The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent

“The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent”

By Lionel Trilling

(2008, Northwestern University Press)

Last week, wondering if George Orwell’s essay, “Notes on Nationalism” was in the Orwell Reader we’ve had for years, I went hunting in the nook.  A couple of summers ago, Ben and Denise lined up book cases in a “U” in our basement, put a lamp and a nice chair in it and migrated hundred of our books onto the shelves.  The books are sort of ordered and Ben remembers where he shelved most of them… but Ben had just gone back to school and I didn’t want to bother him.

I did not find the Orwell Reader because I was arrested in my search when I spotted The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling.  I had gotten this as a gift awhile back and it must have been swept off to the nook without my realizing it.  Which is great because now I have the happy surprise of rediscovery.

Trilling attended Columbia University in the 1920s and later taught English at Columbia his whole career. (He was the first Jew in the department and mentioning this gives me opportunity to digress and mention that my parents gave no example of racial or ethnic prejudice that I can remember.  I went for years in my teens reading Isaac Asimov without twigging that he was Jewish.  It was for some friends in high school to disbelievingly say, “You know, Jews, with names like Goldstein!” for me to get an incredulous clue.)

I read his collection of literary essays, The Liberal Imagination, somewhere in the mid-80’s and again five or six years ago.  His long essay on The Princess Casamassima by Henry James eventually proved my entrée to the works of James.  What I think brought me back to Trilling was his being a colleague of my man, Jacques Barzun.

The title, “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” stops one in one’s tracks.  It might be patronizing: I’m intelligent, are you pulling your weight?  But I don’t take it that way.  I take it that we all really do have an obligation to educate ourselves and think unceasingly in whatever sphere we work.[1] 

“Trilling never encountered a good reason to postpone thinking,” writes Leon Wieseltier in his introduction to this volume.[2]  In times like ours – which are really like all times – we cannot take the truths we are handed without critically examining them.  That sense, which has accreted in my own awareness through reading science, testing software and studying history, tells me that we must study things from many angles.  It leads me to make most of my judgments very provisional – something I suspect my family finds maddening.  Wieseltier on Trilling again: “The intellectual life, if it is genuine, is a life of strain.”

To return to Orwell (I’m still keeping an eye out for that Reader), or rather to Trilling on Orwell.  I think this explains Trilling’s point and the title and the need:

[What any of us] could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance on being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly, having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them.  He liberates us.  He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the inside dope.  He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively.  He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men.[3]

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[1] The title “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” came from a lecture and then an essay by one of Trilling’s professors, John Erskine.

[2] This book was published in 2008, before Wieseltier was swept off the stage by the #MeToo movement – which demonstrates that intelligence is not one’s only moral obligation.

[3] P264 in the present volume, in the essay, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth”, 1952

Coding for Everyone. Right.

Although I’m very appreciative of it, I have not subscribed to “The Economist” for years.  Even I can’t read that much each week.  However, I have been traveling some for work recently and when I do I treat myself to the latest issue on the airport newsstand.  That’s where I most recently saw an article about the popularity of the Python programming language.  “Everybody” seems to learning it.

Python is just one of hundreds of programming languages.  It is popular now and in wide use.  But it isn’t the only widely used language.  But if everyone should learn to code, why not Python?

“Coding” in general seems to be the mantra of educators and Technological Evangelists everywhere these days.  I’ve been puzzled by this for a long time.  (That’s an actual job title, “Technological Evangelist,” I’m not making it up.)

Now, it’s valuable to have some idea what goes on under a computer’s hood and a programming class can help with that.  Also, programming may be the only formal logic training most of us get these days: how to think through a decision tree is Very Valuable.

But coding-for-everybody seems to emphasize the wrong thing. 

·   First of all, one can’t get very far into any programming language without discovering how hard it is.  Even supposedly English-like languages like Python quickly become not English at all.  Here is a fairly early exercise from an online Python class I took last summer.  This was to show how string indexes and the find function work.  Any idea why the output of this routine is 18?  (Answer at the end of this piece.)

s = 'here, there, everywhere'

t = 'where'

i = 0

print (s[i:].find(t[i:]))

·         Ostensibly, in teaching everybody to code the idea is they could get jobs as software coders.  This seems mis-directed.  Coders are the minority in most IT shops.  They are certainly the most invisible.  Coders are usually kept behind a human or procedural firewall from the project teams they serve.  It’s the analyst who interfaces with the project team on their behalf who provides the real value.  Coders often seem like commodities.  (“Agile” teams supposedly put the coders in the midst of the project team, but over time I’ll bet a similar segregation grows.)
·         Finally, most coding is maintenance of existing code.  It isn’t the fun creation of new worlds, it’s the painstaking study of someone else’s existing code to figure out how to add a function or fix a bug.  (When I used to manage programmers and ask one to tweak an existing program, the constant whine I got back was: can’t I just rewrite this from scratch?)  I wonder if coding classes include maintenance in their curricula?  I did a quick search and, while not finding a lot of hits, I did see a book: “Find the Bug: A Book of Incorrect Programs.”  I have not seen the book and I know nothing other than the title, but I like the idea.

As alluded to above, the real value is business & systems analysis and communications – oral and written communications.  One can be trained in these, too, but that’s harder and not as sexy.

Why the answer is 18:

s = 'here, there, everywhere'

t = 'where'

i = 0

print (s[i:].find(t[i:]))

·         So, s and t are string variables, that is, strings of alpha/numeric characters.
·         Individual characters can be enumerated in a string starting with zero for the first position.  In the string called t above, with the value “where” the ‘w’ would be zero and the ‘r’ would be three.
·         You can perform operations on portions of a string with an ‘index’ which is an expression inside square brackets.  This means our string could be approached thus t[3] where the result would be ‘r’.
·         If you add a colon to the index you are asking for everything in the string up-to or from the value.  This means that t[3:] gives ‘re’ – that is, from the ‘r’ to the end of the string.
·         For more fun, you can put a variable into the index.  If we let i=0 and then we execute t[i] we will get ‘w’ because the value of i is zero and the zero position in t is ‘w’.
·         If we combine that variable with the colon like t[i:] we get ‘where’ because we start from the zero position of t and go to the end of the string.  That expression t[i:] appears in the code above inside the parentheses of the ‘find’ function. 
·         By the same process we can define the string s as ‘here, there, everywhere’ and i being zero, s[i:] is the same as s, ‘here, there, everywhere’.
·         The find function consists of string.find() where the computer looks in the string for whatever is in the parentheses and returns the position of the first character.  In the code above, (s[i:].find(t[i:])) then is this…

‘here, there, everywhere’.find(‘where’)

·         And to get the answer we just have to count, starting at zero for the ‘h’ and the substring ‘where’ begins at 18.

I apologize for that explanation’s length.  It was challenging to write and probably more challenging to read.  When I first found that example I thought it might be too easy but now I wish I had found something more elementary still.  Which rather makes my point.

The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1785

The retirement correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is lauded as two giants of the Revolution reflecting on what they had wrought and their roles in it.  That’s what I assumed this volume to contain.  And it does, but it also contains the complete extant correspondence between the two men as well as letters between Abigail Adams and Jefferson.  In fact, 38% of this collection is letters from years preceding Adams being inaugurated as Vice President and before the French Revolution.

Our thumbnail sketches of historical figures don’t capture the whole person, of course: cranky, monarchical John Adams and abstract, democratic Thomas Jefferson are labels of convenience but as these work-a-day letters show, the thumbnails are far from their lived reality.

This is an example of something I have felt intuitively for years but which I have lately learned is an aspect of Bonini’s Paradox.  Paul Valery’s summation of it: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."  This idea affects business and computer models and maps and history.  I was recently explaining to one of my kids an odd cycle of reporting by corporate IT to management to which I have been subjected over the years: management wants a “dashboard,” a quick way to see the health and progress of a project.  Once the dashboard is before them, the managers begin to ask for details to support the readings.  This is reasonable; they need to validate what we are reporting and take action where results are lagging.  But the dashboard becomes, as a result, more complicated, more elaborate as it attempts to capture more and more detail.  Until finally, frustrated management declares it needs a summary dashboard that tells the story simply.  Bonini’s Paradox!

This whole digression was prompted by the Adams/Jefferson letters from 1785.  In reading these, one has to set aside the thumbnail descriptions of the people and observe what they were laboring over day after day. 

1785 was two years after the end of the War for Independence.  The Philadelphia constitution lay in the future. Congress, governing under the Articles of Confederation, had sent Adams and then Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin representing the new country in France.  With peace and Franklin’s return to America, what was needed were commercial treaties to foster trade with Europe.  And that’s what Adams and Jefferson labored over in 1785. 

When John Adams was appointed ambassador to England and Thomas Jefferson remained as ambassador to France, the two wrote frequent letters back and forth.  Supposedly abstract Jefferson was as much in the details as Adams, pitching the value of shipping flour to Portugal rather than wheat (but facing Portuguese resistance to protect its own millers) and countless other details.

The details are fascinating because they are so… everyday.  Adams had ordered crates and crates of French wine to follow him to London.  When he discovers that his ambassadorial status will not exempt him from import duties, he hurriedly writes to Jefferson to intercept the shipments, take some for himself, return what he can.  Portions of many letters include the efforts to deal with this and to settle accounts between them.  Jefferson wants the London newspapers but it was no easy thing to get them cheaply in Paris and they write that maybe this Duke or that Count could help.  Odd characters keep accosting the ambassadors with tales of how they helped the Revolution this way or that way and now they need their expenses reimbursed – each writes to the other: have you heard of this fellow? Sometimes they write in code, but at one point their cipher sheets get out of sync and they have to write in the clear to correct each other’s encryption. 

The letters between Jefferson and Abigail were more playful, often satirizing their respective host governments or one asking the other to buy shirts from London or figurines from Paris.

Weightier matters occupied them too, of course.  Buying off the Barbary Pirates, for example.  But even here, it was a matter of countless details.  This man could go to Morocco but not Algiers.  This one for Algiers then.  But we must send with him a secretary to keep us independently informed of his actions.  Yes, but who can we trust?  Has Congress authorized these delegations yet?  Do we have authority to make these arrangements?

There was at this time no love lost between England and America and John and Abigail Adams bore the brunt of this in London.  They, for their part, were fiercely impatient with the British Press and the British government and frustrated at the dismissive attitude toward trade with the former colonies.  This attitude also took the form of individual, everyday events: a snub here, a cancelled meeting there, a scurrilous newspaper story to rebut.

And in what would today be a scandalous conspiracy of political incorrectness, both men wrote the other to work out the best way to market American whale oil in Europe!

So the Adams and Jefferson of our thumbnail sketches had not yet appeared on the stage – as if they ever would.  I’ll check back in on this a few years down the road in their correspondence…

ADDENDUM: I have long observed at work that activities improve as management pays special attention to them.  I came across this way of phrasing the same idea in a letter of Jefferson’s: “The king sets out on the 21^st inst. for Cherburg in order to animate by his notice the operations there.”  I love that “to animate by his notice.”