I Speak the Social Tissue: Or Collaboration May Not Be Enough

Of course I am referencing Walt Whitman’s masterful I Speak the Body Electric, both in praise and in warning.

To begin with, yes, a modern and contextual appropriation of the Six Blind Men tale, and its software engineering-esque iteration, Booch’s The Elephant and the Blind Programmers, is all about the practical dangers and futility of looking at the world through just one’s lenses. Simply put, and this is a conclusion from the Philosophy of Science course I took last year (don’t mind me flexing my hippie muscles), our mind is not photographic; i.e., we are uncapable of, firstly, reminding, let alone retain, every single detail about an observable object. Not in the least less important, we are also unable to see the world through clear unbiased lenses. We are social animals who need language, after all. And as I have written (and many others too) before, our language shapes the way we see the world. For that reason, Wittgenstein would advise us to think and speak not in our terms, but on society’s, so as to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, discussions, and debates.

Reflecting on Whitman’s poem, what a masterpiece, and what a shame. It is a masterpiece of and for the human soul in me and us. He talks about the body, and reports the world through the lenses of characters and that of cosmic omnipotence. What a shame, though, that he were to write artfully about abolition of slavery, while, not only supporting the US intervention in Mexico—a nation that had already abolished such violation of dignity, decency, and rights, but also diminishing the Mexican “race” (whatever that means, although I suspect he would have been good frienemies with Vasconcelos’ nation-building myth of mestizaje).

This is to say, just talking to people is not enough. For all the beauty Whitman captured in his lyricism, he could not transcend many other social constructs of his times (albeit, I do admit, they are very hard to identify and deconstruct in the first place.) What is needed is talking to the right people: the people we may disagree with, or who have been historically misrepresented—we need diversity.

Only through this very specific kind of collaboration shall we break not only from our own biases, but from society’s prejudices and constructs. Only through diversity shall we see a clearer picture of what reality is, and what it can, and ought to, be.

In a more technologically dependent world where we can point out clear examples of the machine language reflecting our image back to us in, for instance, sexism and racism, diversity is a must.

 

Booch, G. (2010, November). The Elephant and the Blind Programmers. IEEE Software. Retrieved from: http://arielortiz.info/s202113/tc3049/the_elephant_and_the_blind_programmers.pdf

Echávarri, R. (2021, August 30). Walt Whitman, antimexicano. El Universal. Retrieved from: https://confabulario.eluniversal.com.mx/walt-whitman-antimexicano/

Heilweil, R. (2020, February 18). Why algorithms can be racist and sexist. Vox. Retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/18/21121286/algorithms-bias-discrimination-facial-recognition-transparency

kanika24fps. (2009, May 18). Six Blind Men [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBqgr5xZLz0

rmb1905. (2009, March 9). 2.01_The 4 1 Model [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp2-_YbCuyM

Shiverly, C. (n.d.) Mexican War, The. The Walt Whitman Archive. Retrieved from: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_540.html