Consider a row of books currently molding away on a shelf in my home office. They are about programming Microsoft Windows using the Microsoft Foundation Classes, about FileMaker Pro version 7, about Microsoft FrontPage, about Mac OS X “Tiger”, about Windows XP. All big thick books about long-dead software and techniques. Well, not really all that long dead. Just long dead in technology years. I really need to toss the silly worthless things. They’re not even saleable in a used-book store; nobody wants them. They’re books about nothing.
Then consider a row of books on another shelf: Alfred Dürr on the Bach Cantatas, Richard Taruskin’s monumental five-volume “Oxford History of Western Music”, Donald Francis Tovey’s “Essays in Musical Analysis”, A. Peter Brown’s multi-volume study of symphonic forms from the 18th century to the present, and a fine study of the Mozart symphonies. Not a one of those books is the slightest bit out of date. There’s no way that they can become obsolete, in fact, given the timeless universality of their subject matter. I could sell them easily, but there’s no way I would do that. I need those books, and I always will.
Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Hume, Montaigne. Aw, heck: add Phillip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Steven Pinker. None of them are going anywhere any time soon. They will not become obsolete. Their works will not devolve into those lengthy and expensive tomes that offer intensive training in topics that have all the lifespan of a mayfly.
And there we have one of the worst aspects of today’s tech world and the here-today-gone-tomorrow mindset of those who inhabit that world. It’s evanescent, ephemeral, and trivial. The programming language du jour, the latest operating system, the hipster-approved hot software app. It all comes, it all goes, and generally in pretty short order. Technological stuff doesn’t last. It’s worse than pop music, and heaven knows that stuff flickers on and off rapidly enough. Successful techies must become overnight experts, then cast off that quickly-acquired expertise in short order. Nothing they learn has any staying power.
All of which adds more fuel to the fire in favor of absorbing literature of all kinds, of learning the great works of Western music, of finding out all about Leonardo and Titian and Michelangelo. You can spend a lifetime studying Beethoven and your knowledge will never go obsolete. Bach is forever, not just here today and gone tomorrow. Anything you learn about Bach will last you for the duration, and your understanding will grow, develop, broaden, and deepen.
Tech people are rarely culturally sophisticated, although some might be doltish enough to confuse trendiness with sophistication. Cultural awareness is also a matter of cultural depth, and that can’t be acquired by pursuing the latest fad with panting earnestness. It takes a good long time to amass the experience and education that leads to the kind of understanding of Beethoven you get from, say, Charles Rosen. In a world in which the latest hot technique or programming language is absorbed and cast aside for tomorrow’s variety, there can be no depth, no awareness, no sophistication.
The creation of this vast and shallow tech population just might be the most disturbing and long-lasting disservice the computer has done humanity. A computer, just by itself, need not be dehumanizing agent. But if it produces a generation of people who cannot even conceive of intellectual permanence, then we just might be on the road to cultural extinction.