The Content Philosopher

The Fate of Books

This is a picture of the London Library after being damaged, rather substantially, during the blitz. I came across this image when re-reading The History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. When you take the time to consider this picture you are struck by how incredible it is and how much it can tell us about the nature of books. This is exactly what Manguel does. We can do the same right now. 

For starters, we see one of the features of printed books that is always noteworthy and that is their robustness. Certainly many books would have been obliterated by the initial explosion. Others would have been soaked as the London Fire Brigade battled the attendant flames. But a great many books would have survived. I have touched on the persistence of books before (see The eBook Revolution: Blowing Books to Bits) and the importance of this quality is worth returning to from time to time. 

But as Manguel points out, there is a lot more here as well. Most notably, instead of the bustle of emergency workers we find people who probably arrived to survey the damage but who have been distracted by the books on the shelves. They immediately revealed themselves as incurable readers, as seekers of knowledge. Now I cannot but help seeing one of the quintessential qualities of the British, a stubborn fascination with learning, and then seeing this as one of the reasons why Britain never flinched during the onslaught and invariably prevailed. 

We also see here a common fate of libraries. As has been chronicled in a number of books, libraries have a nasty habit of falling afoul of forces who seek to strike at the heart of any given society by striking at their libraries. As two examples, see A Universal History of the Destruction of Books and Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History. There is a perverse logic at work in these cases. The mainstays of a society will seek to collect, enshrine and protect what it knows, believes and values in institutions that declare, quite physically, the importance of these resources. Hence libraries. And hence the specialized communities that build up around them with these sometimes being very exclusive communities (just try wondering into the Bodleian Library without a readers card, for example). When strife appears, these institutions quickly become targets. In other instances, an earnest but expensive lattice work of investments is erected around these institutions which attracts the attention of a more pedestrian enemy. Funding cutbacks inevitably follow. This circumstance has led me on occasion to make a highly uncharitable substitution of librarians for lawyers in one of Shakespeare's more notorious declarations about what do with lawyers. 

More interesting to me than the destruction of books and libraries, however, is their remarkable ability to survive. The more common fate for libraries than destruction is in fact their dispersal. When the investment needed to manage and protect a library wanes, what usually happens is that the holdings are boxed up, shipped out, sold off, or in some cases simply pillaged. Then the books enter a wider circulation and one that is usually uncharted. This is where things tend to get really interesting, to my mind. Unchained (sometimes quite literally) from their shelves, ex libris books have often travelled widely and sparked unforeseen consequences. So while the learning circle that grew up around John Dee and his Elizabethan library is noteworthy, the dispersal of the books and the new circles it might have spawned is even more interesting. The same can be said of the renaissance library of Matthias Corvinus, the Raven King of Hungary. The holdings of this library, filled with some of the latest and most exquisite examples of scriptorial art, found themselves being spread widely across Europe and the Islamic world. Books that were once only accessed by the invited few suddenly found themselves in the bargain bin of history, accessible to anyone with some spare change.

I am also reminded of a story I remember hearing about the early Bodleian Library when investigators dispatched under a reactionary Queen Mary (aka Bloody Mary) found that about 300 of the 303 volumes in the library should be classified as prohibited. I have a fanciful image of clerics running out of the library in a state of horror after having encountered volume after volume of astrology, magical science and heretical philosophy. The immediate consequence of this investigation might have been the destruction of the books but I can't help but think that the tomes would have simply shifted around the town of Oxford thereby remaining in unofficial circulation. (I have not expended any energy on researching this further, as I am sure that someone has looked into it. And I suspect that I will prefer my version of the story over what I might discover. Nonetheless, the more than a little quirky, and at times irreverant, nature of many Oxford scholars - then as now - leads me to be quite confident that at least some of the prohibited books found a life after being proscribed.) 

The persistence of books does have a material bearing on how this pattern of dissemination has operated in the past. Now the emergence of electronic books offers us new channels of movement, and ones that operate at the speed of light. The persistence of these electronic artifacts does become an interesting topic to consider. In some ways, the unbridled replication that theoretically comes with digital representations may make these electronic books highly persistant. In other ways, however, electronic formats have a habit of falling out of favour, or disk drive space oddly becomes a precious resource to be protected through hamfisted purges, and information that was once widely available can suddenly find itself to be very rare indeed.

Even in my own experience, the mountains of electronic documents written and posted on the early web - ironically frequently about digitizing information resources and business processes - have all but vanished. So it seems that some of the forces that regularly threaten books and libraries do not distinguish between the hardcopy and the digital. We should be mindful of this fact as we move more and more of our books online. And we should think seriously about how we can bolster, instead of undermining, the persistence and portability of books in a digital world. I suspect that more depends on this than we currently understand. 

In the Spirit of Benjamin Franklin

 

I recently found myself spending some time in the historic district of Philadelphia and consequently surrounded by echoes of the irrepressible Benjamin Franklin. Every once and a while, when surveying history, you come across people who just seem to lay their hands on everything and somehow manage to leave a lasting impression on everything they touch. Ben Franklin is one of those characters. And among the American founding fathers, it is Franklin that strikes me as the most approachable - radiating a thoroughly engaging combination of affable sociability, tireless industry and unquenchable curiosity. He was a successful printer, popular author, respected scientist, ingenious inventor, worldly statesman – and these have since coalesced to make him a paragon of particular approach to life (one that holds a lot of merit I might add, and to which we would do well to revisit from time to time). Among the many things that are attractive about Ben Franklin perhaps the strongest is the sense that he was very much a people person – with communication being his capstone skill.

Now my visit to Philadelphia was occasioned by participating in the J. Boye Philadelphia 2010 conference, an event that assembles web professionals from far and wide to discuss the latest trends in web content development, management and delivery. It was an interesting gathering and one that exhibited a number of very positive features. As I have observed in the past (See The Death of the Tradeshow), I have often found the typical technology tradeshow to be unsatisfying – and on many levels. The J. Boye event managed to sidestep many of the points I have been quick to criticize in other venues. Firstly, there is an emphasis, even an overwhelming emphasis, placed on bringing together a community of practitioners and facilitating the networking amongst them. The primary activity of the J. Boye organization, as far as I understand it, revolves around creating and facilitating a community of practice for web professionals, and especially those charged with managing and guiding the investments organizations are making (or should be making) in order to capitalize upon what the web can now provide. The format of the event seemed to reflect this orientation with there being a large number of sessions whereby many of the attendees shared their experiences. A significant percentage of the talks took the form of case studies or reflections upon recent experiences (as did mine). Layered on top of this format were a number of social events – which started with a “jet-lag reception” on the evening before the event began, included a trip to a bowling hall, and concluded with a post-event dinner. As its primary virtue, the event featured many good conversations.

In parallel with this event, by a strange coincidence, I also participated in an online webinar convened by Publishing Business and sponsored by Aptara . This online event assembled presenters who are actively engaged in the accelerating eBook revolution and connected them to several hundred practitioners from across the publishing industry. Although the format of a one-hour webinar does introduce several practical constraints, the short presentations and the ensuing discussion sparked by good questions did manage to cover a lot of ground. The echoes of the event on Twitter showcase how successfully this short gathering was in striking a chord with publishers. So this online session shared with the J. Boye conference a key feature – good conversations convened between professionals who might not otherwise have crossed paths. 

When Benjamin Franklin was only 22 he drafted what he hoped would someday be his epitaph. Almost as we would expect, it mixes some gritty realism with a healthy measure of humour, all sustained by the solid underpinning of his faith.

“The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author.”

Perhaps caught up by the intellect behind the words, I can’t help but to apply this epitaph to our past approaches to book publishing – with this application pointing towards the arrival of a new, and more perfect, realization of the venerable book. But Benjamin Franklin would not, I suspect, take that step. His actual gravesite, which I had a chance to pass on several occasions, bears a much simpler declaration – one that he penned in his final will with the advantage of much experience behind him, and one that puts forward what mattered most.

Person of the Millennium

While this contribution comes a full decade after the topic was being debated more generally, for some reason I have found myself musing over the question of who should be declared the most influential person of the last millennium. Allowing for the fact that evaluating the influence of any one individual on history is impossible and comparing the influence of different individuals even more so, I cannot help but to venture a proposition. I would put forward Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603).

From the list of candidates, we find the names of scientists, artists, thinkers, inventors, activists and political leaders. Of these, the influence of scientists, artists, thinkers and inventors is almost universally overstated, along with the associated declarations of originality. The influence of activists has been more substantial in that the impression made on social patterns can be remarkably resilient over time. Looking into the yet earlier millennium, we would classify the founders of the major religions that grew in those years as activists whose impact has been amplified over time rather than dampened. Within the millennium in question (1001-2000), the greatest influence would appear to have been wielded by what we might term activist political leaders, people who controlled various mechanisms of power and leveraged them in an influential way. Of these, many have been influential thanks to their generally destructive exploits. Fortunately some of these activist political leaders did manage to achieve surprisingly positive effects with some of these finding their way down to the better features of the modern world. It is from this latter category that the “person of the millennium” should be chosen.

In the case of Queen Elizabeth I, the most notable feature of her besieged reign as the Queen of England is her striking a tactical balance that placed tolerance and compromise as the core building blocks of political stability. That striking and sustaining this balance was hugely difficult for her is beyond question. That it also demanded tremendous skill and strength similarly cannot be questioned. It proved to be an essential stroke and English history since that period can in many ways be seen first as a struggle to maintain this balance on a number of occasions and then as a period of growth and expansion that this balance made possible. Clearly, a great many threads fed into the circumstances that Elizabeth found herself thrust into and some of these threads in fact made this form of political balance possible. But the appearance of a character of the strength and skill of Elizabeth proved critical at this juncture and the path she chose to uphold left an indelible mark on not only English history but that of the entire world.

The elevation of Queen Elizabeth I to the place of person of the millennium thus depends on two claims. One is that the principles of tolerance and compromise have been essential to the evolution and operation of democratic government and that balanced democracy, in general, has been one of the most notable millennial accomplishments. The second claim is that the influence among nations of the United Kingdom is without equal in the latter half of the millennium - in leading the world into industrialization, in casting many features of modern globalization through the spread and evolution of its colonial empire, and in providing such resolute leadership in opposing the militant imperialism that surfaced in the twentieth century. These are two claims that can be challenged but I feel completely confident in defending them.

The fact that this claim establishes a woman as the person of the millennium is also noteworthy. It is indeed incredible that she was able to make such a mark on history as a woman at a time when the landscape of power was entirely dominated by men (substantially more so than today, without this suggesting that the playing field is now level). Turning these observations on their head, one might begin to muse about whether the particular balance that she was able to strike would have come to pass had the person of the millennium been a man.

Tinsel and the Tree

This reflection is drawn from a long time ago. Twenty-five years ago to be exact. I was attending a talk by a then (and still) famous Canadian author with this event being held in Grant Hall at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The gathering was very well attended and Grant Hall was in fact packed to the rafters. It was something of a celebration of the success achieved by this author and it should be added that the celebration was well deserved.

There was one part of this particular evening that remains with me and it has ultimately prompted this post. As part of the talk, this author embarked on a digression that, by a backhanded route, sought to throw support behind the university's fledgling women's studies program. It was backhanded in so far as the speaker decided to contrast the virtues of this program with what would have been the male counterpart where study would have been directed to military uniforms, medals and atrocities. Many in the audience found much humour in the remarks. Being a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, I was a little less enthused but I was not especially upset. By chance however, my eyes fell on the far right of the front row of the seating area and I noticed an elder gentleman sitting quietly and attending to the speaker with evident care. The comments quickly turned stale.

The elder gentleman was Judge John Matheson, who had also been the honorary colonel of my regiment during my early years in uniform. Prior to that night, I don't think that I had ever seen Judge Matheson except when in uniform, with his numerous decorations visible to all.

The contrast between the artist making the remarks and the retired soldier was inescapably stark. Colonel Matheson, I knew full well, had been badly wounded at the battle of Ortona in the Italian Campaign of World War II. So badly wounded that he was initially triaged as "dead" and then, in hospital, he had been told that he would never walk, work or have a family. It is an understatement to say that he proved them wrong on all counts. He returned to university, married, became a Member of Parliament (MP), led the initiative to establish a new flag (he is regularly referred to as the father of the Canadian flag), initiated the Order of Canada (by which Canada recognizes civilian contributions, including ironically those by the speaker at this event), served as a court judge, and continued to actively support his military regiment and university. For the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Ortona, he was instrumental in convening a gathering of former Canadian and German combatants so that they could bury forever the conflicts of the past. He is, in many ways, an embodiment of the very best in what people can achieve over a long and varied career.

It was in contrast to this life story that the shallow criticism of militarism looked so ridiculous. Now the speaker was unaware of his presence or his history and too much should not be made of the comments. It did not appear, from my vantage point on the balcony, that Judge Matheson was at all put out. The contrast does remind us however that there is a massive distinction to be made between those who decorate history with their artistic contributions, valuable as they are, and those who by industry and sacrifice effectively constitute history. While it rings a little too harshly in its handling of artists, and their contributions, it is difficult not to say that there is a big difference between the tinsel and the tree on which it hangs.

Looking back, I think the lingering impression of this event is entirely one of respect for the contributions of people like John Matheson and a marvelling at how any one person can undertake so much.

"The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."
- King Lear

Postscript

In 2009, a gate to Canadian Forces Base Kingston was named after John Matheson. It may be a small gesture but it does underscore the fact that some people remember.

Popular History at its Best

As any trip into a bookstore will confirm, history has become, of all things, sexy. Of course, this might be wishful thinking on my part and it might really reflect a smouldering need within me to see a subject that has absorbed so much of my energy become fashionable. But these trips into book stores do seem to indicate that the presses are churning out a significant number of historical works with some of these even becoming bestsellers.

Now, as confessed above, I am quite pleased with this trend. I have been able to pick up a great number of these popular histories and thereby supplying my reading material for long trips. These books will typically address a particular period in history and they will usually try to find a novel spin that can give well-worn facts a new significance, or at least currency. Sampling these works has uncovered some interesting, although not too surprising, observations.

One observation is that not all such works are of equal quality. Fortunately, there are a few sign posts that I have found to be helpful in separating the wheat from the chaff and to do so before you part with your money or invest any time. The works that fall into the "to be avoided" category are usually easy to spot. The authors will very often be journalists who are turning their hand to history and expressly setting out to create, and cash in upon, a provocative twist. These works can be deceptive in that the journalist will usually have been supported by some researchers so a decent array of historical details will be pulled into service. But in reading the works, and this will be especially true if you have already been corrupted by some systematic historical studies yourself, it will become increasingly clear that the authors don't in fact know very much about the period into which they are venturing. The material, as a consequence, has an effect similar to eating cotton-candy - diverting but somehow unsatisfying (or worse). So where a work of history has been composed by a professional journalist who has suddenly found an esoteric corner of history to be interesting (or potentially lucrative), then reader beware.

There have been a couple of instances, although more rare, where seasoned academic historians have been enticed to quickly repackage past works in order to tap into the growing market for works of popular history. These are more difficult to spot because it will usually be academic historians who will have the deepest reservoirs of knowledge upon which to draw and quite rightly it would be to these people we would normally turn. One clue will be if the work draws heavily from material published in the past, or if the work has been published in its entirety at some earlier date. It is not so much the prior publication that is the issue as much as the nature of the originally intended audience. If a work was originally written by an academic for academics then at issue will be the readability of the work and very often the measure of intellectual ambition displayed. Academics, within their natural habitat, will be painfully circumspect and tentative and while we applaud this as essential to the advancement of knowledge, it does tend to bleed material of most of its practical usefulness or interest.

What we are discussing here is popular history that, in its best form, will engage today's readers in part by connecting past lessons to our current trials. It should, to my mind, help to ignite the interest of readers to discover more about the past and to build up a due sense of respect, humility and caution when considering how the past relates to the present.

I have recently finished reading a book that I would hold up, with several others, as an exemplar of popular history at its very best. It is "The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World" by Matthew Stewart (See Amazon). The author, while not a practicing academic, does possess a respectable academic pedigree and clearly the work is grounded on his advanced studies of philosophy. The work bristles with the fact that he knows a great deal about his subjects and the period in which they lived. (I was further endeared to Mr. Stewart when I came across an article he wrote for the Atlantic (June 2006) entitled "The Management Myth".) This work is highly readable, engaging, instructive and at times quite entertaining (I recall laughing out loud as Leibniz pursuing his windmill project was likened to the all-too-familiar management consultant). I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in learning a little more about the intellectual landscape of the 17^th century (which I am always encouraging people to do although with only mixed success) or interested in seeing popular history at its very best.

Renegade Learning

During a recent stay in Oxford, I found myself thinking about Roger Bacon (1214-1294). At least some of my strolls were loosely designed to retrace some of the pathways he may have followed. One reason he comes to mind is that I find his example to be particularly relevant these days. What this example might be can be a little challenging to delineate simply because he has become a figure enshrouded with legends. Since the time of this Doctor Mirabilis (wonderful teacher), he has become many things ranging, in order of increasing defensibility, across magician, Faustian alchemist, and forbearer of modern science. 

The fact is that enough time intercedes between the present and his time that we cannot be absolutely sure of many things. We do not, for example, actually know when he was born. And each generation of historians, declaring in turn a renewed attention to the truth, have painted him differently. More recently, this effort has been coloured by the current academic fixation with the rather tenuous notion of "originality". The claims of previous historians that in Bacon they found early expositions of the modern scientific method are being challenged as people find other traces in other, yet earlier, sources. The pursuit of origins in ideas reminds me of the little old lady who interrupted a scientific conference with her theory that the world teetered on the back of a turtle. When queried by a doubtlessly self-satisfied authority on what this turtle might itself be standing on, our intervener returned "It's turtles all the way down". There is always an antecedent.

And I will be no different than previous interpreters of history in seeing Roger Bacon as an exemplar of renegade learning to which I feel a particularly strong affinity. One thing we do know about Bacon is that he was passionate about his learning and, due to the financial strength of his family at least during the early part of his life, he was able to pursue this passion in all possible directions. One dimension of this passion was a determination to delve into various languages so that he could access knowledge from various sources without the dilution or distortion that comes with translation. It was his reputation at the time that he was the most learned man in Europe and there have not been many convincing arguments to undermine this reputation. His driving passion, it seems, was to achieve a more perfect and more complete access to knowledge and with this to realize a new level of freedom and independence.

 

Another thing we know is that he was exceedingly practical in his pursuits and he documented numerous experiments, such as in optics. His arguments championing experimentation are striking in their modernity and they are very much early articulations of the scientific method. On practical matters, he took up the cause of correcting the calendar which was something that was eventually done. His major work, Opus Majus, although it was itself a sprawling compendium of scientific knowledge, was actually written as an "abstract", that he wrote for the Pope, outlining an even greater project to assemble all of the world's knowledge.

We also know that he joined the Franciscan order and, like many scientists after him like Isaac Newton, the particular character of his faith seems to have influenced many of his specific areas of scientific inquiry. It may have been the nature, or intensity, of some of these beliefs, more so than his reputation for experimentation and his espousing the philosophy of Aristotle, that got him into trouble. Again, we are not exactly sure how he found himself in trouble with some powerful elements in the Church and nor are we sure what exactly the consequences of the trouble were. The stories of his punishment that have been passed down have probably survived, and been embellished, because they are so difficult to contemplate as befalling someone who was so obviously passionate about learning and teaching. It is said, for example, that his masters within the Franciscan order forbade him from studying and set him to long days of manual labour. One line of the story that applies nearer to the end of his life has Roger Bacon dispatched to a prison cell where he was forbidden to speak to anyone. One of the romantic twists on the story, emerging as an expression of hope in the face of despair, sees the wonderful teacher sharing his knowledge with passersby and local children through a hole in the wall of his imperfect cell.

I would argue that it is in being an exemplar of renegade learning, the type that observes no boundaries and that energetically seeks opportunities for experimentation and application, that Roger Bacon is the most noteworthy. The constellation of myths and stories about him can be jettisoned or leveraged as necessary as their presence takes nothing away from this role. The presence and persistence of these myths and stories might, however, indicate that the power of this example is genuinely compelling and has been so for centuries. When compared to many of the practices seen within academia today, often coloured by a strange mixture of timidity and territoriality, Roger Bacon's example, even what little of it we can really see, serves as a ringing reminder that what is learned must be brought out into the daylight, tested and then deployed into practical service. His is an example we would do well to emulate a little more closely.

Knowing and Doing

For some strange reason, I have been thinking about, of all people, Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574). In particular, I have been thinking about a specific portrait by Giorgio Vasari entitled "Duke Cosimo I and his Artists" (located in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence).

To my mind, what makes this portrait interesting is its depiction of the interaction between an executive (the Duke), responsible ultimately for doing, and the artists, responsible for knowing and creating.

What I especially like about the portrait is that it depicts, quite intentionally to his favour, Cosimo's interest in the arts. He is depicted holding a compass and a ruler, so he is trying his hand. But best of all is the fact that he is shown as interrupting the discussion and stirring into action. Something important is happening and the time for action has arrived. There is a tenderness in how Cosimo is interrupting the exchange while there is an evident awareness amongst the artists that they need to step aside so that the Duke can take care of business. Now all this is squarely set in the long tradition of portraiture but nonetheless the treatment of the dynamic between knowing and doing is memorable.

On regular occasions in my experience, and specifically on those occasions where academics are drawn into business environments, I have seen where this same dynamic emerges. What is sometimes missing in these events is an awareness on the part of the academics that the understanding conveyed in knowledge is only one input to the process of decision making. On the other side, the business executives often miss the value of putting aside the demands of the minute so as to seek an understanding of what they have been taking for granted and that may need modification.

Even within the last few weeks, I have found myself hankering for ways to reintroduce a more constructive interaction between the two domains. Specifically, I was participating in a workshop where on one side the academics continuously quoted obscure research while the business people were looking for overly expedient answers whose shelf-life would be measured in days at best.

There is a fundamental difference between the domains of knowledge and those of action and facilitating a pragmatic and productive interaction between the two is central to being successful, with success here being defined as broadly as possible.

As I am sometimes heard saying "To focus on knowledge is to focus on potentials. Business, let us not forget, is about actuals." This does not denigrate knowledge because what can actually be achieved is bounded by what is possible. The range and quality of the knowledge available and readied for application determines the range of possible actions. It is the interaction between the two domains, of knowledge and action, that is really interesting and, at the end of the day, important.

Giving Aristotle his Due

To my surprise, in two books that I have read recently, the authors went out of their way to denigrate Aristotle and to do so with almost puerile glee. In both cases, Aristotle was "the Man" to be overthrown and the teacher at whom we can thumb our noses while we run from the classroom. It strikes me as odd because Aristotle, we must remind ourselves, has been dead for 2330 years.

The impulse to denigrate Aristotle of course has a long pedigree. With the rediscovery of many of Aristotle's works in Spain in the 12th century, thanks to the care and commentary of Islamic scholars, he came to be known simply as "the Philosopher". Aristotle's surviving works can rightly be said to have revolutionized western thinking and laid the foundations for, among other things, what we now call science. And in this way did Aristotle very much become "the Man".

Among the things that really distinguishes Aristotle is the fact that he very much was a practicing "scientist" given to compiling endless details on observed phenomena. So unlike many in the field of philosophy, then and now, he was engaged in the practical business of building knowledge. Seeing how long ago his work was carried out, and the state of art that existed at the time, it is less surprising that his scientific works exhibit errors than the fact that in many regards they started the ball rolling in the first place.

To encounter authors in the 21st century who delight in pointing out mistakes in Aristotle's work and celebrating their superiority therewith strikes me as mean-spirited and ungrateful. In at least one case, quite entertainingly, the celebrations were premature because upon closer inspection the Philosopher remained firmly on top.

Once again I am reminded of the Third Voyage in Gulliver's Travels, where Swift summons up the ghost of Aristotle to face his inquisitors:

I then desired the governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle.  This great philosopher freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally to be exploded.  He predicted the same fate to attraction, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters.  He said, "that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; and even those, who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles, would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined."

Jonathan Swift was solid in his knowledge of Aristotle and, I would argue, the words he gives to the Philosopher sound completely appropriate for a seasoned practitioner in the business of applying and refining knowledge.

So we consider the case of the 21st century author who declares triumphantly that Aristotle has, once again, been proven wrong and this time in an area where he had otherwise been universally respected. Aristotle, we learn, argued that knowledge was a categorization system ultimately resting on definitional assertions. Reality, and our psychological perspections thereof, are intrinsically messy and undermine all attempts at definition. Aristotle, a study of pattern recognition amongst children proves, is wrong in advancing categorization schemes, definitions, logical reasoning and so on as the basis of knowledge. Knowledge it turns out is more slippery than that. And there is a manifest joy exhibited by this author in now being free from the artificial constraint of definitions, from the interference of "experts" and specifically from "the Man".

This is patent nonsense and ironically, but with some justice, the problem is one of definitions. If, as Aristotle would, we define knowledge explicitly as what we formalize and then endeavour to test and refine, the argument that reality itself does not body forth definitions is met with patient agreement. The response that one could imagine Aristotle making, were we to summon him up again, would be "And this is news to you?" And Aristotle would probably continue with something like "Just try to build one of those flying machines without definitions."

If we define knowledge in terms drawn from, and with recourse to our evolving understanding of, the psychology of perception then it would be caught in the ebb and flow of our daily discoveries and debates. On the other hand, if we define knowledge as a more general, and therefore more abstract, artifact, then the usefulness of the term, and discussions around it, will persist and evolve in parallel with our other endeavours. The latter seems the more prudent, and less frustrating, path.

Some discussions of "knowledge", which are a popular adjunct to studies of organizational design and knowledge management, prefer to define knowledge in a way that makes it as prone to definitional turbulence as possible. This way every new paper published can carry a stirring title such as "the new knowledge" or "the death of knowledge". But they are like the weather reporter who choses to define "weather" as a particular type of precipitation. When a sunny day is forecast, this reporter must soberly inform the audience that everything we knew about weather is about to change.

As an example of someone who, perhaps more successfully than anyone before or since, straddled the domains of both knowledge and judgment, Aristotle remains unparalleled. Declarations of his overthrow are very much premature. And in the light of his accomplishments, the mean-spirited efforts of some of this latter day critics looks all the more ridiculous and their motivations all the more questionable.

Derivative History

In my post about "Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages" I mentioned the phrase derivative history to which I associated this book and which I immediately declared was not a bad thing at all. Before I get into trouble, I thought I better explain my meaning with this phrase.

By derivative I specifically mean that the work is one that builds on the work of others who have either delved deeply into specific areas of history or have done some of the summary work of yet others who have delved even more deeply still. One of my own recollections from studying history is that there is literally no bottom to the details that can be unearthed. And at every level of depth there is no end to the number of possible perspectives that can be used to accord meaning to those details.

In my online archive of papers the curious can find an array of artifacts written during my time in Oxford and several of these illustrate some of the consequences of stepping into the rabbit hole of primary sources. While a reader at the Bodleian Library, I would often find materials by accident that bore upon the people or events I was researching and this would lead sometimes to days of further digging. All this impressed upon me a firm sense humility when confronting the subject of history. Drawing sweeping conclusions is something that must always be done with a pocket-full of this humility.

Now one other consequence of this observation upon history is that all history is derivative and that the process of derivation is central to the process of understanding the past a little better and hopefully learning a thing or two about ourselves and maybe even our future. A book such as that written by Alex Wright is one that tries to pull together some of the salient themes from an intricate lattice work of historical research and theoretical commentary. In dealing with some of this material it is helpful to quote liberally from both the initial sources as well as the commentators in order to let them be heard, however briefly, in their own voices.

Given the volume of materials that could be reviewed, the process of derivation, if done in a way that opens windows onto this prior work, is the best form of annotated orientation to these larger domains. And as was deeply embedded in the original practice of history writing, all history strives to tell a story and to communicate a moral - whether this is intended or not. Opening windows onto the underlying lattice work helps to make the distinctness of the new story more clear.

In all work, whether scientific or business or historical, among our most pressing challenges at this time is figuring out how to deal with infinite detail. Derivation, or as I sometimes say in meetings (to the utter bafflement of those around me) distillation, is a key prerequisite to innovation - to framing a new story.

Mastering Information Through the Ages

Just today I finished reading a book that was found by chance and turned out to be a quite delightful read. It is "Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages" by Alex Wright (ISBN 978-0-309-10238-4). I found the book while perusing a bookstore last week in Sacramento. While being caught in a bookstore is not unusual for me, on this occasion I found myself in a section that I don't usually hover over. It was here that the bright orange cover leapt out at me.

I say that the book was a delight because it is immanently readable, interesting because it surveys the long history of humanity's evolving quest to manage information, and surprising in that it conveys a thoroughly good-natured disposition towards the past. This latter point is notable because it is often missing in more recently published books (in truth it is not so novel a trend) where authors seem to think that the past was populated with complete dunderheads. You can probably guess what my opinion might be of this affected posture. Sometimes it is done out of simple ignorance of the past, which I somehow find easier to excuse. Sometimes it is done out of a desperate and somewhat cynical attempt to get attention, and presumably a readership, by feeding into what one might call the "infinite narcissism of the present".

Alex's book indulges in no such nonsense and instead conveys a variety of interesting stories that chronicle how ingeniously some of our collective efforts at managing information have been. In doing this, the book is what we might classify as a derivative history although I do not mean this in any way to be a detraction or a slight. It means that the works of other writers, typically historians, have been drawn upon liberally to lay out the landscape and across this landscape a story is told. By leveraging the works of others, this type of book can focus on telling a new, or slightly different, story. This is valuable. And when it is done, as it is in this case, with a general sense of respect for what others have done, then the results can be quite engaging.

I would contrast this book with another book that I read around the same time and on essentially the same topic - the fate of information classification practices in a rapidly changing world. This other work buried some worthwhile points under a mountain of politically correct contortions, unbearable academic posturing, and, yes, thinly disguised contempt for basically all contributors to the field other than the author.