Occasional Address - Australian Catholic University - Spring Graduation Ceremony
OCCASIONAL ADDRESS
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
SPRING GRADUATION CEREMONY
BY THE HONOURABLE J J SPIGELMAN AC
CHIEF JUSTICE OF NEW SOUTH WALES
SYDNEY, 4 OCTOBER 2006
Today is an important anniversary. On 4 October 1582, Pope Gregory XIII implemented the Gregorian calendar. Accordingly, in nations such as Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain, 4 October was immediately followed by 15 October. We have become accustomed to rapid change over recent decades, but nothing quite as dramatic as that.
I grew up in a country in which the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, was able to travel to England for six weeks by boat with the Australian cricket team, stay for a month or so watching cricket and then return, taking another six weeks to do so. Such conduct is inconceivable today.
I hold the belief, which many of you probably regard as illusory, that this was not that long ago. The technological changes over this period have been extraordinary and are continuing. For many years, all aspects of Australian life was dominated by what was aptly described as the tyranny of distance. In some respects we have substituted the tyranny of distance with the tyranny of immediacy. This tyranny, at least, we share with everyone else.
All aspects of life have speeded up. Olympic sports like luge, cycling and canoeing are now measured in milliseconds. Other sports have changed their rules or reinvented themselves to provide a “fast-food” alternative. One thinks of the introduction of tie breakers in tennis. Sir Robert Menzies would never have approved of one-day cricket.
Anyone using contemporary telecommunications or computer technology has experienced a curious phenomenon: a sense that a particular delay in some processing functions was quite intolerable, even though that length of delay was perfectly acceptable, indeed regarded as miraculous, only a year before.
Where we once spoke of words per minute, we now speak of characters per second. One can buy telephone answering machines with a quick replay button – in a digital format, so that the replay is accelerated without the high pitch of a Disneyfied chipmunk. In Tokyo there is a restaurant which charges by time. You clock in, you clock out and your bill is computed at a certain number of yen per minute.
Indeed it is necessary for us to create the illusion that we are saving time, even when we cannot do so. On most elevators, the “door close” button is in fact a placebo. It has no function other than to placate those who measure their life in seconds.
Every discipline and profession has been transformed over recent decades by information and communication technology. The practice of law is in large measure an information retrieval business and the new technology has revolutionary implications for it. Electronic communications and the accessibility of legal information online is the most dramatic technical change in my legal lifetime. Yours is the first generation to have been brought up with computers and mobile phones and to regard the internet as a fact of life, rather than as a miracle. The transformation has really only just begun.
There are some who doubt, even those who fear, the implications of the internet, particularly insofar as it may threaten traditional mechanisms of publication in print form. There is nothing new in this. The previous great revolution in communication, the invention of printing, was greeted with the same doubts and fears.
Before the upstart entrepreneur and goldsmith turned printer, Johann Gutenberg, transformed publishing, it had been conducted for millennia by scribes who, in Europe, were controlled by the Church. A limited form of mass production was able to be achieved in large scriptoria contained in monasteries. Printing was clearly a threat to this business.
As Filippo di Strata, a Dominican friar from the convent of San Cipriano in Murano, an island of Venice, proclaimed in the late 15th century:
“The world has got along perfectly well for 6,000 years without printing and has no need to change now.”[1]
Unlike scribes, persons who were involved in printing were crude and untutored – frequently German interlopers taking work from Italian scribes. Fra Filippo thought that they vulgarised intellectual life, did not really understand what they were doing, made spelling mistakes and typographical errors. The great educational value of having to write things out in long hand, at a pace which enabled a monk to absorb and contemplate the text, was being lost in the speed of the printing process.
What was worse, printers produced enormous quantities of books. Fra Filippo complained that it was hardly possible to walk down the streets of Venice without having armfuls of books thrust at you “like cats in a bag” for two or three coppers. An early form of information overload.
Lascivious Roman love poetry, such as the works of Ovid, were titillating the young and impressionable. Most significant, however, was the threat to the authority of religion. Cheap printed versions of the Bible, distorting what Fra Filippo saw to be the subtlety of the Latin text, were now becoming available to individuals without the intermediation of a priest.
This same process is underway today. A good example is the study of the hundreds of crypto Catholic websites devoted to the Virgin Mary, which operate without any supervision by the Church and consist of a range of cults proclaiming miracles and wonders. They overlap imperceptibly into New Age sites[2].
We must all now face the problem of information affluence. How can each of us make our way through this extraordinary profusion of available information, so that we can make the most effective use of our talent and our time. Each of us must develop our own self-consciously determined process of selection, otherwise mere chance will determine what we learn and what we do. I speak as one who wishes to remain in control of my own intellectual development.
The scale of the problem can be represented by one figure. If you search the words “information overload” on Google, as I did yesterday, you get 3,180,000 hits. That has a certain self-satirical quality. It does, however, reflect the broader problem, which has been called “data asphyxiation”.
On this occasion, I thought I might tell you how I have come to deal with the burden of information overload. It is not a coping mechanism that will suit everyone, but some of you may find it useful. A maxim I have found compelling is: Live as if you will die tomorrow, but read as if you will live forever. An insight that I have found useful in my own journey is that if you try to learn too much, you may end up learning nothing.
I decided long ago that if I kept reading as widely as I had been, and in an unsystematic fashion, I would acquire a lot of information in the short-term, but the depth of my understanding of anything would not improve.
My technique for adapting to information overload was to choose one area of intellectual inquiry about which I could read in-depth, preferably an area not directly connected to my daily activities.
I first chose the history of western Shanghai. This was the early eighties when China was still a totalitarian State and the possibility of the extraordinary change in the People’s Republic, and the re-emergence of Shanghai as a major international city, was not within the realms of contemplation. That project ceased after a few years when I realised that I really couldn’t do it properly unless I learned how to read Chinese. That, at the time, seemed a daunting project albeit, in retrospect, I wish I had had the courage to proceed. Nevertheless, last month, at the invitation of Warrane College to choose whatever topic I wished for the annual Warrane Lecture, I was able to dust off and deliver the first few chapters of the draft I had prepared twenty years ago.
When I abandoned the Shanghai project, the substitute was far removed in time and place. I read in depth into medieval history, concentrating on the life of Thomas Becket. This was a subject on which I was tolerably confident that there were no new documents to be discovered. My schoolboy Latin was probably enough. Becket had attracted a large, but finite and apparently manageable, body of historical writing.
This became my intellectual hobby. It was a disciplined way of organising my ignorance. It had a purpose and a finite end. Instead of acquiring a glib understanding on a wide variety of subjects, I could come to understand a particular subject in-depth and eventually, perhaps, write about it. My overseas travel acquired a purpose. There were places to be visited, such as Canterbury itself. In those pre-Amazon days, books had to be discovered, often by chance, in second hand bookshops. I recall well the thrill of finding a definitive biography in a Paris bookshop of the contemporary French king, Louis VII. I did not experience anything like the same sensation when, in order to check whether this was still the definitive biography in french, I conducted a thirty second check on Amazon France, to find that it was.
Eventually I was able to organise this research in the form of a draft during a sabbatical I gave myself from the Sydney bar in 1992. Nothing more was done until 1999, when I was asked to address the St Thomas More Society.
Over the course of five years, this little obsession transformed itself into a series of lectures to the Society on the life and death of Thomas Becket and his relationship with Henry II. It has been a wonderful journey and when the lectures were published last year by the Society as a book, this journey was over.
In 2003, when I finally killed Becket, I began the search for another intellectual hobby. I have now signed up for another five years of lectures with the St Thomas More Society to cover the conflict amongst the great lawyers of late Elizabethan and Jacobean times, roughly from 1590 to 1620. These lectures will cover the interaction of Francis Bacon, Sir Edward Coke and Lord Ellesmere, against the background of one of the most significant transitional periods in British history. The first lecture will be delivered next month. As with the Becket project, I will be engaged with Catholic martyrdom. However, on this occasion, having jumped four centuries, there will be Protestant martyrs too.
This has been part of my journey. I thank the Australian Catholic University for the recognition you have given me by this award of an honorary doctorate. It is awarded for my services to the law. I indulge the conceit that my work on Becket could have entitled me to a real doctorate. In my own mind I will privately extend your testamur to cover it.
I congratulate each of you on your graduation and wish you well on your journey.
END NOTES
- This and the following quotations are from Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship In Renaissance Venice, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1979 at pp26-35; and Vernon J Hibbetts “Yesterday Once More: Sceptics, Scribes and the Demise of Law Reviews”, 1996, 30 Akron L. Rev 267 at 268-271.
- See Paolo Apolito The Internet and the Madonna University of Chicago Press, 2005.
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