Millions of Pepys

For those who may have browsed the archives of this site and read some of the roughly 60 essays posted since January, it has probably occurred to you that this blog is “all over the place,” as one friend has asserted. Most blogs—at least, those that aspire to be more than an exercise in navel gazing—tend to focus on the blogger’s primary interest, avocation, or vocation; hence, lawyers write law blogs; political scientists write policy blogs; so forth and so on. In many cases, the strength of the blogosphere is the product of specialists and talented amateurs divulging their special knowledge. Many bloggers know their chosen material better than any journalist can possibly hope to and can offer a valuable counterpoint to the professional journalists, most of whom learned their trade in America’s dull, and dulling, j-schools. In the blogosphere, even partisans have a certain role to play, acting as a check to the mainstream media’s hubris and/or laziness, and while they frequently go off the right or left rail, I believe in sum the internet is a better place for them, at least, when they’re taken in small doses.

THE DIVAGATOR is different in that I seek to touch on a wide range of topics, from Kremlinology to popular music to central banking to baseball and beyond. Honesty compels me to say that I am not a “renaissance man.” I cannot read Russian, play the guitar, set the discount rate, or hit a 95mph fastball; rather, I am the modern, nickel-plated version of what we used to call a “renaissance man”—I am the dreaded “generalist,” as one kind anonymous reader commented last week.

Some might say that generalist is merely a euphemism for know-it-all, and I cannot deny certain similarities, but I think the difference between the two is one of attitude more than approach. To be a generalist requires a certain degree of humility, of knowing what you don’t know—and freely admitting it to others. Besides, think how boring life would be if we abandoned it to specialists, or as the poet W. D. Snodgrass once wrote in the oft-anthologized “April Inventory”:

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

If I must profess a specialty to conjure some goodwill or respect, then I suppose it would be literary history and the ancient art of poetry, though I am a slack practitioner and an unenthusiastic prosodist. Living in a land insensate to the pleasures of poetry, the more gregarious part of my nature wants for attention beyond this taxidermy of language I have chosen for myself; therefore, I keep this little diary which modernity calls a web log.

Sometimes friends ask me if I consider it a little odd that I cast forth these assorted musings—one day cross-border mergers and acquisitions, the next, punk rock—to a nominal audience that, like poetry, all too often consists of one reader, myself. Perhaps it is a little odd. Many fellow bloggers, or so I’ve noticed, inhabit the blogosphere with more functional purposes—to create an online community of folks around a particular interest, like cooking, equity investments, grass-roots politics, so forth and so on. There they hope to converse with like-minded souls, exchange ideas, and occasionally challenge themselves with an opposing point of view. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but what I hope to create with this site is something different. Rather than serve as an online water cooler or a gallery of links to other sites and other people, I would rather provide genuine content, sometimes occasioned by a specific event, sometimes not. I’ll leave it to such readers who may happen upon this site to judge the value of this strategy. I would say that I always attempt to be fair and honest, but never objective.

In publishing this “diary,” as I’ve called it, there is, obviously, an inherent immediacy and self-consciousness absent in true diaries. Take that most famous of English-language diaries, that of Samuel Pepys, the 17th century English bureaucrat, whose accounts of London during the Restoration are considered ground zero for students of the period. Pepys probably had an inkling that his thoughts might be published one day (after all, he went to some effort to preserve the diary), but there was still a considerable distance between himself and that prospective, future audience. Such distance often allows for the degree of candor and self-revelation for which diaries are known. Naturally, blogs are different; they’re immediate, both in time and in their “publicness”; they’re also interactive—there’s always the possibility that one must account for one’s words to others who press the issue. All of this wars against extreme candor, and despite the many who use blogs as a sort of RSS feed directly linked to their Freudian ids, more self-aware folks are rather more circumspect regarding how and when they reveal themselves online.

So perhaps this is no diary at all. I’ve seen “real” online diaries (indeed, there’s a whole site dedicated to them), composed by folks who are either too ignorant or too self-deceived to be believed. They maintain the pretense of privacy when airing their thoughts in a public confessional, and many of them upon reading have a slightly sleazy, voyeuristic element about them. You will excuse me if I prefer to keep my dysfunctions to myself.

It would seem that what saves diaries from being mere echo chambers is their function as a record, a trail, a ball of thread with which one can find one’s way in and out of the labyrinths we make for ourselves. If THE DIVAGATOR suffices as a diary, it will have to be on such grounds.

When I began this web log, I must admit that I did not have in mind the diary analogy. I was thinking of something more along the lines of The Spectator, that uniquely Augustan creation of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, often considered the forerunner of today’s opinion journals and periodicals. I even picked up the notion of the silly persona, although I have spared all of you—thus far, anyway—from the gallery of invented personalities, such as Will Honeycomb and Captain Sentry, introduced by Addison and Steele.

In fact, I believe the diary analogy first struck me when I read a recent essay by Alan Jacobs, titled “Goodbye, Blog,” where he explored in more depth and with more learning the Pepys connection I made above. Upon further review Jacobs, a professor of English at the evangelical Christian Wheaton College in Illinois, seems to have soured on the blogosphere, ominously concluding his essay as follows:

“As I think about these architectural deficiencies, and the deficiencies of my own character, I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as ‘that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation.’ For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, ‘could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure.’ Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like RSS), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.”

One must believe such a Luddite conclusion to be consciously over-the-top, and if more or less true, such a conclusion tells us more about ourselves than the technologies that enable cultural self-degradation and/or self-destruction. I remain hopeful that blogs represent a unique opportunity to make our cultural conversation far more polyphonous than the mass market provides for, although, as with making friends in the real world, one should employ some degree of discrimination in determining whom one gets on with. Nonetheless, there is something charming and very 18th century about a nation of men and women garretted in their rooms, or flopped down in their wired coffeehouses, discoursing about the most effective means of cultivating tiger lilies or about why Joseph Lieberman should be sent packing.

Of course, the mass-market media still gets cranky with the amateurs who seek to muscle in on their turf, but aside from hectoring the rest of us about the virtues of the journalistic craft, most folks in the media haven’t really done much to address why their audience is slowly leaving it for alternative sources of news, information, and perspective. In yesterday’s New York Times, there was an interesting article regarding the recent turnover at the anchor desks of the three major networks’ evening news programs. As the NYT had it, there has been some serious, serious thought from CBS concerning its broadcast. For example,

“In many respects, Ms. Couric’s retooling of the 'CBS Evening News' will appear comfortably familiar.

She will sit at a desk finished in ginger root maple laminate—lighter than the mahogany model used by Dan Rather and later Bob Schieffer, but still a desk—atop bright red and blue carpeting, with a 15-foot projection television to her left. Nearby are areas for her to stand and to accommodate chairs for live interviews.”

It is in this world of media self-regard and pomp that the blogosphere has triumphed, and while Jacobs may well be right that, ultimately, the blogosphere is “an enemy of thought,” I can’t imagine that Katie Couric’s desk will host the revival of thought he seeks. So as my anonymous commenter suggested, “Does the blogosphere really need a true generalist? I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”