One thing you learn quickly around people who work creatively is that they are obsessed with what they do. Writers love to write about writing, journalists love to cover the media, Hollywood loves to make movies about film. It makes sense, once you’ve done a bit of that kind of work. Creation of all kinds is a miracle, and miracles are always fueled by reverence for, and devotion to, some kind of holy mystery.

The problem with exploring the sacred mysteries of a creative endeavor lies largely with the audience. Most people just want to eat the sausage, and have only the briefest interest in how it gets made. But even if your audience is entirely made up of fellow creative types, the mysteries of the creative process tend to be… well, mysterious. The tangled thread of events and associations, hard work and random chance, penetrating insight and surrender to mystery, that produce something new and wonderful tends to be too ineffable to capture with any logical or narrative clarity. Besides, if you haven’t felt the wild joy of the creative mystery yourself, it all tends to sound terribly self-involved.

Sometimes, though, you read an insight into the creative act that makes it all seem shockingly straightforward. Suddenly the mystery evaporates, and the prosaic truth of creativity is just sitting there with a bemused smile on its face. In fact this happened to me recently, while reading a book that I will be sure to discuss at further length in these pages: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement To Calculation, by Joseph Weizenbaum [available for 14 day loan at the Internet Archive, with a free membership, and almost nowhere else]. That’s right, we’re going to learn an important lesson about writing from a computer scientist.

Computer Power is a remarkable book, which in 1976 connected the core functionality of the then-infant computer with its psychological and sociological effects, tracing the patterns that have gone on to shape our society in profound ways. Anyone who has ever bemoaned the lack of education in the humanities among the computer elite will recognize the ideal of their advocacy in Weizenbaum, whose deep understanding of computers is enhanced by a deep philosophical and literary context.

But don’t take my word for it, just listen to the man. Toward the end of the third chapter, which explains “how computers work,” he begins to compare programming and writing, casting a dazzling light on both in the process:

“To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word “because” and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the “why” of something, but discover we don’t…

Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of natural language and to its inherent ambiguity. The very eloquence that natural language permits sometimes illuminates our words and seems (falsely, to be sure) to illuminate our undeserving logic just as brightly. An interpreter of programming-language texts, a computer is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence… a computer is a merciless critic…

One must, of course, learn how to use criticism… Computers are maddeningly efficient at stumbling over purely technical i.e. linguistic programming errors, but stumbling in a way that disguises the real locus of the trouble, e.g. just which parenthesis was misplaced. Indeed, many professional programmers believe that their craft is difficult because the languages with which they must deal have rigid syntactical rules. There is therefore a persistent cry for natural language e.g., English, programming systems. Programmers who hold to this belief have probably never tackled a truly difficult problem, and have therefore never felt the need for really deep criticism from the computer. It is true that in order to write one has to first master the syntactic rules of one’s chosen language. But then one must also have thought through what one has to say. Literary criticism is not the business of calling attention to spelling errors and to technical violations of grammatical rules. It has to do with substantive ideas. The literary critic has to know much.”

Weizenbaum is difficult to quote because (like so many great writers) he brings together so many threads, and builds his thematic edifice over the course of the entire book, but here he is building to a point that is internet-ready in its concision. Bemoaning the the myriad challenges that accompany the computer’s lack of contextual understanding, of the kind that the literary critic has in abundance, he points out that

“The difficulties that ensue are no more rooted in syntactic rigidities than is, say, the difficulty of writing a good sonnet rooted in the rigid form demanded by that class of poem. To write a good sonnet or a good program, one must know what one wants to say.”

A sentence as brief and freighted with meaning as the last one I’ve quoted here risks reading as trite outside of its full context. Like the greatest writers, he is making several points at once here: about writing and programming, about computers and humans, and about their profound commonalities and differences. It’s a devastating critique of the kinds of people he describes in the next chapter, “compulsive programmers,” for whom the computer’s truth is absolute, and its power an end unto itself. But it’s not a Twitter dunk either, conceding that natural language comforts us in falsehood as much as it illuminates the truth. Both writing and programming, at their best, are tools for discovering the truth and what we want to say about it.

Of course, not many people in 2023 would describe computer programming that way. That’s because first computer culture, then our broader culture, has been colonized by people for whom the only truth is the power of the computer. For them there is no mystery that can’t be solved with computers, eventually. There is nothing to say except that everything will someday be quantifiable and calculable, and that the best course of action is to simply get rich along the way. Computers are no longer just a tool of discovery (as they were to Weizenbaum), a screwdriver with which to disassemble and understand the universe, but rather a hammer with which to beat the world into their quantifiable, rationalizable shape.

Born into the wreckage of religion and ideology, it’s not hard to understand the comforting simplicity of the computer’s offer. The order, predictability and control we’ve yearned for for eons now seems to be at hand, and pushed ever closer by the seemingly mechanical progress of technology. As disease after scarcity falls to the computer’s power, its triumph seems ever more assured. Real human beings have even volunteered to let Elon Musk bury experimental hardware in their brains, hasta la victoria siempre.

Writing, on the hand, turning inside to find the meaning in ourselves and our world remains as messy as ever. Centuries of scientific endeavor have yielded only the roughest heuristics to aid our explorations of inner space, to understand the angels and monsters we find there, and to try to relate with our equally mysterious fellow humans. But the more computers deliver on their promise, the more control of our external world they give us, the more our collective problems find their homes in the hearts of men.

Which means the need to dive into the inky, disorienting mysteries of ourselves and each other, to find something real to say, is greater than ever.