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Obama's computer analogy: a bug, not a feature
James Taranto, "Best of the Web" @ Wall Street Journal"Barack Obama says his presidency is an opportunity for the United States to spread a message of tolerance," the Los Angeles Times reports in "Obama's first newspaper interview since his Nov. 4 election": "I think we've got a unique opportunity to reboot America's image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular," Obama said Tuesday, promising an "unrelenting" desire to "create a relationship of mutual respect and partnership in countries and with peoples of goodwill who want their citizens and ours to prosper together." Sorry, what is that message again? He's promising an unrelenting desire to create a relationship with peoples of goodwill? What about peoples of badwill? What about peoples of goodwill who are ruled by corrupt and oppressive governments? Does Obama believe that peoples who need peoples are the luckiest peoples of all? We suppose a certain amount of sheer fluff--or let's call it strategic indirection--can be useful in international diplomacy. Let us hope that Obama is not actually naive enough to mistake the platitudinous for the profound, and that he is merely using the former to keep America's adversaries guessing. Even granting the president-elect the benefit of the doubt on that point, however, one thing about his remarks irritates us--to wit, his promise to "reboot America's image." How does that work, you just hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and everything starts over? (Also, why is this a "unique opportunity" to do so? Perhaps because President Bush had a chance to save his work before shutting down?) Over the past couple of decades, computer analogies have multiplied like an email virus. Whole books have been written about how to improve your life by "reprogramming" your mind, or how the way to get good government is by upgrading the bureaucracy's "operating system." Computers are wonderful tools, of course, and there's no doubt that they contribute immensely to human knowledge and communication. But has an analogy between the workings of a computer and that of the human mind or society ever actually helped anyone to understand the latter? Are the Bible, the works of Shakespeare and America's founding documents impoverished in their understanding of mankind because their authors had no idea what a "processor" or an "operating system" was? Posted by: Mike 2008-12-11 |
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