Photo: William Taylor for wired.com

Nicholas Carr is famous for fretting that Google is making us stupid — that the Internet is driving our brains into The Shallows. But he knows that he’s not the first to worry about the effects of technology and the “outsourcing” of our thinking. Socrates argued that the written word, even the alphabet, was an intrusion on memory and free-flowing speech. Proust’s Marcel, transported by a melody, could imagine a sweeter world where music had evolved as the true and only language of souls — no speech, no texts. T. S. Eliot lamented in 1916 that a machine was now shaping his phrases and ideas. “The typewriter,” he wrote in a letter, “makes for lucidity, but I am not sure it encourages subtlety.”

NC: It’s true that he then went on to write “The Wasteland”, which is, some people think, quite subtle. So yes, I think there is always a worry, and I spent a lot of time in the book going through all these worries that have come along because I find, even when they’re wrong, they tell us something about the course of technology and what the tradeoffs are. And I’m sure there was a tradeoff in going from writing by hand to typewriting. I don’t know if it was good or bad or indifferent, a little of both.

What I see with the net is a technology unlike the typewriter or the calculator, or other things people have worried a lot about, something increasingly that is always with us. There are people today who wake up in the morning, the first thing they do is check their Blackberry or their iPhone, and it goes constantly until they go to bed, when the last thing they do is check their iPhone or Blackberry. So your point about the intrusion of technology into the most personal, most intimate aspects of ourself, it seems that what we’re seeing now with the net is kind of the culmination of that trend.

Reading and listening to Nick Carr I find him too subtle for his own argument, and far short of any brain-science evidence that the neurons that fire together when we’re on Facebook are wiring together against our better selves. We are stuck, Nick Carr and I, with a sentimental argument that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson would have phrased better on a walk through Sleepy Hollow in Concord, Massachusetts — and doubtless did. A Hawthorne journal entry from 1844 noted the glimmer of sunshine through shadow, “imaging that pleasant mood of mind where gayety and pensiveness intermingle.” Till — horrors! “But hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive, — the long shriek, harsh above all other harshness… since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace.”

NC: The passage from Hawthorne’s notebooks is a beautiful expression of what is available to us through solitary, very attentive, very quiet thinking. Leo Marx, in his great 1960s book “The Machine in the Garden”, draws a contrast between what he calls the pastoral form of mind, which is what Hawthorne is expressing there, and the more industrial form of mind, which is also important: it’s the way we solve problems, the way we move progress forward in some way, the utilitarian mode of gathering information and making decisions.

So this is a long term shift that dates at least to industrialization where we see this constant pressure to be more utilitarian in our mental lives, and more problem solvers. What we lose is that pastoral sense. And Hawthorne definitely saw this when he heard the train disrupt his deep thought. So I think the best way to look at the internet is in that long progression, that long shift in emphasis in our thought, in the consonant devaluation of the more pastoral, more contemplative mode of thought. …

I think we’re at risk of losing this deeper, personal, solitary mode of thought without even paying much attention to what we’re losing.

Nicholas Carr in conversation with Christopher Lydon in Boston, June 28, 2010

Thoreau didn’t like that train through Concord either. But the train was Emerson’s way into the “wide world.” And the Internet, I decided long ago, completes his journey. It’s the fulfilment of Emerson’s wildest dream:

CL: “The mind is one,” Emerson wrote in the essay, History:  “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”

From: Christopher Lydon Interviews… “A God for Bloggers”

When Emerson speaks of “access to this universal mind,” he could be describing the leveling effect of Google search engines.  He is envisioning what we now call distributed intelligence. He is foreseeing and the expressive democracy we practice every day on our networked computers. I call him the “God for Bloggers,” the true prophet of the blessed Internet.

Nell Painter and I seem to have opposite takes on the great Ralph Waldo Emerson. In The History of White People, she makes Emerson “the philosopher king of American white race theory.” On the contrary, I say he was one of the inventors of transnational, transracial America. Before there was a “melting pot,” Emerson coined the phrase “smelting pot.” Granted: he prized inconsistency. But in his Journal in 1845, Emerson wrote resoundingly:

I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party. It is the dog in the manger. It is precisely opposite to all the dictates of love and magnanimity; and therefore, of course, opposite to true wisdom… Man is the most composite of all creatures… Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent – asylum of all nations — the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes – of the Africans and of the Polynesians — will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. ‘La Nature aime les croisements’ [Or: 'Nature loves hybrids'].

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Journal, 1845.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, we are having a cordial time here. A prolific historian recently emerita at Princeton, now pursuing an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, Ms. Painter in this big new book flips the ethnographic mirror on white America. Now that we are all supposed to have absorbed the genomics of it — that “race” is a social concept, not a scientific one; a construction, not a fact — she is asking: who invented “whiteness” as a human category? (Answer: Germans thought up the theory. Brits refined the practice.) Who expanded and shrank that slice of the species over the years? It’s old news, of course, that “white” came to be code for Anglo-Saxon beauty, intelligence and power. But in 2010 the icons of American beauty, intelligence and power are our radiant brown President and his darker-skinned wife, First Lady Michelle Obama.

The gift in Barack Obama’s rise, Nell Painter suggests, is not least the affirmation that “mixed ancestry is an old story in America.” It is Nell Painter’s story, too. “People like Barack Obama have always been with us; we haven’t always been able to see them as bi-racial people.” Now we do.

It interests me that unlike Henry Louis Gates in his Faces of America PBS series, Nell Painter has not tested her DNA and finds that “roots” inquiry meaningless. It tells her only that “we’re all related, but I knew that… What I am is what my parents made me, and what I have made of myself. I am not my biology. Your biology is not you.”

The species, she says, is breeding its way to another history and another understanding.

NP: Anybody can be racialized. We have manifold choices in human difference. So we could build a race on the shape of the nose; in the nineteenth and century century, races were built on the shape of the head. So you can use anything. And whether it’s what we see as a big difference or what we now see as a small difference, the point is to show that the people who are at the bottom, who do the dirty work—paid, unpaid—are there because of something inside them, intrinsic in them, and permanent.
 
CL: Phrenology, of course, the shapes of heads, has been exploded many times. We come to the age of the genome, and a realization, which I think is pretty common now, that we’re all almost exactly the same stuff, and the human brain is almost everywhere the same thing. I think of it as a kind of universal carburetor that was tested and proven, evolved and improved, and then sent out from East Africa — what, 50 or 75 thousand years ago.
 
NP: And the point is that they kept walking, and they kept migrating. People have not stopped moving. People are still moving, they’re still meeting, they’re still having sex, and they’re still having babies. And their babies are growing up and having more sex…

Nell Irvin Painter in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, March 29, 2010.

In our children and grandchildren, it seems, The History of White People is dissolving.

Mary and The Emerson Summer Gang,

I apologize for the delay in getting this out. I spent the weekend writing and writing, always finding myself backtracking, realizing what I was attempting to say was not what was on the paper. So, what I ended up doing was taking my notes/questions and doctoring them up. Therefore, my response will not read like earlier responses, nor does it directly talk about Emerson’s “Spiritual Essay.” Rather, I took the approach of asking myself some questions, and then drawing a conclusion at the end based on what I believe Emerson is trying to tell us in the essay. This is not exactly how I wanted to present it, but because we’re already a few days behind, I thought it better to have something posted. At least it will give us a place to start. So, without further ado….

Bobby in an Email to Mary

Click to listen to Chris’s interview with Harold Bloom Part 1(8.7 MB MP3)

And carry on, by all means, to Part Part II:

Interview with Harold Bloom Part 2(5.4 MB MP3)

And carry on, by all means, to Part Part III:

Interview with Harold Bloom Part 3(5.4 MB MP3)

Nick is looking into a better way to organize the thread as well. Thanks Nick!

Maybe after close reading we could stipulate: every sentence of this amazing central essay deserves to be underlined or highlighted. Emerson is unceasing, relentless… and before you leave, and it may take time, more time than we have here, or more than one reading, you just have to get it. And if Emerson gets through, you will be grateful because he ultimately gives you back to yourself.

Potter in an Email to Mary

Self-Reliance, July 20
Compensation, July 27
Spiritual Laws, August 3
Love, Aug. 10
Friendship, Aug 17
Prudence, Aug 24
Heroism, Aug 31
The Over-Soul, Sept. 7
Circles, Sept. 14
Intellect, Sept. 21
Art, Sept. 28

Whether we actually complete both series or not, the point is the start, the initiative is all, what Susan Sontag called “the beginning mind.” In what follows I’ve tried to offer some opening general impressions on Emerson, as well as more specific observations on History, the first essay of the first series. As far as a plan or schedule, I think we should read the essays in sequence, as Emerson, perhaps, intended. For, as Douglas Crase points out, the “light” as the end of History leads into that “gleam of light” at the beginning of Self-Reliance. Separate threads will be set up for each individual essay, with specific headers written by volunteers to kick things off.

The only general guide for reading and discussion that I can think of right now, is to look out for repetitions and resonances within and between the essays. Emerson encodes his ideas in startling imagery. How these images fit into and form the overall picture he’s painting, is, I think, key.

So, let’s get started…

Mynocturama in an Email to Mary

So David has been laboring mightily for two weeks now to give us all the day off today. He did this by listening through hours of interviews about one of Chris’s great loves, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and by creating out of them a brand-new hour of documentary, of Chris chasing the ghost and the spirit of Ralph.

It’s a gorgeous documentary. I know this because I’m listening to it right now, on July 4th. I am listening to it now only because, as I was just making plans with Katherine to watch the fireworks, she, in her car with a dog, asked me if I were enjoying the show.

Aha. The show. So for one exquisitely postmodern moment, Katherine, her dog and I — she and the dog in her car and I in my living room and all of us on the phone together — just listened to Chris’s voice and Dave’s handiwork. Dave is in the Adirondacks right now enjoying the day off he gave us all and, well, only he knows where the audio is, so I promise I’ll have it up on the site tomorrow.

But in the meantime I am surrounded, here in Allston, by garden parties, on my way out the door to enjoy the little bit of the fireworks that Katherine swears you can see in Belmont. Happy Fourth of July.