In Modest Praise Nicole-Anne Boyer was, err, modestly praised.

It may seem as if I harbor a special enmity for Nicole-Anne Boyer since I have repeatedly dunked her pigtails in the ink well ^{1, 2}, but as usual it's a special affection expressed through close attention and criticism. She's the best of the lot at WorldChanging, by a wide margin, and has her own blog at Fuzzy Signals, a venue worth visiting regularly and so resident in my blog roll.

I'm sure this isn't how she sees herself but my take is that she's a sensible and well meaning person who has fallen in with a bad crowd. She indulges in the normal behavior of the bad crowd, flashing gang sign and parroting party line, but when she expresses herself about subjects that make her think virtue is revealed, a swan among ducks, but not aware of the vast distinction for lack of a mirror.

In Book Review: In Praise of Expert Amateurs & Passionate Hobbyists you can see this when you look carefully. The distinction is revealed more by the choice of subjects than the statements about those subjects. It's a long post so it's a lot of work to distill the essence and realize that though she dutifully flatters the gang leaders in an often strained attempt to lend their authority to her observations that it isn't necessary or useful. She's far ahead of them and strong enough to stand on her own. She doesn't need to fluff them regularly to remain within their protective circle, indeed she should shove those wankers to the ground and assert her power since the evidence of her choice in subject matter is evidence of leadership.

Beginning with a review of Simon Winchester's newest book, and its place in Winchester's related body of work, she quickly moves to the more interesting and timely issue of the Pro-Am revolution [sic].

Which leads me directly to my first observation: this massive and sustained effort that turned into the Oxford English Dictionary or OED (it was originally called the New English Dictionary and only switched names late in the game) would never have happened if weren't for an active and dedicated group of amateur philologists and lexicographers and other supporters who turned their passions into their life's work, not to mention thousands of volunteers from around the English-speaking world who dedicated much time and effort to supplying the OED's editors and staff with important content. Using a methodology called "historical principles" (what a word meant and when it mean[t] it) this included everything from identifying words, both old and new, together with their illustrations, etymology and history, to even correcting proofs. While a far cry from an modern open source approach, there are some parallels in motivation and this was indeed a collective and distributed effort with the OED team being its kernel...

Another observation that stood out: as class-ridden as Victorian England may have been, the story of the OED reveals that it was also surprisingly open to motived intellectual entrepreneurs who proved their worth, something that is hard to imagine today with an equivalent project even though we purport to have a more egalitarian society. Provided manners were gentlemanly (and they were the right colour), amateurs could self-educate themselves and gain entrance to learned societies without, necessarily, formal credentials.

It may be useful to gain some perspective about that age and that place. In The Classics in the Slums Jonathan Rose illuminates the era.

In 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, president of the Modern Language Association, authoritatively stated (as something too obvious to require any evidence) that classic literature was always irrelevant to underprivileged people who were not classically educated. It was, she asserted, an undeniable "fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them."

One should not be too hard on Professor Smith. She was merely echoing what was, at the time, standard academic opinion: that the Western classics embody a worldview that somehow "marginalizes" the poor, the nonwhite, the female, the "other," and justifies their subordination to white male "hegemony." And like so many postmodern critics, Professor Smith could be naively confident that she was in full possession of the facts, even without the benefit of research.

But her theory had no visible means of support. Whenever it was tested, the results were diametrically opposed to what she predicted: in fact "the canon" enabled "the masses" to become thinking individuals. Until fairly recently, Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy, and music. They were denied the educational privileges that Professor Smith enjoyed, but they knew that the "great books" that she derided would emancipate the workers.

This is hugely significant today since nothing is more modern than the British autodidact tradition. As noted in Invisible Pachyderm:

...the recent announcement of the Google partnership with leading research libraries to scan and upload their collections makes it all clear. They really do plan to put the knowledge of humanity online. They are already ahead of the plan. Now all that massive hardware makes sense. What was taken as the idealistic but unfeasible bragging of youths now seems more like the grand vision of geniuses. The head librarians of those research libraries, sober people not given to exaggeration, claim that the earth moved, that this is simply huge and that the effects on society in coming decades are incalculable.

The Enlightenment (actually, Enlightenments since there were several) didn't happen in the library it happened in the street. The libraries and universities, then as now, were the haunts of those who chose not to participate, the old guard happy with their places in life, reactionary defenders of the status quo. Their purpose was to raise new generations of priggish flatterers who would continue the order, assume rank and privilege after long and often demeaning apprenticeship. Then as now academic manners and social life were beliefs rather than knowledge. Meanwhile, "there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air"...

Medieval alchemists, their natural philosopher successors and the public intellectuals that in turn followed them weren't just bright people interested in knowledge, they were privileged people with access to treasures and patrons. The successors to public intellectuals could be anyone at all once knowledge is literally available to the world at the press of a button. It isn't just the writings that are accessible, so are other people wherever they reside. Conversation and debate no longer requires copresence to avoid being asynchronous.

Nicole glimpses but does not grasp, a defect I attribute to the bad crowd. Contemplating the long development time of the OED by largely autodidact authors she says:

... it's hard to image an OED-like project starting today and surviving given all the setbacks they experienced. Please let me know if I'm wrong about this -- I would be happy to be --but as Brand and others have documented long term projects are getting harder and harder to fund and sustain. However well-intentioned, a obsessive focus on "results" and "return on investment" for funders, regardless of sector, is precluding a whole range of projects from being initiated. So most projects' time horizon are measured in years, if not shorter. Forget anything that takes ten years or more. ( Similar themes in blog, Learning from Nuclear Waste.)

Some would cite the Wikipedia though it is embattled at present, seemingly being skewed by partisan influences, a fatal defect, while others point to Google. It seems to me that OED like efforts abound but that we can't recognize them since we are immersed in them. It is only with the distance of historical perspective that we can look back and see the whole of such large entities. We can imagine them now but it is truly like blind men attempting to recognize and describe an elephant. We can't see at all and can only feel a small portion at a time. Each in a crowd of blind scholars may have a different description while none grasp the enormity of the whole.

One thing that seems clear to me is that the idea that an educated elite in effect created our present world and is the only hope of continued progress is bunk, an artifact of defective historical accounts written by elites for elites, a family history of little value and less interest except to the family. The importance of this for our times cannot be overstated since the world of elites is rapidly dissolving as knowledge democratizes due to ICT. The choice is stark for those elites; they can either join the fray and try to keep up with the rude but energetic commoners or be bypassed by history. ICT let the dogs out and things will never be the same.