At the graduation ceremonies of Brandeis University on May 19, Leon Wieseltier spoke of the urgent need "to offer some resistance to the twin imperialisms of science and technology":
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For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening
denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a
society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the
values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological
mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer
practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are
true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an
instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its
ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects
of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or
another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy
itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality –
modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness —
and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.
The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite
astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever
devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make
us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones
if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in
computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our
bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no
longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in
Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.
In
the digital universe, knowledge is reduced to the status of
information. Who will any longer remember that knowledge is to
information as art is to kitsch-–that information is the most inferior
kind of knowledge, because it is the most external? A great Jewish
thinker of the early Middle Ages wondered why God, if He wanted us to
know the truth about everything, did not simply tell us the truth about
everything. His wise answer was that if we were merely told what we need
to know, we would not, strictly speaking, know it. Knowledge can be
acquired only over time and only by method. And the devices that we
carry like addicts in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives also in
other ways: for example, they generate a hitherto unimaginable number
of numbers, numbers about everything under the sun, and so they are
transforming us into a culture of data, into a cult of data, in which no
human activity and no human expression is immune to quantification, in
which happiness is a fit subject for economists, in which the ordeals
of the human heart are inappropriately translated into mathematical
expressions, leaving us with new illusions of clarity and new illusions
of control.
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Read the whole of this important essay, which appeared in the May 19 issue of The New Republic under the heading "Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture." It is a remarkable statement of the urgent need to resist the the monopolizing force of technology, the triumph of the gadgets that link the ear and eye to pointless data, noise without meaning or melody. It also features the second best use of the word "twitter" that I have encountered this year: "There
is no greater bulwark against the twittering acceleration of American
consciousness than the encounter with a work of art, and the experience of a
text or an image." The best use of the word — for its sheer unexpectedness and its tabu alliteraton – came up in the first series of the American (Kevin Spacey) version of House of Cards when a woman reporter dismisses a younger rival as "a twitter twat." — DL