Thoughts on human nature after Japan

They form orderly lines. They throw no tantrums. They do not loot or take advantage of their fellow sufferers. They bear what fate has presented them, even after watching loved ones swept away in brown sludge, even as radioactive clouds snow on them. They do so because of who they are, as individuals and as Japanese, and because they understand that however bad it gets, they must avoid making it even worse through their own actions.

Some 50 of them even stayed in the reactors until commanded to return, like modern samurai, fighting the splitting atoms so that less death may issue forth, knowing that they will suffer and die because of it. Radiation, too, is a divine wind, a kamikaze. In form less Homeric, more insidious, it yet demands the same of the samurai.

They are individuals, yes. But they are also members of a culture, and there is a shape to their response. Isn’t there always? People behaved differently in Port-au-Prince. And again in New Orleans. And in Christchurch.

I once happened to find myself living in Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak. It was a fascinating time. (This was one of the articles I wrote.) The virus largely hit the different “regions” of China — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the mainland. And each place revealed itself to be not only “Chinese” but unique, in ways that surprised even those living there.

I recall (what not everybody there may perhaps now choose to remember) that in some of the Taiwanese hospitals, some (not all) of the nurses and staff fled the virus, yielding to their fear, abandoning those who had come there in need. For them, the individual and the family was all there was. There was no community, no neighborliness, no society. Yes, they were aware that they were thus making the situation worse, by spreading the virus. But worse-for-others did not count.

The Singaporeans responded as expected: with ruthless and relentless efficiency, cordoning off and quarantining with no regard for those being separated from loved ones, whether they were confirmed infected or not. The rules were draconian, but nobody broke them, nobody pleaded special treatment. The individual was entirely subordinated to the group, and Singapore suffered least as a result.

The mainlanders also showed their ruthless side. Uniformed cadres barricaded entire towns, cutting them off from the world as in an Albert Camus novel. But the un-uniformed mainlanders did not respect these rules as the Singaporeans accepted those of their government. Individually, many (though not all) tried to escape, evade, be the exception. Whereas the Singaporean authorities chose merciless truth to gain and keep credibility, by reporting every case, the mainland Chinese defaulted to their customary secrecy, and nobody believed anything at all. Singapore was harsh but trustworthy, the mainland simply harsh. And the mainland suffered the most as a result.

And then there were the Chinese of Hong Kong. How surprised we, the expats, were by their response. How surprised even the Hong Kong Chinese were. Each nurse and doctor and customs official and neighbor, it seemed, did his duty. And they, too, chose unforgiving truth, reporting every turn for the worse so that we believed them when they finally announced the turn for the better.

And yet the Hong Kong Chinese were not like the Singaporeans. In Hong Kong, they did make exceptions in their quarantines, they did wait before cordoning off housing blocks, because they balanced the suffering of the individuals inside against the interests of the society outside. Was it civic values picked up, unwittingly, from the former colonial master? Was it something else? Something made them different. Hong Kong suffered more than Singapore, but less than Taiwan and the mainland. And when it was over, everyone in Hong Kong was proud.

Last year, we debated the topic of heroism here on The Hannibal Blog. As usual when intellectuals debate anything, the subject recedes until everybody wishes it had never been forced into hiding. And yet we all intuited all along that you know heroism when you see it.

My Elephantine mistake

Copyright: Shoshani and Tassy 2004

I’ve been telling you something very wrong about Hannibal’s elephants all this time. Not deliberately, mind you.

Almost three years ago, when I wrote my post “about Hannibal’s elephants“, I was really just kidding around, as I was in the early stages of research for my book. The levity, I thought, was abundantly obvious from my treatment of the subject. I did not mean to imply that I had any idea of what I was talking about (although I sort of do now).

I was, you see, a blogger! (Ie, I was more interested in thinking out loud, and getting readers to correct me, than in pontificating authoritatively.)

To my surprise, that particular blog post keeps getting a lot of traffic. In fact, its traffic is increasing. I have no idea why, so I must guess that the Google gods are sending people its way (which should cast aspersions on Google’s algorithms, not on my post). Those of you who blog may have made the same discovery: those posts you think are most valuable are not at all the ones that attract the eyeballs, and vice versa.

So I will set the record straight in this post. But first, I’m delighted what the earlier post has already done: It has brought me many of my readers (mostly the silent, non-commenting type). One of you has even (hush, hush) hinted that you might write a children’s book about Hannibal’s elephants — and I have voluteered my own kids and me as the first readers.

Now: The first question is how many elephants Hannibal brought with him when he left Iberia to cross the Alps and attack Rome. I’ve read the number 37, but Serge Lancel, the late French historian who seems to know best, says 27 (on page 63 of his book). So I’m going with that. Personally, I don’t really care about the real number. It changes nothing in the story and the drama.

The second question — and the one I answered wrong — is: which kind of elephant?

The correct answer is the African Forest Elephant, or Loxodonta cyclotis:

Click for attribution

As it happens, we very recently (last year) discovered that these elephants were an entirely different species (as opposed to just a sub-species) of elephant. So you should imagine the (older) genealogical tree at the top with another twig on the third branch from the right, as this blog post explains.

The discovery comes via DNA analysis from Nadine Rohland, David Reich, Swapan Mallick, Matthias Meyer, Richard Green, et al., who summarize their findings here:

Our data establish that the Asian elephant is the closest living relative of the extinct mammoth… We also find that savanna and forest elephants, which some have argued are the same species, are as or more divergent in the nuclear genome as mammoths and Asian elephants, which are considered to be distinct genera… The divergence of African savanna and forest elephants—which some have argued to be two populations of the same species—is about as ancient as the divergence of Asian elephants and mammoths…

So it is those forest elephants that Hannibal brought with him. They were quite a bit smaller than the savanna elephants of Africa. So artists have, for millennia, exaggerated their size.

Or have they? Generations of boys reading about Hannibal must have imagined them just as the young Roman legionaries perceived them, which is roughly thus:

Responding to my cold reader

At this (quite advanced) stage in the book-publishing process, there is suddenly a lot to do, always urgently and usually without prior notice.

For instance, another dead-tree copy of the manuscript just landed on my desk, marked up in old-fashioned ink. Apparently, the cold reader had had his go.

The cold reader? Who knew? I normally prefer my readers warm.

It appears that Riverhead has sent the manuscript to someone who is anonymous to me (“cold”, I suppose) for perusal. His or her comments were not “large” (about the sweep of the story, or the logic of an argument, say), but very detailed queries about language.

All regular readers of The Hannibal Blog know me as a pedant (or word-lover, to be generous). I am rarely caught out in word matters. But it does happen, and I find that fun.

So here are a few things the cold reader pointed out, and then a few instances in which I overruled him/her.

  1. If something “ascends up to,” it actually simply “ascends to”.
  2. “Aquiline faces” are actually faces with “aquiline noses.”
  3. A “crevice” is not a “crevasse”, and Hannibal in the Alps better have passed the latter, or we would be mighty bored.
  4. “Projecting a perception of invincibility” is simply “projecting invincibility”. (Can’t believe that one happened to me!)
  5. A line of soldiers marching “only a couple of men deep” is actually marching “a couple of men wide.” Duh.
  6. Scipio could not have stood there, “his posture erect and lithe.” No, he stood there, “his posture erect, his body lithe.”
  7. If Scipio and Cato (or whoever) “mixed like oil and water”, then they did not mix, like oil and water.
  8. Being “suspicious” is not the same as being “suspect”. (Duh. Must have been late at night.)
  9. Do I really need to spend hours going through my books to find out whether Lucius was Scipio’s only brother? Oh yes, because, that determines whether it is “his brother Lucius” or “his brother, Lucius”.

Here are a few of the comments I overruled (getting a little frisson out of the STET every time):

  1. No, Meriwether Lewis’s father was not fighting “Native American” tribes. He was fighting “Indian” tribes. It’s about context.
  2. Hannibal might have contemplated a “bold evacuation of Italy.” But he could not have contemplated a “bold evacuation of his troops from Italy.” Why would he want to rip out the innards of his own soldiers?

😉

The threat of the other story

Ferdinand von Schirach

It is extremely difficult — well-nigh impossible — to hate, condemn, or dismiss other people after hearing — really, really hearing — their stories.

This might be one way of summarizing Verbrechen (Crime), a fantastic book I recently finished reading. (It took me only a couple of hours to read, that’s how good it is.)

The author is Ferdinand von Schirach, a criminal-defense lawyer in Berlin who has seen every sort of perversion and gore and weirdness there is. (I read the German version; the English translation is here.)

I won’t go into the stories he tells in his book. They’re short, full of suspense and wonder, and you might want to read the book and be surprised. Suffice it to say that I love this man’s voice. It is masculine and sparse, empathetic, slyly humorous at the right moments, forgiving but not indulgent.

But back to my opening sentence: This post is really about storytelling per se.

Well over a year ago, we discussed “the danger of the single story” — that danger being that incomplete storytelling about a person (ie, stereotyping) robs that person of his dignity.

But it occurred to me that there is also “the danger of the other story“.

That other story is the one that

  • challenges our worldview,
  • shakes our certainty about something,
  • makes us feel uncomfortable.

If we’re suing somebody, it’s that other person’s story. If we’re a certain kind of Turk, it’s the Armenian story. If we’re a rape victim, it’s the story of the one we (wrongly) accused of the rape to feel better. If we are…. (The list of examples goes on forever.)

What’s so “dangerous” about these stories? They destablize us. Once we’ve heard the other story, we have to revisit something, something that we do not want to revisit. Perhaps we have to withdraw a judgment. Perhaps we have to share empathy with somebody, when we really wanted it all to ourselves.

Consider my recent story about an extended family of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Somewhere in the middle of that longish piece, there were a few lines about a trailer that one of the families lived in,

… a trailer in Watsonville, just outside Steinbeck’s home town of Salinas. The trailer is dilapidated, but Ms Vega tends to it lovingly. By the door hangs a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. There is even a small television set. But the trailer has no air conditioning or heating. On this day, after a downpour, it smells musty….

Then one of the comments caught my eye. The commenter was upset by this detail of the trailer. Why? Because it was the other story. You see, he (or she) does want to talk about trailers. But it has to be his trailer story:

When poor native born Americans are forced to live in trailers, they are dismissed/ignored as trailer park trash. When poor illegals cross into the country to have babies and live in trailers, we write up their sob stories and talk about human suffering. If the author bothers to look, he’d see the tens of millions of wretched poor we already have in the US, living in urban ghettos, trailer parks, rural areas, reservations, their cars, even homeless. Where are their sob stories?

He didn’t actually mean “where are their sob stories?”. For those are everywhere, and the author (ie, me) has “bothered to look.” No, this commenter was really saying: “Why is the other story here instead?” Seeing this story makes it harder to maintain the identity he built on his story. He wanted the circle of empathy, the focus of storytelling, drawn around a tighter group. And so the other story is a threat. He would much prefer it not be told.

Risqué extension to politics and society

We can expand this discussion to reach for a more general insight. The difference between the two dangers — ie, the danger of the single story and the danger of the other story — has something to do with whom each threatens.

  • The single story, by stereotyping, threatens individual dignity. (Even if you stereotype a group, it is its individual members who suffer.)
  • The other story threatens group cohesion.

Now recall my own, personal and amateurish diagram of the political spectrum (which is no more than a doodle to comfort me in my confusion):

Concern for the individual is, on balance, a liberal instinct (if you use the correct definition of liberal).

Conservatives (in the classical, Burkian sense) are more concerned about group cohesion.

Now, based on my experience, there is a natural spectrum among people:

  • Some tend t0 emphasize the danger in the other story, and they tend to be conservative.
  • Others emphasize the danger in the single story, and they tend to be liberal.

The single story is more likely to be what Nietzsche would have called Apollonian: sanitized, reassuring, heroic, morally clear. It might involve flag-waving, or a triumph of the justice system, or our own fight against some outrageous wrong.

The other story is more likely to be messy, dark, weird, morally complicated. It might involve exceptions, outsiders, a failure of the justice system, or our own shortcomings.

(Obviously, nobody is exclusively in one camp or the other. But it is quite rare that a storyteller might give equal emphasis to the single and the other story, as Clint Eastwood did with his double take, one and two, of the battle of Iwo Jima.)

One interesting upshot to contemplate: This might explain why conservatives tend to win propaganda wars against liberals. (In America, for instance, Fox trounces whatever rivals pose as its left-wing analogue.) The reason is that the conservatives pick one single story and rally around it, telling and retelling it until the audience is numb. The liberals try, but fail, to agree on a single story to tell. They cannot help themselves and tell many, many other stories. The conservatives thus rally their troops around a single story; the liberals can’t even get anybody to stand in an orderly line for the battle.

This brings us back to my older thread about Socrates, and in particular why the Athenians felt they had to kill him. In this post, I reflected on how Socrates might have behaved in the famous Asch experiments (about conformism): he would have told the truth every time, thus compromising the coherence of the group. (Here is my somewhat dumbed-down piece in The Economist about this tension.)

In a nutshell: Conservative Athens could tolerate Socrates, who really personified the other story, as long as it was a stable polis. But once the polis came under threat (after losing the war against Sparta and the putsches by Spartan sympathizers), the emphasis shifted to group cohesion and other stories were deemed too dangerous.

If you want to expand your perspective even further, you might contemplate all of Western intellectual history as an awkward tension between the single and the other story: as you recall from this anatomical analogy, one side of the “body” is devoted to each.

Whatever you think about this, don’t jump to the conclusion that I worship one and condemn the other. The truth is that there is a certain masochism in telling other stories.

Which reminds me of something that Ferdinand von Schirach says in the prologue to his great book (and I translate):

I had an uncle who was a judge… [His stories] always began with him saying that “most things are complicated, and guilt is quite a thing.”

One day, after a long life, that uncle went to the woods and blasted his head off with a shotgun.

I have them: title, subtitle & cover

It’s official. Riverhead today sent me the jacket, ie cover, of my book. This is a big moment for a first-time author.

Alas, my editor pleaded with me not to share it with you yet. A big sales conference is about to happen and a catalogue is being made up, and apparently this sort of thing must be sprung upon certain people as a surprise.

But I will blast it out right here as soon as I get the green light.

In the meantime, you might be asking me whether I am happy with the result. I’m almost surprised to say Yes, even on the first go.

I admit that when I first opened the PDF file, I had whiplash. It was not at all what I had expected.

But then my focus groups went to work: wife, parents, agent, agent’s office colleagues….

And I had to agree with them. The cover — think of it as an aesthetic package of words and visuals — is:

  • simple (a prerequisite in my worldview),
  • bold (some people will love it, others will hate it, which is a good thing),
  • playful and tongue-in-cheek (which is important, because it’s an intellectual book, which might turn some readers off).

As my editor said when we discussed it (I made him expound on every single visual element), it comines “vibrant and subtle,” and is Riverhead’s way of saying “big idea.”

As I said to him in return: I was in charge of providing subtlety and nuance and texture between the covers; so I always knew I couldn’t be the one to deliver the direct, right-hook punch on the cover.

___

PS: Does anybody have any views on which WordPress themes are particularly elegant for book authors?

The making of corny subtitles

The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator may not be uproariously funny, but after clicking through a few iterations I had to concede that it is at least moderately amusing.

The Generator is, of course, a spoof. You start with the cover of Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and then click on Generate New Bestseller. With each new cover, you realize how tritely manipulative the formula is.

Did I say “formula”? Oops. But yes, that’s essentially what it seems to be: the marketing department‘s (as opposed to the author’s) idea of a catchy title and subtitle. As the Generator puts it in one iteration (pictured above):

Subtitles: How Secondary Titles Inflate a Sense of Importance

Now, as it happens, I have been meditating on this subject in recent weeks because I am, right now, in the process of finalizing a title and subtitle for my own forthcoming book.

We seem to have decided on a title (which I will announce as soon as it is official), but we’re still bouncing subtitles back and forth.

Who is “we”?  Well, we includes me, of course, and my agent, and my editor at Riverhead, and the marketing and publicity departments at Penguin (which owns Riverhead), and possibly lots of other people. Lots of folks in lots of meetings, in other words. Meetings that I don’t get to sit in.

The result is quite interesting. Each “faction”, if I may call it that, seems to have a very different sense of linguistic aesthetics. Or possibly a different sense of strategic objective.

For the record, I am not slagging off the marketing folks — they’re bringing a vital perspective to this, and their suggestions have been good. But authors and marketers do appear to perceive the effects of word combinations in different ways.

So one might speculate, while browsing a book store, which side prevailed in which Title/Subtitle decision on display. There are fantastic titles and subtitles out there. And there are the others.

_____

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What Mendel tells us about thinking

Find quietude. Observe whatever is around you. If it seems banal, discover it to be fascinating and mysterious. Ignore distractions, otherwise known as ‘everybody else’. Ask simple questions that puzzle you. Be patient in pondering them.

That is how I imagine Gregor Mendel might answer us today if we asked him: How  — I mean how! — did you achieve your stunning intellectual breakthroughs, on which we today base our understanding of biology?

Put differently: Let’s pretend that Gregor Mendel were alive today instead of in the 19th century, and that he were not an Augustinian monk in the former Austrian Empire but a wired and connected, über-productive modern man with an iPhone, a Twitter account, cable television, a job with bosses who email him on the weekend, etc etc.

Would this modern Mendel be able to achieve his own breakthrough in those circumstances?

So far in my rather long-running thread about the greatest thinkers in history, I’ve featured mostly philosophers and historians, with the odd scientist and even one yogi. But it occurred to me that Mendel belongs into that pantheon — not only for his thought but also for his thinking. I think he offers us a timely life-style lesson, an insight that fits the Zeitgeist of our hectic age.

So: First, a brief recap of his breakthrough. Then my interpretation how his life style and thought process made that breakthrough possible (and why ours might make such breakthroughs harder).

1) Mendelian genetics

Mendel was an Augustinian monk in what used to the Austrian Empire (and what is now the Czech Republic). He had an open and inquisitive mind and, as a monk, wasn’t all that busy, so he had plenty of spare time. He liked to breed bees. Then he began breeding peas. That’s right. Peas.

Peas intrigued him. (Would they intrigue you? What else does not intrigue you?) He found peas interesting because they had flowers that were either white or purple and never anything else. (Would you find that interesting?)

Mendel contemplated what peas could therefore teach him about how parents pass on traits to their offspring, ie what we would call genetics.

At the time, conventional wisdom held that the traits of parents are somehow mixed in their children. If parents were paint buckets, say, then a yellow dad and a blue mom would make a green baby bucket, and so on. (It’s interesting that nobody spotted how implausible this was: After several generations every bucket, ie every living thing, would have to end up mud-brown. Every creature would look the same. Instead, nature is constantly getting more colorfol, more diverse, with more and stranger new species.)

So Mendel, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, started playing with his peas. Pea plants fertilize themselves, so Mendel cut off the stamens of some so that they could no longer do that. Then he used a little brush and fertilized the castrated pea plant with pollen from some other pea plant. He thereby had total control over who was dad and who was mom.

He was now able to cross-breed the peas with purple flowers and the peas with white flowers. So he did. Then he waited.

Surprise #1:

Already in the next generation, Mendel could rule out the prevailing “paint-bucket-mixing” theory. No baby pea plants had lighter purple (or striped or dotted) flowers. Instead they all had purple flowers.

So he took those new purple-flowered pea plants and cross-bred them again. And again, he waited.

Surprise #2:

In the next generation, most pea plants again had purple flowers. But some now had white flowers. Wow! How did that happen?

Moreover, the ratio in this generation between purple and white flowers was exactly 3:1. Hmm.

Mendel kept doing these experiments, and kept thinking, and then inferred the simple but shocking conclusion:

  1. Each parent had to be contributing its version of a given trait (white vs purple, say) to the offspring.
  2. Each baby thus had to have both versions of every trait, but showed in its own appearance only one version, which had to be dominant.
  3. The other (“recessive“) version, however, did not go away, and when these pea plants had sex again, they shuffled the two versions and randomly passed one on to their offspring (with the other coming from the other parent), so that their baby again had two versions.

This looks as follows:

In the second generation, every pea plant has a purple (red, in this picture) and a white version, one from each parent, but since the purple is dominant, every flower looks purple.

In the next generation,

  • one fourth will have a purple from dad and a purple from mom (and look purple),
  • one fourth will have a purple from dad and a white from mom (and still look purple),
  • one fourth will have a white from dad and a purple from mom (and still look purple), and
  • one fourth will have a white from dad and a white from mom (and look white).

The rest, you might say, is history. With all our amazing breakthroughs in biology in the 20th century, we merely elaborated on his insights, in the process explaining the mechanism of evolution (Darwin, coming up with that idea at the same exact time, had no knowledge of Mendel’s breakthrough.)

In today’s language, Mendel

  • showed the difference between genotype and phenotype. (Your genotype might be white/purple, for example, but your phenotype would be purple.)
  • understood the basic idea of meiosis (the division of a cell into two haploid gametes — a sperm cell or egg with half of the mother cell’s chromosomes, randomly chosen),
  • described how two gametes then merge sexually to form a diploid zygote (ie, a cell with all chromosome paired up again, one member of each pair coming from each parent),
  • explained how some versions of the gene pairs, called alleles (such as purple or white), are expressed and some not, even as those not expressed can re-emerge in the phenotype in the next generation.

DNA, RNA, ribosomes and all that were merely detail.

2) How was it possible?

Let’s make ourselves aware, first, of what it must have been like for Mendel during these years (this is purely conjecture):

  • He got up.
  • He prayed.
  • Had breakfast.
  • Went into the garden.
  • Looked at the pea flowers for a long time.
  • Watered them.
  • Took a break.
  • Watched the peas some more.
  • Thought about them.
  • Dozed off for a nap.
  • Woke up and had an idea, still inchoate in his mind.
  • Went to bed.
  • Thought about it some more….

You get the idea. Not exactly stressful. Few interruptions. Lots of waiting (how long is one generation of peas anyway?).

He was, we would say, switched off. He was not multi-tasking, he did not have adrenaline coursing through his veins as he answered a text message while watching a video stream while writing a Powerpoint …

Compare his time with his pea plants to Einstein‘s time at the Bern patent office, where he was utterly underemployed and could easily have been bored, but instead did thought experiments and had his “miracle year”.

Or compare it to Isaac Newton‘s time after had to leave the action of Cambridge (because plague broke out) and returned to the isolation of his family farm with nothing to do except watch apples drop from trees….

Or compare it to the time when Gautama Siddhartha (aka the Buddha) withdrew from all action and sat, just sat, under a tree, with the birds pooping on his head until there was a pile of guano on his hair, with his flesh melting from his bones because he was too deep in concentration to eat…..

Lesson #1:

Good stuff can happen during downtime (even if you didn’t volunteer for it).

Corollary: Can good stuff happen during uptime? You may have to take time out to be creative.

Lesson #2:

Be amazed.

Corollary: Don’t assume the things and people in your daily life are boring.

Lesson #3:

Turn the devices off.

Corollary: Distraction not only kills people, it also kills thought.

Lesson #4:

Be patient.

Corollary: You can’t breed peas in internet time. Nor novels, scripts, songs, paintings…

Lesson #5:

Look for the simple.

Corollary: The more bewildering the complexity observed, the simpler the solution.

(See also: Gordian knot.)

Lesson #6:

It doesn’t have to be complete to be original.

Corollary: It took us a century to explain the process Mendel grasped; an idea is good even if it “merely” starts something.

(See also: Incompleteness theorem. Mr Crotchety’s favorite — need I say more?)

Lesson #7:

Don’t expect the world to get it right away.

Corollary: If it took us a century to understand Mendel’s breakthrough, we might take a while even for yours. 😉

The natural-length revolution in books

Short text, tablet edition

I”ve long been predicting that the main effect of the digital revolution on writing and reading has to do with word count. Put differently, it has to do with the length of texts.

Yesterday, I saw my vision starting to become reality.

But first let me explain why word count/length are so important to literary culture, and why length is at present often distorted.

As music went….

In this post, I’ve ruminated on the imperative of writing to the optimal word count — that is, writing neither too long nor too short.

To use the imperfect analogy of music: Beethoven shouldn’t have been forced to shorten his Fifth to the length of the Rolling Stones’s Brown Sugar, nor the Stones to lengthen Brown Sugar to equal the duration of the Fifth. Each work of art has to be true to itself, which means that each has its own optimal length.

For many years, that presented a packaging problem in music. It made no sense for an orchestra and an audience to gather for only a few minutes. And it made little sense to manufacture and sell vinyl discs that contained only a few minutes of music. So the emphasis was on longer forms of music, or on collections of short pieces — albums, not singles.

But as soon as music migrated from analog to digital media, that packaging distortion disappeared. So now music has been “liberated”. Each artist can compose at optimal length. (Where the medium is still analog, as in a live performance, there is still a preference for greater length.)

… so will text

Text has been far behind the curve. Yes, the digital media have already resuscitated ancient short-form traditions such as haikus, sonnets and aphorisms, in the form of Tweets and blogs. But the dominant medium for the written word is still the printed book. And analog books present the ultimate packaging problem.

Hence the pernicious and pervasive bias toward unnecessary length.

An adult book, especially non-fiction, that is as thin as a baby book looks stupid. No self-respecting publisher, and no author, would touch it. Hence publishers demand that authors pad their ideas to reach a minimum word count. A 30,000-word idea has to be packaged as an 80,000-word book.

This

  • delays the process of writing and publishing and
  • means that most readers only read a small part of most (non-fiction) books.

Bookshelves everywhere are groaning under the weight of unread words. What a waste.

Enter the Kindle Single

Digital books (on Kindles, iPads, iPhones etc.) will change all that. Suddenly, a “book” (shall we still call it that?) no longer looks stupid if it is short. As many Kindle readers have pointed out, one has no sense of length on a Kindle anyway.

And thus Amazon, shrewdly, has launched Kindle Singles, in direct allusion to the music analogy above. As music was liberated from length distortions, so text will be.

This really sank in yesterday when I got an email from Chris Anderson, the “curator” (a title I find a tad pompous) of TED. (That’s an upmarket conference that would like to be a social network. I’ve attended, hence I’m on the email list.) In it, Anderson announced that “TED Books” are now being sold as Kindle Singles. I just bought my first one.

TED Books, he writes, are

to Books as TED Talks are to lectures. They’re short, pithy, riveting. They’re designed to express a single big idea in a way that can be absorbed in a single sitting. A typical 18-minute TED Talk might be around 2000 words. A typical traditional book is at least 60,000 words. TED Books nicely fill the gap in between. They come in at 10,000-20,000 words. So they can be read and absorbed in an hour or two.

So there you have it: the length distortion has disappeared. More interesting is how Anderson talked about that distortion:

Many people are hungry to learn, but have limited time to read full-length books. TED Books offer an exciting new alternative. And it also will allow many brilliant thinkers who don’t have a spare year to author a full-length book (and another year to wait while that book gets published) to nonetheless get their ideas out in the world….

I highlighted that phrase because, as you may remember, I took about one year to write my book, and have been waiting almost two years now for the publication process to kick off in earnest. (It has indeed kicked off: publication is slated for the fall, and my publisher is suddenly very busy.)

My point is that this process, which all publishers today share, makes no sense to a logical alien visiting earth, or to anybody under thirty. This is why the publishing industry will (not might, but will) be disrupted.

As TED’s Anderson puts it,

the world of serious reading is undergoing a revolution. Suddenly it’s possible to carry around a whole library in your coat-pocket. Suddenly, books don’t have to be 200 or 300 pages long so that they feel substantial in printed form. Any length is possible. And that was the breakthrough for us. We’ve seen from TED Talks the power of giving speakers a time constraint. It’s been an amazing instance of “less is more”…

You are what you speak

Apropos of my previous post about corrupting language to fake a sense of community: A colleague of mine at The Economist, Lane Greene, is about to publish a book (on March 8th), which goes much deeper into this subject.

Lane emailed me that You are What you Speak is

a lot about the role language (the creation of modern standard languages) plays in imagining communities…

More formally, his book flap says:

Beginning with literal myths, from the Tower of Babel to the bloody origins of the word “shibboleth,” Greene shows how language “experts” went from myth-making to rule-making and from building cohesive communities to building modern nations. From the notion of one language’s superiority to the common perception that phrases like “It’s me” are “bad English,” linguistic beliefs too often define “us” and distance “them,” supporting class, ethnic, or national prejudices. In short: What we hear about language is often really about the politics of identity…

The flap goes on. Lane then emailed me:

… boiled down, how’s this? “We believe a lot of myths about language, and we’ll learn to love our languages even better when we learn where those myths come from, and get past them…”

I think that sounds pretty damn fascinating, so I’ve pre-ordered the book.

And of course I’m smirking because all this “versioning anxiety” between flap texts and nut grafs (I had asked him for one) and elevator pitches will soon overwhelm and torment me, as I prepare to publish my own book in the fall.

Society masquerading as community

The word community is in danger of overuse by the politically correct jargon crowd.

(It thus joins a long and growing list of words that were once beautiful and powerful but have now been neutered. See: passionate and sustainable.)

This has consequences. The resulting loss of meaning certainly reflects but might even exacerbate the common modern feeling of alienation.

First, here is what our (The Economist‘s) Style Guide says about the word:

Community is a useful word [in some contexts] but in many others it jars. Not only is it often unnecessary, it purports to convey a sense of togetherness that may well not exist. The black community means blacks, the business community means businessmen (who are supposed to be competing, not colluding), the homosexual community means homosexuals, or gays, the intelligence community means spies…. the international community, if it means anything, means other countries [or] aid agencies … What the global community means is a mystery….

I would go even further. A real community is an almost-biological thing: human beings living together closely and with a shared fate that binds them, whether they love one another or not. For context, you might rank human groupings in this order:

  1. Family
  2. Clan
  3. Community

I’ve posted, in other contexts, about Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis that there is a cognitive limit to the size of primate communities, which for our species is about 150. I think that’s just about right.

Beyond that, you don’t have communities. At best you have societies. That’s when humans agree to cohabit a physical or abstract space with other people, most of whom are total strangers, by agreeing to certain rules.

Because people typically are not happy living as unconnected atoms in such a society (ie, because they feel alienated), they will be psychologically tempted to fudge.

They will, in the famous words of Benedict Anderson in this classic of International Relations, imagine communities where none exists. (Perhaps project is a better word.) This is often called

nationalism.

Beyond such national or ethnic societies, you might merely have systems, as in the international system. That is the witty meaning built into the title of another classic of International Relations, Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society.

Within a nation (unless it is a failed state), somebody has a monopoly on legitimate violence, in order to enforce rules, and that provides order. In the absence of such a monopoly (as in the international system), you get anarchy, so you need a different way of achieving order (a balance of powers, for example).

In any case, I can’t help but wonder whether all these mentions of communities that I constantly hear might not reflect a profound and unsatisfied yearning. We yearn for that sense of togetherness which is so often just not there.