Bentham, Burke, and QWERTY
North, Gary
minem assertions based on the character of its opponents. At the same time, he strengthens the recurring innuendo: antihomosexuals are birds of a feather with every manner of despicable...
...So much for the data concerning efficiency...
...Today Dvorak...
...I have nothing profound to add to this topic...
...Indeed, they are the results of various necessities and expediencies...
...On the positive side, as on the negative, Professor Brudnoy contributes nothing toward a better understanding of his topic...
...He devised a truly efficient keyboard, and during World War II, fourteen Navy women were retrained to use it...
...At the same time, he concedes that the columns of a leading homosexual publication, the Los Angeles Advocate, "confirm much of what antihomosexual thinkers say...
...And qwerty, it now appears, is not very efficient...
...Habit...
...It would be useful, to begin with, to know what science has not yet determined: to what extent is homosexuality an innate disposition resulting from heredity or from early environmental facBentham, Burke, and QWERTY But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever can make the men of whom any system of authority is composed any other than God, and nature, and education, and their habits of life have made them...
...Rational blueprints have been a glut on the market for a long time...
...In a science issue of the now defunct Saturday Review (October, 1972), Charles Lekberg presented a peculiar bit of sociological data in an essay, "The Tyranny of Qwerty...
...Dvorak's keyboard...
...Capacities beyond these the people have not to give . . . . Old establishments are tried by their effects...
...Thus does Professor Brudnoy fight prejudice with prejudice, bigotry with bigotry, injustice with injustice...
...Qwerty...
...It is costly to advertise, especially now that the patent has run out...
...Certainly my local IBM typewriter sales department had never heard of it, in spite of the fact that one IBM model--Model I)---is available with a Dvorak keyboard for a $15 surcharge...
...Lekberg writes: "Using the Dvorak simplified keyboard, or DSK, as it came to be called, the women's fingertips were moving little more than one mile on an average day, compared with twelve to twenty miles a day for typists using the standard keyboard...
...But I did run across something quite striking recently...
...Evidently arguments based on the character of homosexuals will get us little further than arguments based on the character of antihomosexuals...
...So long as Mr...
...Gary North 16 The Alternative October 1973...
...Yet Mr...
...In his Social Change and History, Nisbet reminds us that it is structure and permanence that provide the setting for change, and that the former categories, rather than the latter, are basic to human society...
...I doubt that many of us will run out and buy one...
...Why are men so irrational as to ignore, for four decades, an utterly rational improvement...
...After one month the women were turning out 74 percent more work and were 68 percent more accurate...
...But I probably won't.} Yet for the man who faces the typewriter keyboard daily, what could be more rational...
...At the same time, he strengthens the recurring innuendo: antihomosexuals are birds of a feather with every manner of despicable being...
...Well, maybe I'll get to Dvorak tomorrow...
...I may In twenty years of typing papers, I've never learned to use more than one finger, so my costs of retraining are lower...
...In old establishments various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory...
...Bureau of Standards announced that "there is little need to demonstrate further the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard in experimental tests...
...McLuban's age of hot messages stays in the future (and his book royalties keep rolling in), we will have to deal with qwerty...
...Qwerty is that famous top row of letters that confronts us on typewriters, on-line computer outlets, teletype terminals, and tape- and card-punching machines...
...Building a universal ethical or juridical system on the basis of a philosophic calculus would have seemed like the ultimate in human folly to Burke: "The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori...
...Qwerty is the primary system devised to get ideas onto the printed page...
...We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived...
...Men resist change...
...Here, then, is a classic BenthamBurke conflict, although morality is not directly involved...
...theories are rather drawn from them...
...It is costly to reform educational institutions that train young typists...
...Developed in 1872, the present typewriter keyboard remains firmly entrenched internationally...
...We are not that changeoriented, even for the sake of rationalism...
...Since Professor Brudnoy so studiously avoids his nominal subject, I don't know what he would say on behalf of the moral validity of homosexuality...
...He talks in passing of the character of homosexuals, how many "have risen high in science, government, the arts, live good lives, and so forth" and how "the homosexual population is by and large decent, even beneficial to America...
...tomorrow the world...
...One may legitimately ask: is fairness toward one group furthered by unfairness toward everybody else...
...We need them, but we should not overestimate them...
...Yet it seems safe to conclude that not one person in ten thousand had ewtr heard of the Dvorak keyboard prior to Lekberg's essay...
...I won't bother you with the details...
...In short, rational solutions are very expensive...
...They are not often constructed after any theory...
...Plenty of well-documented evidence exists...
...Just a few simple changes in our habits, and we can have a far more efficient skill at our disposal...
...Most of the other typewriter companies offer it...
...I doubt that even the Esperanto people would want to make the necessary changes...
...August Dvorak, the originator of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (patent lapsed), concluded forty years ago that we could have a superior keyboard simply by arranging the keys at random...
...But qwerty will continue to tyrannize us, one and all, and our children and grandchi|dren, too...
...They do not get calls for it, and they do not advertise it, so far as I have ever seen...
...Why are intellectuals--those peculiar people who buy typewriters and hire secretaries who use them-as immune to reason as the unwashed masses...
...If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest...
...Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science . . . . " Robert Nisbet, throughout his writings, but especially in Quest for Community, points to this aspect of nineteenth-century conservative thought: the distrust of rational schemes of political or social reconstruction...
...Lot me then conclude with a few preliminary and tentative considerations of the sort that Professor Brudnoy should have raised, either to affirm or to confute...
...Those of us who are in the armchair-blueprint-for-social-reconstruction business should be made more humble by Mr...
...Good, old-fashioned, Burkean habit...
...It is costly to relearn things...
...They are very expensive to implement...
...Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Had Edmund Burke lived long enough to see the ~piritual sons of Enlightenment rationalism--yes, even the "reasonable" expermmr~tal rationalism chronicled by Peter Gay's The Enlightenment--he would hardly have been surprised...
...In 1965, the U.S...
Vol. 7 • October 1973 • No. 1
