RESEARCH SUMMARY ON THE 80TH BIRTHDAY
CONTENTS
Introduction
Future generations or "The awful daring of a moment's surrender"
Self-criticism
Old news or "information"
On
occasion of my 75th birthday in October 2012, and as a response to
inquiries about research
results, thoughts and feelings, both professional and personal, I presented a
text in the form of a few relevant excerpts from The Ecclesiastes with
some pertinent additions. Additional strong personal emotions and
insights with far reaching intellectual implications for me were lately
formulated in some of the texts that I included in my
weblog.
For the rest I have become firmer in my conviction that
what
is most
needed
is a
research
integrated
with
"Evangelization" or "Apocalypticism" as illustrated
at the end of a timely research report, a review of the historical and
political research summarized
in
the Swedish book with the title, in my English translation, Is
the Swede a Human Being?
I believed
that the hints in my research summaries could work as a handbook for
professors emeriti in general, and
as a
guide
for
a progressive
closing
of life's balance-sheet.
I realize
that with advancing age human relations become gradually more important,
as it has been noted in the most important research on aging that I know,
as referred in some of the reports from Stanford University's Life
Span Development Laboratory. Beyond
the gift I got - at last - of an enduring conjugal
love there
is
the
related question
of children.
I
have
quite
consciously
and painfully renounced
to fatherhood, and I have often wondered whether it was a legitimate thing
to do before my finding - too late in life in regard to children - faith
in enduring love. And that leads to the first item of this summary.
Soon after my 75th birthday in November 2012 some thoughts coalesced in my mind that found a kind of expression upon my reading a few lines in a poem by T.S. Eliot. Instead of adding them to my recent research 75th research summary I transcribe them into a preposterous "preliminary summary" of an imagined 80th birthday. It is preposterous because I should not be mortgaging the future, but perhaps it is allowable if I simultaneously confess that I am conscious that I may die before completing the 80 years. Indeed, of course, I may die tonight or right now. But I wish to share these with others with similar destiny who may find solace and some self-understanding in these words:
"What have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms"
[From T.S. Eliot, "The Waste
Land" - 1922, in Collected Poems 1909-1962,
London: Faber and Faber, 1963.]
I think that, of course, this has much to do with research because our
own children, or the students that represent them, impersonate the ultimate
reason for our research, both in terms of its continuity beyond our death,
and in terms of imagined potential beneficiaries of our struggle
for a better life. Belatedly I understand better now why my scientific advisor
West Churchman towards
the end of this life increased his focus and concern for "future generations",
as in his The Design of Inquiring Systems (cf. the keywords),
and Thought
and Wisdom (Seaside,
Intersystems Publications, 1982, pp. 17ff, and 65ff.) It is all about
what and how we should do research. And "The awful daring
of a moment's surrender" that I have not been able to dare in my earlier life may have something
to do with our profession of faith in God, that is, in genuine love or in what
love should be, seen against the gloomy background of tragic
tendencies in modern families. It may be the source of my wish to write in order to have at least the illusion of leaving some heritage to coming generations as they are represented by my students and former colleagues.
Eventually, in August-September 2013 I happened to study Steven Shapin's book A Social Theory of Truth. For a review, see John A. Schuster and Alan B.H. Taylor "Blind Trust" (pdf file) in Social Studies of Science 27, No. 3, 1997. I found there inspiration for understanding my own attitude and constraints in research. For instance:
"There is such a kind of difference between virtue, shaded by a private, and shining in a public life, as there is between a candle carried aloft in the open air, and enclosed in a lantern. In the former situation it gives more light, but in the latter, it is in less danger to be blown out" (p. 189, quoted from Mackenzie, Moral Essay Preferring solitude (1665), edited by me in modern English, as in the following quotations.) So long all well in view of my own renunciation to a more prestigious academic career. But Shapin considers further advices in old texts such as William Ramsey's The Gentleman's Companion (1676):
"One was to keep one's due distance from one's superior, to show proper respect and submission, and to avoid, where possible, being entrusted with secrets that should compromise one or expose one to vice or danger. One was to be civil to inferiors, without showing or encouraging familiarity, now was one to expose to them the secrets of one's heart or purse. With equals one was enjoined to be constant and faithful, to avoid all contentious disputes, but, it unavoidable, to seek to keep them within manageable bounds, and to them the truth so far as prudence dictated. The obligation to truth-telling was therefore relative to setting [...]" (p. 103.)
But I felt a near hit at my Achilles heel when I read the following additional advices in a quotation from Obadiah Walker's Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen (1673):
"Be not magisterial in your dictates; nor contend pertinacious in ordinary discourse for your opinion, nor for a truth of small consequence. Declare your reasons, if they be not accepted, let them alone; assure your self that you are not obliged to convert the whole world. It is also an uncivil thing...to confute every thing we think is false...Also if what you report is not believed, do not swear it, ...not lay wagers, not take yourself engaged to defend it, or that he who believes you not, affronts you...The conceptions according to truth are alike and the same, but false are infinite; wherefore if you find a man single in his judgment, be wary of him; he either knows more then all others, or there is some ill principle in him." (p. 117.)
And Shapin continues quoting from other sources that the bold maintaining of any argument questions one's own civil behavior. Similarly, discourse which is too precise and which demanded too much accuracy in following it, was a violation of the presumed equality of civil society. Citations of authorities ought to be done circumspectly and with care for avoiding even the appearance of pedantry: "When you cite an author, be not too precise in quoting the Chapter, or Page." Bold and peremptory positions, being true, offend the opposer, and being false, shame the proposer. Nothing in the world could be certainly known, which recommended a healthy, if mitigated skepticism about the status and significance of any knowledge-claim or body of knowledge not directly involved with the stream of practical life.
Referring to Niklas Luhmann, Shapin observes that such conversation is not viewed as a means to an end, rather aiming at its pleasurable continuance. I see that as a reminder of the rebirth of such a view in today's academic interest for relativism and postmodernism ending in the extreme of smart careerism in organizations and modern universities where I know of senior experienced researchers teaching courses on how to make conversational friends and no enemies in order to increase the number of published papers. Disagreement was regarded as problematic and no articulated thought could be criticized for regard that vulnerable persons were behind such thought: it must therefore only be commented upon, reviewed from another perspective, cautiously examined, and circumvented.
I felt a near hit at my Achilles heel, I said, because in the above terms I may have had a tendency to pedantry and a passion to question and convince. Therefore I felt it as a relief to read further Shapin's observation (p. 120) that Luhmann's account of conversational conventions (that symptomatically recall the modern problem of "political correctness"!) belongs to a specifically historical inquiry. Luhmann wants to show how this code conflicted with the origins of science. He is said to share a widespread Continental tendency to associate "science" simply with its Cartesian version or with formal methodological pronouncements concerning Cartesianism. Science aimed then to secure certainty through rigorous reliable methods for arriving at indubitable knowledge and eliminating the merely probable. In this context Shapin cites extremely interesting sources such as John A. Schuster's Methodologies as Mythic Structures (1984) as well as the same author's contribution to The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method (Eds. Schuster & Richard R. Yeo, 1986.) I felt all this as a relief because I recognize that my own scientific orientation in the concept of "probabilistic" information along the dialectical pragmatism of West Churchman justified an escape from Cartesianism (and positivism), albeit at the cost of a conflict between systems science and the hidden tenets of computer science.
Quoting Alain de Botton (2014):
"But now the press [as digitalized news on industrialized research, my addition] had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well-informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he was still an idiot - a depressing combination of traits that previous ages had never had to worry about. The news had [...] armed stupidity and given authority to fools." [...]
"We can't find everything we need to round out our humanity in the present. There are attitudes, ideologies, modalities of feeling and philosophies of mind for which we must journey backwards across the centuries, through the corridors of reference libraries, past forgotten museum cabinets filled with rusting suits of medieval armor, along the pages of second-hand books marked with the annotations of their now-deceased owners or up to the altars of half-ruined and moss-covered temples. We need to balance contact with the ever-changing pixels on our screens with the pages of heavy hardback books that proclaim, through their bindings and their typefaces, that they have something to say that will still deserve a place in our thoughts tomorrow." [...] A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us."
[Quoted from Alain de Botton (2014). The News: A User's Manual, New York: Pantheon Books, pp.70, and 254f. And regarding "the brief time still allotted to us" see also pp. 105, 152, 157, 172, 205f, 221, 236, 252.]
Of course, these masterly rhetorical expressions by Alain de Botton can be seen as pale secular equivalents to the Bible's Ecclesiastes (the archetype for emeriti's retirement handbook), all against the background of my dismay in face of the impotent meaninglessness of many perverted societal debates, not the least academic debates. They underpin my conviction, expressed in various later writings, that in face of a perceived forced choice between the options of dedicating ourselves to evangelization or apocalypticism appears a third last option of prayer, such as suggested by Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ, and Pierre-Joseph de Clorivière's The paths of prayer: A clear portrayal of the various kinds of active and passive prayer [French orig.: Considérations de sur l'exercice la Prière et de l'Oraison], recently translated into Swedish.
Reaching the eighties I could confirm the meaninglessness of perverted societal debates including computerized social media, and deepen my understanding of the essence of computers and computation in a paper on Computers as embodied mathematics and logic. After that I noticed that further questions arising in my mind could be integrated in these and my other latest papers. I conclude that the last mentioned paper may turn out to be my "swan song" in the sense that it works like a summary that fits into the larger puzzle of my life and total research. Whatever else that arises and cannot properly be considered as academic research I keep in my weBLOG, and still fits into the puzzle.