A proposal to resurrect the Republic of Letters

I propose resurrecting the old-time Republic of Letters to encourage more thoughtful writing.

“The Republic of Letters was the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment.” – wikipedia

Many names you’ll recognize were participants in the Republic of Letters. For example, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, perhaps the last true polymath, wrote tens of thousands of letters.

A great deal of important thinking was done through such correspondence. For example, Leibnitz and Samuel Clarke exchanged five letters apiece as they refined differing positions on Newtonian mechanics. (There would have been more, but Leibnitz died.) You can read them in Clark’s 1717 book, A Collection of Papers, Which passed between the late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke, In the Years 1715 and 1716.

Was the Republic of Letters so fantastically successful because the authors lucked out by being alive at the beginning of the modern age, when there was so much low-hanging fruit to harvest? Or was there something about the affordances “In design, affordance […] refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.” – wikipedia My claim is that the ancient letter-writing infrastructure nudged people away from unproductive activities (shitposting, snark) toward productive ones (inventing calculus).of that particular form of communication that fertilized creativity? I suspect so.

Given that I’m unhappy with all the modern varieties of “collective sense-making” available to us now, perhaps an experimental revival is in order.

I haven’t researched the topic deeply yet, I have two books on order: The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment, Dena Goodman, and Impolite learning: conduct and community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750, Goldgar.but I’m struck by some likely-important factors:

• Letters took a long time to get to their recipient (how long, on average, I don’t know yet). This removes the pressure on the recipient to reply promptly – the sender isn’t waiting on you.

• Perhaps as a result, letters are fleshed out. Dr. Clarke’s fifth reply starts as follows:

  As Multitudes of Words are neither an Argument of clear Ideas in the Writer, nor a proper means of conveying clear Notions to the Reader; I shall endeavour to give a distinct Answer to this Fifth Paper, as briefly as I can.

  You can see what “briefly” means by clicking the link above. He’s being thorough. (To be fair, the ancients had very different ideas of brevity than we do.)

• (I think) replies were more in the nature of blog posts inspired by the sender than quoting little bits of the letter and then addressing each as a separate unit, making for no kind of coherence. (The dreaded “fisking" Fisking: “A rebuttal to an article or blog made by quoting its content in sections and refuting each section individually.”that originated in email replies and polluted the “blogosphere" “The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community.” – wikipedia back in the day.)

• The letters weren’t broadcast, they were person to person. That’s not to say copies weren’t made. I expect letter senders kept copies (especially if they employed clerks to make fair copies of the letters) and I believe it was not uncommon to attach a copy of a letter from person X in a letter to person Y.

  I think there’s a difference between personal communication and a broadcast medium like a blog because a personal communication encourages a thoughtful response, whereas blog comments encourage off-the-cuff, underthought remarks – often with the clickbait snark that typifies our corrupt age.

So here’s what I imagine.

1. I write an email to you, but I send it to republic@ofletters.net. The body of the text begins with “Esteemed email@example.com”.

2. An app of some sort will download such letters and assign them a randomly-generated delivery date.

3. On that date, the letter is sent to you. (I’m inclined to ignore the original Subject in favor of “Republic of Letters: Missive from sender@example.com”, with the original subject tossed into the body of the letter. Closer to what I imagine would be Leibnitz’s experience getting a letter from Clark.

4. That’s all. No archiving, for example. Future historians will have to grovel through a modern Leibnitz’s email folders, just like today.

I think this would be simple to implement, using Fastmail to handle that email address, just as it does marick@exampler.com.

This actually doesn’t need an app at all. It could just be implemented by adapting a convention of a recognizable Subject and a promise by everyone to roll a die and not read the email for that number of days. Maybe that would work just as well.

What do you think? It would be most appropriate to comment by sending me mail to marick@exampler.com.