Glass Bead Game
Someone at a recent meeting said that a software product embodying Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game was being developed. Another person said “I loved that book!” with enormous enthusiasm — but then couldn't remember what it was about. So I'm reading it.
I think I'll remember the Glass Bead Game: Intellectuals begin to see curves, trends, and universal constants across musicological, mathematical, philosophical, and any other field you can think of. So they develop a language of symbols and moves that are abstractions of these universalities, and they come together to play games with these abstractions with intense joy, exultation, and engagement. The community that plays the game is peopled with scholars who write famous treatises like The Reception and Absorption of Slavic Folk Music by German Art Music from Joseph Haydn on.
This community is an elect group, chosen and trained from a young age. It starts as a utopian rarefied society, rigidly controlled and cultivated, and is enormously respected. Things begin to decay when the connection between the world that funds this intellectual enterprise and the inner elect inhabitants of it becomes attenuated.
I can't imagine how the game will be made into a software product. You'd have to take all the knowledge of the world and distill it into a few visualizations. Sure, I'm a big believer in pictures, but I'm suspicious of reductionism — I ran across a lot of it in music theory that made me frustrated and skeptical. (In fact, The Glass Bead Game has a heavy musicological/theoretical bent. But no one in the elect community actually composes any music. They just admire the serenity of classical themes. Scary.)
And isn't the point of the book that such cross-disciplinary abstractions are beautiful but ultimately doomed?
I'm at a conference on Law and the Brain sponsored by the Gruter Institute. Maybe I'll ask the other attendees how they feel about the Game.