EI Weekly Listen — Iskander Rehman on early modern information overload

Bookful Luggage Stolper presents leadership in statecraft, studies in power, edited by court armquist Alistair Ben and Matthias Herceros, read by me Helen Lloyd. Information overload and policy making, insights from the early modern era, by Iskander Raymond. When I was five years old, my grandparents took me to Hamlies. The largest toy shop in the world, Hamlies is a beloved London landmark, stretching over seven floors. I entered its cavernous halls, in a state of dazed bewilderment, nervously clutching my grandmother's hand, as she and my grandfather instructed me to choose a birthday present. Surely this must have been one of the happiest moments in my young life. Instead, somewhat puzzlingly, subtle changes in my general demeanor began to slowly unfold. My palms grew sweaty, my breathing accelerated, and my initial elation soon curdled into some deeper form of existential angst. How could I possibly choose just one toy amid such mind-numbing abundance? There were thousands of bright, shiny objects to examine, categorize, evaluate, and meticulously cross-reference. The teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle section alone appeared to yawn into infinity. It was all too much for my five-year-old brain. I broke down crying, and we had to leave. Later that day, my patient grandparents took me to another much smaller toy shop, where I rapidly made my pick. Why share this mildly embarrassing childhood memory? It points, albeit on a micro-level, to some of the decisional quantities that come from living in a time of unparalleled plenty. We live in an era of abundance and distraction of shrinking attention spans content shock and of seemingly endless quantity over elusively finite quality. Thanks to the internet, we have never had access to so much information, and yet somehow we appear to be less collectively well-read, less well-informed, and more intellectually fee-brile, fragmented, and jittery. The statistics are depressing. Americans now touch their smartphones and average of 2,617 times a day. As digital databases expand, attention spans shrink. The average time spent on a webpage is 15 seconds, reading an article approximately one minute. We're also witnessing a slump in general reading. Americans now claim to read on average 12.6 books a year, which is two to three fewer than between 2001 and 2006, and this decline is most pronounced among university-age individuals. Part of this is due to the ease and ubiquity of continuous digital distraction, but also one might contend due to sheer overwhelming awe-inspiring and ultimately terrifying abundance. We all struggle to collect and process the ever-growing mounds of information at our disposal. What should we privilege or prioritize during our limited time on Earth? What should we merely skim and what should we read in depth? And yet this is hardly a new phenomenon? Writing in a state of cranky isolation from his cottage in mid-19th century Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau lamented the fact he had never got round to reading Plato. His dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read him. And then comes that all two familiar self-flagellation as a mis-anthropic new England are griped, we should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, runts, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the column of the daily paper. When it comes to history, which periods should we endeavour to truly grasp, and why? After all, history keeps on expanding, not only in temporal scope, but also historiographically and even geographically, as we become ever more aware of alternative historical traditions outside the bounds of the West. Should an American ruthlessly prioritize the American revolution over antiquity? Are the most recent periods of our history always the most relevant, not necessarily? As the famed historian and French resistance hero Mark Blach once noted, "When reaching for a deeper understanding of complex phenomena, linear chronological prioritizations don't always make the most sense." What would one think of the geophysicist, who, satisfied with having computed their remoteness to a fraction of an inch, would then conclude that the influence of the moon upon the earth is far greater than that of the sun? Neither in outer space nor in time can the potency of a force be measured by the single dimension of distance? Perhaps more importantly, how do these issues of information management and cognitive overload affect intelligence gatherers and policy makers? These vast and complex issues will no doubt only gain in salience in the coming years; it therefore might prove helpful to focus briefly here on two core themes. First, our latent anxieties around informational abundance and complexity, which may appear exacerbated by technological advances, are not new, and were particularly prevalent during the so-called "information explosion" of the early modern era. That epoch, spanning the early Renaissance to the late Baroque period, remains rich with insights for applied historians. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the historians' endeavour should be viewed not solely in terms of rich empirical content, but also in terms of intellectual processes. Indeed, the process of historical inquiry itself provides a form of calisthenics for the mind, one which strengthens its capability to process information, boosts its ability to detect shifting patterns amid tangled skeins of concurrent events, and more generally helps it rise above the crushing mass of everyday phenomena. In so doing, it greatly enhances what the ancients would have termed prudence, practical wisdom in the classical Aristotlian sense, what we would now perhaps refer to as intuition or good judgment. The early modern period is particularly interesting for scholars of information management and policy-making. It was a time of enormous political, intellectual and diplomatic upheaval. The increased sophistication of the early modern state, its growing centralization, the heightened intricacy of its bureaucratic apparatus, complete with teetering mounds of paperwork and endless reams of epistolary exchanges, all required chronically overworked rulers to find safe and effective ways to delegate authority, administer newly sprawling domains, and implement their increasingly far-reaching reforms. Institutionally, this led to the mushrooming of small governing councils composed of tight cadres of ministers and royal councillors across Europe, and to the rise of the figure of the secretary, the discreet and dedicated public servant at the heart of the new letterocracy, whose dry tendrils extended across the chancellaries, ministries and embassies of the continent. Paperwork had become, in the words of historian Paul M. Dover, the demon of early modern state craft. Kings, popes and doges all found themselves gasping for air under a veritable deluge of memoranda and correspondence. Philip II was frequently driven to despair by these devils my papers, with up to sixteen thousand separate petitions sent to his desk over the course of a single year. Similarly in France, Cardinal Michelur, behind his wintry and steely exterior, was in fact often a neurotic mess, according to scholar A. Lloyd Moote, a bundle of nervous energy drowning in work and suffering debilitating migraines. In the face of this avalanche of correspondence, new bureaucratic solutions were devised, as were new methods of communication. In fact, some of the more fascinating documents from the period could be described as early versions of shared online documents, manuscripts or memoranda, where the sovereign would write in one margin, the advisor in the other, both communicating back and forth through these jointly annotated briefs. Counselors and ministers would sometimes draft short daily memoranda for their rulers, which compiled key intelligence findings, point-by-point summaries and select excerpts of diplomatic dispatches, early versions of the presidential daily briefings, which first officially came into being during the Lyndon Johnson administration in the 1960s. Within this densely saturated information environment, the role of the newly empowered secretary, ambassador or counsellor, was not only to filter distil and interpret incoming torrents of data, but also to provide clear and actionable guidance to overwhelmed rulers. This required, noted many commentators at the time, a distinct set of skills, clarity of style and expression, the ability to be detail-oriented while not losing sight of the big picture, and the capacity to combine careful reflection with decisiveness. Many will be familiar with Winston Churchill's 1940 memorandum, touting the virtues of short crisp paragraphs in government communications, and calling for an end to bloated unnecessary verbiage. Many 16th and 17th century writers argued along similar lines and even more forcefully. The Spanish Jesuit, Balthazar Grazian, was characteristically direct in his hugely popular pocket oracle and art of prudence 1647, berating his fellow court-apparatrics in the following terms "Don't be tedious, brevity flatters and opens more doors, it gains in courtesy what it loses in precision. What's good, if brief, is twice as good." Meanwhile writers such as the Florentine historian and statesman Grecia Dini warned against getting bogged down in detail, writing in the recording of 1530 that "trying to absorb too much information could exert something of a paralyzing effect. At times I have seen a man who knows only the general facts of the case judge well, whereas the same person will judge poorly when he has heard the details. With the advent of the printing press and the rediscovery of long-lost works from antiquity, historically inclined councillors and legislators faced a daunting new problem, overwhelmingly abundant source material. Some of this cognitive burden was newly offloaded in the form of Floreligia, Compendia and Encyclopedias. After all noted Samuel Johnson, it was time for scholars to acknowledge perfect omniscience was impossible and knowledge was ultimately of two kinds. Either we perfectly knew as subject ourselves or, more realistically, we knew where we could find information about it, and indeed this was when some of our more recognizable methods of academic practice came into being, such as the footnote devised primarily as a means of assisting 17th century bookworms to burrow through increasingly dense layers of scholarship. Figures including Johnson and Francis Bacon also spoke of the necessity of adopting new more differentiated reading strategies, for example Bacon had this to say in 1597. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. That is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read but not curiously, and some few to be read holy and with diligence and attention. Meanwhile, satirists from Jean-Labouillet to Jonathan Swift, fiercely lampooned contemporaries who never actually metabolized great works in full, but rather sampled ready-made summaries, with Swift gesting that, after all, to enter the palace of learning at the Great Gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back door. History was still considered the wet nurse of prudence, and its study an essential prerequisite for sound statecraft. Not only did it serve a moral function, encouraging legacy-obsessed legislators to act virtuously, it also allowed for the vicarious acquisition of experiences extending far beyond the fleeting span of mortal life. At the same time, however, writers started to warn of history's potential, through its sheer bloated mass, to confound days and overwhelm. How much is the sight of a man's mind distracted by experience and history, wondered bacon? When it came to the study of the rise or fall of great nations, it was perhaps not wise, he said, to look too long upon these turning wheels of vicissitude, lest we become giddy. To be overly fascinated by history, Philip Sidney argued in his influential defense of policy, 1595, was to run the risk of being captivated to the truth of a foolish world, mired in grubby, unedifying sequences of events, rather than engaging in more elevated forms of philosophical or poetical reflection. To which thinkers could and did respond that it was not so much the dull cataloging of events themselves that mattered, but rather how one chose to make sense of them. Central to the process of historical inquiry is the notion of discernment, a word first entering common usage in the late 1500s. What does it mean precisely? A modern dictionary definition might say, keenness of intellectual perception inside a cuteness of judgment. More prosaicly, one might simply suggest it is the ability to engage in critical thinking. Its etymology can provide some clues. It derives from the Latin de Channere, which means to separate, divide, or more accurately sift apart. Thus writes Montenia in his essays, a true student of history should pass everything through a sieve, and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority or trust. Famously, the French humanist wrote, "It was better to have a well-made rather than a well-filled head." Beyond a sometimes overzealous quest for immediate parallels, history can be almost equally useful when highlighting moments of ruptures and discontinuity, for, as Juan Luis Vivis rightly observed in on education, circa 1531, "Even a knowledge of that, which has been changed is useful, whether you recall something of the past to guide you in what would be useful in your own case, or whether you apply something which formerly was managed in such and such a way, and so adapt the same or a similar method to your own actions as the case may fit." To sift through history with ease also requires avoidance of the common pitfalls or pathologies of the discipline. French historian Emanuel La Roi La Dorie once mused that all too often his academic colleagues appeared to be either truffle hunters, their noses buried in the details, or parachuteists hanging high in the air and looking for general patterns in the countryside far below them. Arguably, this issue has only become more acute since La Roi made this observation in the 1980s. The historian, come policy-maker, must avoid stumbling into such artificial, academically imposed binaries. For it is precisely the telescopic quality of historical work, its ability to zoom in and out of the factual weeds while retaining sight of panoramic societal or geopolitical vistas that renders it so uniquely valuable to policy-makers. Indeed, the best historians tend to be the best sifters, sauters, and processors, honing a manner of approaching the world which may at first glance appear rooted in relatively unconscious thought processes, but in reality flows from a much deeper intellectual predisposition. As Herbert Butterfield once observed, a profound understanding of the past can prove salutary. It seems true that many of the errors which spring from a little history are often corrected as people go on to study more and more history. A little history may make people mentally rigid, only if we go on learning more and more of it, will it correct its own deficiencies gradually, and help us reach the required elasticity of mind. Maliability, adjustability, and a certain willfully acquired intellectual limbiness, these aspects of the cognitive process inherent to historical examination are most relevant to our era, along with the associated ability to engage in what the Greek historian Polybius termed the interweaving of events. That is, the ability to scry the riot as flow of world affairs with the hope of spotting amid its eddying worlds, underlying currents of cause and effect. This intuitive sifting and sorting ability gradually accreted over years of study allows one to identify chains of causation more rapidly and fluidly, to draw attention more easily to the interconnections between theatres, actions, and events, and to more seamlessly analyze geopolitical developments horizontally as well as vertically. Neuroscientists might refer to this as the ability to engage in associative processes across multiple planes simultaneously, and indeed neuroscience shows that the brain region most consistently engaged during analogical or relational reasoning is the left frontal lobe, the same part of the brain long postulated to play a key role in creative innovation. It's perhaps for all of these reasons, the Harvard historian John Clive once openly wondered whether historians, especially those dealing with abstract entities like groups and classes and movements, have to possess a special metaphorical capacity, a plastic or tactile imagination that can detect shapes or configurations where others less gifted see only jumble and confusion. Isaiah Berlin, in his skillful essay on political judgment, evokes something very similar, albeit with his characteristic iridescent eloquence, an ability that entails above all a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing multicolored effinescent perpetually overlapping data, too many, too swift, too intermingled to be caught and pinned down like so many individual butterflies, thus conjuring an acute sense of what fits with what, what springs from what, what leads to what, and so forth. In short, applied historians should perhaps be somewhat more optimistic as to the prospects of their chosen field. Yes, history departments may be closing. Yes, tenured job prospects may be dwindling, but somewhat paradoxically, in our information-drenched, distraction-filled, and data-drowned world. The historian's hard-earned mental navigational skills may actually prove to be among those most useful for harried, cognitively overwhelmed policymakers.