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Calling anonymous, Or, Can Anyone Be a Citizen Anymore?
When he joined us for the Ricochet podcast last week, anonymous got me thinking. (To judge from the comments, he got a lot of us thinking.) One of John’s points: That as knowledge expands, each of us can know only a smaller and smaller portion of the whole. Computers, for example, used to be simple enough to enable John and a couple of his buddies to design them from scratch, then sell them. Today that would be impossible. Computers now rely on too many layers of software. John could still design a computer from scratch, of course, but it would seem so primitive, so much like a crude toy, that it would have no commercial value.
This brought to mind Jeffrey Hart, the professor who had a profound influence on me when I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth—and the professor who in turn had influenced him. Consider this passage from Professor Hart’s magnificent volume, Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe:
In 1947 and 1948, when an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I studied with a professor of philosophy named Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a refugee from the Nazis. During World War I, as a soldier in the German army, he had fought at Verdun. On one occasion, during a lull in the bombardment, he wandered out into the pitted and scarred no-man’s-land. Suddenly the artillery on both sides began firing again and he took refuge in a crater….”I was a naked worm,” he told the students in the classroom. In 1933, he experienced another extreme negation in the form of the Nazi revolution…In consequence, he had thought long and deeply about education…He had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student’s mind.
He would say, “History must be told.” He explained various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.
He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.
No one could ever have held the whole of human knowledge in his mind—not, at least, for several thousand years. The Romans may not have known anything about electricity or the internal combustion engine, but no one man could have held in his mind all that they knew about engineering or the whole of Roman law. But could certain ancients have held in their minds the essentials of their civilizations? The intellectual kernels from which their civilizations could have been rebuilt? I think so. Moses could have re-founded ancient Israel. Pericles could have recreated Athens and Julius Caesar could have re-established Rome. Moving much closer to the present, I’d be tempted to argue that Jefferson or Adams could have recreated much of what was known and valued in the early United States.
Could anyone pull it off today? Who? To recreate the United States—the contemporary United States—what would he have to know? To put the question more realistically, what should young people learn to make them true citizens of this country—not citizens of the world, the ridiculous phrase so in vogue on campuses today, but citizens, again, of this country?
Published in General
Venice Beach will be the hippest spot for post-apocalyptic gastronomy.
“And how would sir like his filet-of-mutant prepared? You have a choice of red, yellow, or green soylent on the side.”
American Politics: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, -that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men.”
Theology, Old Testament: “That which is despicable to you, do not to others. The rest is commentary.”
Theology, New Testament: “Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the light -no one comes to the Father except through me.””
Cooking: “All French Cuisine is divided into three parts: soup, sauce, and wine.”
Our fundamental rule was this: “When the Gamemaster Smiles, it is already too late.”
Cooking: After sipping a requisite glass of wine, preferably red, cook your food in butter, season it with salt and pepper, eat, and remember; salad is not cooked, but is simply a punishment for having earlier cooked too much.
I’m not at all convinced it was a good idea; I’d say, anyone who wants to wage war in the Middle East should consider carefully what Lawrence achieved in the story. I’d also recommend Churchill’s stories about his wars in Afghanistan & the Sudan. Much insanity would have been spared had people waging war listened to those who’d done it before, at least the successful ones.
People should know the saying of Isaac Newton “If I have seen a little further then it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” They should also know that (appropriately enough) he did not coin that saying himself. He was quoting the theologian Bernard of Chartres (birth unknown, death around 1124???). This humble wisdom will be needed by anyone who hopes to rebuild civilization.
Well, such would not really be “designed from scratch” so much as adapting existing tech, recently made incredibly affordable. Truly making one of those from scratch would require either a wafer fab or a ton of NAND and NOR chips. The Raspberry et al are really just the PC tech of 2000 miniaturized down to a single board – but then the 4040s of the 70s were really just miniaturized transistors of the 50s. Heck, a 1990s Furby carried more computational horsepower than did an Apollo capsule.
But your point is sound – hobbyists and tinkers have incredible tools at their disposal. To address Peter’s issue – who would want to create a PC from scratch today? It has been done, and moreover commercialized to the point where the PI is so powerful for its cost that the next questions are along the lines of “how many PCs can I stuff into a project?”.
NO! Very Bad! A suicide cult is “by and for the people” (or aliens), but you wouldn’t want that (I hope).
How about “Get off my lawn!”
And mocking Robert Hooke, which despite the fact that Hooke almost certainly didn’t deserve it, is still my favorite part of the story.
Skip,
Truly you have a great and mystical point of view of the landscape. However, what happens when subversive dandelions appear. Sinking their hideous roots into the sacred lawn.
What then, oh great master of the mulch? Shall we suffer the ignominy of outrageous weeds or take up trowel and dig them out?
Regards,
Jim
I am lazy about lawn care, and dandelions and clover are the only things that grow.
“Hey, Kid! Get off my dandelions!” Just doesn’t have the same ring.
Skip,
Com’on Skip, what kind of an attitude is that, I ask you? Sure you can get things to grow. Why maybe even corn. Corn as high as an elephants eye!
http://youtu.be/9LdIL5WCso8
Regards,
Jim
My respect for both of you gentlemen knows no bounds, but this is simply false. The barriers to entry in this field have never been lower.
First, you can use, or at least start with, a processor core design from OpenCores, in traditional Verilog. The OpenRISC 1200 core might be a good starting point. Of course, you’ll need to use a tool to get from hardware description to real hardware.
Another attractive alternative might be RISC-V, which is explicitly intended for industrial use. There are compilers, the Linux OS… even a Linux-on-RISC-V simulator that runs in your browser.
The open-source LLVM project is a great foundation upon which to build a programming language for your processor. Or you can just port the existing clang compiler.
You can stick with Linux because it’s traditional, but these days you might want to look into the recently open-sourced seL4.
There’s plenty of room to become the next Intel, Microsoft, or Apple.
And it could still be done in a garage.
I think you have to be really American to think that means wisdom. I’d say anyone not American would see the arrogance of it immediately. Maybe you’re not thinking about it literally enough. The closest images you’ve got to giants is great statues of heroes & gods. You sit at their feet, not climb on their shoulders. The presumption is colossal…
I gleefully admit I’m describing something hopefully quite a bit more disruptive than just what would indeed essentially be a Raspberry Pi competitor otherwise. My point was primarily that it’s not a priori insane to contemplate competing with ARM Holdings. :-) But I’m also not persuaded that the road to follow would be porting all the things you mentioned, but rather to start over from first principles with a focus, e.g. on privacy and security from the ground up.
Sure, if you want to play the “more GHz” game on their turf, that’s obviously true. I’m talking about zigging when they zag—whether it’s on processor architecture, OS architecture, app architecture, or whatever. Intel never expected to lose the embedded market to ARM. Microsoft never expected to blow both the internet and mobile markets. RIM certainly never expected to lose the smartphone market to Apple, of all organizations.
So yeah, building PC clones isn’t a viable business today. But building a totally new system from processor design up to software stack and industrial design is. But maybe I’ve just capitulated what you meant by “two different things.” :-)
I get thistles as high as the middle of my thigh (it rhymes!).
Yes, the being is called God. Since his hand originally created it in the first place. He will let it fall he he so chooses, and he could recreate it were every and when every he so chooses. No man could every do it if God was not in it.
If you read about the history of America and England, there are to many miracles in which against impossible odds the nations did not fall. Then again Lenin almost lost the war against the whites. If the Allies had bother to send a division or two we very well could of never seen communism have the reach it did for decades. So I have to account that to divan intervention also.
Um, you do know that we did send in expeditionary forces? Here’s a monument for one of them that is down the street from me:
Yes, we had supply and combat ships going into Archangel, and some troops stationed there too. Not sure how much combat they actually saw.
Peter–Your theological sentence presumes you retain a Bible, which will convey a great deal more than a sentence. Could you convey the germ of Christian theology without the Gospels?
Let me propose the following hypothesis/fact for political economy: the effects of any social policy are never limited to its objectives.
The point, Skip, is that the allies did send in forces. Not only these two American expeditions (I linked to both), but also British, French, Japanese, et al. troops. It’s not like the allies just ignored the situation from the start. 13,000 American soldiers is nothing to sniff at, even if they had limited objectives. And in total, I’m counting over a hundred thousand troops. That ain’t nothin’.
And it’s not like the Allies were in a great position to redirect forces at that point anyway, nor was there really a coordinated Russian opposition to the reds (one of the reasons the US eventually pulled out).
Right, but the above quote is where this all started. A division or two? Depending on the army, whether it’s at war, etc., a division might be between ten thousand and thirty thousand troops. So, the more than hundred thousand troops that were in the crumbling Russian Empire would constitute more than just a division or two. That was the only point I was making from the beginning.
I’m actually not arguing with your point, was just adding some additional info.
FYI:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/top-10-crowd-funded-pcs-how-steve-jobs-heirs-are-building-the-next-great-computerreat-computer
A friend of mine teaches the great books. I’ll probably send my kids to his school when they’re old enough, rather than send them to regular middle school and high school. (My kids are homeschooled now).
“Get off my lawn” would do, skipsul. It would do very nicely.
— John Locke
— Milton Friedman
— Freeman Dyson
Peter, I love you, but as ever that’s an awfully one-sided view of (even Christian) theology. If one were feeling a touch cheeky (yet serious), one could largely forego the sentence and make a similarly strong case for a single word: obey*.
Sticking with the whole brevity thing, I’m rather a fan (for once) of Muhammad Ali (expressed several ways, including):
Unfortunately, the representation that most accurately reflects implementation appears to be:
smh
*Not to be confused with the Shepard Fairey OBEY Giant campaign, which had an antiauthoritarian bent – that the same artist also created the sickeningly propagandistic “Hope” campaign serves as yet another reminder that pop artists, like politicians, aren’t our best models of consistency…