monarchies. Colbert and Louis XIV built a lot of foundations that you know France for today; even later non-democratic regimes such as the Second Empire (Napoleon III and Haussman) structured the Paris that brings tourists the world over…
The French revolution - that I know of - led to the invention of restaurants because rich people from remote cities came to Paris and wanted to live the fastuous life they envied from nobles. Social cleansing? Nothing of the sort, social exploitation as always, from where money and power came as always.
By gumby 2023-07-2919:07 > I think you’re mistaken, at least about the French revolution. It was carried out by rich people, looking for more power, making use of a common and regular occurence of popular uprising
It is always thus; one must belong in order to revolt. In fact that was successfully exploited by the Swedish King in the mid 16th century by wiping out a significant chunk of disaffected aristocrats to form a moat between the monarchy and the classes that couldn't afford to revolt. A similar strategy was taken by Louis XIV by forcing the aristos to move to Versailles away from their intrinsic power bases. Of course in bot cases this just delayed things and the middle classes formed alliances with aristos and overthrow those regimes too.
You see this also in both competing sides of the Chinese civil war, Viet Nam's and India's independence movements, the Bolsheviks, US revolution and its civil war, etc. The hagiographic retellings always emphasize of the popular underpinnings in order to try to establish or maintain legitimacy, but it is never the case.
By toyg 2023-07-298:40 Spain effectively lost its monarchy status by popular will, and it took a violent and very bloody coup to reinstate it - but even then, as a ceremonial puppet. Similarly the UK. I am not familiar with Sweden but from what I occasionally read, the Swedish crown lost pretty much all its power too. Monarchy as an institution is fundamentally bad in the long run, because belonging to a certain family is no guarantee of competence in government - something that the Romans had already discovered.
> some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power.
I’d similarly argue that some people are much more good (in the sense that their work actively makes society better). Their concentration is also higher near the centers of power. An awful lot of people go into government out of a genuine love of their country.
By southerntofu 2023-07-297:361 reply I understand your point, but strong disagree from experience.
What do you think happens to people who want to do good by approaching positions of power? In my experience, friends who became teachers or cops, they either became evil/abusive themselves, or they were pushed into depression by social exclusion and either left or killed themselves. These are some of the jobs with the highest suicide levels, precisely because some people came to do good while realizing the systems in place made it entirely impossible.
> These are some of the jobs with the highest suicide levels
What data are you using please?
By southerntofu 2023-07-309:33 Thanks for asking, made me check. It seems teachers suicide data is not as drastic as hearsay has it, although from anecdata i believe depression is very widespread:
https://blog.francetvinfo.fr/l-instit-humeurs/2019/11/09/cha...
As for the cops, there are a few statistical/sociological studies. I may have exaggerated claiming they are the jobs with the highest suicide levels, but they do have higher suicide level than the general population.
https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/les-policiers-se-suicide...
Anecdotally, what the article doesn't mention is that, at least here in France, it's not uncommon for cops committing suicide to actually kill their wife and children before killing themselves... which i believe is a rather unique feat of their profession, but as there are no official stats on the topic you should take this claim with a grain of salt.
By jongjong 2023-07-297:40 Sure but in my experience, these people rarely get promoted to positions of power. A lot of the well-meaning people end up as low-level political puppets because they don't see the evil that's happening right before their eyes; the reason is because good people fail to comprehend the motivations behind evil and that makes them blind to it.
There is a lot of denial like "No, that's not possible, such and such would never do such an evil thing, what would they gain out of it?" The fact that you're a good person may be the reason why you do not see the motive or do not understand its significance. Some people really want total control, they want it really really badly. They could be a billionaire, a president and yet their first for more power is stronger than a person lost in the desert thirsts for water.
Wonderful post.
I have this loose hypothesis that stacking a lot of crooked timber builds something that you could almost call straight. But it takes time and it may not be stable.
In any case if biology gives you crooked timber you better become an expert carpender.
By s1artibartfast 2023-07-2821:42 Conversely, a structure of crooked Timbers may be stronger due to its irregularity, it is just more difficult to understand and defies engineering.
I'm reminded of Inca temples with a irregular stones, which due to their differences make the structure more resistant to earthquakes. I'm also reminded of biological diversity and variation, which enable species to evolve and adapt.
If you want to get technical, think of the thousands of crooked proteins that make up our bodies, each with their unique properties, behaviors, and functions. Not even a proto-cell can be built with a uniform materials, only viruses and prions are identical.
By jjtheblunt 2023-07-2919:32 You just made me think that Fourier analysis is like your crooked timber stacks: add an increasing number of properly chosen’crooked’ functions to one another and you can get arbitrarily close to something very different.
