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Jefferson’s Revelation

A few days ago, I pulled Henry Adams’ history of the Jefferson administration off the shelf and started reading it, hoping to distract myself from 2019. I bought the Library of America edition a few years ago after reading Adams’ autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. His vigorous, sharp-edged prose captivated me; I wanted to read more. As happens too often with me, the volume rested on the shelf until this week.

Looking for an antidote, I found a revelation.

Here is Adams quoting Jefferson in about 1800:

“Progress is either physical or intellectual. If we can bring about that men are on the average an inch taller in the next generation than in this; if they are an inch larger around the chest; if their brain is an ounce or two heavier, and their life a year or two longer, that is progress. If fifty years hence the average many shall invariably argue from two ascertained premises where he now jumps to a conclusion from a single supposed revelation, -that is progress! I expect it to be made here, under our democratic stimulus, on a great scale, until every man is potentially an athlete in body and an Aristotle in mind.”

This is refreshing, although women would not be left out of this formulation in the 21st century. On the physical side, the US has done well. In the intervening two centuries, we have become taller, we live longer, and we are better educated.

Reasoning from “ascertained premises” has been a triumph and a constant struggle. I marvel at the way Jefferson captures today’s dilemma more clearly than our claims and counterclaims of facts, alternative facts, and lies. He uses “ascertain” in a way that I intend to use more often. Webster’s Unabridged defines it as “to find out or learn for a certainty (as by examination or investigation).” Jefferson does not insist that premises be true. Instead, he asks for ascertainment: examination and investigation of the premises. Ascertainment is his only touchstone.

Truth does not enter the discussion. He requires investigation and examination, not truth. But action must wait for ascertainment, which is never final. Further ascertaining may yield more useful results, but Jefferson asserts that ascertained premises, and the more the better, yield progress. The opposite of ascertained premises, supposed revelation yields stagnation.

There is no need to examine and investigate a revelation, which is a great help to lazy thinkers. Pick any supposition from the sloshing pool of revelation. You know your inauguration was the largest ever, your tax cut is the biggest, and your trade policies are better than fried pickles at the county fair. These are your revelations. Investigating and examining revelations is a waste because revelations are truth. You are free to move on to your next great thought, go play golf, or take a nap with your trophies.

According to Jefferson, basing action on ascertainment, examining and investigating, rather than revelation made the United States different from Europe. When monarchs speak, they voice a revelation that is true because a monarch said it. But the United States have no monarchs. Its government’s actions are based on dynamic examination and investigation of the premises of the argument, not stagnant revelations.

The Jeffersonian method of progress is to ascertain, examine and investigate, rather than blindly accept revealed truth. Jefferson did not trust monarchs, established institutions, wealth, or revealed truth in any form. But he did trust the people’s examination and investigation of every premise.

In Adams’ view of Jefferson’s day, Americans were struggling, as they struggle today, to prove wrong the reactionary belief, now prevalent in Russia and China, that democracy will inevitably lead to lives, in Hobbes’ words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Not an easy task. In 1800, the United States’ debts from the revolutionary war dwarfed the rest of the budget. The country had little industry. Agriculture was disorganized and inefficient. Heavy transportation was by water and much work was needed before rivers would be reliably navigable. We had almost no roads and none fit for freight. Natural resources were abundant, but without means to extract them, they had little effective value. Schools were few. Artists, engineers, and scientists were scarce. Americans did not have the expertise to design their own capital and traveling anywhere was slow and arduous. The country was debilitated by a plague that debased slaves and demoralized slave-owners. The vultures of Europe were circling to pick the carcass of the infant nation’s demise.

But here we are today. Jefferson’s vision, that the ascertained premises of the people would generate progress that would crush archaic vultures and push away nasty, brutish and short lives, that revelation has prevailed. Ascertained premises won two world wars, put a man on the moon, conquered small pox, and elected a black president.

This is the antidote I sought.

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Word For Writers

“The biggest problem with Word is that it is way too much program for 90% of creative writers and self-publishers.” JW Manus.

Yep. I read discussions of Word on the network all the time. Many of the comments are negative. Sometimes I take time to defend Word or offer tips on how to use Word more effectively. But I have to admit that something about Word is seriously broken, but not the application itself. It’s better than ever.

Agile programing and continuous update have changed the software industry. In the old days, we spent months or years designing a program down to the last detail. Then code and unit test for another year or so. Then quality assurance system testing executed tests based on the design, not the as-built code. Every failed test was a dagger in your heart. If you were “lucky” QA was cut short to meet roll out deadlines. And, more often than not, when the product finally hit the customers, it was a travesty.

Software is maddeningly complex, and its presence often changes its environment in ways that invalidate the requirements which the software is intended to meet, and software is more fluid than any physical object. A program designed several years before a real user touches it, never meets user expectations.

The enormous cost overruns and failed projects that plagued software of the 1990s were largely due to a methodology called called “waterfall development.” In the waterfall, design, construction, testing, and acceptance of the final product proceed in strict order. Each phase must be completed and signed off on before the next phase can begin. Administrators loved it because they always had signed documents to shake in people’s faces. It worked great for bridges, skyscrapers, World War II, and the moon landing, but failed for software.

Today, the prevailing approach is to build software in small increments. Build a single feature, release to a test user group, look at the problems and let the release generate further ideas, then fix the defects, incorporate the ideas, and roll out another incremental release. Keep the increments small and rinse and repeat forever. The network bandwidth and speed available today makes it possible to develop continuously in small increments. This has proven to be much more successful than the waterfall.

Microsoft and many other software developers have adopted the agile methodology, but the new methodology has its own problems.

An unforeseen consequence of agile programming and continuous update is that documentation doesn’t keep up well with the development of the product. Microsoft has opened a fire hose of development and innovation in Word and documentation has not kept up.

Writing and revising documentation often takes as much time as developing and testing code. Asking a writer to document incomplete code easily degenerates into a time-wasting mess. Distinguishing defects from features is often hard and software can turn on a dime. The documentation often has to be rewritten at the last minute anyway. Consequently, the documentation usually trails behind the product.

However, documentation is also critical to software quality. If a feature is not clearly enough documented for a customer to use it well, the system is broken, no matter how perfectly it works.

Microsoft Word has suffered from the efficiency of agile development and frequent updates. Word processing in general has leaped ahead in the last few decades and it becomes more powerful with every automatic software upgrade, faster processor, increase in available memory and storage, and jump in network bandwidth.

So often, when I read of writer’s problems with Word, I think of some poor sap trying to cut a two-by-four with a Skillsaw without plugging it in or turning it on.

And I sympathize. They’re writers. They don’t have time or inclination to become experts on a huge and challenging system like Microsoft Word. Writers usually learn just enough to get the job at hand done and then get back to their serious business of writing. The solution might work but be all wrong down the road. Two months later, when they tackle a similar problem, their half-learned and half-remembered solution lets them down. And intervening updates may have improved the process, but they also changed it. Who wouldn’t be mad?

Microsoft has not made it easy. These days, most developers aspire to programs that are so simple to use, they don’t need documentation. But that’s an aspiration that is devilishly difficult to realize when the work done by the program is as complicated and hard to understand as word processing today.

I’m a software engineer and architect who coded his first word processor at the same time he started using word processors forty years ago. In recent years, I’ve burned hours puzzling over Word help forums. I’ve resorted to reading the xml in docxs and studying Word OLE documentation to get a feeling for Word’s internals. I used to know developers on the Word dev team and watched them stumble while using Word. In the end, I’ve always concluded that Word is a good product, well-designed with surprising power and flexibility, but first priority for writers is to write, not become Word experts.

Nevertheless, the writers who plug in their Skillsaw, instead of going back to a handsaw, will make more sawdust.

Today, if you are having trouble with Word, I suggest getting a copy of Word For the Wise by JW Manus. It will help. I have some disagreements with some of her approaches—I go farther with styles and I think my process is easier and more foolproof—but you won’t go wrong following her advice. Her book is still the best I’ve seen.

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Johnny Jump Up

My mother loved Johnny Jump Ups. Her birthday was toward the end of March. As her birthday approached, she went out into the woods, looking for Johnny Jump Ups. They were among the first spring flowers to appear on the woods floor. Johnny Jump Ups are wild pansies. I don’t have any pictures of Johnny Jump Ups from our woods.

Generic yellow pansies. Grant [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Grandma Waschke cultivated pansies that she grew from seeds, mostly purchased from Tilllinghast’s seeds down in LaConner.

My mother had nothing against my grandmother’s cultivated pansies, but she had no passion for them either. My mother went to business college and learned to be a bookkeeper. Before she married my father, she was a bookkeeper at various businesses in Lynden and Bellingham. My grandmother grew roses and pansies. Mom tended the vegetable garden and searched for Johnny Jump Ups and Easter Lilies (Trilliums) in the woods and tried to transplant them to grow in the yard.

She succeeded with the trilliums. They grow well on the north side of the house. They are most likely up now, uncurling their leaves. They will bloom in a week or so, the white blooms turning purple as Easter arrives and the season wears on. There are blue, pink, and white violets in the lawn. Violets and pansies are the same thing, but the violets in the lawn are not Johnny Jump Ups.

In our woods, Johnny Jump Ups are small bright yellow flowers with a black accents that look as if they were drawn with a sharp crow foot nib and black India ink from the finest and blackest charcoal. The black in the generic photo above looks smeared compared to my mother’s Johnny Jump Ups. They grow in bright yellow and green beds on the bleached gray leaves of the woods floor. My mother succeeded in digging Johnny Jump Ups from the woods, generally under spreading big-leaf maples, and transplanting them to little clay pots she lined up on the window sill above the kitchen sink. The blossoms lasted a week or so and lived on as nice little green plants, but they never bloomed a second season. Pansies are perennials, but gardeners usually replant them each year, as my grandmother did.