the rhetoric of computers and all

The part of Mr. Burns discussion I enjoyed most was his retelling of his discovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. He had left the Air Force, gone to college, taught for awhile. He looked at his student’s papers and didn’t feel like they were any better at the end of class than they were at the beginning. He was having his doubts about what composition was, what he was trying to teach. I felt some real sympathy for his position at that point—confusion about where one fits between theory and practice, an existential moment between one’s personal past and future. It was like we were both sitting on the same branch in the tree of knowledge—high enough up that a fall was going to be painful, but absolutely no confidence about how to proceed through the tangle of branches overhead.

And then somebody gave him Aristotle and it was a revelation, everything was made clear. The roots of the educational system with its division between arts and sciences had been growing in Greece and they still supported the tree of knowledge. Aristotle’s Rhetoric broke down language into its component parts and that analysis was still valid. The world was arranged in words and those words were arranged by logic. All the disparate facts of the world, all the disparate facts of Burn's life began to make sense. The world was an atomistic arrangement of meme’s that were held together by logic. The memes were like brain cells in the universal mind of man that was still thinking the world into being.

Of course, what I heard Burns say and what Mr. Burns thought he was saying are almost assuredly two different things. But in that moment, sitting on the same branch with him looking down, I did share his assurance that the tree wasn’t simply a trunk balancing on the hard ground. That it did have roots and that it had organically developed to this height. It was “of a piece” with the past.
But then Mr. Burns extrapolated that past into the future and computers and I was suddenly on the branch alone. The rest of the lecture, he was like a squirrel rustling in the leaves, jumping from branch to branch, teasing the old dog I’d become, suddenly wondering all over again what the hell I was doing sitting in a tree.

Okay, time to abandon this metaphor. They say confession is good for the soul, so here goes: I have an old dude’s fear of computers. No matter how many times I hear that hear that computers are simply a tool to dig through a pile of facts, I always feel like I’m digging with an ice pick instead of a shovel.

Okay, back to the tree metaphor. I don’t want to encourage this steak of self pity. In fairness, I did catch a few phrases from those rustling leaves that did orient me a bit to my place in the tree. It was reassuring to listen to someone who understood the relationship of people to computers. I was reassured to learn that a human being (who seemed like a nice guy) was actually doing the programming, telling the computer how to behave. I also like the thought that the reasoning he used to tell this computer how to think was in some fundamental of a piece with the reasoning that Aristotle used.

I’m sorry I missed you all at the restaurant. I walked through at about eight thirty and the place was so crowded I thought you’d probably gone somewhere else. I should have known they’d stick English majors in back room, I guess. I would definitely have liked to put an even more human face on these machines.