Steve Jobs, Romantic

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Steve Jobs

"…the season

Wherein the spirits hold their wont to walk

the fruitful matrix of Ghosts…"

                                                  Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

Steve Jobs died a year ago October 5th, and we can expect his ghost to appear in any number of recollections and assessments as the anniversary approaches.

I'd like to talk here about a spirit that Jobs carried within himself. It's a spirit he relied on for inspiration, although he seemed at times to have lost track of its whisper. In any event what it says can tell us a lot about our relationship to machines.

I refer to the spirit of Romanticism. I spent much of this past summer reading about the Romantics – the original Romantics, that is, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – and it's remarkable how closely their most cherished beliefs correspond to principles that Jobs considered crucial to his success at Apple.      

What Apple does that other companies don't, Jobs often said, is infuse the technologies it produces with human values. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough," he said during one of his famous product introductions. "We believe that it's technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."      

Jobs can be forgiven for never getting very specific about what he meant by marrying technology to the humanities. It's by definition a subject that's hard to pin down, though not especially hard to understand. Basically he was saying that Apple's products have soul, and that people are attracted to those products because they can feel that soul, both consciously and unconsciously. These are things the Romantics thought about a lot.

That the creative artist can bring life to inanimate objects was a central conviction of the Romantic poets. (I'm speaking of the thrust of the Romantic movement in general; individuals within the movement disagreed on specific issues.) For them the inanimate object in question was words, for Jobs it was technology, but the basic point – that a work of art, properly executed, carries within it an invisible, living essence – was the same. Devoid of this essence, said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, what's produced is as lifeless as the "cold jelly" of a corpse. 

Jobs onstage presenting Apple's iPad 2

Put in contemporary terms, soul from the Romantic perspective is an emergent quality, a product of an organic, harmonious relationship between constituent parts. Even when those individual elements are familiar in other contexts, as the elements of Apple's products were often said to be, combining them with due attention to essence can bring something new into the world. As Coleridge put it, the true artist "places things in a new light…What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest…[He] not only displays what tho often seen in its unfolded mass had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, Lights & Relations."

Relations, in turn, create unity. Each part is completely faithful to the creation as a whole. To construct a work in accord with some "mean or average proportion" is to dilute its essence, said William Hazlitt, "for a thing is not more perfect by becoming something else, but by being more itself."

This supports Jobs' insistence that Apple maintain control over both its hardware and its software, a policy that insured they would work seamlessly together. Soul emerges on its own in nature, but not in art. The unity on which it depends is concealed, as one critic put it, beneath "a surface world of chaos and confusion." To reveal essence requires not only vision, but also focused attention and deliberate action. Coleridge coined a word to describe the unifying power of the creative imagination: "esemplastic," derived from the Greek for "to shape into one."   

Nor will essence emerge on the strength of reason alone. Indeed, Romanticism was explicitly and decidedly a revolt against reason, a rejection of the empirical presumption of the Enlightenment. Coleridge considered the "Mechanico-corpuscular philosophy" his lifelong enemy; its endless reductionism smothered, he believed, any trace of vitality. What remained wasn't art, he said, but "a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding" – a fair description of how Steve Jobs viewed the products of Apple's longtime rival, Microsoft.          

The Romantic contemplates nature

There's no question that Jobs was intimately familiar with and sympathetic to the Romantics' convictions, if only because they were shared by two of his most formative influences, Eastern religion and the 60s counterculture. This is not to say he was directly aware of that coalescence; I've seen no interview with Jobs in which the Romantics are mentioned. Nor is there evidence to suggest he recognized how freely the streams of the three philosophies intertwined. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, wrote poetry based on the Bhagavad Gita and paid tribute in person to Coleridge and Carlyle. Autobiography of a Yogi, a book Jobs claimed to have read annually since he was in college, quotes Emerson several times. Values regularly celebrated in Romantic texts – passion, spontaneity, authenticity – were counterculture touchstones as well.

Jobs' philosophy, then, overlapped with the Romantics', whether he knew it or not. Coleridge famously said that every person is either a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian – the Romantics were Platonists, Bill Gates would qualify as an Aristotelian – and that no one changes from one orientation to the other. It may be that Jobs was, as he and many others contended, an exception to that rule, able to play successfully on both sides of the technology/humanities divide.

There were signs that Jobs wasn't finding it easy to hold on to his Romanticism as his business career progressed. In Apple's early days he'd been a believer in the messianic promise of computers, convinced they were the greatest force in history for human liberation. In more recent interviews he dismissed suggestions that technology can solve the problems of the world, and he was stung by critics who said that some of Apple's products were more about consumerism than creativity. He also expressed disappointment in the narrowness of vision he saw in the students who came to hear him speak on college campuses. The only thing that seemed to impress them, he said, was how much money he'd made.

Jobs' weariness speaks to a point I'd mentioned at the beginning of this article: that the spirit of Romanticism can tell us a lot about our relationships to machines. To believe that technology can be our savior was a minority opinion in the counterculture. The predominant sentiments of the time were more in tune with the Romantics, who believed that salvation was to be found not in mechanical power, but by living as simply and as close to nature as possible.

Pastoral retreat on any substantial scale isn't likely at this point. Our technologies are with us to stay. Living more simply would seem to be an option, though. We might also consider the possibility of constructing those technologies more Romantically. That would entail recognizing, as Steve Jobs did, that the things we create really do have souls, and that they speak a language we can hear.                  

Books that were especially useful in my research for this reflection were Richard Holmes' two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp, David Newsome's Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought, and Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.

Note: This essay was published earlier this morning by O'Reilly Radar. Thanks to Mac Slocum for opening the door. 

Image credits: iPad 2 presentation: Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post; "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," Casper David Friedrich, 1818.

©Doug Hill, 2012

Foxconn and Ford, Emerson and Jobs

To borrow a line from Chuck Berry, it goes to show you never can tell.

I embarked this week on a bit of historical research, thinking I might find some connections between the factory workers of the digital era and those of the industrial era. Along the way I found myself confronting deep questions about the relationship between technology and spirit. 

As most people know, there's been a raft of publicity lately about the conditions that prevail in the mega-factories of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based company that produces many of the digital devices we love so well. Even as Foxconn was denying that its workers are mistreated, the company announced it was raising their salaries by as much as 25 per cent, its third announced pay increase in the past two years. Overtime hours are also being reduced. 

No doubt these adjustments are aimed in part at repairing some of the damage to Foxconn's public image, and to the public images of its clients, notably Apple Computer. A dozen or so employee suicides in rapid succession tend to attract critical scrutiny.

That's not the whole story, however. Several reports also point out that Foxconn is at pains to stabilize the high rates of employee turnover in its factories, turnover that suggests the company may not always be able to depend on the vast, pliant pool of migrant labor that's fueled its explosive growth so far.

All this struck me as having some interesting parallels with the evolution of labor policies in the factories of an earlier breakthrough technology, the automobile. 

In 1913 Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line at his Highland Park factory in Michigan, revolutionizing the process of mass production. The following year he revolutionized his company's relationship with its workers by introducing the Five Dollar Day, a pay rate that more than doubled the average employee's salary. He also cut back the standard shift from nine to eight hours.

There were strings attached, including requirements that Ford's standards of cleanliness and sobriety be met at home as well as at work. Nonetheless, for the legions of mostly immigrant workers who besieged the employment office at Highland Park, the Five Dollar Day redefined what it meant to earn a living wage. 

Like the pay raises at Foxconn, the Five Dollar Day was aimed at reducing unacceptable rates of employee turnover. The profits Ford was realizing with his production efficiencies were being eaten up by the cost of replacing 370 per cent of his workforce a year. Workers hadn't yet grown accustomed to the grinding routine of the assembly line; absenteeism was also rampant. The Five Dollar Day effectively encouraged employees to show up, and to stick around.

Whether by luck or by design, the Five Dollar Day also established one of the foundational principles of modern consumerism: Pay employees enough so that they can afford to buy the products they produce. This, too, is part of what's happening in China. Foxconn employees want to own iPads and iPhones as well as make them. Economists and environmentalists are having fun contemplating the implications of a shift in individual buying power in China today analogous to that unleashed in America in 1914.

This was pretty much what I expected to find when I started looking into the history of the Five Dollar Day. What I didn't expect to find was that Henry Ford's institution of that policy may have been inspired, at least in part, by the Sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

It's an irony of history that a man who loved nature as much as Henry Ford would have so much to do with its destruction. According to biographer Robert Lacey, Ford was a great admirer of the naturalist John Burroughs. He gave Burroughs a Model T in hopes of persuading him that cars, by providing people with means to escape the pestilent cities, would promote rather than undermine the cause of conservation. Burroughs presumably was unconvinced, but he did manage to infuse Ford with his passion for Emerson.

Lacey says the Five Dollar Day reflects in particular the ideas expressed in Emerson's essay, "Compensation." Ford often gave copies to friends, and a close associate said it "comes nearer to stating his creed than anything else." It's not hard to see why, given that Ford was a billionaire who believed in reincarnation, and who sometimes said he belonged with "the Buddhist crowd."

"Compensation" distinctly demonstrates the degree to which Emerson's transcendentalism resonates with Eastern religions. "The true doctrine of omnipresence," he says in one passage,

is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.

In another passage he adds, "The soul is.

Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself.

As we used to say in the 60s, far out.

We know that Steve Jobs was well acquainted with the principles of Zen Buddhism and Hindu mysticism. With the works of Emerson, probably not so much. There's no mention of Emerson in Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, or in several other books on the history of Apple I've read. Jobs wasn't known as a reader (neither was Ford), and I'd guess that "Compensation" would have tried his patience. It's as abstruse and as silly in spots as Emerson's other essays, and as wordy. Still, one imagines that if Jobs had read it, he would have recognized its affirmation of some of the cosmic truths he held dear. (In fact, a few lines from "Compensation" are quoted in a book Jobs says he read once a year for most of his adult life, Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda.)

Basically "Compensation" is a meditation on what in Eastern terms would be called karma and the interplay between the yin and the yang. The gist of the message is that no one, in the end, gets away with anything. "A perfect equity," Emerson says, "adjusts its balance in all parts of life…

Our action is overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in line with the poles of the world.

The subject of work is directly addressed sporadically, but those mentions are telling. "Human labor," Emerson says, "through all its forms,

from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price – and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get anything without its price – is not less sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature.

Robert Lacey cites this passage as suggestive of Ford's realization that he wasn't enjoying the advantages he could have enjoyed from his assembly line because he wasn't paying heed to the absolute balance of Give and Take. He wasn't paying the price.

This isn't to say that reading Emerson suddenly turned Ford into some gooey-eyed idealist. Many scholars argue that the Five Dollar Day was less about sharing the wealth than it was about gaining control of an unruly workforce. Ford himself described the policy as "one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made," but he also insisted he'd rather make 15,000 families happy than to make 20 or 30 millionaires.

In any event, the Five Dollar Day accomplished its mission, and helped ignite the engine of consumerism that defines, as much as anything, the American character to this day. In that sense Steve Jobs most assuredly carried Ford's legacy into the 21st century. 

It's impossible to say how Jobs would have responded to the controversies regarding Foxconn that continued to escalate after his death. In a June, 2011 interview, two months before he stepped down as Apple's CEO, Jobs said he was deeply troubled by Foxconn's employee suicides, but insisted that Apple was doing "one of the best jobs in our industry and maybe in any industry" of monitoring the working conditions in its supply chain. Even if that's true, Apple's critics argue that doing "one of the best jobs in our industry" doesn't necessarily mean the company is doing enough.

There's not much evidence, in Isaacson's biography at least, that during his lifetime Jobs spent a lot of time thinking about the people who assembled his products. There's endless talk about purity of design and the seamless integration of hardware and software, but no substantive discussion of workers, factories, or China. Foxconn isn't mentioned at all. I think it's fair to conclude that Jobs was far more focused on what it feels like to use the iPod, the iPad, and the Mac than he was in what it feels like to make them. His talent lay in empathizing with his customers, not with his factory workers.

It would be unfair to expect Jobs to have been all things to all people. Like everyone else, he had his strengths and his weaknesses. Still, it's regrettable that a man who believed so strongly in the holistic integrity of Apple's products, inside and out, seems to have paid relatively little attention to the human beings who literally bring those products into the world.

In his better moments Jobs had to have realized, if he allowed himself to think about it, that there's an inherent karmic imbalance in the production of Apple's products. The devices he shepherded so carefully to market promise to open paths of individual freedom and creativity. That's why he believed they made the world a better place, and that's why we love them. The revelations about the working conditions at Foxconn remind us that individual freedom and creativity are not the values that prevail on the assembly line.

As consumers, most of us give even less thought to what it's like to work on the line than Steve Jobs probably did. Our disinterest ignores Emerson's absolute law of Give and Take. "Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they," he said. "If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own."

©Doug Hill, 2012

Annals of Childish Behavior™ (continued)

"At the root of the reality distortion field was Jobs's belief that the rules didn't apply to him. He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one….Even in small everyday practices, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him."

                                                             Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Is modern culture being overwhelmed by an epidemic of childishness? José Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1930, thought so. Annals of Childish Behavior™ chronicles contemporary examples of that epidemic. The childish citizen, Ortega said, puts "no limit on caprice" and behaves as if "everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations."

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, and the Aspen Institute

Unless I missed something, there's an interesting sidelight that's been overlooked amidst the avalanche of publicity accorded Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. 
 

Many people, including Isaacson, have attributed Jobs' "genius" to his ability to combine technological achievement with an artistic sensibility. Science and technology are often said to be natural enemies of the arts and humanities. Jobs was one of those very rare individuals capable of bridging the gap between them. (For more on this, see my previously published commentary "The Boffins and the Luvvies.")

I haven't seen Isaacson's book, but I wonder if it mentions that the Aspen Institute, of which he is President and CEO, was born directly out of the war between science and the humanities. Two of the key figures in the founding of the Institute were Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago, who insisted that science and technology, in their narrow-minded focus on results, were ignoring and eclipsing the foundational wisdom of Western culture, wisdom accrued over the centuries from its classic works of literature and philosophy. This was the rationale behind their creation of the famous "Great Books" program, and it was the guiding philosophy of the Aspen Institute at its formation.

The founding of the Institute is the subject of a fascinating chapter in James Sloan Allen's "The Romance of Commerce and Culture." In it he quotes Mortimer Adler's declaration of principles as stated in the Institute's first press release. Human beings in the twentieth century live, Adler wrote, "in a world which almost worships science and technology," so much so that they have lost sight of the "moral and spiritual truths" that would enable them to control the machinery they've unleashed.

"Science does not and cannot appoint the goals men should seek," Adler argued; "science does not and cannot direct us in the good life or to a good society; science does not and cannot determine which among competing values are true and false." It is the humanities, he concluded, that must direct us toward "the fundamental truths which can give human life direction and which can create a society to be served by science rather than ruled by it."

I think Steve Jobs would definitely have agreed with those sentiments. Whether his achievements in technology will ultimately work for or against a readjustment of the imbalance Adler deplored is another question. 

©Doug Hill, October, 2011

(Photo credit: Nathan Bilow, USA Today)