words on the Moon

As a child the spectacular daring of men on the Moon inspired me. One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind extends a hairline beyond the terminator of my memory. I am old enough to remember the later Apollo missions. I zoomed around the living room during the opening credits of TOS before we called it TOS: to boldly go where no man has gone before. It was a time in my life and for the country when every boy dreamed to be an astronaut. And it was always man, mankind, boys: this was a decade before I began to penetrate beyond a skin-deep awareness of gender, coinciding with the biological imperatives of adolescence, visions from encountering New Wave science fiction, a broader diversity of crew on the Space Shuttle.

As an adult I maintain a general sense of optimism about the future. I’m still transported by videos and images from the Space Age, starting with we choose to go to the MoonThinking about space continues to influence my thinking, from teaching my history of ideas course on the circle, to archiving information across the solar system.

Yet here we are, fifty years after Armstrong set foot on the Moon, and what has changed? Here on Earth, the place where I work remains way behind the curve along many measures of diversity. The city where I live is segregated and surrounded for miles by one of the most monochromatic parts of the nation. The politics of the nation itself are fractious.

As for the Moon, we are going there again, or so we’ve been saying for years, and then beyond. But, as with any endeavor, who is actually doing the work? Who receives the credit when things go well, who distributes the blame or spins the narrative when things falter?

In Kennedy’s speech, he declared, “There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet.” But as we humans fling ourselves into space, we carry the politics of difference with us. To a certain extent, this is inevitable, even welcome — individual distinctiveness is good. And I want us to be adventurous as a planet.

However, when we leave the development of rockets to a tiny group of plutocrats, we should wonder whether only the wealthy should control access to space. When art on the Moon or communication with potential extraterrestrial intelligences is dominated by small groups, we should question how broad their perspectives and methods can be.

I am not interrogating whether we should go to space. I think it is inevitable. We are a wondering, wandering species. All of us begin our lives as curious explorers. Instead, I am wondering how we should go about space exploration and development. Sometimes when I consider our ventures in the early 21st century I think: yes, let’s do it, let’s go to space. But no, don’t do it like that. It hurts that way.

We should be more grown up by now, acknowledging the value of multiple efforts, values, and perspectives. Otherwise, it’s just Whitey on the Moon all over again.

declining virtue

I support inclusive language that recognizes and respects a person’s individual gender identity. People have enough troubles making their ways through this world. The very least anyone can do is to refer to fellow human beings by their preferred names and pronouns. And focusing on pronouns is good-intentioned. To quote from the Wikipedia article on declension, the one situation where gender is still clearly part of the English language is in the pronouns for the third[-]person singular.

However, I don’t understand one particular form of virtue signaling that I have encountered at work.  When some people introduce themselves at meetings, they say:

My name is <so-and-so>. Preferred pronouns: she, her, hers

or in email signatures, they write:

Pronouns: he, him, his

Pronouns: she/her/hers

At first glance, this provides more information than any native English speaker would need. Just state your pronoun as she or he; we can figure out the rest. Any information beyond the nominative case is not merely a waste of time, it presupposes the audience does not know the grammar of the English language as well as the speaker. As a brown person, throughout my life I have experienced assumptions about how well I know my first language, so I find this style of virtue signaling rather insulting.

(Just between you and I, the great irony is that someone who introduces themselves with preferred pronouns often misuses grammar, as in the beginning of this sentence.)

However, a short list of three grammatical forms actually provides less information than a native English speaker would need: consider the four elements necessary to express {they, them, their, theirs}. If someone prefers less commonly known pronouns, such as ze, that person also needs to provide more than three grammatical forms, because there are different ways that ze could decline. In contrast, a person who provides only three pronouns is broadcasting their ignorance of grammar, their assumption about the audience’s ignorance of grammar, and/or the privilege of being associated with a common gender identity.

Listing only three pronouns reveals privileged assumptions about how grammar operates — namely, that everyone else’s pronoun grammar should operate the same way as one’s own. Consider the following table, also from the Wikipedia article on declension:

  Masculine Feminine Neuter
(non-person)
Neuter
(person)
Subjective he she it they
Objective him her it them
Dependent possessive his her its their
Independent possessive his hers its theirs

 

To make patterns more obvious:

  Masculine Feminine Neuter
(non-person)
Neuter
(person)
Subjective A A A A
Objective B B A B
Dependent possessive C B B C
Independent possessive C C B D

Someone who states she, her, hers is imposing the ABBC pronoun declension structure and is privileging that feminine structure over others. Someone who states he, him, his is implicitly assuming and imposing the ABCC declension structure.

I could wish English did not distinguish gender, as in my father’s Visayan language, although this did cause him to switch between he and she within the same conversation, which may have been disconcerting to his medical patients. I have heard pronouns in some Chinese languages also lack gender. Perhaps gender distinctions will eventually disappear from English. Languages do tend to simplify, like the dual disappearing after Homeric Greek or, just between you and I, the objective case.

But no one can wish away the history of the English language. The problem with any set of pronouns that decline ABCC, ABBC, AABB, or ABCD is that they incline towards existing gender roles. A truly revolutionary pronoun, in order to break out of traditional gender roles, must decline differently from these patterns.

In the meantime, what should we do about preferred pronouns? Someone may claim the perfect is the enemy of the good, stating that they were doing the best to their understanding when listing only three pronouns. That was then, before this essay. This is now. And now someone who wishes to support inclusive language that respects gender identity has several viable options:

0: State no pronouns, yet support those who do through useful actions. These could include the propagation of systems that encourage others to express their pronouns, active listening to those who confront challenges with expressing their gender identities, and other advocacy.

1: State one pronoun, for the sake of brevity and to display more explicit support of those with less common pronouns. Understand that less common pronouns may have different case declension patterns.

4: State four pronouns, for the sake of comprehensiveness.

I currently exercise option 0. The challenge is that I can be perceived to be ignorant of gender issues or to be declining virtue signaling. On the contrary, I do believe in the power and significance of inclusive language. To that end, we need to be more careful about the declension of pronouns, both in the expression of our own preferred pronouns and in the construction of new vocabularies that recognize the constraints of existing grammar.

notes

A moment ago a sunbeam mottled through the neighbor’s trees, casting on the motes dancing mid-air. I remembered

An infant’s fascination with the lit-up stained glass of Nor’easter as she swung in Flip-Away 1-2-3

Awake to stay on Eastern time, camped near Yosemite, sunrise warming trees and ground and air, standing balanced on a stump as everybody slept

Alone in the basement in Devola, the dust fastening on sunlight through the basement window, where toads lived to fascinate a boy as much as lightning bugs and robin’s eggs

Learning the word “mote” in middle school when a friend said he was reading The Mote in God’s Eye, to realize words could be small yet unknown

Lying on the immense yard of Grandview Avenue, staring at the blue sky in search of contrails, watching floaters drift past and return with each blink

Studying Brownian motion, amazed at how much atomic detail can be derived from the close observation of random macroscopic motion

Coding workers in the puzzle game 7 Billion Humans to perform random walks in their tasks, leading to surprisingly highly optimized, though not guaranteed, results

The moment no photo can capture has passed. The sun now lights the trees in the front yard a brilliant summer green. Birds chirp their songs in the cool morning air, cars occasionally pass sounding like surf. A dog barks outside, rousing a dog sleeping belly up on the belly of a sleeping woman. A boy reads on the purple chair, remarks he has theater class but not piano today, asks Can we have pancakes for breakfast?

impossible man

I attended a joint symposium a week ago Friday. Sharmila Sen read from her recent book Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America, while Nico Slate read from his brand-new book, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India, which Sen had edited. Both texts confronted issues of race and identity politics, and both authors were thoughtful during the Q&A. The idea to celebrate their books together was brilliant.

Slate sen 900x600

However, the event led me to reflect uneasily on my own experiences with race. In particular, I was disturbed by some of the questions. One person related, with what seemed to me an element of envy, that when she lived in Chicago she had a friend who could pass for many different races, and all the other parents at the school were friendly to her. The implication was that being of uncertain race is a great advantage.

I lived in Chicago twenty years ago and it remains the place where I have been most keenly aware of how others perceived me in terms of race. Chicago is the most racist city I know. The problem is that Chicagoans perceive race starkly in black and white, with a vague awareness there also some brown-skinned Latino people. If you do not fit into those preconceived categories, you are not merely invisible, you are existentially impossible.

Earlier that same day, I had discussed combinatorics with one of my advisees. During the Q&A for this symposium, I realized the concept of race claims to partition a human population into sets, with every individual belonging to exactly one set. The error in Chicago, from my experiences living there towards the end of the 20th century, is the partition {White, Black} is faulty; it is an incomplete description. Nevertheless, when I lived in Chicago, I was confronted with all the negative prejudices of being brown.

The problem of being neither this nor that — of being perceived as belonging to a community when that community itself wouldn’t accept me — extends beyond the Upper Midwest. Growing up in small-town Ohio, other children asked whether I was Chinese or Japanese, because in their minds there were only two possible types of Asian people. My own daughter and son, growing up here at the head of the Ohio River, have also been subject to the erroneous {Chinese, Japanesepartition. When I was my daughter’s age, one of my classmates apparently had partitioned the world into {White, Black}, taunting me under his breath with the N word.

When I moved from Chicago to New Mexico, I began inhabiting the racial partition {Anglo, Indian, Hispanic}. When people heard me speak, they classified me as Anglo, even though in other places I had been taken for Native American or Central American. I was greatly confused by this because anywhere else “Anglo” would have closely mapped to “White” or other phenotypical characteristics. However, race classification in the American Southwest is more concerned with geographic origin, cultural background, and linguistic practice.

At the symposium, Sen pointed out Asians themselves don’t consider themselves as a single race. When she moved as a child from India to the United States, she was puzzled that she was classified with other people from the same continent but with whom she shared practically nothing in terms of food, clothing, history, language, religion, or appearance. This is an obvious truth to anyone of Asian heritage, yet the US Census lumps everyone into “Asian”.

In summary, we human beings perceive race because it is advantageous to notice patterns. The trouble with racial classifications is how they blur the distinctions among not only individuals but entire populations, bundling people who have real differences, sometimes even centuries of conflict. Being of uncertain race is not an advantage, because that person is lumped into grossly inaccurate categories, simply for the mental convenience of the classifier. The Chicago mother who could pass for many different races was welcomed by others at the school only because it was psychologically comfortable in that particular setting for those who met her.

Racial categories render entire populations as invisible or impossible. The Voyager Golden Record, while a monumental achievement and hastily assembled, excluded all of the native languages of the Philippines, one of the most populous countries in the world.

When visible, I am seen as a Filipino-American. Legally I can claim both nations, yet I do not know what that term means. I understand but do not speak Tagalog; for years I ate native foods but have not cooked any besides rice and lumpia; I was raised Catholic but no longer embrace that faith; I have visited but never lived in the Philippines. On the other hand, on many occasions and in many places around the United States, my outward appearance leads my fellow citizens to prejudge me as not-American. I am liminal between Filipino and American — or rather, I am subliminal to both, not quite there. In the chemical sense, to the much of the rest of the world I am not of solid substance: I have been sublimated; I am sublimed.

small country, big dreams

Today the Beresheet spacecraft, containing the Arch Mission Foundation Lunar Library, descended towards the Moon, where it crashed.

The Lunar Library contained one of my projects, “A Brief History of Archiving Civilization,” including an essay, societal and astronomical records to mark the epoch, excerpts from the Westinghouse Time Capsule and Voyager Golden Record, data from Earth Tapestry, and a small collection of poems.

I hope SpaceIL is able to marshal the resources for another go. They came so close. Space is hard.

11SPACEISRAEL1 superJumbo v2

Chungking Express, seeing

Two weeks ago I watched Chungking Express, inspired by the Hong Kong episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown that features the idiosyncratic cinematographer Christopher Doyle. As Bourdain and Doyle talked about the influence of the camera on how we perceive and interact with the real world, I thought: I should see one of the films they are mentioning.

After I watch an outstanding film, sometimes I’ll look back at the trailers and check out those DVDs from the library too. I’ll also, more rarely, seek out movies with a particular actor. With Chungking Express, I thought: I should see more films by Wong Kar-wai. How did I not know about him before?

The first vignette takes place during the spring of 1994. We apprehend this because our protagonist is going from store to store in search of canned pineapple with an expiration of May 1, 1994, the date he will give up hope of reuniting with his girlfriend. This slyly humorous plot device reminded me of how I used to mark time towards the end of Mookie’s life, looking first at bottles of shampoo, then at gallons of milk, wondering if they would last longer than he.

Certain memories of spring 1994 are vivid. Friends and colleagues at Andover surprised me with a birthday party. I interviewed for a job at Bard College. My students in Bartlet wore T-shirts screen-printed with Mookie, including when they played a concert on the lawn behind the dorm.

25 years ago, the protagonist was 25 years old, and I was near that age too. Half a lifetime ago.

I truly attended to Chungking Express, engaged by the snappy cinematography, fine acting, and iconic locations like Chungking Mansions and the Central/Mid-Levels Escalator. But also because of the subtitles. When watching at home, with many distractions available, it can be challenging to watch any film, and most of the Chinese films I’ve watched before have focused on action. This time, the subtitles helped to focus my attention.

I intended to watch it again, because it strikes me as a film that rewards multiple viewings, but someone else has requested it from the library. Good on them. I will watch another Wong Kar-wai film instead, having just requested Ashes of Time Redux and Fallen Angels. And I am awakened, after also watching Crazy Rich Asians with the children this past week, to how enjoyable a film can be when it takes on a different cast.

two Jews, three opinions

The annual AAC&U Diversity, Equity, and Student Success conference occurred in Pittsburgh this year at the Omni William Penn. After lunch last Friday, during the discussion on the Tree of Life tragedy, one of the rabbis said if you speak with two Jews, you get three opinions.

I retreated from the emotionally laden conversation to the peace of Diophantine mathematics, and asked myself: what is the general case? With n Jews, how many opinions O(n) will be present? I started to consider possible functions that satisfy the following conditions:

  1. O(2) = 3
  2. O(n) is a counting number for all counting numbers n
  3. O(n) is a polynomial function
  4. O(n) should admit of some reasonable answers in the special cases when n = 0 and n = 1 

O(n) = n + 1 provides the entertaining result that one Jew, being alone, will nevertheless harbor two opinions. When n = 0, the function indicates is there is still one opinion, which could be interpreted as that of God. While this null case is interesting, the interpretation of cases when n > 1 is increasingly dull. The number of opinions is always simply one more than the number of Jews present.

O(n) = 2n – 1 is slightly more interesting with its the steeper slope. As n becomes large, the number of opinions approaches double the number of interlocutors, suggesting that Jews are able to entertain two sides of an argument that each is individually interpreting. However, when n = 0 (the case of “God alone”), the number of opinions is negative, which is not a meaningful result.

Other linear polynomials, such as 3n – 3, yield nonsensically negative results for n = 1 (the individual case) or don’t provide integer solutions across the domain of counting numbers, such as 1/2 n + 2. Likewise, higher-order polynomials such as n^2 – 1, n^3 – 5, and n^4 -13 fail to give meaningful results when n = 1.

O(n) = 3 is the trivial case. This function satisfies all four of the given conditions. However, it doesn’t pass the “sniff test” –I would expect a group of Jews to hold more than 3 opinions among each other.

O(n) = n^2 – n + 1 has the lovely quality of growing faster than the other three viable options. As n approaches infinity, the number of opinions approaches the square of the number of Jews. To put it another way, the number of interactions increases as the number of pairwise interactions between n argumentative, intellectual, inquisitive people: n (n -1). The constant at the end could represent God’s opinion.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove that other polynomial functions besides these four cannot fulfill the conditions above. As for me, I favor the last of these possibilities.

Screen Shot 2019 04 01 at 23 38 35

 

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beyond impossible

As a pescetarian for over 14 years, I did once enjoy meat, and I enjoy a veggie burger that approaches the smell, look, and texture of beef. When I make a Beyond Burger at home, I toast and butter the roll, sauté onions with Worcestershire and soy sauce, and slather on some Dijon mustard. I’ve enjoyed the Impossible Burger at restaurants like BRGR and Dave & Buster’s. More than half the experience of a decent burger, at least it seems to me now, is the accompaniments.

One of my guilty pleasures back when I ate fellow mammals was White Castle. I crave the entire slider experience, including the rehydrated browned onions and soft steamed bun. I’ve gone to great lengths to eat at White Castle: taken detours in New Jersey, made special subway trips in Manhattan, driven long distances in Chicago, taken the Metro and walked alone at night in St. Louis, talked it up to family while visiting Las Vegas. It’s probably a good thing I’ve never actually lived close to one. I recognize it’s not the healthiest fare. It’s a memory of childhood, the first fast food I remember eating when we were in the Bronx.

Now Impossible Burger claims to have an improved version, and it’s debuting at White Castle. One reviewer talked up the Impossible Burger 2.0 in an Engadget article. But look at this photo:

Dims

It doesn’t look any better than the original Impossible Burger. And how is this a White Castle product? The proportion between burger and bun is completely wrong, because that’s not the bun White Castle should be using. And why is there a piece of lettuce stuck between?? They need to go back to the drawing board. Make a slider that looks and tastes like a slider.

Of course, my complaints are not going to prevent me from homing in on a White Castle the next time I’m near one, to try this new product.

watch this space

Back when I used to blog in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the tagline of Best Let or Get was:

       good works 
nifty gadgets
wild thoughts
+ {my} life

{William Alba}

Seeking to blog frequently again, I will indulge myself occasionally and write once more about nifty gadgets. I’ll start with wrist watches. My children say I have too many, but really I have only three: the automatic I inherited from my grandfather, a quartz watch with a 24-hour dial, and my newest lovely acquisition from Christmas. (They say I have a fourth — my Fitbit Charge 2. which does flash the time on my right wrist, but I count that instead as a fitness tracker.)

My grandfather’s watch is a Seiko Sea Lion M44 manufactured, according to its serial number, in April 1964. My mother believes he bought it on a trip to Japan sometime that year. She’s not certain because she had already immigrated to the US by then.

P1040493

I remember admiring this watch as a child. When Grandpa visited the US for the first time, sometime around 1970, he placed it against my ear so I could hear the ticking. That’s the same trip when he blew smoke rings up towards the ceiling of our South Bronx apartment, and when he knocked insistently on the bathroom door to tell Grandma that it was snowing. It was a few flakes dancing slowly from the sky and I said, “It’s just snow, Grandpa,” but he had never seen it falling down.

This Seiko looked so enormous to me. I couldn’t imagine my own wrist ever wearing such a large object. He gave it to me sometime in the mid-1970s. I remember him handing it to me, telling me to take it. “But it’s your watch, Grandpa,” I said, completely puzzled. “I want you to have it,” he said. Seeing the tears in his eyes, I didn’t understand, so I refused. He instead gave it to my mother for safekeeping. He was well, as far as anyone knew. Yet that was the last time I saw him.

I didn’t see or wear the watch for decades. As a younger child, I wore a Mickey Mouse Timex where the hands were Mickey’s arms. For a while as a teenager, I wore a pseudo-diver’s watch from an outfit like Sears or Montgomery Ward. Then for many years I didn’t want anything to restrict or confine my hands. I could see the time on wall clocks or computer screens. In the 1990s and 2000s I sometimes carried the time with me on a clever little TimeTag that was simply a metal clip attached to an LCD, or on a portable device like a PalmPilot, iPod Touch, or iPad.

Then in 2015, somehow I thought I wanted a watch again, to know the time during classes and meetings. I ordered a Casio quartz from Amazon. Small, thin, light, accurate, inexpensive, with 24-hour markings, I thought it would be perfect. But it disappointed me greatly. There was no heft to it, the watch band was uncomfortable, it had no spirit. I sent it back and looked for Grandpa’s watch, stored away in a wooden box in my bedroom. 

It started right up. As an automatic watch, the simple act of picking it up wound the mainspring and the second hand began sweeping, the gears began ticking. It was smaller than I remembered, with a case width of 38 mm, small by today’s standards. But it fit my narrow wrist perfectly after I removed a couple of fine links.

I love the clean dial. Okay, so the time drifts into inaccuracy from day to day, and its power reserve doesn’t last through half a weekend, but what is a watch for?, I asked myself. To remind me of the passage of time.

But after a while, I found I did want something more accurate. A watch that I didn’t have to check against the oven clock before I left for the bus every morning. I had been admiring the Eone watches that I missed getting on Kickstarter, and especially the new Bradley Element, with its ceramic ridges and valleys. I thought this would be a great way to know the time by touch, to tell the time more discreetly.

BradleyElement 3Q 1024x1024

But I kept this watch for less than a week. It felt too self-indulgent. I loaned it indefinitely to my mother, suffering from macular degeneration, so she could tell the time better.

Later in 2017 I bought the Fitbit Charge 2 for myself. It’s a good activity tracker, and the app is convenient for tracking water intake and sleep. I switched in a magnetic “Milanese” strap. But it’s not a watch.

With a fascination for 24-hour time, last fall I purchased the Svalbard Glacier.

Svalbard Glacier AA19B 02

It is certainly more accurate than Grandpa’s Seiko, and it has a sense of itself. My main complaint is that it wears large for me at a case width of 41.5 mm. And while I thought the 24-hour markings on the face would intrigue me, I found myself doing mental calculations too often to interpolate between the hour markings.

So last November I was still looking for a watch that I could call my own. Something understated yet distinctive, accurate, low-maintenance, rugged, easy to view. Preferably a watch that helped me perceive and change time across time zones. And something that I could proudly leave to a grandchild.

I found the Casio Oceanus OCW-S100-1AJF:

IMG 1902

There is so much that I love about this watch, my Christmas present from my wife this year: its atomic radio accuracy (which can also sync to the Clock Wave app if I’m beyond range of six transmitters in the US, Japan, China, Germany, and Great Britain), coupled with quartz precision. A solar-powered battery, world time settings accessible through the crown, perpetual calendar and automatic DST adjustment, shock and water resistance, and clean dial with lume. I can wear it for work or play, although I do take care not to scratch the titanium case and band, or smash the sapphire crystal. The case width is spec’d at 41.5 mm, yet it sits perfectly on my wrist.

I don’t know why I would buy another watch anytime soon. There’s so little I would change about it. I wish the 30 time zones on the face were just a bit more legible while remaining unobtrusive, and that the words “TOUGH MVT.” were on the caseback rather than the dial. These are incredibly minor issues. At the moment I consider this my BIFL (Buy It For Life) watch, one that suits just about every 

 …

So what other watch could I possibly ever need? I can think off a few categories:

  1. A beater watch, inexpensive and easy to replace. Currently I take off my watch instead, if I’m doing something like trying to uninstall the dishwasher. One possibility: for my son’s upcoming birthday I purchased an Alba watch, cased in China with a Japanese movement from Seiko. It doesn’t have all the features of the Oceanus, but it does have a clean dial, date and day window, and solar power, and it lists at about one-fifth the price of the Oceanus.
  2. A GPS watch. While these are more immediately responsive to time-zone changes, all current models are too large. Casio, Citizen, and Seiko make good watches in this category.
  3. A black-tie automatic watch, something very dressy. I would consider a Grand Seiko watch like the “Snowflake” for the smooth and accurate Spring Drive, or a Credor Spring Drive (another Seiko sub-brand). A Rolex (maybe the Sky-Dweller but there are other attractive models), or a Patek Philippe with marvelous complications also falls in this category. Okay, so the last two are not terribly original choices – I don’t dwell much on four- and five-figure watches.
  4. A completely silly and playful watch, like those by Tokyoflash Japan.
  5. A watch loaded with astronomical data, like the YES Equilibrium. But the Equilibrium LCD looks pixelated, the ring is too cluttered, and the case is just too large.
  6. A watch that has a desirable timekeeping feature I currently lack, such as vibrating alarm, illumination, or day-of-the-week. But not a Casio G-Shock – those things are monsters.
  7. A second Oceanus watch, because I like this one so much.
  8. A Dick Tracy watch. I still have a flip phone instead of a smartphone, and I’m ready to use one but don’t want to carry it around. Currently an Apple Watch needs to be tethered to an iPhone to use its communication features. Why this limitation? I don’t understand why we don’t yet have Dick Tracy watches.

the educated person, per Drucker

Yesterday, as on many Saturdays, I read and return items to the Homewood Branch of the public library. Because another patron requested The Essential Drucker, I was compelled to quickly review this book. The main chapter that captured my attention is titled “The Educated Person,” originally from Peter Drucker‘s 1993 book Post-Capitalist Society. It begins:

Knowledge is not impersonal, like money. Knowledge does not reside in a book, a databank, a software program; they contain only information. Knowledge is always embodied in a person; carried by a person; created, augmented, or improved by a person; applied by a person; taught and passed on by a person; used or misused by a person. The shift to the knowledge society therefore puts the person in the center. In doing so, it raises new challenges, new issues, new and quite unprecedented questions about the knowledge society’s representative, the educated person.

In all earlier societies, the educated person was an ornament. He or she embodied Kultur – the German term that with its mixture of awe and derision is untranslatable into English (even “highbrow” does not come close). But in the knowledge society, the educated person is society’s emblem; society’s symbol; society’s standard-bearer. The educated person is the social “archetype” – to use the sociologist’s term. He or she defines society’s performance capacity. But he or she also embodies society’s values, beliefs, commitments. If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the “bourgeois” in the Age of Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the postcapitalist world in which knowledge has become the central resource.

At this early stage, I was metaphorically nodding in agreement. Drucker’s attempt to distinguish knowledge from information, by centering knowledge in personhood, appeals greatly to me, as does his elevation of the educated person as the standard-bearer of society.

But then I began to wonder what Drucker meant by this, that personhood is necessary for knowledge. What counts as a “person,” and what does he mean by “knowledge,” in contrast to information?

What is Drucker’s stance towards Cartesian mind-body duality: can the mind (and knowledge) of a person be separated from body, or does “personhood” require a material substrate? That is, would he hold that materialism alone cannot account fully for consciousness, as in Nagel’s thought experiment “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Or would he instead agree with the postmodernist Lyotard, who suggests in his essay “Can Thought go on without a Body?” that we cannot dissociate human thought and perception from our particular bodies, including differences such as gender?

This piece by Drucker antedates widespread commercial access to the Internet, which has engendered a rise of a kind of artificial intelligence: algorithms harvesting vast amounts of data. Before Copernicus, humans inhabited the center of the universe. Before Darwin, humans distinguished and elevated themselves from the rest of the biological organisms on Earth. In the quarter-century since Drucker wrote, I wonder whether the line between knowledge and information has become blurred by artificial intelligence. Humans are no longer the only entities on this Earth who can identify patterns in information and take action. Our algorithms can also diagnose disease, play chess and Go, drive cars, win trivia contests, and predict and influence human preferences in everything from media consumption to political action.

Continuing to excerpt Drucker:

A motley crew of post-Marxists, radical feminists, and other “antis” argues that there can be no such thing as an educated person – the position of those new nihilists, the “deconstructionists.” Others in this group assert that there can be only educated persons with each sex, each ethnic group, each race, each “minority” requiring its own separate culture and a separate – indeed an isolationist – educated person … [T]heir target is the same: the universalism that is at the very core of the concept of an educated person, whatever it may be called (“educated person” in the West, or “bunjin” in China and Japan).

The opposing camp – we might call them the “humanists” – also scorns the present system. But it does so because it fails to produce a universally educated person. The humanist critics demand a return to the nineteenth century, to the “liberal arts,” the “classics,” the German Bebildete Mensch. They do not, so far, repeat the assertion made by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler fifty years ago at the University of Chicago that knowledge in its entirety consists of a hundred “great books.” But they are in direct line of descent from the Hutchins-Adler “return to premodernity.”

Both sides, alas, are wrong.

Again, I want to agree with Drucker. It is also my gut reaction that postmodernism verges upon nihilism and moral relativism. This drops the ground beneath our feet. To illustrate this, After all, Lyotard the postmodernist, translated from the French three decades ago, wrote, “I don’t know whether sexual difference is ontological difference… Your thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on the irremediable different of gender.” But the idea of gender itself has become interrogated since then, and gender has become a more fluid concept. 

On the other hand, we cannot simply go back one hundred years, ignoring the technological, social, and philosophical changes that have occurred since modernism. According to Drucker, looking backward would have a stultifying effect on educated persons — and I agree:

The knowledge society must have at its core the concept of the educated person. It will have to be a universal concept, precisely because the knowledge society is a society of knowledges and because it is global – in its money, its economics, its careers, its technology, its central issues, and above all, in its information. Postcapitalist society requires a unifying force. It requires a leadership group, which can focus local, particular, separate traditions onto a common and shared commitment to values, a common concept of excellent, and on mutual respect.

The postcapitalist society – the knowledge society – thus needs exactly the opposite of what deconstructionists, radical feminists, or anti-Westerners propose. It needs the very thing they totally reject: a universally educated person.

Yet the knowledge society needs a kind of educated person different from the ideal for which the humanists are fighting. They rightly stress the folly of their opponents’ demand to repudiate the Great Tradition and the wisdom, beauty, and knowledge that are the heritage of mankind. But a bridge to the past is not enough – and that is all the humanists offer. The educated person needs to be able to bring his or her knowledge to bear on the present, not to mention to have a role in molding the future. There is no provision for such ability in the proposals of the humanist, indeed no concern for it. But without it, the Great Tradition remains dusty antiquarianism.

(Reading only this excerpt from Post-Capitalist Society, I confess I don’t know what Drucker, who so often was published by the Harvard Business Review, means by postcapitalism.)

… Postcapitalist society needs the educated person even more than any earlier society did, and access to the great heritage of the past will have to be an essential element.  But this heritage will embrace a good deal more than the civilization that is still mainly Western, the Judeo-Christian tradition, for which the humanists are fighting.  The educated person we need will have to be able to appreciate other cultures and traditions: for example, the great heritage of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean paintings and ceramics; the philosophers and religions of the Orient; and Islam, both as a religion and as a culture. The educated person also will have to be far less exclusively “bookish” than the product of the liberal education of humanists. He or she will need trained perception fully as much as analysis.

The Western tradition will, however, still have to be at the core, if only to enable the educated person to come to grips with the present,  let alone the future.  The future maybe “post-Western”; it may be “anti-Western.” It cannot be “non-Western.” Its material civilization and its knowledges all rest on Western foundations: Western science; tools and technology; production; economics; Western-style finance and banking. None of these can work unless grounded in an understanding and acceptance of Western ideas and of the entire Western tradition.

I question whether material civilization and knowledges must rest on Western foundations – or even what this means. I happen to agree with him, but I may be making assumptions about what counts as “Western” as well as discounting the influence that “non-Western” civilizations and knowledge have had historically. And while Western foundations may explain the state of the world today, it’s not entirely clear whether this was simply an accident of history and whether Western foundations are an inevitable necessity of the future. In summary, his and my understanding of Western tradition may be a shared blind spot.

Tomorrow’s educated person will have to be prepared for life in a global world. It will be a Westernized world,  but also increasingly a tribalized world. He or she must become a “citizen of the world” – in vision, horizon, information. But he or she will also have to draw nourishment from their local roots and, in turn, enrich and nourish their own local culture.

Postcapitalist society is both a knowledge society and a society of organizations, each dependent on the other and yet each very different in its concepts, views, and values. Most, if not all, educated persons will practice their knowledge as members of an organization. The educated person will therefore have to be prepared to live and work simultaneously in two cultures – that of the “intellectual,” who focuses on words and ideas, and that of the “manager,” who focuses on people and work.

If I may summarize, in this essay Drucker distinguishes knowledge from information, declaring that only persons have knowledge. He then sets up dichotomies between humanism and postmodernism, between Western and Eastern heritages, between global and local citizenship, between technical and humanistic practices (in a section that I did not excerpt here), and between intellectual and managerial cultures. In his view, the best educated persons of the future must navigate the spaces of these dualities.

He closes:

[O]ne thing we can predict: the greatest change will be the change in knowledge – in its form and content; in its meaning; in its responsibility; and in what it means to be an educated person.

Drucker’s essay leaves the thoughtful reader with two challenges. The first is how to shore up and elucidate the points he makes. I am personally inclined to agree with him, he sounds good, but the terms of his arguments are vague. I would want to see them clarified, amended, and/or winnowed.

Suppose we do accept the broad sense of his arguments, that he has outlined what constitutes an educated person. The second, more interesting, and larger challenge is how to actually implement this vision, in order to educate students across the arts and sciences.