The Doughty Traveler

To everyone who ever doubted the utility/importance of memorizing passages from Shakespeare, I give you the brilliant send up of Hamlet below, courtesy of a British newspaper in 1805. Napoleon’s army awaited only a fortuitous break in the blockading British fleet to descend on Dover, his battle-tested army sweeping across the green fields of England like a plague.

Faced with such a grave predicament, for the British Army was a shambles compared to its ‘wooden walls,’ at least one newspaper editor took the time to taunt the Emperor, and his invasion fleet cooped up in Boulogne.

T’invade, or not t’invade – that is the question –

Whether ’tis nobler in my soul, to suffer

Those haughty Islanders to check my power,

Or to send forth my troops upon their coast,

And by attacking, crush them. –T’invade – to fight –

No more; – and by7 a fight, to say I end

The glory, and the thousand natural blessings

That England’s heir to; – ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. – To invade – to fight –

To fight – perchance to fail: – Ay, there’s the rub;

For in that failure, what dire fate may come,

When they have shuffled off from Gallia’s shore,

Must give me pause. – There’s the respect,

That makes me thus procrastinate the deed:

For would I bear the scoff an scorn of foes,

The oppressive thought of English liberty,

The pangs of despis’d threats, th’attempts delay,

The insolence of Britain, and the spurns,

That I impatient and unwilling take,

When I myself might head the plund’ring horde,

And grasp at conquest? Would I tamely bear

To groan and sweat under a long suspence,

But that the dread of something after battle,

That undecided trial, from whose hazard

I never may return, – puzzles my will,

And makes me rather bear unstated vengeance,

Than fly from Boulogne at the risk of all.

And thus my native passion of ambition

Is clouded o’er with sad presaging thought:

And this momentous, tow’ring enterprise,

With this regard, is yearly turn’d aside,

And waits the name of action.

For an enjoyable history of this period, check out The War for All the Oceans.

I’m two chapters into Tyler Cowen’s new book, Create Your Own Economy, and frankly, I’m baffled. The root of my confusion? Cowen’s strident defense of the autistic.

I purchased Cowen’s book after reading Ben Casnocha’s excellent review in The American. Ben’s piece nailed the euphoria I feel as curator of my own information stream, a curious combination of opinion headlines, news from the cartographical world, the occasional blog war over localism, among other topics. I ruthlessly purge my feeds, striving for a funnel of news where each headline has a personal relevance, but still offers breadth and opinions that challenge my beliefs. The river of posts and stories get funneled into appropriate tags, which I later revist.

For instance, a DIY tag is attached to interesting projects that would help me improve from hopeless handyman to soul crafter (to use Matt Crawford’s lingo). I budget an hour or two over the weekend to try my hand at simple soldering or turning old maps into wallpaper. I have a “readme” tag that goes on longer articles: on a weekend getaway I printed out several dozen and lingered by the poolside diving into essays on Aristotle, career development, and Catholic liturgy. Afterward, I digitized my notes and created several outlines for future blog posts.

This process renders intelligble both my collection of feeds and the myriad random articles I read at the behest of friends’ emails, Tweets, blog posts, Facebook, and the every other form of sharing a hyperlinked, “You gotta see this.” Coupled with the “Note in Reader” bookmarklet, I’m able to find fascinating connections, and preserve them in a coherent fashion, in spite of my unspeakably bad memory. For instance, while reading the Adkins’ excellent naval history of the Napoleonic Wars, I came across a line recounting popular discontent with Britain’s naval strategy. It stirred a memory of a hilarious map I’d seen on the web, but I couldn’t remember beyond that. I nipped into Google Reader, searched my “Mappish” tag for Britain, and scrolled through the handful of results until I found this hilarious image.

That whole process is what Cowen calls autistic thinking. Not in a perjorative way, mind you (don’t even think of making that mistake). No, here’s how he describes it:

One strong feature of autism is the tendency of autistics to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, categorizing, and listing. Autistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately. When it comes to theri areas of interest, autistics are the true infovores, as I will call them.

…

I began to see that the autistic mind-set about engaging with information is a powerful way to understand the whole world around us. Especially now.

Cowen believes that autism, far from being the severe mental handicap it is often made out to be, actually has some benefits. In our digital era, where categorizing is invaluable, anyone tapping the benefits of autistic cognition has a great competitive advantage and will be much more comfortable in our information-rich age.

So, what’s the problem? Chapter Two.

Cowen spends the second chapter hammering the point that autistic kids are neither to be pitied nor censured, but celebrated. Autism is a blanket term crudely applied to a variety of conditions and larded up with connotations, all of it negative. Cowen wants us to think of recognize that autistic congnition is can be a blessing and the condition is far from a curse. Autistic folks, as much as the infinite variety that term is slapped upon can be described, are no more handicapped than brunettes, Chinese or short people.

That’s a wonderful sentiment, but I don’t understand who exactly he’s arguing with.

Do people really view autism as a completely negative term? I can’t help but wonder if that’s generational. My first thought on hearing “autistic” more closely matches what Cowen is celebrating in autistic cognition. I thought, “socially awkward, sometimes extremely so, with potential intelligence benefits, a la Bill Gates.” By comparison, my mother described autism in purely negative terms. My wife, who has taught students ranging from seriously to mildly autistic, had a more nuanced view.

Don’t underestimate the downsides of autism. Some high-functioning autistic children may benefit from that kind of cognition, but the problems that many autistics face aren’t just the imaginary creation of overwrought “experts” and distraught parents.

Like I said, I want to enjoy this book, and I agree, so far, with Cowen’s underlying thesis. I’m just not entirely comfortable with his approach so far. More on this as I get deeper into the book.