The Center for Future Storytelling

MIT has opened a Center for Future Storytelling, a determined effort to destroy the written word in even its debased www form. Sam Leith's (until this week, literary editor of the Telegraph) comments are interesting, although characteristically of a modern Englishman he feels obliged to lout to pop culture (Twitter, GTA4, soap operas) however unconvincingly, and even if, characteristically of an English journalist, he misrepresents the situation. There is no doubt about what the Center intends: it wants to provide the tools for worldwide LARPs.

By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

Vampires ahoy, matey.

Even worse, one of the professors is a Ramesh Raskar, "a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies." In a word: bodcasts.

Leith is only pretending not to understand what MIT is up to and is only playing at pop culture, but he really does know English. He says it perfectly:

The eggheads at MIT have, in this respect, more than just a prose style in common with the governing body at Meadows Community School in Chesterfield.

The closure of the library at this 759-strong comprehensive is being explained as "a move towards the relocation and redistribution of non-fiction and fiction resources in the light of the new developments in a virtual-learning environment and interactive learning".

Every clause is doubled-up into redundancy in the hope of sounding grand. How does "relocation" differ from "redistribution" - and don't they add up to "relocating from the library to the skip"? What are "non-fiction and fiction resources" - other than a fancy way of saying "all the books we have"?

How does "a virtual learning environment" differ from "interactive learning" (what learning isn't "interactive", come to that) - and is it just clever-sounding verbiage for the internet?

The thing is, the internet does some things very well, and the codex book does other things very well. There is an overlap - they are both means of preserving and sharing information - but it's foolish to see the two as interchangeable, or the former as supplanting the latter.

One of the clichés about education is that it should teach you not what to think, but how to think: and a vital part of that is understanding the shape of knowledge - being able to evaluate categories of information and degrees of authority in sources. If the educators themselves can't or won't think about these distinctions, God help their pupils.

Rem tetigisti acu, to address him in his ill-concealed native tongue.

Parini for the lulz

An absurd article suggesting that playing video games improves the literacy of the player, or perhaps of people near the player (really). Some of the people quoted in the article think playing video games is better than reading books:

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices,” said James Paul Gee, the author of the book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” “You can’t screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game.”

“I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘What exactly is reading?’ ” said Jack Martin, assistant director for young adult programs at the New York Public Library. “Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper.”

Is an assistant director for young adult programs at a library a librarian renamed, or is he in professionalized management with librarians reporting to him? In any case, it is almost admirable how willing he is to be illiterate in support of illiteracy. Usually advocates of bad spelling, grammar, reading, etc use standard English themselves and show some evidence of letters, an ironic fact often thrown back at them by conservatives. Jack is a proper revolutionary, a vanguard illiterate: "Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense" shows how firmly he has rejected English syntax and idiom.

Gee employs some remarkable English with "You can't screw up a Dostoevsky book," but all I have to say to him is that he really should play a video game. He will be astonished to find that games let the player save his place and retry levels, so that choices are almost costless. The 1-Up mushroom will blow his mind like peyote.

The best part of the article, of course, is the appearance of my favorite moronic English prof:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are creating fictional universes which are every bit as complex as the world of fiction of Dickens or Dostoevsky,” said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches English at Middlebury College.

The tendentious might want to ask him what he means by "complex," and whether that word can apply in the same sense to intricate software and well-developed fiction, but look at the implication in his statement: Dickens and Dostoevsky created fictional universes, as though they were mere precursors to Tolkien and his hobby world. I had naively supposed that the "universes," or settings, of their books existed to support each story, which was the intended creation. Maybe Parini is just confused, thinking Dickens and Dostoevsky are the D&D of the Forgotten Realms.

And yes, I have read a shameful number of Forgotten Realms books, and played all the Bioware/Black Isle games. I suppose the one advantage to such a waste of life is that I can say with complete confidence that my literacy suffered for every hour reading the really appalling pulp and playing the entertaining but vacuous games.

The unexamined life

Unlike Socrates, I think the unexamined or unexamining life can be worth living, but only by those who can live it. Whether some daimon or some demon compels it, others must examine, and if that examining is uninstructed and unaccompanied, it is a torment that twists and cripples thought. I have often thought that many of the strangest elaborations of religion must have their origin in the undirected examinations of compelled minds. Even a land-bound peasant or a stone age tribesman may be born with such a mind, and lacking any lightning-rod to direct his inspirations harmlessly, his mind must instead blaze up and burn without relief. The intricacies of pre-modern magic, medicine, and mythology testify to the perverse ingenuity devoted to them. As there are fewer and fewer living men with whom life may be examined, those who must examine their lives draw ever closer to the savage's desperate isolation of mind. The great rise in conspiracy theories may in part come from that loss of all prior thought.

In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates describes just the union of society and learning that is the rightly directed use and the satisfaction of a compelled mind:

The treasures of the wise of old, written and bequeathed in their books, I unfold and peruse in common with my friends. If our eye light upon any good thing we cull it eagerly, and regard it as great gain if we may but grow in friendship with one another.

Life of Johnson: Reading

Boswell says Johnson was not a croaker, one who complains about his age in all ways. Johnson found his age very pleasing, except that "subordination is sadly broken down in this age." The Tory Telegraph still makes the same complaint, but calls it "lack of deference." Johnson does twice say that reading had declined, once in reference to lawyers' preparation and I think to doctors the other time, but it seems he only thought more training was now acquired in conversation than formerly.

In keeping with the Johnsonian spirit, I should make it clear that I would not choose any other age, all the others being poor in knowledge and menaced by torturers going by the name of physicians. Scientific advances have been an increasing proportion of each century's glories from the 16th, but this age has seen science become unearthly in its glory and beauty. Medicine has become powerful too, and it is an everyday thing for a sick man to be told, "Take up your bed and walk." My grandmother just had a knee entirely replaced, and the other will be done in a few months; she will travel to Italy this year. Johnson tried hard to get to Italy in his final year, hoping the better climate would help, but his too-helpful band of doctors could not make him well enough.

There are many other wonderful things about this age, among them that basic literacy and some degree of knowledge belong to more people than ever before. My earlier complaint is more specific: that group, never large, of people who can attain to significant knowledge and true literacy is now afflicted with the delusion that those attainments are at best private games and at worst sabotage of the efficient machines that will create heaven on Earth. Since Dewey's fools have come to the worst conclusion, the result has been that every year's births provide the raw materials for an educational system more perfectly stripped of knowledge than the year before. If you happen to be one of those industrial inputs, but are somehow so badly machined that you end up with some part of a humane education, you will find that the other inputs, having stayed on the assembly line, can no more understand your peculiarity than a BMW could see the point of a horse. People are not more stupid now than before--they may even be smarter, and many become powerful engines of science--but even with smart listeners, the whole of life cannot be conversations in the form of lectures starting at first principles.

Even highly esteemed graduate schools in the humanities have little to work with, though they do their best by drawing from overseas and from private schools. It is painful to listen to professors talk and to realize that you are witnessing the descent of man; in classics, the greatest scholars are all past retirement, and many are over 80. They have been great from their early days, as I found whenever I read their published work, though of course they have grown more learned over time. Professors of 50, unless they were educated entirely overseas, have little of the older generation's penetration, but are serviceable: hammers, not lances. Professors of 40 show astonishing gaps in their knowledge, and professors of 30 sometimes seem never to have opened a book from outside their field or this year's NYT bestsellers list. American graduate students in their mid-20s, though their native talents may be great, would have been rejected by undergraduate admissions fifty years ago for appalling unpreparedness. All of this refers to Americans educated in public schools and most private schools; the rest of the world was not so stupid as to admire Dewey.

So imagine being an American of 30 or 35 but by ill chance possessed of a mind roughly molded in the older style. As you look far ahead to those nearing death, you see scholars who utterly outstrip you; looking ever closer, you find people more and more like you, though more finely modeled; somewhere around 50, they grow more alien; when you look behind at those coming up, you realize that their principles of thought are becoming not only alien but hostile, fused with political ideology. Every year the desolation, like the Sahara, increases its borders a little more, but also adds more savages who only know the wasteland. They love the wasteland; men love the manner of life to which they are born, and resent attempts to unearth and tear up its radical errors. All this is not pleasant now; it will be intolerable in thirty years, when the wasteland covers everything and only scattered anchorites remember what was lost.

Johnson would surely not believe the extent of the collapse, but he would understand how reading might die, once learning was no longer esteemed or profitable, and other entertainment was cheap and ubiquitous:

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse; emulation, or vanity, or avarice. The progress which the understanding makes through a book, has more pain than pleasure in it. Language is scanty, and inadequate to express the nice gradations and mixtures of our feelings. No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.

Why read?

Reading must often feel a useless indulgence. Unless you are part of the society of authors and scholars, you will rarely have the satisfaction and improved understanding that come from dissecting a work in conversation. Nor does reading bring any significant amount of praise or even recognition, since with so few now reading, you will meet hardly anyone who knows how Rasselas differs from Tuesdays with Morrie, or that one book even can differ in any meaningful way from another. Nearly all think of reading as nothing but a hobby, increasingly rare and in its more serious form simply eccentric. Worse, what little recognition there is for reading belongs to those who read, or at least flatter with the pretense of reading, the latest profitless works of trendy literature or radical politics. When someone says he is a reader, hide your own reading or risk having to fight your way out of the conversation when he starts to praise some House of Sand and Fog or Hegemony or Survival. It is even more depressing when the reader turns out to read only books on personal finances (men) or self-help (women); they look on books as mere stuff to line their material lives, not readers but paper wasps.

As it happens, reading good books is of private advantage; it is difficult to prove to doubters why this should be, but once acquired a well-stocked mind reconciles a man to life. By contrast, Theodore Dalrymple described the self-destroying pain of those who reach their 30s without internal resource, just as the delusory significance of youth fades. Still I would like to believe that these strange electrical whorls, that for the moment fill my mind but soon enough will uncoil and go dark, have some kind of purpose outside myself. Johnson's essay in the Adventurer, issue 85, gives no proofs, but offers wonderful reassurance.

An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.

Astounding that at the very dawn of the modern age, Rousseau's foolishness had already spread generally. Johnson might as well be responding to a modern pedagogical statement on the value of critical thinking over "rote learning." His next argument has by now been made often, but it is delightful to hear how he says it:

If reason has the power ascribed to it by its advocates, if so much is to be discovered by attention and meditation, it is hard to believe, that so many millions, equally participating of the bounties of nature with ourselves, have been for ages upon ages meditating in vain: if the wits of the present time expect the regard of posterity, which will then inherit the reason which is now thought superior to instruction, surely they may allow themselves to be instructed by the reason of former generations. When, therefore, an author declares, that he has been able to learn nothing from the writings of his predecessors, and such a declaration has been lately made, nothing but a degree of arrogance unpardonable in the greatest human understanding, can hinder him from perceiving that he is raising prejudices against his own performance; for with what hopes of success can he attempt that in which greater abilities have hitherto miscarried? or with what peculiar force does he suppose himself invigorated, that difficulties hitherto invincible should give way before him?

Johnson comes now to the part that, even if I can see how the sentence I italicized is only assertion, still warms me with reassurance:

Of those whom Providence has qualified to make any additions to human knowledge, the number is extremely small; and what can be added by each single mind, even of this superior class, is very little: the greatest part of mankind must owe all their knowledge, and all must owe far the larger part of it, to the information of others. To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.

I wonder though, what Johnson would say to those of us whose minds fall between the discoverers of new knowledge and the common intellects, in an age when the common intellects are little interested in new knowledge and wholly uninterested in anything old. To live in an age of ignorance has the selfish advantage of making even modest minds seem great, to themselves, for merely attempting what was once required of young students. It is not a very satisfying feeling though.

If I have dwelt on the unhappiness of having no public benefit in reading, still Johnson goes on to say much the same thing:

Persius has justly observed, that knowledge is nothing to him who is not known by others to possess it [Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter: your knowledge is nothing, unless another knows of your knowledge.]: to the scholar himself it is nothing with respect either to honor or advantage, for the world cannot reward those qualities which are concealed from it; with respect to others it is nothing, because it affords no help to ignorance or errour.

He goes on to recommend that scholars cultivate skill in conversation, to make their knowledge of public use and honor, and to practice writing, so that their scholarship and their conversation are both made more exact. What, though, would Johnson say is to be done, when there is not conversation to be had, nor many readers to be found for writing?

To write a blog, praise myself, and take another swig from the bitter cup of learning, I expect.