the great divide
from the overdue files
Art, or science? Software, that is. Is it ahhhrt, or scientifically delicious?
Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz, programming’s juggler laureate, took up the Great Question on July 24th at the Open Source Conference in Portland. I’m such a lazy blogger that I’m only getting around to talking about it just now.
If you’ve never seen or heard one of r0ml’s talks, do yourself a favor and listen to one or two of ‘em. You’re in for an entertaining ride, whether you see it as highbrow comedy or Big Important Philosophical Points.
At the beginning of this talk, or as he put it, at the beginning of this installment of one single long-running talk, r0ml took issue with a previous presenter’s characterization of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as America’s original geeks. Original, yes, but geeks? Well… “geek” is a lowly term, you see. And the overarching theme of the day was how to sort mankind’s endeavors into “low” and “high” ones. Ol’ Tom and Ben’s pursuits, it turns out, were really too fancy-pants to be geeky in the linguistic sense.
technique and practice
The Greeks, says r0ml, categorized activities as techne or praxis. Techne, the root of “technology,” “technique,” and “techno” (the lowest form of music), consists of matters they considered mundane—think butcher, baker, candlestick-maker kind of stuff. Praxis, then, was the fancy-pants stuff like mathematics, law, politics—anything to do with leadership of men (and by men, r0ml says, he means “all genders”).
Another way to think of it is that techne is supposed to be useful in the day-to-day world, while praxis need not sully its hands with such notions as utility or real life. Thus was set up a great running gag for the talk, where r0ml could humorously elevate some act into the higher realm of praxis by declaring it useless. “Anthropology,” for example, “not being a useful art, is praxis.”
Of course, we modern folk still fuss over the same kind of distinction, but with a few surprises. Agriculture, for instance. You’d think techne, right? Look at how many movies portray farming as a dreary existence, and the hero has to buy a one-way bus ticket into the bohemian big city and, I dunno, go write some novels or something. But agriculture was praxis to the Greeks. Land ownership. Management. Leadership of men.
Another surprise: contrary to its esteemed status and northeasterly location, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not an Ivy League school. The reason, r0ml says, is right there in the title: techne-ology is too lowly to be worthy of inclusion into the praxis-gilt halls of the Ivy League.
liberal arts
So where does software fall in all this? From here, there’s a bit of tangent into liberal arts, and into the various nuances of the word “liberal” over time. Libre has always meant “free,” of course, but the original usage of “liberal” was in the sense of “free time.” Landed aristocracy didn’t have to spend every waking minute toiling in the fields, and so had time to study the things we think of as liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, and so forth.
Later, “liberal” came to mean “free from restraint,” as in “a liberal heaping of French fries” (or should I use another word for potatoes, for you non-liberals out there?). Nowadays, of course, it connotes “freedom from prejudice.”
This interlude was a segueway into the origins of the Free Software movement. Among the names originally considered was software libre, to avoid the “free of charge” vs. “free from restraint” ambiguity. But libre looks an awful lot like “liberal,” and Richard Stallman “didn’t want to inject politics into the issue,” r0ml quipped. Of course, the FSF is intensely political, and it’s slightly amusing that their “copyleft” family of licenses are spoken of as “non-liberal.”
which one are we?
How about software? Techne or praxis? Are we programmers a toiling class of intellectual laborers, cranking out useful inventions? Or are we abstract thinkers, and leaders of men?
In past talks, r0ml has spoken of the school of thought that sees programmers as interchangeable cogs in a software factory, planted firmly in techne.
On the other hand, Abelson, Sussman, Iverson, Knuth, and others frequently speak of programming as high art. Programs are first and foremost ways for humans to exchange ideas, write Abelson and Sussman. Programs should be literary, says Knuth. Computers are theatre, writes Brenda Laurel.
Maybe some software is techne and other software is praxis. Eric Raymond has suggested that open source software is a higher form of art than proprietary software. Tongue planted in cheek, r0ml suggests we run an experiment to see whether open source software is useful (and therefore mere techne) or useless (and therefore praxis).
How about a Google search? Since “useless open source software” returns nearly five times as many results as “useless proprietary software,” open source is clearly praxis, right? (Just as long as no one thinks to rerun the experiment with “useful” instead of “useless.”) One other thing to note from this experiment is that at least 600,000 people have deliberately sought out useless software on Google. “Why do people search for useless things? They don’t want to appear lower class.” Ba-dum crash.
open source praxis
So, software is moving from techne to praxis, just like agriculture did centuries ago. And in fact, these two worlds come together in the poetic phrase digital sharecropping.
Writing software, r0ml says, is merely grammar: arranging text until it compiles. But releasing it, opening it up for the world to see, attempting to persuade everyone that a particular solution is the best one, is rhetoric, and therefore praxis.
Who gets the higher accolades these days? The guy who wrote a few lines of a programming language interpreter for the Altair? Or the guy who set out bombastically to change the world, and became a leader of men?
the big finish
I should tell you more. I should mention the alternative analysis r0ml provides, just so he can refute it and bolster his main theme. In classical rhetoric, that’s called the confutation, and, as r0ml says, “You’re not supposed to tell the audience” when you’re doing it. He did anyway, of course, as a guidepost “so that you can understand where we’re at in the talk.”
Anyway, the confutation portrayed human endeavor not as a struggle between techne and praxis, but as philosophy vs. oratory. Amassing knowledge vs. amassing a community. Science vs. engineering. We’re in a pro-philosophy phase of mankind now, so when we have revolutions, they’re couched in philosophical terms.
On the topic of revolutions, when software workers seize the means of production, what are they seizing? The source code. Revolutionaries speak of elevating production (technology) to praxis. How interesting that the eighteenth-century American ideal of the self-made man—about as far from twentieth-century workers’ revolutions as you can get—managed to perform the same feat of elevating ordinary experience.
Interesting as it was, the confutation was a diversion from r0ml’s main point that open source elevates the techne of software to the lofty level of praxis.
And therefore, he says, we shouldn’t refer to towering figures like Jefferson or Franklin as mere geeks, but instead as “polymaths,” Franklin’s term for intellectually versatile folks. With a few more praxis-ioners, maybe bigger achievements are within mankind’s reach.
Like the Clock of the Long Now. The hard part of that project isn’t building a clock that’ll last 10,000 years. It’s building a culture that won’t turn it off before then.