Don’t forget, you’re invited to an open discussion at the Harvard Berkman Center tonight, 6-7:30 pm. I’ll talk for 15-20 mins about why it’s important to think of the Web as a world and not just as a medium. Then we’ll talk and eat pizza.

By the way, if you want to know what Marshall McLuhan meant by “medium,” which is not what I mean by it, check Mark Federman’s article.

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ToTheSource has sent out a brief essay by Dinesh D’Souza that gives some insight into the conservative majority’s point of view. I find myself agreeing with much of it, but then feel dismay and disappointment as D’Souza swerves, betraying a contempt for those with whom he disagrees. (I can’t find the essay online — what’s up with that, ToTheSource?)

He quickly traces the historical/philosophical roots of the notion that morality is grounded in following one’s inner voice. In his narrative, our inner voice gets increasingly removed from the larger, outer voice:

Augustine contends that God is the lamp that illuminates the inner soul. Rousseau broke with Augustine by severing this connection between the inner voice and any external authority. For Rousseau the inner voice is the sovereign and final authority.

This is the moral code that we have inherited today…

D’Souza avoids the easy rant against the “imperial self” (although the term gives away his attitude towards it):

…We are wrong to dismiss this as a mere affirmation of selfishness, a rejection of morality. It is a massive shift in the source of morality — away from the external order, toward the inner self. Nor should the new code be understood as relativism or nihilism. It does not affirm that “anything goes.,” It insists that the inner voice is morally authoritative and should be followed without question.

Yes, it isn’t “anything goes,” but the imperial self is still non-moral. Imagine that when we’re born, we “imprint” on the third person we see and believe that morality consists in being true to #3. That’s not “Anything goes, but it’s not moral. So, why is doing whatever #1 says any more moral than doing what the random #3 says? But D’Souza doesn’t draw that conclusion. Instead, he proffers what at first sounds like respect for this alternative view of morality:

I do not believe that this new ethic of the Imperial Self can be completely uprooted, as some people who bemoan the decline of the old moral consensus would like to do. But I am also concerned with the moral danger of conceding final moral authority to the Imperial Self. Human nature is flawed and the “voice within” is sometimes unreliable and sometimes wrong. As Immanuel Kant warned, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Perhaps a more practical goal is to contain, and perhaps to roll back, some of the excesses of the new ethic of authenticity. This involves a recovered sense of the moral sources that continue to inform our moral self-understanding, sources that can be found in our religious and ethical traditions but which have disappeared from our public debate. The urgent task at hand is to recognize the power of the new ethic of authenticity while steering it toward something higher, to ennoble the self by directing it toward the good.

There’s a bunch of signs and signals going on here. On the one hand, we have the imperial selves. D’Souza has made it clear earlier in the article who they are, for the imperial self:

…was first adopted by intellectuals and artists in England, France, and the United States. These elite groups, of the kind that dominated the Parisian café, the Bloomsbury society in England, and Greenwich Village in the United States, have been living according to the bohemian code for a long time. What changed in the 1960s is that these values, once confined to small enclaves in society, now became part of the social mainstream.

Then we have the traditionalists who “bemoan” the decline of the “old moral consensus.” Think: The preaching Christians who chastise and berate on the channels you skip over. D’Souza is distancing himself from them.

Then there are the moderns like D’Souza who recognize that ideas have histories and who adapt to modern practicalities. These moderns recognize that you can’t reform hippies; they’re always going to insist on “doing their own thing.” They’re too far gone to ever become truly moral the way D’Souza is. The best you can do is try to redirect the inner light to better moral goals.

There’s arrogance there. It’s one thing to think that following one’s inner light is only accidentally moral — like happening to imprint on a moral #3 — and another to recommend dealing with those who hold such a view as if they were children.

And there’s also some pernicious line-drawing by which only those who believe in a particular “external moral order” get to count as moral:

One can no longer make a public appeal to the external moral code. The Clinton sex scandals were clear proof of this: some Americans considered his actions morally scandalous, but others thought it was no big deal.

Say wha’? Many of us who thought that Clinton’s adulterous blow jobs and lies about said blow jobs were not enough of a big deal to impeach him but still think adultery and lying are morally wrong. Thinking that MonicaGate was blown out of proportion (so to speak) by a right wing that was lying in wait doesn’t mean that one forsaken all external moral codes.

In fact, here surfaces the danger of D’Souza’s view: External moral codes disagree in theory and in application. With the Clinton example, D’Souza reveals that he’s playing a game of shirts vs. skins in which those who do not believe in a particular moral code are bohemian hippies who immorally follow their own “inner light.” But the real game is that we have skins of many colors and shirts of many stripes that desperately need to figure out how to share a planet. That can’t be done with either of the positions D’Souza gives us: Follow your inner lighters can’t do it because they have no way to mediate disputes with inner lights that point elsewhere. Eternal moral coders can’t do it unless they accept that they don’t have a lock on what that their external authority (um, G-d) says.

D’Souza’s compromise is phony. Doing an end run around someone’s immorality does morality a disservice.

By the way, D’Souza’s notion that our “religious and ethical traditions” have “disappeared from our public debate” is a hoot. Was D’Souza away during the recent election year?

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I just noticed in AKMA‘s sidewall the published version of an essay of his that I’d seen (and blogged about) in draft a couple of years ago. It’s on the ethics of interpretation, and it’s a beautiful piece of work. AKMA is such a fine writer. For example, here he’s explaining the idea (that he does not agree with) that a text has meaning even when people don’t know what it is:

The presence of a cement floor in my basement provides sufficient evidence for me to infer the existence of its opposite side; the presence of a text in my hand provides sufficient evidence for me to infer the existence of its meaning.

AKMA is trying to find a ground between saying there is one right interpretation of a text (particularly the Christian Bible) and saying every interpretation must be taken as valid:

A differential hermeneutic permits practitioners to see in interpretive variety a sign of the variety in human imagination (in establishing historical facts as well as in drawing theological inferences), to account positively for difference among interpreters, to envision the practice of biblical interpretation less as a contest of experts and more as the shared effort of Christian communities, and at the same time to provide clearer, more specific and more modest criteria for correctness and legitimacy in interpretation.

…practitioners of differential hermeneutics observe that the act of offering an interpretation involves not only the author and the text but also one’s interpretive colleagues and the audience of the interpretation. interpretation. Hence, interpreters must devise interpretations that are accountable not only to text and author but also to rival interpreters and audiences.

AKMA is such a Jew! : )

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Thanks to Michael Shook, here are some MP3 versions of my talk to the Library of Congress on Monday:

Speech (15MB)
Q&A (19MB)
The whole shebang (39MB)

The Quicktime movie of it is here in the unlikely event that you think seeing me will improve your experience of it. Or maybe C-SPAN’s Real version of it will work for you.

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I’ve been having trouble getting C-SPAN’s video of my talk to the Library of Congress to work, so I’ve made a Quicktime version that you can try accessing here. It’s 90MB of streamin’ video. I’m working on posting some other formats as well.

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Steve Kruba has discovered an online version of John Austin’s classic essay, “A Plea for Excuses,” which I mentioned a few days ago. In it, Austin shows that our casual, ordinary use of excuse terms is actually quite precise and subtle…but when experts use those terms, they get all bollixed up.

This is where Austin asks us to consider the differences between:

a1 He clumsily trod on the snail.
a2 Clumsily he trod on the snail.
b1 He trod clumsily on the snail.
b2 He trod on the snail clumsily.

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AKMA takes issue with Steven Johnson‘s assessment of Derrida, which I had pointed to.

AKMA, who seems disappointed that Steve thinks “the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones,” writes:

I think one might argue that “deconstruction” was a merely instrumental sidetrack for Derrida, whose greater projects involved explorations of metaphysics, justice, and meaning. He undertook deconstruction as a throat-clearing — then he spoke, ardently and forcefully, on topics which other people wanted to claim that he couldn’t consistently speak.

I never got past the throat-clearing and thus Steve’s assessment rings true to me; the Derrida I tried to read seemed to take throat-clearing as its subject. I couldn’t find any engagement in a matter beyond itself, and it seemed not playful but irritating and smug. (I am not saying I’m right. In fact, I’m pretty much saying I’m wrong.) AKMA recommends Derrida’s Limited Inc. as a good place to start understanding Derrida, so I’ve ordered it from Amazon. AKMA hasn’t led me astray yet. (And is this an appropriate place to again recommend AKMA’s intro to PostModernism?)

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Derrida is dead but not erased. Steve Johnson has blogged a memoir that, in a couple of paragraphs, puts Derrida in a perspective that others have spent volumes trying to get right. Snippet:

Ultimately, I came out of that period with the feeling that deconstruction was ultimately an accurate, legitimate, and surprisingly understandable critique of the way language produces meaning. (Or it least it could have been understandable, if its proponents weren’t so insistent on having their writing enact the contradictory, self-erasing property they were trying to document — which is a bit like a evolutionary biologist choosing to write a paper using strands of DNA.) But I also came to feel that the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones; extremely important to deal with if you were, say, a philosopher of language –but not all that important if you were trying to analyze a novel, or a political movement.

When Derrida was coming to prominence, I was hanging out with Heideggerians who viewed Derrida as someone who would spew irksome contradictions merely to have something to say…pretty much exactly what non-Heideggerians thought of Heidegger. I never made it over Derrida’s intelligibility hump. In fact, only now am I reading Foucault with the respect — awe — he deserves. Maybe I’ll make it to Derrida before I die…

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Mark Federman, Chief Strategist at U of Toronto’s McLuhan Program (where I spent one night a week for a year in the late 70s at a graduate seminar led by the master himself) has put forth a fascinating paper on the way in which the way in which we bind time and space is changing. He asks:

In our world of instantaneous, multi-way communication, everywhere is here and every-when is now. What is the nature of the artefacts that are characteristic of our pervasively connected culture?

He posits ephemeral artefacts as his answer: “An ephemeral artefact exists precisely in the present, and can only be experienced at the moment of its creation.”

There are lots of provocative ideas in this piece (I particularly like his notions of “interpassivity,” the dominance of touch on the Net, and the Net as an acoustic space), but I have questions about the primary one:

Mark looks to art as a precursor of the future and finds examples of artefacts that have both the characteristics to which he points: They are ephemeral and involve us both as performer and performance. But might they be simply oddities, not precursors? It seems to me that we’re trending in the other direction. As I look at the Web (which, granted, is not all of life or all of the world, dammit), it seems to me that many of its most important artefacts aren’t ephemeral. Some are short-lived — JibJab productions are good for a couple of days maybe — but Mark means by “ephemeral” things that exist only so long as we experience them. Aren’t many of the truly “binding” artefacts on the Web not ephemeral? For example, while with blogs there is no separation of performer and performance, blogs are persistent. They are our bodies on the Web, binding our selves through time. I think their temporality is absolutely essential to their nature and their success. So, am I not looking far enough ahead? Are blogs already yesterday’s news?

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I’m leading the first in a series of open discussions at the Berkman Center this Wednesday at 6pm. You’re invited. Here’s the blurb the Center sent out:

Join us on Wednesday, Oct. 6, at the Berkman Center [Baker House, on Mass Ave. in Cambridge] at 6 pm for the first in a series of discussions, led by David Weinberger, on the effect of the Web on how we understand ourselves and our shared world. Each session will begin with a 20 minute discussion-opener, followed by open conversation. (Food will be provided.)

Oct. 6th topic: Objectivity, Truth and Blogs

Wikipedia.org — the grassroots encyclopedia — has frozen edits to the page about George W. Bush because supporters and detractors were revising the page at a head-spinning clip. Wikipedia’s aim is to present an article that contains the core of acknowledged facts about the President, with links to pages that argue many sides of the issue. This assumes that there is an objective core, an idea that dedicated Post-Modernists would dispute. For the rest of us it raises interesting questions about the Web’s effect on authority. Is the multiplicity of voices on the Web in fact leading us to a stronger division between fact and opinion than ever before, rather than the fusing of fact and values some have expected? And is authority moving to groups instead of to individuals? Are we seeing the development of “multi-subjectivity,” that is, webs of subjective commentary that, because of their diverse viewpoints, can “compete for truth” with objective sources. What’s the locus of truth on the Web?

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