It’s said that people grow more moderate and conservative in their beliefs as they grow older.  I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s say it is.

The implication is that this comes from gaining experience.  You start out with all sorts of new ideas, and then you learn that you can’t change everything, that there are hidden forces that resist purposeful change, forces that follow their own rules.  And you learn that beautiful ideas can look horrible in real life, and that things could easily be worse than they are.  Moderation and conservatism is the sane response to that.

That’s the belief, anyway.  I disagree.  I think there’s another factor: Cowardice.  Anyone who becomes more moderate in all things is not becoming wiser, they’re just learning that any time you believe in a principle, or see things differently from everyone else, you risk making a fool of yourself.  So it’s safer not to do that.

What experience actually tells us, if we listen, is that this idea is impractical, and this principle needs to be moderated, but that idea is correct whatever anyone says, and when it comes to that principle there can be no talk of moderation.  Young people are random fanatics, they seize on whatever powerful idea comes their way.  Wisdom is to be a selective fanatic: Moderate in some things, unbending in others.

Experience can help us to calibrate that balance.  Or it can turn us into abuse victims, hiding behind a safe shell of middle-of-the-road beliefs.

Det pågår en debatt om man burde ha en egen Vær varsom-plakat for bloggere.  Og det er jo en tonedøv men også harmløs idé, for hvem skulle velge å følge en slik “bloggplakat”?

Et mer interessant spørsmål, synes jeg, er: Hva er egentlig poenget med pressens egne etiske retningslinjer?

Jeg vil at journalister skal oppføre seg “etisk”, altså som folk, men jeg lurer på om det er med medier som med andre store bedrifter, at “etikk” blir et skjold mot kritikk, som i praksis senker kravene til oppførselen deres i stedet for å heve dem.  For når det ikke finnes skrevne retningslinjer, må hver og en bruke sin egen moralske dømmekraft, og den er sannsynligvis langt strengere enn Vær varsom-plakaten.

Jeg forventer f.eks. av journalister at de bryr seg om at nyhetene de formidler er sanne.  Men når det kommer klager til PFU på at mediene har slurvet, som i denne klagen fra George Gooding, svarer de at det er ikke dårlig presseskikk å skrive noe som er feil.

Nei vel.  Men hva er poenget med en definisjon av god presseskikk, hvis den ikke dekker det mest grunnleggende kravet jeg som leser stiller til en avis?  Er poenget noe annet enn å kunne si: “Nei, vi har ikke gjort noe galt. Det står her i kjennelsen fra PFU det.”

Alle tabber seg ut i blant.   Men da bør man iallefall være flau over det.  Man må ha yrkesstolthet, noe som lever, ikke en død tekst du kan gjemme deg bak når du gjør en dårlig jobb.

I’m reading an interesting review of The Social Network aka the Facebook movie, by Zadie Smith, and see this:

Or is it possible [Mark Zuckerberg] just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible?

If such a pleasure exists?  Did I just read that?  This is where I realize that neither this writer nor probably the movie understand the world they’re trying to describe.  They’re looking through a telescope, reporting that they can see something red, or maybe blue, over on that distant world of “software technology”, and it’s doing something, for some reason?

I haven’t seen the movie.  I don’t even like Facebook.  I hate having all my family, friends and coworkers gathered in one place.  Help me keep my multiple identities separate, please.  But I know what motivates programmers to make software that changes the world: It’s really really fun.  All programming is fun, at least to programmers.  I didn’t mention it in my essay on how software is made, because it seems so obvious, but it is.  Programming is like being paid to play with Lego.

And if you don’t understand that, then all technological change today is a mystery to you.  The central – and potentially tragic – fact of software is this: Anything that is possible, somebody is going to make, maybe for money, maybe for fame, but mostly just because it’s fun.

I threw off a phrase in yesterday’s post: “The moral legacy of Western civilization”. It set me off thinking. Why does that phrase have such an odd resonance?

The first reason, I think, is that it places Western civilization as something in the past.  Something that was.  I don’t mean that everything it included is dead, but that using it to describe something in the present is inaccurate.  The layout is different now.  The ideas earlier generations associated with the West are no longer confined there.  At the same time, other ideas are in play.  I’m not saying that we’re all submerged into one big happy world culture, just that “Western civilization” is not a meaningful description of anything in the present.

The second reason is that if Western civilization belongs to the past, then we really can evaluate its moral legacy.  And we can do it more neutrally than before.  We’re still working through the rebellious phase where everything about the West is EVIL, (and then the rebellion against that rebellion, and so on, swerving from side to side).  But it’s a possible next step.  History always has an implied “us”, and what I have in mind is the kind of history of Western civilization where “us” is everyone.  A history that doesn’t exaggerate any one perspective just because that’s the one readers identify with.

I’m not sure if all of this is correct.  But if that harmless-sounding phrase is like a grenade, then this is what comes out of it when it explodes.