The New Republic of Letters
What if we created a new form of interacting online, based on the epistolary form and the power the letter has held for humanity since the inception of writing?
The imminently and irrepressibly quotable Joan Didion once said "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." Writing is a curious engagement with oneself. Done on the page, it slows thinking down, being no quicker than the movement of the hand and the flow of ink. Something very powerful is unlocked when the focus of that writing is to share an idea with another person, to enter into dialogue with them. This, historically, has been the magic connective force of the epistolary form, a cornerstone of civic life.
Things are different now. Email (letter writing carved of its slowness, etiquette, careful choice of words, and charm) and social media are our mediums. Despite their promise and undeniable benefits (ease of sharing information, increased connectivity), this public square of the digital age has gamified communication, changing the very way we interact with one another and leaving little room for slow deliberation.
The questions these Flourishing Commons missives gather around are how we create healthy civic exchange in this age of shifting mediums, how we share information, and how we constitute our knowledge spaces. We can do better than what the mainstays of social media (e.g., Meta, Twitter) provide now, and one pathway to that better future might be the epistolary form.
There is something incomparable about the epistolary form, something Virginia Woolf called 'the humane art.' A list of exemplary epistles is innumerably long, but more than a few have been indispensable to my own respect for the form. Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Ta Nahisi Coates' Between the World and Me, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from the Birmingham Jail (for that matter, the entire collection of Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela), and the collection of authors writing to young readers and edited by Maria Popova A Velocity of Being. Reading these works, one cannot resist the feeling that there is something imminent in this form of communication that cannot be imitated or replicated. The act of writing to someone, public yet personal, seems to call forward one's poetic voice, palpating 'slow conversation,' makes space for the strange, the mysterious, the as-yet unknown. The letter allows for the writer's unknowing, her vulnerability. The letter expects a silence will follow, a wait for a reply, a genuine dialogue; it creates openings. There is spaciousness and capacity in it. It has an incomparable and undeniable propensity toward emergence.
If these statements seem hyperbolic, we need only look at the role letters have played since the dawn of the written word. Scientific journals as we know them today came from a practice of scientists writing letters to one another and including scientific information (ideas, theories, experimental results) in them. Some of our journals today maintain language that alludes to the historical origin: Physics Letters, Geophysical Research Letters, etc.,. Letters to the editor have been a backbone of civic commentary since the very beginning of printed news. Epistolary poems are a genre unto themselves. Famed corporate memos even adopt the form. Indeed, there was a silent revolution with the arrival of the post.
Letters have been a sage-like medium, foretelling of great changes in society, a place that history repeatedly affirms house the unexpected origins of radical ideas. A certain network of letters across hundreds of years, but flourishing in the 17th and 18th centuries that we call "The Republic of Letters" contain the scientific, cultural, political, and philosophical ideas that fomented democracy, to date our best idea for how to govern ourselves in an equal way. These letters connected our finest philosophers, scientists, and thinkers across national boundaries and cultural barriers in long form conversation. But the exhilarating part is that letters, with their inherent sending and receiving, form a natural network of ideas, a kind of fingerprint for the growth and spread of ideas and the health of the ideascape for a given culture.
You have likely heard that you are six handshakes from the president (in other words you are connected to every person on the planet through a chain of no more than six people) or know the phrase 'Wood-Wide Web.' Underneath these profound discoveries about the world around us and our own social structure is the idea of a network. Network analysis is a methodology used to investigate the structure and dynamics of a system by identifying objects (nodes) and connections between objects (edges).
These methods originated in the social sciences in which people are the objects and connections are defined by the presence of a predefined relationship between people. You’ve probably heard about the social network of Facebook. Network analysis has since flourished and been used to provide new scientific discovery in a broad range of disciplines, including biological, engineering, and geophysical systems. Networks are everywhere in the real world. In fact, they are the lingua franca of complex systems, a way of representing the information about the world in a manner that is capable of greater insight than, say, Cartesian coordinates.
In a brilliant cross-pollination of social and data science, researchers from Stanford used digitized versions of the missives that formed the Republic of Letters to construct the intellectual network that they represented. The network permitted them to 'explore the breadth, shape, and hubs of intellectual networks.'
Here's the exciting part: What if we created a new form of interacting online, based on the epistolary form and the power the letter has held for humanity since the inception of writing? Might we then bring the capacity of digital analysis to understanding the health of the ideas in our communities and society and the state of our interactions with one another? What might we learn about civic community in our digital age? About our ideas, our noosphere? About our connection (or disconnection)? About the characteristics of mediums of exchange that are conducive to healthy relationality (guiding design of new digital spaces and social media)?
I find it discomforting that the epistolary form is being extinguished by our culture of hyper-immediate communication and an insatiable appetite for immediacy and a concomitant desire for the simple and an allergy to the complex. The distillation is always lossy. What are we losing?
We have an opportunity to return to the epistolary form and to adapt it to our digital world, exploring perhaps a new, more connective and generative, medium of exchange that guides what our future social media should be. We are calling for a New Republic of Letters. A space to explore healthy relationality in digital spaces, slow and long form writing in public together. The new republic extends the idea of letters to the virtual world, using its affordances without falling into its traps.
The affordance of the digital environment is that we can study the networks that emerge. This republic could send letters much more broadly, the breadth of the internet, not the reach of the postal service, is the limitation. But we could conceive of this much more capaciously. Imagine sending a letter to a concept rather than an individual and geographical location. Perhaps then we could actually witness our conceptual and epistemic spaces in the network of these letters. There is a beautiful body of research already that is pioneering the study of epistemic spaces (see, for instance, Ju et al., [2022].
The potential for network science to bring new insight given a New Republic of Letters is immense. We can ask questions like, "What is a healthy online exchange of information?"; "Can we witness healthy idea flow in networks of communication and how might we foster more healthy idea flow?"; "What are the conditions under which flourishing knowledge commons emerge?"
To the republic we must bring network and data science, attempts to understand the information exchange and to extract principles for better social media, for better gathering in the digital environment.
The brilliance of the letters is that they are a medium for subjectivities to meet one another. They are a medium steeped in the tradition of John Stuart Mills that one only grows by exposing oneself to ideas not one’s own, where one openly engages with another view point. The Republic of Letters was a critical and unexampled scaling up of the power of the letter during a time of cultural and scientific foment. Only with the distance of time and the tools of network science are we able to understand the importance of the Republic. With that understanding in hand, what characteristics might it suggest for a New Republic of Letters? In shaping the idea of the New Republic, these four may be a guide:
Slowness. Our individual sensemaking does not move at the speed of the technologies we now use, and our collective sensemaking moves even more slowly. Must we somehow slow down the technologies to meet the pace of encountering ourselves and one another? The slowness of writing by hand has always changed the way that I relate to my own thoughts. It seems the epistolary form affects that same slowing down for the way we relate to one another's thoughts, with the added dimension of physically sending and receiving the missive. Something different is cultivated in this meaningful slowing down, a meaningful opening up.
Willingness to hold ambiguity. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.' The social media and online gathering places that are most readily available to us feel overtly declarative, certain; places of deigning to the loud and most outraged. It is unclear to me what this might imply about a new platform, but what it does make clear is that the conversation must instead center on questions. Can we design something so that we can think in questions together? How we might do that remains an open question. Here I will look to places like The Civil Conversations Project and the intellectual history of conflict resolution and peacekeeping for inspiration, guidance, and relationship.
Kindness and compassion. The spirit of these letters and this Republic must be one of intellectual and spiritual friendship. Perhaps this emerges first from cultivating curiosity. Already a part of the Flourishing Commons community are individuals doing frontier thinking about changing the way we teach and make sense in which compassion is a core value. Sara Hendren (
; The Sketch Model) and Mette Boell (The Compassion Systems Framework), along with others who this network might discover, will be guides and luminaries. This will be a community unafraid to bring science and spirituality together, and compassion will be a meeting place.Connection and relationality. Of course, all of this is about connection. These letters and whatever platform we design for them must not cheapen our human connection, that most beautiful and natural foundation of a life, but instead celebrate and expand it. Danielle Allen suggests that we must, 'Replenish news deserts and connect it to alternative civic forms of connection and collaboration to consume the news together in healthy relationality.' This Republic could be that. It could also be many other things like a place to write down what you're thinking, to practice the perfection of listening, to sound the questions that you are living across society. Perhaps it becomes a modern realization of the connection former instances of the public square served. The original Republic of Letters may have been the original global public square.
Descriptive. Finally, it must be conductive to bringing network analysis to better understand the structures, geometries, evolution, and health of our connections. With it we want to bring scientific analyses to the public square to understand the quality of our interactions and idea flow, ultimately revealing healthy and unhealthy relationality, advising about meaningful forms of collective sensemaking and building collective intelligence, and becoming a playground for designing online exchange that is constructive of the social media of the future. Perhaps it can rescue the public square from the mindlessness and downward spiral of economies-of-attention-driven social media and online gathering made available to us today.
But this is merely a vision. We need collectivity and discourse to create a flourishing New Republic of Letters. Where will we create this? What will it look like? I suggest is begins with the ongoing salon series "The Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy," which we have written about here. These letters are what those gatherings need. A way to write together in public. A way to bring energizing live interactions (in-person or on zoom) to new mediums, cultivating sustained, healthy, generative exchange. A way to think critically, openly, vulnerably, slowly about the issues in our society. Part of that exchange is our live virtual salons, which will continue. But that is not enough. We need digital spaces to support trans-medium, multiscale, sustained idea flow. We will be bringing this idea of a new republic of letters in from the margins of awareness during our upcoming salons.
If you subscribe to these newsletters you will be invited to the salons and can be a voice in the conversation. The strength of the ideas that emerge about how to do this will depend on the plurality of voices. Please join us.