Where’s the Love on the Internet?

It’s been a week and a half since my last blog post. But of course this doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been anything on my mind the last days. In fact, it’s usually when I blog the least that I have the most on my mind.

Apart from work, family, enjoying the snow, working out, meeting some new people, drawing, playing the guitar, preparing for Christmas and other activities, I’ve been reading the first half of Rousseau’s Confessions, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and I’m currently busy with The Grapes of Wrath (yes, to my shame I have to admit that I’ve never read it before).

Since I’ve already had a few posts on Rousseau this month, let me follow up on them by a few more thoughts on relating Rousseau to our lives today. As many people have probably heard, Rousseau was an idealist who championed compassion and thought that technology and urban living robbed people of their natural inclination toward empathy. He was all for personal relationships, not for a life centered around possessions. That’s why I think he would be critical of some of our online interactions of today.

I’m often surprised (well, perhaps not surprised anymore, but still disheartened) by how rude people are to each other on the internet. Many YouTube comments are absolutely vicious. Why? Because compassion and empathy do not blossom very well in front of a computer screen. If I talk face-to-face with a person, I can actually see the effects of my words. I can see if what I say hurts the other person, or confuses him, or delights him, or amuses him, or touches him. We can actually interact and make an empathetic connection.

In contrast, with a computer in between you and me, it’s easy for me to forget that there is an actual person “on the other side” reading this and being emotionally affected by it. It’s difficult to convey the empathetic facial expressions and body language of personal conversation in written words. That’s why it’s so easy to be rude in writing. But at least I try (I don’t know how successfully) to retain my humanity even when communicating via technology with people I don’t know personally. Others seem to not try at all, hammering the most awful insults into their keyboards without any consideration of the emotional effects on the recipient.

This is part of our current condition, in which technology has alienated us from reality (a major theme in The Grapes of Wrath, by the way). How much easier it is to kill someone by pressing a button far away from the victim than it is to take a sword and hack that person’s body parts off. But the results are the same. Only the human feelings about it are less. The empathy and compassion are less. Nowadays, you can kill someone in Afghanistan by sitting in front of a screen on a military base near Las Vegas and steering a drone. To a lesser degree, we kill each other with words and other impersonal interactions.

Even though Rousseau was not at all against the written word—in fact, he said he could express himself in writing much better than in person, and he was awkward at socialization—he would still deplore the way technology can alienate people from nature and humanity. Some have called Rousseau an “evil genius” because of his desire for transparency, but I’d rather call him an idealist in a similar vein as Marx. Both brought forth needed criticisms of their society, though their solutions were not attainable and could even prove worse than the ailment they tried to cure. And it is even questionable whether Rousseau intended his ideal picture of society as a solution at all or only as a way to make us think.

Rousseau was a fan of small communities (10,000 max) based on personal relationships. He would not support a situation in which anonymous people from any community whatsoever can send in secret documents to someone who puts them into an electronic box and everyone around the world can sit alone in front of screens to peep into that box and find out the nasty things politicians have said about one another (see WikiLeaks).

In closing, let me stress that I am much less knowledgeable on Rousseau than a lot of other people, and I might be entirely wrong about what Rousseau would or would not support if he were alive today.

Would Rousseau Love Wikileaks?

In response to the recent Wikleaks disclosures, there was a discussion on French television entitled “The Tyranny of Transparency.” An online friend who lives in Paris translated part of the program. This is what Luc Ferry, a French philosopher said during the discussion:

“What is very interesting in this story is, and I come back to what Jacques said we are all for transparency. Who is going to be in favor of lies in a democracy? When it comes to fighting against lies, including diplomatic lies, I am delighted. But there is a big difference between legitimate transparency in a democracy, and voyeurism.”

I agree. What is disturbing in the Wikileaks affair is not so much the disclosed details—they hardly come as a surprise—but the possibility that the value of transparency might turn into a kind of tyranny in which privacy gets lost.

Ferry then pointed to Rousseau as someone who desired this kind of transparency:

“… in the letter on the arts and entertainment, Rousseau criticizes the theatre. He hated the theatre, but of course he aims this at Voltaire who loved the theatre. But, behind this criticism of the theatre, there is something very profound that touches on our subject matter. That is, Rousseau reproaches the theatre because the people in the theatre have no connection to one another except via the intermediary which is the stage. In the theater, the spectators are seated in the darkness, so they can’t see one another. They are not transparent to one another. They cannot see one another transparently like Jean-Francois and I can see one another right now. They are lodged in the darkness, they are stuck in the darkness. And the communication passes by a third intermediary separate from the individuals.”

For Rousseau, this was a metaphor for the monarchy. Said Ferry: “It’s the king that connects all the individuals, but each individual has no direct contact with other individuals except via the mediation of the king. So, Rousseau replaces the theatre with the festival. There is no stage in a festival. He said plant a pike into the ground in the town square and arrange to have music played, and the people will dance. And this [festival] is the metaphor for the democracy in opposition to the metaphor of the monarchy, so that all individuals can see each other in perfect transparency … for me, perfect transparency is horrific. Perfect transparency is a horror … maybe you can say a word about Saint-Just, as a historian, because he is all about this ghastly idea of Rousseau’s …”

While I support Ferry’s concern, we have to realize that in times of limited mass communication and even more limited education of the masses, the need for freedom of speech, bridging the gap between rulers and people, and empowering people by connecting them was much more pressing than the need for privacy. Judged in its historical context, I find Rousseau’s desire for transparency quite understandable and even praiseworthy. I doubt he would voice the same need in our digital age in which the "ethic of transparency" means that recording devises are all around you and anything you say or do might end up on the web and be seen by people on the other side of the world in a matter of minutes.

Max Weber: Rational Means for Irrational Ends?

In the early 20th century, German sociologist Max Weber saw in his contemporaries a society that pursued irrational ends by rational means. People made humongous rational efforts for economic gain, but what did they want economic gain for? Rational ends? No, Weber said, the drive toward more and more economic gain was an irrational one.

The epitome of this paradox was the Third Reich, which pursued highly irrational ends such as hero worship and Arian purity, using equally highly rational means of technology, science, and organization. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare come true: a bureaucrat like Eichmann sitting at a desk and calmly, rationally organizing the extermination of several million Jews.

Weber saw this development coming, but he maintained that the basic pattern of pursuing the irrational by means of the rational was true even before the rise of Hitler (which he himself did not live to witness), and no doubt he would say that it has continued on even after the death of the Führer.

The means by which we organize society are more rational than ever before, but have our ends become more rational? Can they become more rational?