I find something moving about this collection of photos of peace rallies around the world.

Thanks, David I.

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The Happy Tutor has started a blog focusing on “Philanthropy, Democracy and Weblogs.” In it, he’s his normal brilliant, incisive and archly funny self. (See, for example, his “Rationale for Extreme Wealth.”) The site in fact has an objective, expressed in its subtitle: “Notes towards a Summit of Key Players.”

Here’s one way blogging maybe could help: I’d love to read blogs by people who are doing the work of helping — someone scooping rice from a sack, someone scratching innoculations into a long queue of people, someone getting a water purification system up and running. You know, the actual heroes.

Anyway, I’m glad the Tutor’s new site is around. Thanks.

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Paul Musgrove writes passionately as a writer of history about the limitations of writing history. His lead example of historiography-gone-wrong is a conference where the gender of the Industrial Revolution was discussed:

What I want you to understand is the mindset in which “The Industrial Revolution was a masculine event” is a statement which makes sense. It is a mindset which has lost touch with reality.

I’m in no position to decide about this particular debate. But I do want to defend the utility of abstractions of this and other sorts.

Paul worries that the very act of abstraction — for example, talking about The Industrial Revolution as if it were an actual event rather than a way of referring to a wide range of acts, ideas and feelings — does violence to the very real people who were directly affected by it. For example:

The more I write, and the more I read others’ writing, the more I detach myself from the pain and joy of daily life that lies behind “agricultural depression” or “bank failure,” or the pettiness and granduer wrapped up in “Congress” or “American hegemony.” As I use written language, that is, history becomes a set of arbitrary symbols, rather than a quest to understand the events and choices that confronted people with thoughts and feelings as real as mine.

But he holds out some hope:

Words, when used to communicate well, can push us in the direction of truth. The same attention to detail which serves the best poets and novelists would serve a historian no less well. And our best historians—William Manchester, Robert Caro, and—yes—even Steven Ambrose—comprehend the relationship between the telling detail and understanding. That’s why their books are readable and informative, and books exploring the gender of the Industrial Revolution aren’t.

I’m a sucker for readable histories. And I also like books, like Manchester’s “A World Lit Only by Fire,” that abjure trends and theories in favor of descriptions of what daily life was like. I like historical fiction for the same reason. But that doesn’t mean that historical accounts that are not about the quotidian are therefore false. One might as well say that the theory of natural selection is untrue because it passes over in a phrase (“nature red in tooth and claw”) the very real pain of the short-necked giraffe curled up as it starves on an over-populated plain of Africa, yada yada.

Here’s what I think: Truth doesn’t apply only to the details, and the details aren’t all that’s real. Communities are real. Generations are real. Wars are real. Peace is real. Poverty is real. Even fashion trends are real. They are real in different ways, and truth — IMO — consists in (1) revealing each in ways appropriate to it, and (2) remembering that there isn’t only one type of revelation. If you do 1 but not 2, you become a narrowly focused partisan who sneers at history’s stories as sentimentalism or sneers at history’s hypotheses as mere academic flatulence…but either way you end up sneering. If you do 2 but not 1, you end up without beliefs or understanding.

So bring on the abstract theories! But remember that they’re doing the work of abstraction, which is not the only work we need done.

As Paul concludes:

The problems of historiography, alas, are not hard to solve; the solutions are simply difficult to implement.

By the way, don’t miss the discussion of Paul’s ideas following the blog entry itself.

What I’ve said about truth comes mainly from what I learned from Heidegger. He talks about truth as an uncovering. This in opposition to the standard view of truth as the correspondence of a statement with a state of affairs. Seems real right to me.

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Dan Gillmor explains the latest FCC “compromise” that actually is a near-total victory for the incumbent telcos. Want to guess who the big losers are? Got a mirror handy?

Writes Dan:

Spinning this as a victory for any party but the regional Bell monopolies is a big mistake. Competition for tomorrow’s data access just took an enormous hit.

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I don’t like hearing from collection agencies. They scare me because they get to write bad things about you on the permanent record your high school principal warned you about. So, when I received a letter from a collection agency today, it made me nervous. It seems I owe AT&T Worldnet the mighty sum of $16.95.

The nice guy I spoke with at the collection agency cut me off in mid-outrage as I said that I’d never received the original bill. It turns out that the $16.95 was the final charge for a Worldnet account I cancelled a year ago. AT&T had sent the bill to my worldnet email account…yes, to the account that I’d cancelled.

“I get this all day long,” the collection guy said.

It looks like AT&T has earned yet one more Golden D’oh.

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Yesterday I heard two presentations that might have been arranged one after another on purpose. The first was an endless walkthrough of all of Microsoft Project’s features. “We looked at how teams actually work together,” the presenter said, and then apparently they decided to see how much of the humanity well-designed software could squeeze out of the process. Endless grids, timelines, pie charts, warning flags and drill downs that together constituted informational white noise.

The next presenter talked about how the Pentagon rebuilt itself after 9/11. A “slab to ceiling” renovation was already underway, but the team dedicated itself to restoring the hole in their lives within a year of the attack. Contractors and architects worked together, rather than positioning each other to take the blame for overruns in time and budget as is the usual custom. The “ends” were empowered and given incentives to succeed. Spirits were high. And Walker Evey, the ex-NASA guy who headed the project, showed true leadership.

Now, I have every confidence that the Pentagon restoration project used plenty of Gannt charts, timelines, pie charts and grids to coordinate the activities. For all I know, it used Microsoft Project. But it succeeded because of leadership and dedication…and because its managers didn’t made the common business mistake of confusing the measurement with the measured.

[Note: Please don’t bother writing on the discussion board that you don’t like the Pentagon or what it stands for. Neither do I. But if you can’t appreciate either the suffering the attack inflicted or the admirable aspects of the restoration project, then, well, you might want to do some yoga to try to get the kink out of your self-righteousness.]

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In its monthly list of “Wired, Tired and Expired,” the new issue of Wired lists “loosely joined” as tired. (“Evolved” is wired and “tightly coupled” is expired.)

I believe that according to the terms of the Geneva Convention on Lost Luggage, I am therefore entitled to claim that “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” must have been at some point implicitly wired. Right?

Woohoo [by implication]!

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I’m on my way to Kansas City so this concludes the JOHO broadcast day. Cue the grainy images of America and the scratchy rendition of the national anthem…

I’ll be back late tonight.

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Demonstrating a remarkable lack of irony, the Republican Team Leader site that was caught astroturfing letters to the editor (write a letter and get GOPoints redeemable for attractive GOP logo-wear) is now urging members to astroturf the Boston Globe in response to the Globe’s editorial against the Team Leader site’s astroturfing. (Yes, that sentence does make sense.)

And, quite wonderfully, the pre-composed letter you can click and send is in fact the original letter about President Bush “demonstrating genuine leadership.”

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From Betsy Devine’s blog comes a link to Linda Kim Davies‘ home page. It’s a Flash site and my first reaction was impatience and annoyance. Images and words fade in, leaving me feeling like Bob (or was it Ray?) in the Bob and Ray interview with the president of the Slow Talkers of America Society. Likewise, her essays appear one slow-fading paragraph at a time. “What right does she have to take my time this way?” I thought.

And then I realized how stupid I was being. Or how webby. I’m acting as if I’ve been made the Lord of Time, that I have an inalienable right to control the pace and editing of what I experience. The sequential, non-random arts demand we trust them with our time, a non-recoverable, non-fungible chunk of our lives. When they squander it, we feel robbed. But when they do more with that time than we could have imagined, not just our ideas and feelings but our lives ourselves have been made more valuable.

On the other hand, I wish Linda Kim Davies would put in a list of links to her photos because I have a lot to do today.

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