The Saunterer

The injustice of using the willingness-to-pay method to put a value on wilderness areas

    According to a U. S. Forest Service resource economist quoted in Science Findings, PNW Research Station, U.S. Forest Service, October 2005:

If something isn’t bought or sold – if it doesn’t have an explicit price – then its value is effectively assumed to be zero or some fixed amount.

    Jupiter, not ever bought or sold, apparently has little value. Yet take Jupiter out of the solar system and comets will bombard Earth.

    The quoted economist practices what is called nonmarket valuation. As part of his research, 3,000 willingness-to-pay survey packets were sent to Oregonians. He explains:

The survey examined the public’s willingness to pay for alternative biodiversity conservation policies and compared this to their willingness to pay for traditional social policies, like roads and schools.

    Is asking 3,000 people their opinions, which they give half-heartedly between breaks in TV shows and the like, a responsible way to gather information that could result in wilderness being developed and lost forever?

    Opposing the willingness-to-pay method are John Muir naturalists - people with John Muir’s beliefs, as extracted from his collected writings and applied to today. I have spoken for them in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.158:

John Muir naturalists protest that the economist’s willingness-to-pay method is an improper gauge of the worth of nature. Using this method, economists find that the public spends more for tickets to football games than for preserving wilderness and species. And in canvassing people, asking how much they would consider contributing to a program to protect so many wild acres, most say they would give little or nothing.

Very well. Who puts van Gogh’s The Starry Night up for auction before a roomful of people blind from birth, and concludes that the winning two-dollar bid represents its value? Who reasons that because wilderness and species whisper unassertively, enticing few to open their pocketbooks to save them from eradication, such things are inconsiderable? How much a person will pay is, John Muir knew, a measure of what feels good, not usually of what is good. Most everyone will pay to appease their hunger for immediate entertainment. Goodness, especially of the long run, doesn’t sell on merit.

Materialists . . . liking what they know, longtime followers of the primrose path, are asked how much they would pay regarding a spiritual future whose rightness for them and posterity they have yet to put themselves in position to know, and cannot until they school their hearts and minds in nature and the arts, and deepen into genuinely rational man. 

Samuel Butler’s idea for teaching people how to do great things

    Samuel Butler’s idea for teaching people how to do great things is the following (as quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 264): All men can do great things, if they know what great things are.

    The idea is germane to educating graduate students, if modified to: “Graduate students can do great things, once they are shown what great things are.” To this end, why not do away with university research seminars? They expose graduate students to medium standards; the seminars are invariably given by resident professors reporting average research. Instead of local greatness, wouldn’t it be better to expose students to global greatness? Wouldn’t it be better to saturate them with the best science, as published in the best science journals? It is hard to imagine a more effective way of raising them to do great research.
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    For a brief biography of Samuel Butler, click here.

Earl Nightingale’s method for improving one’s writing

     Quite a few years ago, driving from Uniontown to Pittsburgh, on the car radio we heard Earl Nightingale tell of the method he followed to improve his writing. The method is along the lines of the method followed in the Kano school of Japanese painters to inculcate standards of skill into pupils (explained in this weblog’s March 24, 2006 entry). The method is this: slowly and attentively, every day and for years, copy passages written by great writers.   

    We’re now confirmed in the habit, having copied thousands of passages, about a million words. It has inculcated into us a high standard of writing, showing us what is humanly possible. Though oftentimes we cannot achieve the standard, we try harder and longer because of it, and our writing is better for it.
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For a brief biography of Earl Nightingale, click here.

Hamilton Wright Mabie on how to inculcate professional standards into pupils

  There is a way to inculcate professional standards into pupils. It is, according to Hamilton Wright Mabie, to follow the method of the Kano school of Japanese painters. About it Mabie says the following in his book, Essays on Work and Culture (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898):

The course of study in a Kano school covered at least ten years, and the average age of graduation was thirty. The rules of conduct were rigid; the manner of life simple to the point of bareness; the discipline of work severe and unbroken. During the first year and a half of study the pupil devoted his entire time to copying certain famous works in the possession of the school; making, in the first instance, a copy from the picture set before him, and then reproducing his own copy again and again until every stroke and detail was thoroughly comprehended and mastered. In the course of eighteen months sixty pictures were studied with this searching thoroughness; the secrets of skill in each were uncovered, the sources of beauty or power discerned; and the eye and hand of the pupil gained intelligence, quickness, penetration. Month after month passed in what seemed to be a monotony of mechanical imitation; but in this arduous and literal reproduction of the skill of others was laid the sure foundations of individual skill. This devout attention to methods secured for a considerable number of men a technical expertness for which we look, as a rule, only in the work of the greatest artists. The result of this training was not mechanical skill, but truth and freshness of observation. The signature of the artist in question reveals not imitative but an original nature, not a faculty absorbed in accuracy but in passion for expression: “Hokusai, the Old Man Crazy about Painting.”

The arduous patience of these Oriental students of painting bore its fruit in a tradition of skill which was in itself an immense stimulus to the aspiring and ambitious; it established standards of craftsmanship which made the possession of expert knowledge a necessity on the part of every one who seriously attempted to practice the art. Mr. La Farge comments upon the level of superior artistic culture which these Japanese artists had attained. They had advanced their common skill so far that a superior man began at a great height of attainment, and was compelled to exhibit power of a very rare order before he could claim any kind of prominence among his fellows.

The establishment of such a standard in any art, profession, or occupation has the immense educational value of making clear to the student, at the very beginning of his career, the prime importance of mastering in detail every part of the work which he has undertaken to do. There is no place in the modern working world for the sloven, the indifferent, or the unskilled; no one can hope for any genuine success who fails to give himself the most thorough technical preparation, the most complete special education. Good intentions go for nothing, and industry is thrown away, if one cannot infuse a high degree of skill into his work. The man of medium skill depends upon fortunate conditions for success; he cannot command it, nor can he keep it. In the fierce competition of the day the trained man has all the advantages on his side; the untrained man invites all the tragic possibilities of industrial and economic failure. He is always at the mercy of conditions. To know every detail, to gain an insight into every secret, to learn every method, to secure every kind of skill, are the prime necessities of success in any art, craft, or trade. No time is too long, no study too hard, no discipline too severe for the attainment of complete familiarity with one’s work and complete ease and skill in the doing of it. As a man values his working life, he must be willing to pay the highest price of success in it, - the price which severe training extracts.
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    For information about the Kano school of Japanese painters, click here.
    For a sketch of Hamilton Wright Mabie’s career and his works, click here.

Katherine Anne Porter on how to know when you are ready to publish your writing

    Katherine Anne Porter cast the prerequisites for being ready to publish in terms of negatives:   

I think it is the most curious lack of judgment to publish before you are ready. If there are echoes of other people in your work, you’re not ready. If anybody has to help you rewrite your story, you’re not ready. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 199.)
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    For a brief biography of Katherine Anne Porter, click here.

Alfred North Whitehead on the horrible burden of inert ideas

    In his book, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Alfred North Whitehead writes about the harm of educating with inert ideas:

. . . inert ideas, that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised or tested or thrown into fresh combinations. . . . Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is, above all things, harmful. . . . except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment, education in the past has been radically infected with inert ideas. That is why uneducated clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible burden of inert ideas.
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    For a brief biography of Alfred North Whitehead, click here.

Albert Einstein on the dangers of zealous patriotism, and its apparent causes

    To Albert Einstein, zealous patriotism was to be despised:

That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. . . . Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them! . . . My opinion of the human race is high enough that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 226.)

Samuel Butler on working to please others versus working to be admired

    Samuel Butler laid this proposition:

The question is what is the amateur an amateur of? What is he really in love with? Is he in love with other people, thinking he sees something which he would like to show them, which he feels sure they would enjoy if they could only see it as he does, which he is therefore trying as best he can to put before the few nice people whom he knows? If this is his position he can do no wrong, the spirit in which he works will ensure that his defects will be only as bad spelling or bad grammar in some pretty saying of a child. If, on the other hand, he is playing for social success and to get a reputation for being clever, then no matter how dexterous his work may be, it is but another mode of the speaking with the tongues of men and angels without charity; it is sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 1993.)
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    For a brief biography of Samuel Butler, click here.

Victor Weisskopf on what has led our culture to become increasingly shallow

    Victor F. Weisskopf put it down to people not feeling a deep commitment to a great cause beyond their own personal interest:

The lack of awareness of sense and purpose has led culture to become increasingly shallow. When the most important needs have been provided for, the content of life may amount to no more than a desire for entertainment or pleasure. In the extreme, the lack of a sense of meaning of life may lead to such excesses as the use of drugs. The damage to our society by drugs, with all their terrible consequences, is more threatening today than the receding danger of nuclear war. . . . What is missing in too many individuals is a feeling of deep commitment to a great cause beyond our own personal interest – a cause whose value is never questioned. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 332.)
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    For a brief biography of Victor F. Weisskopf, click here.

Georgia O’Keeffe on the need to love something alive and beautiful

    In a letter to a correspondent, Georgia O’Keeffe remarked about the need to love something alive and beautiful:

My Kitten Cat is lovelier than ever - Maybe I love her too much - Maybe it is something in me that I have to spend on something alive that is beautiful to me. I am quite amused with my love - For her - and I like her being so sure that I like her - her certainty is one of the nicest things about her. (Quoted from Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, Roxana Robinson, p. 397.)

    Too, she has put her finger on one of the great subtle elements of love: the one you love being unquestionably sure of your love.