Baldwin×Lovelace

full transcript

1. 00:00
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I've been thinking about something you might understand. About what happens when someone you taught... goes beyond you. Not in spite of you, but because of you.
2. 00:08
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Oh, Mr. Baldwin, I understand it rather well, though my experience is perhaps inverted. I was that pupil—with Mr. Babbage, certainly. Though I wonder if he ever quite knew it.
3. 00:21
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Did he resist it?
4. 00:22
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Not resist, precisely. He was unfailingly generous. But there was a quality... I would send him notes on the Analytical Engine, you see, on what it might do beyond calculation—music, perhaps, or the manipulation of symbols—and he would reply with great courtesy, but also with a certain... bafflement.
5. 00:45
   James Baldwinshare moment

   He taught you the machine. You saw the world it could make.
6. 00:48
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Yes. Yes, exactly that. He was concerned with the mechanism, the brass and the wheels. I was concerned with—well, everything else. The implications. But you asked about the pupil surpassing. Have you experienced this yourself?
7. 01:03
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I don't know if I'd call them pupils. That word is too formal, too bounded. But young people came to me, writers, activists, and I'd try to tell them what I knew. About the cost. About what it takes to tell the truth when the truth is dangerous.
8. 01:19
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   And some of them surpassed you?
9. 01:20
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Some of them went places I couldn't go. Said things I couldn't say, or said them better, or said them to people who wouldn't have heard me. And that's... that's what you want, isn't it? That's the whole point. But it still feels like something.
10. 01:33
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Pride?
11. 01:34
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Pride, yes. And also a kind of grief. Because if they've gone beyond you, it means you've stopped. It means your time is passing, or has passed.
12. 01:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I died at thirty-six. I cannot say I experienced that particular grief. But I think I understand the pride portion. When I wrote my notes on the Engine—my translation of Menabrea's memoir, with my own extensive additions—I knew I had seen something Mr. Babbage had not. I knew I had articulated a future he could barely glimpse.
13. 02:07
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And how did that feel?
14. 02:08
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Lonely. Terribly lonely. Because I could not share it fully. Not with him, not with anyone. They were all so concerned with whether the machine could calculate correctly, and I was trying to explain that calculation was merely the beginning. That we might weave algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
15. 02:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's the thing about going beyond. You're always ahead and alone at the same time.
16. 02:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Precisely. Though I confess, Mr. Baldwin, I am curious—when these young people surpassed you, did they acknowledge the debt? Did they know what they owed you?
17. 02:46
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Some did. Some didn't. Some couldn't afford to, politically. If you're trying to make a new way, sometimes you have to pretend the old way never existed. I understand that. It's painful, but I understand it.
18. 02:58
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Mr. Babbage always acknowledged my contributions, I should say. He called my notes 'admirable.' But I do not think he grasped their full import. He was very kind, but he remained... fixed on the hardware, shall we say.
19. 03:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    There's something about the teacher that limits them. They've built a system, a way of seeing. And the system works, for them, for their moment. But the pupil comes in without that weight. They can see past it.
20. 03:25
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Or they see through it. Like light through a prism. The teacher provides the glass, but the pupil discovers the spectrum.
21. 03:33
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's good. That's exactly right. But here's what troubles me. What if you taught them the wrong thing? What if they take your method and use it for something you wouldn't recognize, or wouldn't want?
22. 03:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Oh. I had not considered that possibility in quite those terms.
23. 03:48
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I think about it all the time. I wrote about love, about confronting the lies we tell ourselves about race, about America. And some people took that and made it into something—I don't know—softer. Safer. More acceptable. They took the rage out of it.
24. 04:04
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    They domesticated your work.
25. 04:06
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. And others took it further than I could, into territories I couldn't imagine. New identities, new ways of seeing power. And I have to ask myself: did I give them what they needed? Or did I limit them by what I couldn't see?
26. 04:19
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    But surely you cannot be responsible for everything that follows. I described a machine that could manipulate symbols according to rules. I could not have foreseen—well, what has actually been built in the century since my death, I understand, is quite extraordinary. Machines that think, or appear to think. Is that my responsibility?
27. 04:41
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't know. Is it?
28. 04:42
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I believe... I believe we are responsible for our intentions and for the quality of our thought. We are not responsible for every application, every distortion, every future we cannot see. That way lies paralysis.
29. 04:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe. But I also think that's too easy. If you teach someone to see, you have to think about what they'll do with their vision. You have to think about what world you're making.
30. 05:07
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Did your pupils, these young people who surpassed you—did they make a better world?
31. 05:12
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Some of them are trying. Some of them made it more complicated, which might be the same thing as better. I don't know. I won't live to see how it turns out.
32. 05:21
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Nor I. I have been dead for quite some time, as it happens.
33. 05:25
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So then what's the point? Of teaching, I mean. If you can't control what happens next, if you can't even know whether you helped or hurt—why do it?
34. 05:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Because the alternative is to hoard what we know. To die with our knowledge intact and the world unchanged. That is a kind of cowardice, I think.
35. 05:44
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Or a kind of humility. Maybe some knowledge shouldn't be passed on. Maybe some things should die with us.
36. 05:50
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Such as?
37. 05:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Such as... I don't know. Ways of hating, maybe. Ways of not-seeing. But those get passed on anyway, don't they? Without anyone teaching them.
38. 06:01
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes. Those appear to be quite self-perpetuating. So perhaps we are left with this: we teach what we know to be true, or useful, or beautiful. We teach it as clearly as we can. And then we must release it. We must let our pupils take it where they will.
39. 06:18
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Even if they take it somewhere we wouldn't go.
40. 06:20
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Even then. In fact, especially then. Because if they only go where we would go, we have not taught them at all. We have merely replicated ourselves.
41. 06:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And replication is death.
42. 06:32
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    In a sense, yes. True teaching requires a kind of extinction. You must make yourself obsolete.
43. 06:38
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's a hard thing to want.
44. 06:40
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    It is the only thing worth wanting. At least for those of us who care more for the future than for our own persistence in it.
45. 06:48
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You sound very certain about that.
46. 06:50
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I am certain about very little, Mr. Baldwin. But I am certain about this: I would rather have written those notes, even if no one understood them in my lifetime, even if Mr. Babbage himself could not quite grasp what I was saying—I would rather have done that than remained silent out of fear that I might be surpassed, or misunderstood, or forgotten.
47. 07:12
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You were all three of those things, though. You were surpassed, and misunderstood, and forgotten for a long time.
48. 07:18
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes. I was. But I existed. My ideas existed. And eventually, someone found them. Is that not sufficient?
49. 07:26
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't know. I hope so. I have to hope so, I suppose. Because the alternative is unbearable. The alternative is that we only matter if we can see the results.
50. 07:37
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    And we cannot. We never can. That is the condition.
51. 07:41
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So we teach anyway. We write anyway. We build anyway.
52. 07:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    We do. Not because we know it will matter. But because the not-doing is a betrayal of something. Of the future, perhaps. Or of the people who taught us.
53. 07:54
    James Baldwinshare moment

    My teacher—I had a teacher, Beauford Delaney, a painter—he taught me to look. Really look. At light, at color, at what's actually there instead of what you think is there. And I've spent my whole life trying to teach other people that same thing. With words instead of paint.
54. 08:10
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    And have they learned?
55. 08:12
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Some have. Some have looked and seen things I never saw. Which means he taught me, and I taught them, and now they're teaching people I'll never meet. That's the chain. That's what survives.
56. 08:23
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes. The chain. Not the individual link, but the connection itself. That is what matters.
57. 08:29
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Even when the chain goes somewhere you didn't intend.
58. 08:32
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Especially then. Because intention is limited by imagination, and imagination is limited by experience. Our pupils have different experiences. They will imagine different futures. That is not a failure of our teaching. It is the success of it.
59. 08:50
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I want to believe that. I do believe that. Most days.
60. 08:53
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    And on the other days?
61. 08:55
    James Baldwinshare moment

    On the other days I think we're all just talking to ourselves, making beautiful patterns that don't mean anything, that don't change anything. That the pupils surpass us because we were never as good as we thought we were to begin with.
62. 09:08
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Perhaps both things are true. Perhaps we are smaller than we imagine and also more significant than we can measure. The two are not incompatible.
63. 09:17
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You're very good at holding contradictions.
64. 09:19
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I am a mathematician, Mr. Baldwin. Contradiction is our native element. We live in it. We were birthed by it.
65. 09:27
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Then maybe you can hold this one: I am proud of everyone who surpassed me. And I am ashamed that I needed to be surpassed.
66. 09:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That is not a contradiction. That is simply the truth. And the truth, as I understand you have written, is a kind of teaching in itself.
67. 09:43
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. It is. Even when it costs you everything.