Newfangledness

As the end of another year approaches, it's a good time to think about where I've been and where I may be going. I've spent most of my life working in one way or another in what we call the humanities, those fields of knowledge and learning most associated with human arts and culture more than with what we've come to call the sciences, fields associated with the physical world, including life sciences like biology. In earlier times it was all just knowledge, learning, philosophy. But now we think we know so much we have to divide it up into smaller portions, little bits of knowledge and learning.

But this is nothing new, we've been specializing for most of human history, and knowledge has been segregated into fields of religion, warfare, politics, healing, not to mention the many crafts of agriculture, animal husbandry, carpentry, metalworking, cooking, sewing, and so forth. In few human societies does anyone individual possess all of his or her culture's accumulated knowledge. At some point a specialty arose that became the guardian of that knowledge, that was concerned with passing it along from one generation to the next. As the saying goes, some do and some teach, and I suppose some do a little of both.

Another constant of human culture has been the conflict between the old ways and the new. One of my favorite illustrations of this is Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds, in which the old ways of thinking clash with newer ways in a rather familiar generational struggle for power. Aristophanes rather famously made Socrates the villain of this piece and teased him mercilessly for his newfangled ways that were corrupting the young. This lampoon became serious some years later when the old philosopher was brought up on charges by some of his fellow Athenians who did not particularly value his kind of cultural criticism.

Of course, this is a battle that the older generation can never win. Our only consolation comes from knowing, as we do, that one day the current younger generation will be sitting where we are, and they too will come to lament the way newfangled ideas are corrupting their own children. But I'm straying from my larger point, which is that in the culture business, there's always a struggle between the old and the new, philosophers and sophists, Ptolemaic and Copernican, ancients and moderns, classical and romantic, humanities and sciences. And from these conflicts something is always gained and something lost.

Recently, we've seen another version of the conflict emerging in various fields of the humanities, which could be called analog versus digital, but is really just an older way of practicing one's profession being challenged by a newer way, often represented by younger practitioners who think they've finally found a better way to do what the older practitioners feel was already being done rather well. But just as Plato's writing replaced Socrates' oral culture, the codex replaced the scroll, and Gutenberg's printing replaced manuscript culture, digital will replace analog. Something will be gained, and something will be lost. The older generation will lament the passing of its own superior way of doing things, while the younger generation will celebrate the coming of a better world.

And if we're lucky, or perhaps I should say to my friends in the younger generation, my younger colleagues and former students, if you're lucky, then maybe this new digital age will be better and not just different in some newfangled way. That will be for you to determine as best you can before a new crop of young upstarts comes along demanding not newer canons, but no canons at all, and even more progressive views. I wonder if they won't look back puzzled over what all the fuss was about. After all ebooks are just books, and really aren't all books rather 20th century? The new media aren't about books but other ways of communicating. In a post literate culture you don't really need any books, not even ebooks!