Aquinas Believes in Blogs, Not Spheres

Via Critical Mass, The Boston Globe has an essay "Lost in the Blogosphere" (oh how they love to use blog as a prefix—I don't think any actual blogger ever has) by NBCC member Sven Birkets. In all his muttering over daisy chains and a bunch of upper-middle class schmucks picketing of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he writes, "it is alarmingly easy to slide into a slipstream, or, better, go rollicking in a snake-bed of sites and posts, where each twist of text catches hold of another's tail, the whole progress and regress morphing into a no-exit situation that has to be something new under the sun." Wha...? Sven, ye olde metaphor crumble-eth like muchly strainéd guano beneath ye olde rays of high heaveny orbe.

He does however admit, "I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises." Well done, own up to your biases.

The web must be the unconscious, he argues, but why? (And why are there still people who cling to Freud?) When a print reviewer makes a lightly veiled allusion to another critic, how is that effectively different from a hyperlink—besides the fact that, in the former, you are drawing the reader a map to a place that must be known already in order to be found. The core difference is that a hyperlink takes less time, and is more fully encompassing than a reference or a footnote.

Sven is hooked on the idea that blogs serve only in the distribution of writing that exists elsewhere, ie links to reviews on newspaper's websites. Partially correct, but that is because of his source, The Elegant Variation. I love Sarvas' blog, but he is right in that there are few fully developed pieces of criticism there. But in using TEV (and other like it) as a guidepost (and alternately a yardstick), he is missing The Reading Experience, Amardeep Singh, Reginald Shepherd and others who write excellent, thoughtful analyses and post them to their blogs.

If Sven had a blog, he could have given the Globe a skip and posted his article directly. His loss. Of course, he isn't looking for intellect. He is concerned with "authority and accountability." He longs for "an order many feel is now gone, nodding implicitly to the old Matthew Arnold ideal of a vertical hierarchy where excellence rises and the finest thoughts and expressions shape a commonly known culture."

I am not surprised that people of the elder generation are scared. They came from a time when Nazi Germany was still very real (there were no Hitler on Ice jokes then) and the nation state was king, the Cold War raged, and national identity was equated with salvation (one nation, under God). Authority is a very real issue in their eyes, but its importance is dwindling, along with the centrality of the nation state. This slow death is clear from the all the screaming, like men on corners talking to lamp posts, and the paeans to the past—as if the depression, world wars, bigotry of the 1950s, insanity of the 1960s, and disco were all good things.

Culture is tied to the times simply by its coming into existence, by its being grounded in individuals who are historical. The good old days of criticism as Birket and people like Ozick and Arnold knew them are over, and thank God, because I would choose freedom and peace and food in my stomach over the awful past. Those times, concerns, modes of expression, and the criticism itself was – essentially – a reflection and product of the historical moment. It is no different today.

Birkets writes, "A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet. To have a sense of where we stand, and to hold not just a number of ideas in common, but also some shared way of presenting those ideas..."

Blogs are the new vehicle of presentation. Intellectuals – real intellectuals – will not be bothered by the need to individually decide. The voices out there who are well-read, smart, creative and do their research will stand out—they always have. What we will lose is mediocrity, and that is really no great loss.