From Andrew Sullivan
Why I worry. . .
And why I will not relent on Palin and the danger she represents:
WMDs, Conservatives, Liberals
A reader writes:
That the psychology behind why the WMD propaganda was so obvious and so enraging to liberals, and so opaque to conservatives, has been one of the more interesting elements of the past 6 years (for me).
Orwell wrote:
"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action ... He [H.G. Wells] was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity."
Orwell nailed the dynamics boiling under the surface of the current political environment. Liberals are instinctively opposed to racial pride, nationalism, religious bigotry, and leader-worship--and we saw it in spades with George Bush and Bushism. Umberto Eco's "Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" were on parade and it set our hair on fire.
Have you considered why you were blind to this?
I think I have. I trusted a president after a national catastrophe in a time of war. I had become completely inured to the evidence of Saddam's WMDs, and mindful of our under-estimating his WMD potential in 1990. I assumed that no president would launch a war without sufficient troops to keep the peace therefater. I was unaware we had effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. I was deeply suspicious of the motives of those who opposed the president, many of whom, I suspected, would have opposed him under any circumstance.
I love this country and was deeply angry at what had been done to her.
Was I or am I a nascent fascist? No more than any of us are, I hope. Do I feel racial pride? Nah. I do feel pride in the West, though. Religious faith? Check. Leader worship? Nah. Trust and misplaced hope are not the same as worship, but I do confess to lionizing Bush after 9/11 arguably because I desperately wanted to believe we had a president who could rise to the occasion. And the September 20 speech was remarkable. Love of war? I hope not. But I was less respectful of the benefits of a poisonous peace than I should have been in retrospect.
The key, I think, and Orwell is a model in this, is not to lose those passions that make us human, but to subject them to constant scrutiny and to evaluate the facts as best one can as they emerge. This is neither bloodless liberalism nor authoritarian conservatism. It's an attempt at balance.
And we appease or ignore those forces at our peril.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
A Thanksgiving
"In this world of sin and sorrow, there is always something to be thankful for. I am thankful I am not a Republican."
-H.L. Mencken
-H.L. Mencken
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
A Great Article
This is good stuff, my kind of stuff, an article about current politics within the context of American history by a first-class historian. Perhaps I'll have more to say once I digest it.
Populism Monday, Nov 23, 2009 17:05 PST
Can populism be liberal?
The GOP has owned it since Nixon. Democrats would have to return to the New Deal to recapture it
By Michael Lind
Is a Jackson revival under way? I'm referring not to the late King of Pop but to the 19th century populist president whom his opponents called "King Andrew." According to Michael Barone, in the 2010 elections Republicans have a chance to knock Democrats out of as many as three dozen insecure congressional seats in "Jacksonian districts."
By itself, this would merely reinforce the identification of the Party Formerly Known as Lincoln's with the white South. But in a time of popular anger over banker bonuses and lobby-hobbled government, the themes of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism have appeal far beyond the Scots-Irish enclaves of the Appalachians and Ozarks. Witness the calls from Democrats as well as Republicans for President Obama to oust Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and pay more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street.
In itself, American populism is neither left nor right. Translated into economics, Jacksonian populism spells producerism. For generations, Jacksonian populists have believed that the hardworking majority of small producers is threatened from above and below by two classes of drones: unproductive capitalists and unproductive paupers. While government promotion of public goods like defense, infrastructure and utilities that benefit all citizens is acceptable, Jacksonomics is suspicious of crony capitalists who owe their fortunes to political connections (can you spell B-A-I-L-O-U-T?). And Jacksonian producerism naturally is haunted by the nightmare of a class of the idle poor, who are capable of working but instead live off the labors of others and lack an ownership stake in the community.
Continue Reading
Reform movements have succeeded in the United States only when their programs resonated with populist and producerist values. Lincoln's antislavery Republicans succeeded where the earlier Whigs had failed because the Republicans persuaded Jacksonian farmers that snobbish, parasitic Southern Democratic slave owners were a greater threat to white farmers and white workers in the Midwest than rich Republican bankers and industrialists in the Northeast. Lincoln's Hamiltonian program of aid to railroads and national banking had to be sweetened with the offer of Western homesteads for yeoman farmers before former Jacksonian Democrats would join his coalition.
In the 20th century, the most popular and enduring legacies of the New Deal have been the programs compatible with small-d Jacksonian democracy -- public spending on infrastructure like dams and electric grids and highways, the promotion of single-family home ownership, federal aid to education and Social Security and Medicare, two entitlements tied to individual work by means of the payroll tax. In contrast, welfare for the nonworking poor was always unpopular with most New Deal Democratic voters, who preferred public works programs like the WPA, CCC and CETA to relief payments for the poor and unemployed. Although he broke with the New Deal tradition in other ways, President Bill Clinton was true to its spirit when he collaborated with the Republicans in converting "welfare" from an unpopular federal entitlement to state-based workfare programs.
All too often in American politics the populist distinction between producers and parasites has been mapped onto the racial division between whites and nonwhites. But the Jacksonian republican concern about freeloaders is not, in itself, racist. And it has frequently manifested itself in anger at the freeloading rich as well as the freeloading poor. At the moment, populist anxieties about the nonworking poor or illegal immigrants receiving medical coverage are eclipsed by populist anger at federal bailouts for well-connected Wall Street bankers who pay themselves titanic bonuses for unproductive gambling with other people's money.
Here, one might think, would be an opening for the center-left. And yet the Obama Democrats, unlike the Roosevelt Democrats, cannot take advantage of the popular backlash against Wall Street. Why?
One reason is that the attempt of the "New Democrats" like Clinton, Al Gore and Obama to win Wall Street campaign donations has been all too successful. As Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin helped complete the conversion of the Democrats from a party of unions and populists into a party of financial elites and college-educated professionals. Subsequently Obama raised more money from Wall Street than his Democratic primary rivals and John McCain. On becoming president, he turned over economic policymaking to Rubin's protégé Larry Summers and others like Timothy Geithner from the Wall Street Democratic network.
The financial industry is now to the Obama Democrats what the AFL-CIO was to the Roosevelt-to-Johnson Democrats. It is touching to watch progressives lament that "their" president has the wrong advisors. "We trust the czar, we simply dislike his ministers." Obama owed his meteoric rise from obscurity to the presidency not to any bold progressive ideas -- he didn't have any -- but rather to a combination of his appealing life story with the big money that allowed him to abandon campaign finance limits. According to one Obama supporter I know, the Obama campaign pressured its Wall Street donors to make their contributions in the form of many small checks, in order to create the illusion that the campaign was more dependent on small contributors than it was in fact. Even now President Obama continues to raise money on Wall Street, while his administration says no to every progressive proposal for significant structural reform of the financial industry.
There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama's White House -- and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires' club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives to channel popular outrage? Unfortunately, progressivism in the form in which it has evolved in the last generation does not resonate with populist producerism.
To begin with, most of the moral fervor of the contemporary center-left has been diverted from the issue of fair rewards for labor to the environmental movement. In theory, environmentalism ought to fit the populist narrative of defending shared goods against special interests. Indeed, clean air and water legislation and public parks and wilderness areas are broadly popular with working-class Americans, not least hunters and fishers. But many environmentalists insist that global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately "densified" cities with mass transit. Whether environmentalists propose to engineer this utopian social transformation by tax incentives or coercive laws, the campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.
Even if it had not been eclipsed by moralistic lifestyle environmentalism, contemporary economic progressivism would be crippled by its own priorities. New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. Post-New Deal progressivism is primarily about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. This inversion of priorities is underlined by the agenda of the Democrats since the last election -- universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.
It is only in the post-New Deal era that universal healthcare has become the Holy Grail of the American center-left, rather than, say, full employment or a living wage. Sure, Democrats from Truman to Johnson sought universal healthcare, and Medicare for the elderly was a down payment for that goal. But the main concern of the New Dealers was providing economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have the bargaining power to obtain their fair share of the new wealth in the form of wages, you don't need a vastly bigger welfare state. Having forgotten the New Deal's emphasis on high-wage work, all too many of today's progressives seem to have internalized the right's caricature of FDR-to-LBJ liberalism as being primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor.
This shift in emphasis is connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor. And progressive redistributionism also reflects the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base. Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on the populist values of the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism tends to define center-left politics not as self-help on the part of citizens but rather as charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.
At a recent event in Washington, I was surprised when a Democratic senator said, "The major threat facing America today is the class divide." The speaker was Jim Webb of Virginia, the self-conscious heir to Scots-Irish Jacksonian populism. He went on to attack the inhumane treatment of prisoners in American jails and the avoidance of military service by the American elite.
Populists like Webb are rare in today's Democratic Party, while the Republicans, for all their folksy rhetoric, offer nothing but the economic program of their Wall Street Journal/Club for Growth wing. If mass unemployment and slow growth persist for years, some sort of third-party, "Middle American" populist movement in 2012 seems possible. (Lou Dobbs: tanned, rested and ready?)
Could a new wave of populist independents be steered into the Democratic Party? Alas, that seems unlikely, if Democrats are viewed as the compromised, establishmentarian governing party. Moreover, the Republican Party benefited from the last two populist upheavals. Richard Nixon built the generation-long hegemony of the Republicans on the anger of George Wallace voters, and, following the campaign of Ross Perot in 1992, Newt Gingrich captured anti-system reformism to build a Republican congressional majority for most of the period between 1994 and 2006.
In each case, liberals and progressives indiscriminately rejected the populist voters. The Wallace voters, most of whom were New Deal Democrats, were dismissed by most liberals as though they were motivated by nothing but opposition to racial integration. In 1992 the New Republic published an idiotic cover with Perot dressed as Mussolini, implying that he and his supporters were crypto-fascists. Today ridicule of the bombastic Sarah Palin shades all too easily into loathing for the lower middle class.
It would be much easier for the Republicans to rebuild the conservative-populist coalition that dominated American politics from 1968 to 2006 than it would be for the Democrats to rebuild the kind of liberal-populist coalition of the New Deal era from 1932 to 1968. Will the Democrats be marginalized a third time rather than empowered by anti-system populism? In the next few election cycles we may find out.
Populism Monday, Nov 23, 2009 17:05 PST
Can populism be liberal?
The GOP has owned it since Nixon. Democrats would have to return to the New Deal to recapture it
By Michael Lind
Is a Jackson revival under way? I'm referring not to the late King of Pop but to the 19th century populist president whom his opponents called "King Andrew." According to Michael Barone, in the 2010 elections Republicans have a chance to knock Democrats out of as many as three dozen insecure congressional seats in "Jacksonian districts."
By itself, this would merely reinforce the identification of the Party Formerly Known as Lincoln's with the white South. But in a time of popular anger over banker bonuses and lobby-hobbled government, the themes of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism have appeal far beyond the Scots-Irish enclaves of the Appalachians and Ozarks. Witness the calls from Democrats as well as Republicans for President Obama to oust Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and pay more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street.
In itself, American populism is neither left nor right. Translated into economics, Jacksonian populism spells producerism. For generations, Jacksonian populists have believed that the hardworking majority of small producers is threatened from above and below by two classes of drones: unproductive capitalists and unproductive paupers. While government promotion of public goods like defense, infrastructure and utilities that benefit all citizens is acceptable, Jacksonomics is suspicious of crony capitalists who owe their fortunes to political connections (can you spell B-A-I-L-O-U-T?). And Jacksonian producerism naturally is haunted by the nightmare of a class of the idle poor, who are capable of working but instead live off the labors of others and lack an ownership stake in the community.
Continue Reading
Reform movements have succeeded in the United States only when their programs resonated with populist and producerist values. Lincoln's antislavery Republicans succeeded where the earlier Whigs had failed because the Republicans persuaded Jacksonian farmers that snobbish, parasitic Southern Democratic slave owners were a greater threat to white farmers and white workers in the Midwest than rich Republican bankers and industrialists in the Northeast. Lincoln's Hamiltonian program of aid to railroads and national banking had to be sweetened with the offer of Western homesteads for yeoman farmers before former Jacksonian Democrats would join his coalition.
In the 20th century, the most popular and enduring legacies of the New Deal have been the programs compatible with small-d Jacksonian democracy -- public spending on infrastructure like dams and electric grids and highways, the promotion of single-family home ownership, federal aid to education and Social Security and Medicare, two entitlements tied to individual work by means of the payroll tax. In contrast, welfare for the nonworking poor was always unpopular with most New Deal Democratic voters, who preferred public works programs like the WPA, CCC and CETA to relief payments for the poor and unemployed. Although he broke with the New Deal tradition in other ways, President Bill Clinton was true to its spirit when he collaborated with the Republicans in converting "welfare" from an unpopular federal entitlement to state-based workfare programs.
All too often in American politics the populist distinction between producers and parasites has been mapped onto the racial division between whites and nonwhites. But the Jacksonian republican concern about freeloaders is not, in itself, racist. And it has frequently manifested itself in anger at the freeloading rich as well as the freeloading poor. At the moment, populist anxieties about the nonworking poor or illegal immigrants receiving medical coverage are eclipsed by populist anger at federal bailouts for well-connected Wall Street bankers who pay themselves titanic bonuses for unproductive gambling with other people's money.
Here, one might think, would be an opening for the center-left. And yet the Obama Democrats, unlike the Roosevelt Democrats, cannot take advantage of the popular backlash against Wall Street. Why?
One reason is that the attempt of the "New Democrats" like Clinton, Al Gore and Obama to win Wall Street campaign donations has been all too successful. As Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin helped complete the conversion of the Democrats from a party of unions and populists into a party of financial elites and college-educated professionals. Subsequently Obama raised more money from Wall Street than his Democratic primary rivals and John McCain. On becoming president, he turned over economic policymaking to Rubin's protégé Larry Summers and others like Timothy Geithner from the Wall Street Democratic network.
The financial industry is now to the Obama Democrats what the AFL-CIO was to the Roosevelt-to-Johnson Democrats. It is touching to watch progressives lament that "their" president has the wrong advisors. "We trust the czar, we simply dislike his ministers." Obama owed his meteoric rise from obscurity to the presidency not to any bold progressive ideas -- he didn't have any -- but rather to a combination of his appealing life story with the big money that allowed him to abandon campaign finance limits. According to one Obama supporter I know, the Obama campaign pressured its Wall Street donors to make their contributions in the form of many small checks, in order to create the illusion that the campaign was more dependent on small contributors than it was in fact. Even now President Obama continues to raise money on Wall Street, while his administration says no to every progressive proposal for significant structural reform of the financial industry.
There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama's White House -- and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires' club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives to channel popular outrage? Unfortunately, progressivism in the form in which it has evolved in the last generation does not resonate with populist producerism.
To begin with, most of the moral fervor of the contemporary center-left has been diverted from the issue of fair rewards for labor to the environmental movement. In theory, environmentalism ought to fit the populist narrative of defending shared goods against special interests. Indeed, clean air and water legislation and public parks and wilderness areas are broadly popular with working-class Americans, not least hunters and fishers. But many environmentalists insist that global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately "densified" cities with mass transit. Whether environmentalists propose to engineer this utopian social transformation by tax incentives or coercive laws, the campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.
Even if it had not been eclipsed by moralistic lifestyle environmentalism, contemporary economic progressivism would be crippled by its own priorities. New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. Post-New Deal progressivism is primarily about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. This inversion of priorities is underlined by the agenda of the Democrats since the last election -- universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.
It is only in the post-New Deal era that universal healthcare has become the Holy Grail of the American center-left, rather than, say, full employment or a living wage. Sure, Democrats from Truman to Johnson sought universal healthcare, and Medicare for the elderly was a down payment for that goal. But the main concern of the New Dealers was providing economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have the bargaining power to obtain their fair share of the new wealth in the form of wages, you don't need a vastly bigger welfare state. Having forgotten the New Deal's emphasis on high-wage work, all too many of today's progressives seem to have internalized the right's caricature of FDR-to-LBJ liberalism as being primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor.
This shift in emphasis is connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor. And progressive redistributionism also reflects the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base. Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on the populist values of the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism tends to define center-left politics not as self-help on the part of citizens but rather as charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.
At a recent event in Washington, I was surprised when a Democratic senator said, "The major threat facing America today is the class divide." The speaker was Jim Webb of Virginia, the self-conscious heir to Scots-Irish Jacksonian populism. He went on to attack the inhumane treatment of prisoners in American jails and the avoidance of military service by the American elite.
Populists like Webb are rare in today's Democratic Party, while the Republicans, for all their folksy rhetoric, offer nothing but the economic program of their Wall Street Journal/Club for Growth wing. If mass unemployment and slow growth persist for years, some sort of third-party, "Middle American" populist movement in 2012 seems possible. (Lou Dobbs: tanned, rested and ready?)
Could a new wave of populist independents be steered into the Democratic Party? Alas, that seems unlikely, if Democrats are viewed as the compromised, establishmentarian governing party. Moreover, the Republican Party benefited from the last two populist upheavals. Richard Nixon built the generation-long hegemony of the Republicans on the anger of George Wallace voters, and, following the campaign of Ross Perot in 1992, Newt Gingrich captured anti-system reformism to build a Republican congressional majority for most of the period between 1994 and 2006.
In each case, liberals and progressives indiscriminately rejected the populist voters. The Wallace voters, most of whom were New Deal Democrats, were dismissed by most liberals as though they were motivated by nothing but opposition to racial integration. In 1992 the New Republic published an idiotic cover with Perot dressed as Mussolini, implying that he and his supporters were crypto-fascists. Today ridicule of the bombastic Sarah Palin shades all too easily into loathing for the lower middle class.
It would be much easier for the Republicans to rebuild the conservative-populist coalition that dominated American politics from 1968 to 2006 than it would be for the Democrats to rebuild the kind of liberal-populist coalition of the New Deal era from 1932 to 1968. Will the Democrats be marginalized a third time rather than empowered by anti-system populism? In the next few election cycles we may find out.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Palin in Birmingham
So Palin was in town yesterday. Since I am out-of-town I didn't get to see any of the theatrics. I hope they did it right. A band playing "Dixie." Confederate flags waving. A noose or two being brandished. Did the white-sheeted men show up with their support? Jefferson Davis and George Wallace would LOVE Sarah Palin. She would have made a great president of the Confederate States of America. If Alabama ever secedes from the United States, she would make a great President of Alabama. Yee-hah!
Sunday, November 22, 2009
What's Irreplaceable About Books?
David WeinbergerWriter, Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center
Posted: November 22, 2009 09:27
What's Irreplaceable About Books?
As Marshall McLuhan said, new media generally do not replace old media. For example, radio remained important even after television came to dominance. On the other hand, by the time Western Union ended its telegram service in 2006, the cultural role and importance of telegrams had changed ... and shrunk. So, after we have networked digital books, will books be as ubiquitous and culturally important as radio? Will their role become as narrow as the telegram's in 2005? Will they be as cherished but infrequently attended as live theater? What's the future of books?
The answer depends on what we value about printed books that electronic books cannot replace.
We won't know the answer until we invent the future. But, I'm going to hypothesize, predict, or stipulate (pick one) that at some point we will have ebooks (which may be distinct hardware or software running in something other device we carry around), with paper-quality displays that are full-color and multimedia, that are fully on the Net, with software that lets us interact with the book and with other readers, that are a part of the standard outfitting of citizens, and that exist within a world that provides ubiquitous Net connectivity.
Those are a lot of assumptions, of course, and each and every one of them could be disrupted by some 17 year old at work in her parents' basement. Nevertheless, if the future is something like that, then what of pbooks' value will be left unreplaced by ebooks?
Readability. I'm assuming paper-quality displays, which may turn out to be unattainable without having to wheel around batteries the size of suitcases. But, with a display not as crisp as ink on paper, ebooks' ability to display text in various fonts and sizes should remove this advantage from pbooks.
Convenience. I am assuming that ebooks will be more convenient than pbooks: as legible in sunlight, at least as easy to hold and use, easier to use for those with certain disabilities, long enough battery life, possibly self-lit, etc. The biggest open question, I believe, is whether it will be as easy to annotate ebooks...
Annotatability. The current crop of ebooks make highlighting passages and making notes so difficult that you have to take a break from reading to do either of those things. But, that's one big reason why the current crop of ebooks are pathetic. With a touchscreen and a usable keyboard (or handwriting recognition software), ebooks of the future should be as easy to annotate as a pbook is. And those annotations will then become more useful, since they will be searchable and sharable.
Affordability. The marginal cost of producing ebook content is tiny, which doesn't mean prices will drop as dramatically as we might like. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine a world in which ebook content costs more than pbooks. Of course, this assumes that ebook readers will be cheap enough to compete with pbooks, given the combined cost of content and hardware. On the other hand, if ebook readers turn out to be software that runs on some more generalized device, the economics will likely work in ebooks' favor.
Social flags. We use the books we own as tribal flags, as Cory Doctorow points out in a recent interview. You probably carefully choose which book you're going to bring with you on a job interview, and which books get moved to the shelves in your living room. Ebooks can serve the same role when introduced into social networks, including social networks explicitly built around books, such as LibraryThing.com. They obviously don't work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you're going to have to get physical copies.
Aesthetic objects. Many of us love the feel and smell of books. While ebooks might be able to simulate that in some way — maybe their page displays could yellow over time — it'd still just be a simulation. While ebooks will undoubtedly develop their own aesthetics, so that we'll call people over to see how beautiful this or that new ebook is, they can't replace the particular aesthetics of pbooks. So, those who love pbooks will continue to cherish them.
Sentimental objects. For my bar mitzvah, some friend of my parents gave me a leatherbound copy of A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" and other poems. It was a beautiful aesthetic object, but I also understood that it had a personal meaning to the giver. I doubt that that particular copy did — I don't think it came from his own collection — but the physicality of the book was itself a marker for the personal meaning it had for the giver. As Cory says, the books your father read — the very copies that were in his hands — probably have special meaning to you. It's hard to see how ebooks could have the same sentimental value, except perhaps if you are reading the highlights and notes left by your father, and even then, it's not the same.
Historic objects. Likewise, knowing that you're looking at the very copy that was read by Thomas Jefferson gives a book an historic value that ebook content just can't have. It's hard to see how an author could autograph an ebook in any meaningful way.
Historical objects. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have pointed out, as has Anthony Grafton, books as physical objects collect metadata that can be useful to historians, e.g., the smell of vinegar that indicates the book came from a town visited by cholera. Ebooks, however, accumulate and generate far more metadata. So, we will lose some types of metadata but gain much more...maybe more than our current norms of privacy are comfortable with.
Specialized objects. It will take somewhere between an improbably long time and forever for all collections of pbooks to be digitized. Thus, books in special collections are likely to be required well after we can take the presence of ebooks for granted.
Possessions. We are headed towards a model that grants us licenses to read books, but not outright ownership. (This is Cory's main topic in the interview that stimulated this post.) If we lose ownership of ebooks, then they won't have the sentimental value, they will lose some of their economic value to readers (because we won't be able to resell them or buy them cheaper used), and we won't be as invested in them culturally. Whether ebooks will be ownable, and whether that will be the default of the exception, is unresolved.
Single-mindedness. Books are the exemplar in our culture of thinking. We write our best thoughts in books. We engage with the best thoughts of others by reading books. Books encourage and enable long-form thinking. Ebooks, because they are (ex hypothesis) on the Net, are distracting. They string together associated chunks and tempt us with links beyond themselves. It is easy to imagine ebooks providing the singleminded pbook experience: "Press here to remove all links." But, of course, you could always unpress the button. Besides, since your ebook is on the Net (ex hypothesis), all that's stopping you from jumping out of the book and into your email or Facebook is self-discipline. So, while ebooks can provide the singledminded experience of pbooks, some of us may prefer the paper version to keep the distraction of the Net at bay.
Religious objects. Some books have special meaning within some religions. It's hard to imagine, for example, that an ebook is going to replace the Torah scrolls in synagogues. In fact, orthodox Jews can't use electronic devices on the Sabbath, so they are certainly going to continue to buy pbooks. But, this is the very definition of a specialty market.
So, what does all this mean for the future of books? It depends.
First, are there other values of pbooks that I left off the list?
Second, I haven't listed any unique advantages of ebooks. For example, ebooks will allow social reading: engaging with others who are reading the book or with the traces left by those who have already it. That's potentially transformative of reading. Also, ebooks are likely to radically reduce the cost of reading, especially of some categories of overpriced pbooks (e.g., textbooks). Also, ebooks will make it much easier to understand the content of books through embedded dictionaries, search capabilities, and links to explanatory discussions. Also, as more of the corpus gets digitized, ebooks will make it far easier for scholars to pursue the footnotes (except they'll be embedded links, not footnotes). Also, ebooks will incorporate multimedia. Also, reading ebooks will build a searchable personal corpus that is far more useful to us than bookcases filled with out conquered pbooks. Also, we'll always have our entire library with us, ready to be read or reread, which is good news for readers.
I leave it to you to decide how this mix of values is likely to play out. What will be the social role and meaning of pbooks as we go forward into the ebook era? In twenty years — giving ourselves plenty of time to develop usable ebook readers, to digitize most of what we need, and to build an always-available network — will pbooks be used mainly by collectors, and scholars working with unique texts? Will they be sentimental objects? What poor people read? What rich people read? Will physical books be the equivalent of AM radio, of the road company of "Cats," of quaint objects in book museums — and/or the continuing pinnacle and embodiment of learning?
Posted: November 22, 2009 09:27
What's Irreplaceable About Books?
As Marshall McLuhan said, new media generally do not replace old media. For example, radio remained important even after television came to dominance. On the other hand, by the time Western Union ended its telegram service in 2006, the cultural role and importance of telegrams had changed ... and shrunk. So, after we have networked digital books, will books be as ubiquitous and culturally important as radio? Will their role become as narrow as the telegram's in 2005? Will they be as cherished but infrequently attended as live theater? What's the future of books?
The answer depends on what we value about printed books that electronic books cannot replace.
We won't know the answer until we invent the future. But, I'm going to hypothesize, predict, or stipulate (pick one) that at some point we will have ebooks (which may be distinct hardware or software running in something other device we carry around), with paper-quality displays that are full-color and multimedia, that are fully on the Net, with software that lets us interact with the book and with other readers, that are a part of the standard outfitting of citizens, and that exist within a world that provides ubiquitous Net connectivity.
Those are a lot of assumptions, of course, and each and every one of them could be disrupted by some 17 year old at work in her parents' basement. Nevertheless, if the future is something like that, then what of pbooks' value will be left unreplaced by ebooks?
Readability. I'm assuming paper-quality displays, which may turn out to be unattainable without having to wheel around batteries the size of suitcases. But, with a display not as crisp as ink on paper, ebooks' ability to display text in various fonts and sizes should remove this advantage from pbooks.
Convenience. I am assuming that ebooks will be more convenient than pbooks: as legible in sunlight, at least as easy to hold and use, easier to use for those with certain disabilities, long enough battery life, possibly self-lit, etc. The biggest open question, I believe, is whether it will be as easy to annotate ebooks...
Annotatability. The current crop of ebooks make highlighting passages and making notes so difficult that you have to take a break from reading to do either of those things. But, that's one big reason why the current crop of ebooks are pathetic. With a touchscreen and a usable keyboard (or handwriting recognition software), ebooks of the future should be as easy to annotate as a pbook is. And those annotations will then become more useful, since they will be searchable and sharable.
Affordability. The marginal cost of producing ebook content is tiny, which doesn't mean prices will drop as dramatically as we might like. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine a world in which ebook content costs more than pbooks. Of course, this assumes that ebook readers will be cheap enough to compete with pbooks, given the combined cost of content and hardware. On the other hand, if ebook readers turn out to be software that runs on some more generalized device, the economics will likely work in ebooks' favor.
Social flags. We use the books we own as tribal flags, as Cory Doctorow points out in a recent interview. You probably carefully choose which book you're going to bring with you on a job interview, and which books get moved to the shelves in your living room. Ebooks can serve the same role when introduced into social networks, including social networks explicitly built around books, such as LibraryThing.com. They obviously don't work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you're going to have to get physical copies.
Aesthetic objects. Many of us love the feel and smell of books. While ebooks might be able to simulate that in some way — maybe their page displays could yellow over time — it'd still just be a simulation. While ebooks will undoubtedly develop their own aesthetics, so that we'll call people over to see how beautiful this or that new ebook is, they can't replace the particular aesthetics of pbooks. So, those who love pbooks will continue to cherish them.
Sentimental objects. For my bar mitzvah, some friend of my parents gave me a leatherbound copy of A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" and other poems. It was a beautiful aesthetic object, but I also understood that it had a personal meaning to the giver. I doubt that that particular copy did — I don't think it came from his own collection — but the physicality of the book was itself a marker for the personal meaning it had for the giver. As Cory says, the books your father read — the very copies that were in his hands — probably have special meaning to you. It's hard to see how ebooks could have the same sentimental value, except perhaps if you are reading the highlights and notes left by your father, and even then, it's not the same.
Historic objects. Likewise, knowing that you're looking at the very copy that was read by Thomas Jefferson gives a book an historic value that ebook content just can't have. It's hard to see how an author could autograph an ebook in any meaningful way.
Historical objects. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have pointed out, as has Anthony Grafton, books as physical objects collect metadata that can be useful to historians, e.g., the smell of vinegar that indicates the book came from a town visited by cholera. Ebooks, however, accumulate and generate far more metadata. So, we will lose some types of metadata but gain much more...maybe more than our current norms of privacy are comfortable with.
Specialized objects. It will take somewhere between an improbably long time and forever for all collections of pbooks to be digitized. Thus, books in special collections are likely to be required well after we can take the presence of ebooks for granted.
Possessions. We are headed towards a model that grants us licenses to read books, but not outright ownership. (This is Cory's main topic in the interview that stimulated this post.) If we lose ownership of ebooks, then they won't have the sentimental value, they will lose some of their economic value to readers (because we won't be able to resell them or buy them cheaper used), and we won't be as invested in them culturally. Whether ebooks will be ownable, and whether that will be the default of the exception, is unresolved.
Single-mindedness. Books are the exemplar in our culture of thinking. We write our best thoughts in books. We engage with the best thoughts of others by reading books. Books encourage and enable long-form thinking. Ebooks, because they are (ex hypothesis) on the Net, are distracting. They string together associated chunks and tempt us with links beyond themselves. It is easy to imagine ebooks providing the singleminded pbook experience: "Press here to remove all links." But, of course, you could always unpress the button. Besides, since your ebook is on the Net (ex hypothesis), all that's stopping you from jumping out of the book and into your email or Facebook is self-discipline. So, while ebooks can provide the singledminded experience of pbooks, some of us may prefer the paper version to keep the distraction of the Net at bay.
Religious objects. Some books have special meaning within some religions. It's hard to imagine, for example, that an ebook is going to replace the Torah scrolls in synagogues. In fact, orthodox Jews can't use electronic devices on the Sabbath, so they are certainly going to continue to buy pbooks. But, this is the very definition of a specialty market.
So, what does all this mean for the future of books? It depends.
First, are there other values of pbooks that I left off the list?
Second, I haven't listed any unique advantages of ebooks. For example, ebooks will allow social reading: engaging with others who are reading the book or with the traces left by those who have already it. That's potentially transformative of reading. Also, ebooks are likely to radically reduce the cost of reading, especially of some categories of overpriced pbooks (e.g., textbooks). Also, ebooks will make it much easier to understand the content of books through embedded dictionaries, search capabilities, and links to explanatory discussions. Also, as more of the corpus gets digitized, ebooks will make it far easier for scholars to pursue the footnotes (except they'll be embedded links, not footnotes). Also, ebooks will incorporate multimedia. Also, reading ebooks will build a searchable personal corpus that is far more useful to us than bookcases filled with out conquered pbooks. Also, we'll always have our entire library with us, ready to be read or reread, which is good news for readers.
I leave it to you to decide how this mix of values is likely to play out. What will be the social role and meaning of pbooks as we go forward into the ebook era? In twenty years — giving ourselves plenty of time to develop usable ebook readers, to digitize most of what we need, and to build an always-available network — will pbooks be used mainly by collectors, and scholars working with unique texts? Will they be sentimental objects? What poor people read? What rich people read? Will physical books be the equivalent of AM radio, of the road company of "Cats," of quaint objects in book museums — and/or the continuing pinnacle and embodiment of learning?
Bill Henderson - Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club (3)
"My core fear is that we are, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth---from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery---and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millenia has been central to the very idea of a culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web."
-Sven Birkerts in Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, p. 28
-Sven Birkerts in Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, p. 28
Bill Henderson - Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club (2)
Once upon a time there was a "club" called The Lead Pencil Club. The members of this club swore off the electronic revolution as latter day Luddites. This book, published in 1996, contains some of their views. It is interesting reading today more than 10 years later.
It was still possible in 1996 to "refuse it," like literary critic Sven Birkerts says. Today we cannot refuse it unless we wish to be completely out of touch and ill-informed. I cannot conceive of a life without the internet to keep up with what is going on in the world, without blogs like this one to record my views, and a cell phone for personal AND business use. You cannot avoid voice mail. You cannot not have a computer and use it. You CAN turn off the TV, which I do frequently. You CAN avoid Blackberries and iPhones. But I DO flip thru multiple websites each day to keep with politics and culture. I cannot do without this access.
The key is to find a balance between print and digital. For someone of my age, born in print and still dedicated to print, but conversant in digital, using digital, this is certainly possible. Perhaps it is not possible for people on the extreme sides of my age category. I really don't know.
And so I like to think that I am balanced, still reading books, not ebooks, but active in keeping up with the world on the internet.
It was still possible in 1996 to "refuse it," like literary critic Sven Birkerts says. Today we cannot refuse it unless we wish to be completely out of touch and ill-informed. I cannot conceive of a life without the internet to keep up with what is going on in the world, without blogs like this one to record my views, and a cell phone for personal AND business use. You cannot avoid voice mail. You cannot not have a computer and use it. You CAN turn off the TV, which I do frequently. You CAN avoid Blackberries and iPhones. But I DO flip thru multiple websites each day to keep with politics and culture. I cannot do without this access.
The key is to find a balance between print and digital. For someone of my age, born in print and still dedicated to print, but conversant in digital, using digital, this is certainly possible. Perhaps it is not possible for people on the extreme sides of my age category. I really don't know.
And so I like to think that I am balanced, still reading books, not ebooks, but active in keeping up with the world on the internet.
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