Syntopicon Vault
Originally posted 11/21/2023
A timelapse of the “graph” of this Syntopicon Vault. The red nodes are the 102 “Great Ideas”. The number and arrangement of the connections determines the shape of the graph. Music is Arturo Toscanini conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937, now in the public domain, from the Internet Archive.
Yesterday I finished inputting the Syntopicon as an Obsidian folder. According to the vault statistics, I've created 1,315 notes and 6,305 links in that folder. I'm considering making the raw folder available, since I'm going to back it up anyway, before I start adding my own notes into the basic structure that I copied out of the "Inventory of Terms" that occupy pages 1303 to 1345 of Volume 2 of the Great Books of the Western World. The authors claim this is the index to the three thousand "topics which represent the themes of the great conversation." I'll take them at their word, although I had expected to transcribe more like 1,800 terms rather than only 1,315. In any case, I'll work with these. In the graph view I've colored the 102 "Great Ideas" in red and all the terms are yellow. Each of the yellow terms connect to one or more of the "Great Ideas". None of the terms connect to other terms, so all the links in the Syntopicon are hierarchical in that sense. The "Great Ideas" connect with lots of terms and also with other "Great Ideas". But not directly with all of the other Great Ideas although I suspect there are only one or two degrees of separation between any of them. That is, you could probably find a path through a term or two from nearly any "Great Idea" to any other.
The properties of the Obsidian graph view determine the placement of the nodes. There's attraction between the red "Great Idea" nodes and the yellow terms that connect to them. If a term connects to two red nodes, it tends to pull them together. And the connections between the red nodes themselves tends to pull them closer. So nodes that share no connections are the farthest apart. This means that, for example, Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Tyranny, and Revolution are bunched together. Nearby are Slavery, State, Government, and Justice. Other "Great Ideas" like Quantity, Astronomy, Science, and even Philosophy are in another corner of the graph, unconnected to the previous set. Although Philosophy connects to Progress, which is near (and connected to) ideas like Democracy and Revolution.
While I think it's interesting examining the "bare" graph and discovering the ways Hutchins and Adler thought these ideas connected with each other and formed the basis of western culture, I'm also looking forward to adding my own information and seeing if the ways I connect these ideas changes the graph. One of the sets of ideas that will probably get little to no attention from me will be the religion. There are a whole pile of "Great Ideas" like Angels and God and Religion and Immortality that I can't imagine I'll spend a lot of time with. They are already massively connected to other ideas in the original form of the Syntopicon, but I suppose it will begin to change as I make my own additions and connections.
One of the first things I'm going to do, to further test the structure Hutchins and Adler created in the 1940s, is to read through the "History" Great Idea section and follow the links to the texts they include in the Great Books. I don't have a complete set of the Great Books of the Western World, but I can read them all in the Internet Archive. I'm curious what the editors thought about history and its role in western culture, and I'm curious what has changed in the last eighty or so years. The series was published in 1952 and much of the work on the Syntopicon was completed in the final years of the previous decade. A lot has happened in history since then. The New Social History only really got going in America in the 1960s. Exploring the way the editors constructed the topic will also be an introduction to the application of syntopical reading.
It's a bit amazing to me that this whole thing was created and presented not to an elite, collegiate audience, but to the regular people Hutchins and Adler imagined making up the bulk of the middle and even the working classes. They weren't starry-eyed idealists about the matter. They commented quite a bit in the "Great Conversation" essay that occupies most of volume 1 of the series, about the decline of American education and the rise of mindless entertainments (television). But they seem to have sincerely believed that regular Americans had the capacity to read and understand the classic texts of western culture. And that people would profit from reading them, both in the quality of their own lives and in their ability to participate fully in a representative democracy. The irony is only starker and the need greater now. I’ll have more to say about this soon.