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...
...It is costly to relearn things...
...Good, old-fashioned, Burkean habit...
...One may legitimately ask: is fairness toward one group furthered by unfairness toward everybody else...
...They are very expensive to implement...
...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...
...But qwerty will continue to tyrannize us, one and all, and our children and grandchi|dren, too...
...Here, then, is a classic BenthamBurke conflict, although morality is not directly involved...
...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...
...So long as Mr...
...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...
...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...
...Bureau of Standards announced that "there is little need to demonstrate further the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard in experimental tests...
...I doubt that many of us will run out and buy one...
...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...
...Why are intellectuals--those peculiar people who buy typewriters and hire secretaries who use them-as immune to reason as the unwashed masses...
...Just a few simple changes in our habits, and we can have a far more efficient skill at our disposal...
...Plenty of well-documented evidence exists...
...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...
...Dvorak's keyboard...
...Gary North 16 The Alternative October 1973...
...In short, rational solutions are very expensive...
...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...
...Capacities beyond these the people have not to give . . . . Old establishments are tried by their effects...
...I have nothing profound to add to this topic...
...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...
...Yet Mr...
...Why are men so irrational as to ignore, for four decades, an utterly rational improvement...
...In 1965, the U.S...
...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...
...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...
...If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest...
...tomorrow the world...
...They do not get calls for it, and they do not advertise it, so far as I have ever seen...
...At the same time, he strengthens the recurring innuendo: antihomosexuals are birds of a feather with every manner of despicable being...
...Qwerty is the primary system devised to get ideas onto the printed page...
...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...
...After one month the women were turning out 74 percent more work and were 68 percent more accurate...
...Those of us who are in the armchair-blueprint-for-social-reconstruction business should be made more humble by Mr...
...Today Dvorak...
...Rational blueprints have been a glut on the market for a long time...
...Qwerty...
...McLuban's age of hot messages stays in the future (and his book royalties keep rolling in), we will have to deal with qwerty...
...Evidently arguments based on the character of homosexuals will get us little further than arguments based on the character of antihomosexuals...
...Thus does Professor Brudnoy fight prejudice with prejudice, bigotry with bigotry, injustice with injustice...
...I doubt that even the Esperanto people would want to make the necessary changes...
...Developed in 1872, the present typewriter keyboard remains firmly entrenched internationally...
...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...
...So much for the data concerning efficiency...
...Well, maybe I'll get to Dvorak tomorrow...
...On the positive side, as on the negative, Professor Brudnoy contributes nothing toward a better understanding of his topic...
...It is costly to reform educational institutions that train young typists...
...He devised a truly efficient keyboard, and during World War II, fourteen Navy women were retrained to use it...
...But I did run across something quite striking recently...
...They are not often constructed after any theory...
...Habit...
...We are not that changeoriented, even for the sake of rationalism...
...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...
...Indeed, they are the results of various necessities and expediencies...
...In old establishments various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory...
...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...
...We need them, but we should not overestimate them...
...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...
...Most of the other typewriter companies offer it...
...I won't bother you with the details...
...And qwerty, it now appears, is not very efficient...
...But I probably won't.} Yet for the man who faces the typewriter keyboard daily, what could be more rational...
...Men resist change...
...We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived...
...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...
...theories are rather drawn from them...
Vol. 7 • October 1973 • No. 1
