Building a Machine Made of Words

In an earlier post, I discussed my theory that an essay is a machine made of words whose purpose is to change people's minds. This week, I did an experiment in which I asked my students to sketch out a plan for their own machine based on five unrelated articles.

To save my students money, I usually put together a collection of readings consisting of essays I've found online. Usually, this collection of essays takes us through to the end of the semester and gives us plenty to talk about. This time around, however, I decided to change things up. After providing my students with enough readings to get us halfway through the semester, I invited them to choose their own essays for the class to consider. The idea, I explained, was for a handful of them to pick essays on topics that they found interesting, for the class to read them, and for all of us to gather -- or scavenge -- information from them to advance and support a single idea.

For our first go-round, my students, without consulting each other, selected the following five pieces:

• The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain
• Automation May Mean a Post-Work Society, But We Shouldn't be Afraid by Paul Mason
• Abstract Art Unlocks the Truth About the Universe by Jonathan Jones
• One of Marvel's Avengers Turns to Sign Language by George Gene Gustines
• A Journey Shaped by a Guitar by Peter Gerstenzang

Clearly these are essays about fairly diverse topics, but my students enjoyed drawing connections among them and attempting to formulate a tentative overarching thesis that drew on information from all five sources. 

The first thing we had to do, I explained, was summarize each article. This way, we'd all be on the same page in terms of what the articles were about and what material we might be able to use from them. I may have been beating the machine metaphor to death, but I said that this exercise was like stripping all of the guts out of a bunch of perfectly serviceable machines to see if we could reassemble them into something new. Additionally, since summarizing the articles would take up two class periods, I told my students that they would need to take good notes, as there was little likelihood that any of us would remember details from day one as we moved on to day two.

So, briefly, here are some key points we scavenged from the various essays:

• Cain: Introverts and extroverts complement each other. The trouble for introverts is that many of our institutions are geared toward extroverts, so introverts tend to get penalized in various subtle ways. Unlike extroverts who get their energy and ideas from being around other people, introverts feel energized when they're alone, and they get their best thoughts in solitude. It's important, however, for them to return to the fold, as it were, to share their ideas with extroverts; otherwise their ideas run the risk of going nowhere.
• Mason: As robots take over an increasing number of jobs, humanity faces more than an employment crisis. We also face an existential crisis. For ages, people have defined themselves in terms of the work they do (and, in some cases, the amount of money they make). Mason argues that we need to imagine new ways of defining self (and self-worth) in order to transition more smoothly into the future. We also need to institute a universal basic income. 
• Jones: When we look at works of art like Jackson Pollock's splatters of paint, we're contemplating mysteries -- essentially trying to grapple with that which can only be intuited. Pollock's paintings remind us that much of what we think we know is not objective but subjective.
• Gustines: In 2014, writers behind the comic book character Hawkeye introduced a story line in which he lost his hearing. This plot twist presented the challenge of how to depict the world from the hero's perspective as someone who is newly deaf. Word balloons remained blank to indicate that speaking had occurred but that Hawkeye couldn't hear what was said. The comic's artist had to put some thought into how to depict sign language.
• Gerstenzang: Many people who visit the Martin guitar factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, experience something akin to a spiritual encounter. One guest described in this travel article reminisced about the deceased grandfather who accompanied her to the factory years earlier. The guitars are handmade, but a robot polishes the newly-built guitars. According to the author, seeing a Martin get made puts some people "in touch with emotions they might have thought too inaccessible to be reached."

Once we had sketched out the key points in all of the articles, one of my students immediately suggested linking Cain's discussion of introverts with Jones's piece on abstract art and Gustines' piece on Hawkeye. The connection she saw between Cain and Jones, she said, was that Jones's description of Pollock made the artist appear to be an outsider -- someone who had to go off and do his own thing in order to depict the world as he saw it by way of his inner eye. But he didn't just stop at depicting the world as he saw it; as an artist, he had to share his vision with other people -- which is essentially what Cain argues that introverts need to do. That is, like artists, introverts need to "do their own thing," but they also need to return to the extrovert world to share their ideas. 

This observation made me think of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, so I asked my students if any of them had heard of it. Two students raised their hands, and I asked one to explain it. Basically, he said, the allegory describes people who spend their lives tied up in a cave and staring at shadows on a wall. They think the shadows, which are actually shadows of puppets cast by a fire that's burning behind them, are reality. But one day someone manages to leave the cave, and though the light outside initially blinds this person, he eventually comes to realize that what's outside the cave is true reality and that the shadows he thought were reality were, in fact, not real. But when he goes back to the cave to tell everyone that the shadows are not real, nobody wants to believe him. 

Close enough for jazz, so I asked if anyone could guess why I thought of the allegory and how we might apply it to our current set of variables. 

Cain's point about introverts going off to be alone and then returning to the extrovert fold to share ideas was like the guy who left the cave and came back, a student volunteered. And by association, so was the idea Jones advanced about abstract artists.

What about Hawkeye, I asked?

Well, another student suggested, Hawkeye may not have left the cave on purpose, but he was definitely separated from the world he was used to when he lost his sense of hearing. Basically, learning to sign and to read people's expressions forced him to view the world in a new light. So what we're seeing in all three pieces is a need to move between worlds -- to abandon the thing everyone else is doing and think about stuff for a while and then return with new ideas. 

And the other two articles? How did they fit in?

The guitar factory, a student said, was kind of like going deaf for Hawkeye. It makes people aware of things they weren't aware of before. 

And so it's also like the abstract art that Jones describes, another student said. It makes people look at themselves in ways they're not used to.

And there's a robot there doing work that people used to do, so it's like Mason's article. 

And? I asked. And? And?

And the people who lose their jobs to robots, a student gradually started to say, is like Hawkeye. It's not as if Hawkeye wanted to lose his hearing, and it's not like these people want to lose their jobs, but when it happens, they need to figure out how to define themselves in new ways. They need to stop thinking of themselves in terms of their jobs and find new ways to discover self worth. 

And maybe art will help.

Or maybe music.

Or maybe just being alone.

With this observation, we ran out of time. So, unfortunately, we never got around to formulating a single thesis based on the articles my students chose. However, we (meaning they, for the most part) did a good job of making connections among the articles and creating something new with the material at hand.

To quote a great leader from my childhood, I love it when a plan comes together.