Algorithm Blues

Emerging from a week-long fog and many hours of sleep due to cold weather, a virus, or something I ate, I find a few ideas converging—ideas that I might have ignored altogether under other conditions.

1) I was scrolling through an interview in the NY Times by Ezra Klein in which his interlocutor, an author named Kyle Chayka, was attempting to press home the point that algorithms are homogenizing the world. Chayka was complaining that wherever he goes on assignment, be it Japan or Austria or Rio, the coffee-shops he visits look the same. It finally dawned on him that " digital platforms, whether Instagram or Yelp or Google Maps, were feeding this series of cafes to me as a recommendation" because of his past preferences. He finds the same issue with film reviews, which used to be personal and idiosyncratic, whereas now, he's much more likely to rely on the aggregate score posted on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

Now, anyone who's taken a look at these sites knows that they give you a score at the top and excepts from a long series of reviews underneath. If you care to read any review in detail, a link is provided. By the same token, if you look for a coffee-shop in Paris or Keokuk on Google Maps, and zoom in a bit, it will show you all of them in the neighborhood you've specified. A few  minutes of investigative work will serve to isolate the one that looks best to you. It will probably be one similar to the ones you've liked in the past, but you're free to take your pick.

2) During my week in a stupor, I roamed the house wrapped in blankets, watching highlights of the Australian Open on the computer, playing backgammon, heating up cans of chicken noodle soup, and staring at bookshelves. A volume caught my eye—oh happy day—that I thought I'd lost or gotten rid of: Stuart Hampshire's monograph on Spinoza. I'd never read it, but wanted to see what Hampshire had to say, if anything, about Spinoza's use of the term "conatus." Hampshire identifies it as the tendency toward self-preservation, and places it at the center of Spinoza's elaborate scheme.

As I browsed the relevant sections, I came upon this remark. "An unenlightened man's own account of his motives and behavior will be what we now call rationalizations; he will give plausible reasons for feeling and behaving in certain ways, but these reasons, expressed in terms of deliberate choices and decisions, will not give the true causes of his reactions....He will speak as if his desires and aversion were determined by the properties of external objects."

A case in point, Kyle Chayka's argument: the algorithm made me do it.

Meanwhile, during my brief but friendly perusal of Hampshire's book, it occurred to me where the central error of Spinoza's system lies. It isn't enough to say that the conatus—the desire to maintain equilibrium and preserve life—lies at the center of things. The sociologist George Simmel brings us closer to the truth when he remarks: "Life is that which seeks to go beyond life." That is to say, family life, social life, community life. And also the expansion of personal spirit. Why did Spinoza go to all the trouble of spelling out the details of his system, for example, except to share the good news?

3) At our best, we have all sorts of emotions stirring within us that can't be accounted for by reference to Spinoza's "inadequate ideas." At other times, our hearts are mute. One of the benefits of being "under the weather" is that the mental lethargy makes it easier to stick to a long book, where we become engaged in the emotions of others. As a result of such an effect, I now find myself three-quarters of the way through Stendhal's long and episodic novel The Charterhouse of Parma.        

There are plenty of emotions in this rambling and energetic work, which Stendhal is reputed to have written in a few months, though the central character, a young nobleman named Fabrizio del Dongo, might fairly be described as a moral idiot. The younger son of a conservative Count, Fabrizio is inspired by Napoleon's campaigns and races off, at the age of seventeen, to fight for the cause of liberty. He arrives at Waterloo just in time to participate in the famous battle, but knows nothing of guns or warfare and is attached to no military unit. He's befriended by some camp-followers hauling a food truck, briefly becomes an aide to General Ney, and meets up with numerous other adventures before making his way back to the castle in Italy where his family lives. He's in trouble now, having fought in Napoleon's army, and the Austrians are convinced he's a spy. His enchanting aunt takes Fabrizio under her wing, and for the rest of the novel their lives are intertwined in one way or another.

Fabrizio isn't quite sure whether he actually fought in a battle, and he spends most of the book convinced that he has never experienced "love," though he kills a man in a street fight over an actress—another black mark against him in the eyes of the authorities. In many ways the book resembles The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, though the breezes of liberal political sentiment freshen the air and complicate the plot. Yes, Fabrizio (like Spinoza?) tends to over-analyze his emotions. Many of his actions seem to be inspired by the thought that "This is the kind of thing someone like me ought to do." He can stir himself to anger and burst into tears a few minutes later. It's all rather operatic ... in the best possible way. I guess that's what makes him a "modern" hero rather than a mere swashbuckler. 

But it's not the kind of novel you have to think about much. You just keep turning the pages.