Michael Swaine, editor-at-large of the estimable Dr. Dobb’s Journal, doesn’t like Small Pieces Loosely Joined. But he doesn’t like it for the right reasons: He disagrees with the ideas in it. The way he disagrees points to a deeper problem with the book. And with my life.

Apparently, I set his teeth on edge in Cluetrain by insisting, in Michael’s words, “that the fundamental unit of life is the group and that individual human beings only have meaning or worth as members.” In fact, Michael is so convinced that that’s wrong that he assumes that I must be doing some well-intentioned lying, in the good ol’ fashioned “The poets tell many a lie” sense:

Now, I suspect that he realizes that this is not the case: He regards it as a useful fiction, and offers it up as one of several Lies to Live By. Personally, I think that valuing bloodless abstractions above flesh-and-blood humans is both antihuman and dangerous…

Actually, I have to agree with myself on this one. I don’t think groups are fictions. They aren’t the same sort of thing as individuals, of course, but a view that says that only individuals are real — and that groups like families and communities are therefore fictions and lies — strikes me as overly strict in its understanding of what the meaning of “is” is. (Who would have thought that Bill Clinton would be remembered as a metaphysician?) Nor do I think groups are abstractions any more than the concept of a self is an abstraction. (Humans aren’t just “flesh and blood.”) But it doesn’t follow from the acknowledgement that groups are real and are formative of individuals that groups should have totalitarian power over individuals. It’s just not that binary. We’ve been working for millennia on getting the complex mix of rights and obligations right.

The same issue arises for Michael in Small Pieces. He says the book recommends abandoning ideas like individualism and that the world is independent of our awareness:

He is only suggesting that we jettison these truths and live by lies on the Web, as I understand him. He’s not talking about “real” life. The Web is a new world that we are creating, Weinberger says. Why not make up better rules than those we live by in the “real” one?

Michael then reasonably objects that we’re unlikely to be able to agree on the new values we’re creating in cyberspace. No arguing with that. As he says, “we can’t settle on rules for running a mailing list…”

But, the book doesn’t suggest that we jettison truths about reality and individuality, etc. Rather, it says that our traditional ideas about such things are alienating. For example: (1) The focus on reality as that which exists independent of us drives a wedge between reality and meaning. (2) This split is untrue to our everyday, real-world lived experience, which is of a world of meaning. (3) The dismissing as fictitious of all that is dependent on our awareness — i.e., the claim that groups are unreal because they aren’t flesh-and-blood — is itself a value judgment. So, in Small Pieces I’m not arguing that we adopt some “Lies to Live By.” I’m suggesting that a description of our life on the Web unveils some truths we already live by in the real world. Further, the Web appeals so deeply to so many of us because it offers a haven free of our real-world alienation from those truths.

Michael thinks I’m up to something different because my description of Web life — and of the real world — seems just so thoroughly wrong to him. He and I are left without a lot of recourse. At one point when discussing my claim that our rugged individualism makes us unhappy and lonely, Michael writes “I’d like to see the data on that, David.” Even if there are some statistics (e.g., Putnam’s Bowling Alone), the correlation of psychology and metaphysics is always going to be, um, a little shaky.

Small Pieces proceeds, to put it grandly, phenomenologically. Phenomenology tries to uncover experience. Of course, “uncover” is a loaded term since it implies there’s something there to be uncovered. So, perhaps I should say that phenomenology points at stuff and says “See?” If you don’t see, phenomenology doesn’t have a way of proving it to you. That’s a huge stinking problem. And, of course, it introduces the observer into the equation: could it be that you don’t see what I see because I’m who I am and you’re not? To which the phenomenologist replies: “Oh yeah? You wanna make something out of it??” After which the phenomenologist puts an ice pack on his broken nose and replies that the whole point is that the observer is always already in the equation and that experience is indeed and obviously conditioned by culture and language and that the idea that certainty is the only acceptable criterion for truth is itself a highly cultural/historical idea. But what it comes down to is: “See?”

I wish I had another way to proceed. I like the cool slap of a clean proof. But for the sort of issues I care about, I’m stuck with a way of thinking that is indeed more like writing fiction than like writing science, not because it’s less true than science but because it’s clarifying only if it clarifies. But that’s inevitable if you want to talk not about the world so much as about our world. And both are conversations worth having, IMO.

If you’re not a subscriber to Dr. Dobbs but want to read Michael’s review, it’ll cost you $5 for 72 hours of access, which strikes me as pretty pricey for a narrow time-slot.

Michael’s blog is lively, informative and opinionated. No surprise there.

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