Voice and Values, cont’d

What I really meant to say here, but lack the insight, ability, skill, and intelligence to do so poignantly is:

The great movement for independent thought instilled in the modern mind a desperate refusal of all knowledge that is not absolutely impersonal, and this implied in its turn a mechanical conception of man which was bound to deny man’s capacity for independent thought. Such objectivism must represent the public good in terms of welfare and power and set in motion thereby the self-destruction of freedom. For when open professions of the great moral passions animating a free society are discredited as specious or utopian, its dynamism will tend to be transformed into the hidden driving force of a political machine, which is then proclaimed as inherently right and granted absolute dominion of thought.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pg 214

The refusal to allow personal knowledge a voice within greater society will diminish the society over time. It rules out of court the entire realm of value propositions (posited, at least, by Christianity) based on the common welfare which is unquestionably right to do so and ought not be challenged.

Saul Steinberg

In the world of illustration Steinberg is pretty famous. I don’t know a single thing about that world, but I do know this:

New Yorker Cover

You’ve seen that illustration before. It tells a story about how New Yorkers see the world. Stories are powerful. If you grew up in New York, like myself, you resonate with that picture – you understand it. It makes sense to you.

Now if you grew up in Texas, this makes more sense:

Hugh sees the World

A picture is worth a thousand words if it tells a story. Our entire world is built on stories. Not facts. Not presuppositions. Stories. That is why I like and read Hugh – he understands that.

Theories of Knowing

Over at the Tea Shop they’re talking about fortifying SBL against theologizers. I felt curious about the issue, since last year when I was at SBL here in Boston – Nawlins is just too far for a poor student like myself – I was not under the impression that SBL was being taken in such a fashion. It might be my naivete, or I picked some good sections, who knows.

In going through his discussion, I found this little bit: “some presentations seem to construe the Bible as the primary human text“. I find the objection to the possibility of such an idea strange. If one looks at the text through the critical lens, two billion people religiously find the text as their own. If we were to add in Muslims who honor the Biblical texts to a degree, that is another one and a half billion people. That is over half of the world who identify primarily with this text. That does not even count those who culturally are informed, either actively or passively, by this text. And that is only at this point in history. So, it seems an argument could be made to suggest that this is the primary text by which humanity sees itself, or has seen itself, or is at least in tension or heavily informed by. All this within a critical point of view. It would seem the existence of such a society named The Society of Biblical Literature and the lack of any other major religious literature society would have brought this point into clarity. But, whatever.

I commented to try and find the perimeter, the shape, of this secularizing argument:

I’ve often wondered about where the line of theology is drawn, so I’m glad you’ve brought it up. There must be some element of doing theology that is equally critical as critically examining someone else’s theology. Wouldn’t restricting sessions to only critiques create a situation in which theologies are only destroyed/lessened/rendered lame, rather than be constructive. And that constructiveness need not only be constructive for a specific group (e.g. the church), but for any group, and perhaps, hopefully, all groups? I guess I wonder at the specific audience-focused nature of some sessions that are permissible (feminist, lgbt) while some are not (faith-based). Granted, anyone refusing to be critical or academic in any of these specific audience-focused groups should be refused. I would find it strange that a group for theological readings of lgbt or feminist issues would be permissible while a group for theological readings of ecclesiastical issues would be denied (especially while lgbt and feminist issues are more and more being brought directly into ecclesiastical situations.)

I think the aspect of being constructive is important, for all disciplines. Critical science is able to construct an understanding based on its premises. In all of this thinking I’ve found Jon D. Levenson’s two essays on this topic to be very formative. It is incredibly valuable that we all agree on the historical and critical methods by which we investigate these texts. We flatly do not, and cannot know about the authorship and history behind theses texts. The texts aren’t intended to tell us about this information. The critical methods have been developed to get us some of these answers. However, as Levenson argues, this method is just another system of knowing. All systems of knowing have an equal claim. Religious knowledge is another system of knowledge.

As the tea shop was so quick to point out, critical scholarship is incapable of making a value judgment. I would agree. However, one must recognize the critical project as a value judgment as well. Philosophers have gone well past recognizing the modernity project as failing at the attempt to be fully objective. Of course, religious knowledge are also making value judgments, that is no where in dispute. Why are we unable to recognize this fact? As a person of faith I am able to live in two worlds, the critical world as a would-be-someday scholar, and the religious world. I find some critical results to impact my world of faith. And my world of faith often gives interests and leads to my critical world. I don’t find these two offices to be antithetical whatsoever. As far as SBL goes, if the organization decides to make some sort of statement towards groups that are operating outside the critical method, that is fine. But as Levenson points out, those who only operate within the critical world have no business saying that the value judgments another system of knowledge (within which they don’t operate) are unbelievable.

Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail

Abstract

This paper boldly challenges the long established misconception that the catastrophic failure of expensive software projects is detrimental to society. Historical analysis of bureaucracies such as the Australian Tax Office shows that massive software automation has not increased their real efficiency since the 1950s. Any increase in the efficiency of individual workers has simply been consumed by increased bureaucratic complexity, as predicted by Parkinson’s law. As the primary net effect of software is to facilitate bureaucratic complexity it is therefor essential that software projects fail if society is to function effectively. In this way the heavy burden of guilt can be lifted from the shoulders of the numerous project managers that have subconsciously devoted their careers to ensuring that projects rarely, if ever, succeed.

Humans don’t scale. Technology scales. Humans often think that because tech scales, that it can scale humans. They are wrong.

We know this because in 2007 the tax office’s internal budget was AU$11.4 billion, or 1.23% of GDP. In 1955 it performed essentially the same task without automation for A£66.7 million which was 1.33% of the 1955 GDP. The difference is not statistically significant. (Normalizing by GDP (essentially the sum of everyone’s earnings) accounts for the growing population and inflation.)

To many this is a surprising result. How could the staggering amount of automation instigated over the previous fifty years not produce any meaningful effect on productivity?

One big reason is that we have more data to sift through. As Berglas notes, it took a lot of effort to send out memos in 1955. It is trivial to send an email now. No longer are the senders deciding what is important, the receivers are – each and every one of them. Berglas goes on to cite the incredibly complex business rules that are veiled in marketing. Customers are left to figure out the complexities with the support departments why they aren’t getting their special discounts.

The boundless creativity of politicians and bureaucrats to develop new and more complex regulation is bounded only by the bureaucracy’s inability to implement them. The absolute size of the bureaucracy is constrained by external factors, so the only effect of automation can be to increase bureaucratic complexity.

It would simply not have been feasible to implement the Superannuation Co-Contribution scheme in 1955, but automation had made it possible in 2001. Fortunately for society most tax office software projects have also failed, so the act and regulations have been limited to 15,698 pages. But imagine if all the projects had succeeded? We might need to deal with well over 150,000 pages of regulations, and society would be in danger of collapsing under their weight.

This economic collapse is a good example of such a phenomenon. Relying on the tech models to say “Yes this will work”, combined with the sleight of hand of good salesmanship created an economic society of such complexity that no one was able to see it collapse until it was too late.

Humans do not scale. Technology is not for deciding what is important or correct.

Monsters

For all you parents out there, this understanding of monsters might prove helpful with your kids

As it turns out, many scholars have considered the definition of monsters, and there is even a field of “monster study,” called teratology. I finally settled on a definition of monsters as those socially constructed entities that either blur existing categories or that must exist between categories, where nothing else fits. For instance, Frankenstein is both living and dead, and Big Foot is only scary if he is both Human-like and Ape-like. A giant lowland gorilla species would frighten no one! In turn, this definition implies that the function of monsters is exactly, then, 1) to allow a culture to express what category formations are important to it, 2) what boundaries are currently being challenged, and 3) thereby to express societal fears about these boundary crossings, usually as a catharsis. Godzilla, as an ancient creature awakened by atomic energy, expressed the fears of Post WWII Japan and America in the nuclear age. Monsters are thus vital to the mental health of a culture, and keys to what a culture values. With Clifford Geertz, I consider religion to be a cultural system. Hence, monsters must be crucially important to understanding religion.HT: James Crossley