Hrair

I was taken aback by this article by the Washington Post. This newspaper arranged to have a very famous classical violinist (Joshua Bell), pretend to be a street performer and play the violin in downtown DC. Bell is absurdly good, and even if you aren't really the type to appreciate violin music you can respect a kid whose parents figured out he needed an instrument to play when he, at the age of four, started playing classical music on his dresser by tensioning and loosening rubber bands. The man is somewhat a legend in his field.

The question posed was by the article essentially boiled down to "would people appreciate great art even out of context?" It referenced the beliefs of Kant, who said that in order to properly appreciate art, the viewing conditions must be optimal. The article agreed with him and surmised that this art, taken out of context, was not as meaningful.

I found something else startling though: the number of persons who watched the performance who were interviewed later and did not remember that a violin player had even been in the station.

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

"Where was he, in relation to me?"

"About four feet away."

"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

There were a large number of other people referenced in that article who seemed to not notice that Bell existed at all, and while technologically provided ideological isolation is a topic that has been beaten to death, I think more interesting than what he was listening to is the fact that he could be listening at all. He could also have been listening to a podcast of a college course, been playing with his smartphone or talking on his cell phone and it wouldn't have mattered a lot. The point is that our connection to technology has enabled us to take in far more information than our physical environment is providing us. The other point is that our mental ability to take in data has not scaled with our capacity to access it, and so in order to pay attention to one thing we lose the chance to use that mental bandwidth elsewhere.

***

"Does anybody know where the word Hrair comes from?" My professor asked.

"Watership Down?"

The professor grinned ear to ear and bounced a little pacing the front of the classroom, "Very good, Watership down! Yes, the rabbits could only count to four, and everything after that was 'hrair.' Humans have the same problem too you know. Systems at some point just reach a complexity where no single human can keep all the information in their head. At that point you must break it down into little building blocks, check each block, check how the blocks work with each other, and hope the whole system works. Often those blocks are written by entirely different people."

It is a true principle in more than software. I feel safe in assuming all my readers use computers, but how many of you can program one? Build one? Fix your car? Build a house?

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Scott Adams in his book The Dilbert Principle humorously attributes most of the world's problems to sex and paper. The concept being that with so much sex going on every once in a while by sheer chance we get one smart person. This person has ideas, writes them down, and now complete idiots who could never have built such a thing have access to them... that our world is many times more complex than the average person's intelligence can handle.

I am not sure if we ever had the capacity to really process all the data coming at us in our world, but it seems to be harder than ever now.

So when you have a mind-bandwidth shortage, what do we keep? Increasingly it seems to be the familiar, the mindless, and the mundane. We, like all those people in the station that couldn't hear Joshua, are too locked into our own habits and internal thoughts to see the opportunities or problems around us.

I saw a little sobering scrap in this article on this note: