COVER -> DAY ONE
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In my professional capacity I am always stunned by the almost total ignorance in the Information Age of the true strength and proper uses of hypertext.
Even though it was first evolved by Leibniz 300 years ago, its applications are still narrow and cautious. Thus, most Internet taxonomical procedures are arranged like the trees of Aristotle, an intellectual element can only have one attribute.
This struck me when I was listening to a radio trailer that asked whether the story of the Nativity of Jesus Christ was "Myth or history?".
It is, of course, both --- but it also has a number of facets without which it cannot be understood. Myth and history, for a start, carry a substantial amount of anthropological, legal and historiographic baggage.
The story is informed by a variety of texts from the Jewish scriptures (The Old Testament) which were themselves part of a continuing reinterpretation of tradition as well as having contemporary political significance. The labour involved in writing, as well as the inclination to be selective, account naturally for chronologies which we might consider partial in both senses of the word.
Unfavourable acts might be suppressed and facts of some relevance might be omitted in order to sharpen a point. As well as being a collection of great wisdom and significance the Bible is, still, journalism in very slow motion.
Then, of course, once the Nativity story was written down, there are all those facets which relate to it as a vital element in two major religions. I can never read St. Luke's account of the birth of Jesus without thinking of the passage in the Quran where his mother sits under a fig tree.
I rather prefer it to the embellishment of the Biblical scene, as recounted in my childhood, where Mary was supposed to be sweeping the floor when the Angel Gabriel arrived with his message. Having looked at the events as recorded by the Evangelists and compared them with historical research of contemporary events recorded by non-Christians we are then ready to look at the historiography and theology that succeeded the writing down of the story.
So, if you were about to classify the Nativity of Jesus Christ, a tree classification system would be totally useless; you can't in all seriousness, ask whether the classification should be myth, history or religion. We now have immensely powerful tools in hypertext navigation and databases allowing us to be more subtle in the way we classify the same element by giving it a variety of facets. Equally, the subtlety of our taxonomy will narrow general searches to manageable proportions.
At the level of our everyday lives, I don't suppose there is much harm in there being two leagues for baseball and American football but the more sides or points of view there are the less likely there is to be conflict. There is a lot to be said for trouble on the flanks and in the rear for keeping aggression properly damped down.
At the political level we are almost totally hopeless. Was this or that act by this or that politician politically motivated or was it beneficial to the country? Well, it serves the interviewer right when the answer "both" is uttered yet again but even then I am most depressed when the answer does not go on to describe the very many other facets of the act and when the interviewer seems only able to put himself in the shoes of the interviewee's opponents so that we only ever get two streams of argument based on the two major political parties or coalitions in a country.
It is interesting how few countries have more than two major political parties. One of the happiest, least dogmatic, most pragmatic, most civilised countries in the world is the Netherlands where there is a multiplicity of political parties and there is Israel which is racked with dissent because a few small parties make governance by the two big ones almost impossible, but think of a place where there are three or four political parties of more or less equal strength where they work together according to individual policies rather than forming two opposing federations of parties.
You would have thought by now, with all this university education and the wealth of differing opinions on the Internet, not to mention multi-attribute taxonomy, that we might have become a little more sophisticated, that at least the intellectuals might require a fearsome degree of subtlety.
Yet the coverage of public events has steadily deteriorated in quality in spite of the increase in quantity.
This is not a routine piece of nostalgia. Politics depends critically on the publication of text and the ability to analyse it critically, together with a presentation of events which contains powerful and subtle (that word again) analysis of motives, causes and consequences.
There is, of course, a ludicrous trend in academia, rather oddly termed "Post modernism", which says that it is impossible objectively to analyse a piece of text to adduce the author's intentions and this has spread into all fields of expression.
There is, too, a very proper tendency to couch political language in non-offensive terms which is often described sneeringly as "political correctness" by those who wish to continue to insult ethnic minorities, disabled people, homosexuals and women. This tends to take some of the saltiness out of language and render some of it rather flat, reading like an insurance policy but, still, it is the content that counts not the style.
Thirdly, there is a requirement for compression as people with untrained minds complain about "Information overload" but none of this excuses the hegemony of bipolar geometry.
Most events are made up of a variety of facets, each with their own plane but each informing the others in an intranet of reflection and allusion; and as with precious stones, the shape of the facet is constant but what it transmits varies according to the inner and the outer light. The emblem of political correspondents, already adopted by the best creative writers, should be the pomegranate which requires a niceness in peeling and presents a huge number of jewels, no two being identical and each containing a seed. To reduce a multi dimensional object to two opposing propositions results either from ineptitude or wilful distortion. Dichotomy is usually one or the other!
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