New APPS

I once had a student at the Ohio State University who, by very improbable means, ended up talking with then President Bill Clinton for over an hour. The guy was an Army Ranger who had been wounded in the Battle of Mogadishu (of Black Hawk Down fame) and Clinton had afterwards visited everyone in the hospital. It was pretty interesting to hear about the whole thing, but one of the weirdest aspects is that the student (with slight exaggeration) noted that everyone wounded in the battle ended up being Democrats as a result of the hours with Clinton. This was prior to Bush's wars, when even grunts overwhelmingly tended to be Republican. Also, the wounded soldiers in question had been so furious about the Somali cluster**** that an officer had yelled at them right before Clinton showed up, telling them that he was the commander in chief and they'd better be respectful. But Clinton just did his thing, staying there way over-schedule, and all of the solidiers had a blast talking with him.

From this and other stories, I gather that Bill Clinton is an archetype of a kind of person who can have a mutually entertaining conversation with anybody in any circumstance. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum are Nietzsche's gods/monsters/philosophers, people who are only really comfortable talking with themselves.

Nearly every human being is somewhere in the middle of the Clinton/Nietzsche spectrum. But the ability is not linear. First, there is a strong modularity with respect to setting. Almost all professors are reasonably entertaining and warm when in front of a classroom. There's a lot of pressure to learn to do this well. But the persona falls off and something else is revealed when the professor has to deal with people one on one or in more conversational groups where the interlocutors can talk back without raising their hands. And the creature under the professorial mask is often Nietzschean, vascillating back and forth between (on the one hand) a good (albeit unwitting) imitation of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man and (on the other) just lecturing at the person in question as if she is a classroom. 

There is also another dichotomy concerning talking with individual people versus talking in group settings. I have friends who are fantastically charismatic in APA and SPEP reception type circumstances, but whose one-on-one conversations descend into uncomfortable silence after two minutes. And I have friends (like myself) who tend towards the opposite. In groups outside of the classroom they approximate Community's Abed, but one on one they are more Clintonian and less Nietzschean.

And finally, the ability to affectively engage with individuals is also highly modular. This one I can't figure out at all. What makes some people affectivly simpatico with one another and others not? The ability to entertain one another with conversation is one of the deepest roots of friendship, but it seems almost entirely random whether or not two people will share this. A lot of it comes down to whether the two people can reliably cause one another to laugh. But what in turn causes this? In looking at my own and others close friendships, it seems almost randomly distributed to me. People who should find it very fun to hang out together on the basis of interests and beliefs can end up having nothing to say to one another. And people who for all sorts of reasons should (both descriptively and normatively) not be good friends find each other endlessly entertaining.

It's probably all to the good that there's currently no algorithm for this kind of thing. But it is not inconceivable that with future iterations of on-line dating sites there will be one. This would help many, many people find happiness, but I do worry that something worthwhile and maybe particularly human will have been lost at that point. Our ability to entertain and be entertained by conversation with unexpected people is surely one capacity that keeps us at least a little bit not at one another's throats. The world is filled with potential friends that you don't know about! How cool is that? But if the capacity for mutual affective sympathy is ever gamed out algorithmically then it will be just one more way that technological mediation sorts us into various tribes.* But maybe we've evolved such that it can't be so gamed. After reflecting on this, I think that would be very nice.

[Notes:

Tribes!

Electric mediation already exacerbates this precisely because it removes the cues that generate affective sympathy in humans. In this respect, the philosophical blogosphere approximates a Brassierian "orgy of on-line stupidity" precisely to the extent that people who work on various figures collectively engage in the kind of dysfunctional behaviors that are the dangers of all small communities, but much easier for otherwise intelligent people to engage in when mediated by physical distance.

This leads to all sorts of stupid nastiness towards others who were either never in the tribe or who have been recently excommunicated. This is often couched in philosophical debate, cf. the bit about ducks also floating here.

But the debate is epiphenomenal. The important thing is maintaining group solidarity in the face of threats, even if those threats have to be invented in order to do so.

Part of why I wrote the above post is because I think that the solution to this kind of stupidity generally involves the way that philosophy is best realized in human conversation governed by affective sympathy.

The problem isn't just the idio-sphere. Too much of our institutions treat philosophy as if it is in itself just a competition. Boxing is the usual metaphor here, and the problem here is that you often just get rams butting each other's horns, and the philosophy is just a causally inert superstructure residing over a base base.**

But sometimes you do get this business of "tribes," as if philosophy is not boxing, but rather a football match between two teams! At best, you then just get this kind of thing:

Feh.

**What do the rams think they are doing? Does it ever occur to them that it's just stupid to ram your head into something? Or are they so busy just trying to prove a godammed point? In any case, shouldn't philosophical wisdom raise you above that level? Q&As after talks as well as departmental politics in male dominated departmetns shows that it quite often doesn't.]