A supernatural struggle over The Details

And what it says about how we imagine labour.

Topic: philology
Thesis: the devil superseded God in the phrase “The devil is in the details” as society’s response to the pernicious promise of automation.

The expression “The devil is in the details” has a curious doppelgänger. The phrase seems to have come into use in the 1960s [wiki], but only by the lightest adaptation of an earlier one: “God is in the details”.

What happened here? Have God and Lucifer been locked in a celestial struggle over humanity’s details? How did Lucifer gain the upper hand?

The history of these intertwined phrases has been a thorn in the side of historians of aphorism. “God is in the details” is attributed to many people, but most credibly to the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies van der Rohe’s architectural style was minimalist and modernist; it’s therefore likely that his idea of “details” lay not in ornamentation, but perhaps in the subtle aspects of how parts of a design fit together.

Mies van der Rohe himself may have been channeling Flaubert, who is believed to have said “The good God is in the detail” (“Le bon Dieu est dans le détail”). Strangely, despite how often the phrase is traced to Flaubert, no direct source in any of Flaubert’s letters or writings is available on the internet. (No, not even the French internet.) So, the best I can do is split the difference and say that the phrase probably has a longer history, perhaps more in speech than in print.

What about the devil’s part? The history of “The devil’s in the details”, though shorter, is similarly murky. According to Google Books, the first renderings in print appear in 1965. [UPDATE: as /r/seismech on Reddit uncovered, this date is not quite accurate; it’s probably a smidge earlier, either 1963 or 1964. link] It quickly exploded in popularity, dwarfing its counterpart.

(Interestingly, the German corpus has both versions of the expression too. In Germany, the devil enters the picture a little earlier, in 1951. The version with God is much more popular than its English counterpart and its use endures to the present. The year that “Der Teufel [the devil] steckt im Detail” overtakes “Gott [God] steckt im Detail” is 1965, just a smidge after “The devil is in the details” first appears in print in English. [Google Books])

What do these phrases actually mean? As best I can discern, in both cases we’re talking about the details of a design, a plan, or a task. “The devil’s in the details” is voiced as a warning, usually come too late, about the tendency of seemingly insignificant unanswered questions to blow up in importance and sabotage the whole works.

“Dammit Billy, why didn’t you tie down the two-by-fours?”
Billy shrugs. “The devil’s in the details, I guess.”

“God is in the details” is not quite the opposite. Rather than details creating unexpected splendour and glory, it is used more as a reminder to pay attention to details, to approach them with pious care and humility. This gels well with Mies van der Rohe’s architectural philosophy. He thought the role of architecture was to create spaces that silently and implicitly empowered the humans within them, rather than being objects of attention in themselves. The connotation of humility would therefore have been important to him.

We can see that the distinction between these phrases is much more subtle than it first appears. Both are talking about the same thing: the consequences of skimming over details without giving them proper care. But the more popular phrase characterizes these consequences as diabolical sabotage; the less popular and earlier one sees them as, more or less, the wages of sin.

Even if the phrase “God is in the details” has fallen out of favour, the underlying sentiment lives on. We talk about the benefits of fully embracing the details of a task, giving those details our full attention, rather than holding back out of resentment that the work should have hidden complexities. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was an influential book in this regard: even now, when we talk about the “Zen” of some activity, we’re usually using it in the author’s sense, the sense of becoming absorbed in the details instead of resenting them.

A similar idea is encapsulated in the concept of “flow state”. In flow state, the details of the task that seem, from a distance, like mere nuisances transfigure into the very stuff of life: the hooks that link the human to their process and make the distinction between doer and done-to seem to fall away, leading to better work.

One might be able to pin the decline of “God is in the details” on the rising secularism of our culture. It’s a truism that, even as faith in God has faded, belief in the devil has held on. But there could be another explanation.

I suggest it’s not a coincidence that it was in the 1960s that the Devil won this lexical turf war, just as computerization was beginning to work its way into broad bureaucracy and industry. Possibly the essential benefit of computerization is that it allows us to abstract tasks away: we define the inputs and what we do to those inputs, and then we give those instructions to a machine that can carry them out millions of times a second, without error and without fatigue.

At this point, from the human viewpoint, the tasks are no longer tasks: they’re consequences. At the push of a button they can now occur unsupervised, along with other abstracted tasks, in a cascade of any length. In theory, this frees up our minds to focus on other things—indeed, even to focus on nothing at all, safe in the knowledge that our former tasks are insured, crystallized in silico, no longer being done but simply occurring with the mechanical certainty of a pendulum. Our modern age is founded on this confidence.

Yet by the portents and shadows that flit about in our peripheral vision, it dawns on us that we have made a Faustian bargain. Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Overflow, wrote in 2002 [link] about “leaky abstractions”. Programmers try to translate human needs into transformations of bits, but this translation requires more than one layer of abstraction. First we need to figure out how bits can describe data, then how bits can describe actions on other bits, then how to use those actions to do recognizably human tasks like balancing a budget.

All these layers of abstraction create new possible points of failure that are impossible to understand from the point of view of the abstraction. In order to understand the failure, it is necessary to drill down layer by layer, until one finds the lower-order structure that is not doing what it’s supposed to according to its role in the abstraction. This is basically what programmers mean by the term “bug”.

What is the difference, in parable, between “a bug” and “a devil”?

Abstraction, if we buy into it uncritically, pits us against the details. It enlists details into a fifth column against us. While we’re busy reaching for the sky with crystal spires in the higher-order world we’ve created, abstractions spring leaks somewhere far below; and before we know it, our palaces are toppling. Cussing and frothing, in search of the cause we comb through ancient manuals written when the world was young and the foundations far below were all we had.

The promise of abstraction, and with it automation, led to a cultural shift with effects far beyond the world of programming. Increasingly over the years, the idea of pushing complexity away from ourselves has become the norm: whether to offshore IT offices, cloud storage, or securities made of bundled-up subprime mortgages.

In return for this peace of mind, the capacity grows and grows for strange failures at midnight, emanating from somewhere deep inside the many-layered machine. But rather than lamenting the devils that haunt us, we may take another path. We may practice a healthy skepticism of anything that promises to take complexity out of our lives. We may accept the risk of a leak in the abstractions as a natural consequence of the world humanity has built with computerization. And when the devil, or God, from the dark realm of the details exacts vengeance for our collective hubris, we can grip flashlights in our teeth and descend, wide-eyed and alert, in search of his lesson.