I went down a set theory rabbit hole this morning.

Charles Stein (in his book Light of Hermes) was discussing infinine divisibilty and transfinitive sets. This reminded me of the weird math we Gen-Xers learned as kids. We were taught set theory in like 2nd grade. We were learning rudimentary Boolean logic. I’m convinced that this is why all designers of my generation are always making Venn diagrams. I found a cool book in the political history of new math — the origin of all the set theory curricula. That inspired a long and odd post on my bizarre relationship with math.

So lately I’ve working on a top secret project concerning product management practices, especially Teresa Torres’s “opportunity solution trees”. I am interested in what product management tends to exclude, and what service design might be able to reintroduce. And suddenly the word “tree” jumped out at me, and I recalled this old Christopher Alexander paper “A City is Not a Tree”. And I thought — Wow, maybe opportunities and solutions are also not a tree! And maybe these tree structures are the kind of thing that makes silo-ization inevitable in organizations. And of course, silos fragment services and introduce discontinuites, gaps, inconsistencies and all the other stuff of bad experience.

So I start reading “A City is Not a Tree”… and here is how it starts:

The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction.

I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been deliberately created by designers and planners artificial cities.

Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.

It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

Both the tree and the semilattice are ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems goes to make up a large and complex system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets.

In order to define such structures, let me first define the concept of a set. A set is a collection of elements which for some reason we think of as belonging together. Since, as designers, we are concerned with the physical living city and its physical backbone, we must naturally restrict ourselves to considering sets which are collections of material elements such as people, blades of grass, cars, molecules, houses, gardens, water pipes, the water molecules in them etc.

When the elements of a set belong together because they co-operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.

I think what I’m trying to say is this:

The little air remaining in the field of design — after its professionalization, after its submission to technicity, and after its deemphasis and almost complete abandonment the first-person perspective at the heart of its work — has been sucked out by the myriad promises projected upon AI by terrified, ambitious, manic managerials.

Intuition has been squeezed out of design, and what remains is calculation, explication, prediction, profusion of words.

The workworld is closing in on me and I can no longer breathe.

Younger design professionals seem perfectly fine with this evolution of the field.

And now I am recalling a passage from Richard Rorty said about institutions:

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”

They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon…

Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic,” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

I long for the days of mere claustrophobia, when I could still sneak a breath of inspiration and now and then make a leap of intuition, provided that upon landing I pulled on my Hermetic cowboy boots and carefully backtracked from where I arrived, paving a path of logical footsteps. +O(