The Saunterer

Barbara W. Tuchman on wooden-heads

    Barbara Tuchman centers her book, The March of Folly, on what she calls “the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.” Inevitably the pursuit leads to folly, and she traces much of its cause to a character defect of government decision makers (virtually all of them males), which she calls wooden-headedness. As she tells it:

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian’s statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.” (Quoted from The March of Folly, by Barbara W. Tuchman, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. )

    Starting with Troy and ending with Vietnam, her book presents the march of folly in wars. Had she lived another twenty years she could have included Iraq. Yet, our Sauntering interest in her remark is less about wooden-heads who, of self-interest, start and won’t quit wars. It’s far more about the numerous percentage of wooden-heads at all levels of all governments, from city councils to those bureaucracies that make decisions about nature’s land, water, and animals.

        For a brief biography of Barbara Tuchman, click here.

M. Carey Thomas’s greatest hope and ambition

    A young M. Carey Thomas, later to educate herself and become a pioneer in women’s education and president of Bryn Mawr College, wrote this in her journal:

An English man Joseph Beck was here to dinner the other day and he don’t believe in the Education of Women. Neither does Cousin Frank King and my such a disgusson as they had. Mother of course was for. They said that they didn’t see any good of a womans learning Latin or Greek it didn’t make any more entertaining to their husbands. A woman had plenty of other things to do sewing, cooking taking care of children dressing and flirting. “What noble elevating things for a whole life time to be occupied with.” In fact they talked as if the whole end and aim of a woman’s life was to get married and when she attained that greatest state of earthly bliss it was her duty to amuse her husband and to learn nothing; never to exercise the powers of her mind so that he might have the exquisite pleasure of knowing more than his wife. . . . [They meant women] ought to be mere dolls for men to be amused with, to kiss, fondle, pet and love maybe, but as for associating with them on terms of equality they wouldn’t think of such a thing. . . . I got perfectly enraged. How unjust - how narrow-minded - how utterly uncomprehensible to deny that women ought to be educated and worse than all to deny that they have equal powers of mind. If I ever live and grow up my one aim and consentrated purpose shall be and is to show that a woman can learn can reason can compete with men in the grand fields. . . . My greatest hope and ambition is to be an author, an essayist, an historian, to write hearty earnest true books that may do their part towards elevating the human race towards inducing some, at least, to let their money bags on which they are wasting such a wealth of hope and desire and intellect drop from their hands and aim at something higher than merely providing for our miserable earthly exhistance, to look higher than the miserable disappointments of every day life and . . . [live on] their duty to their fellow men. In the words of Longfellow

“When departing leave behind me
Footprints on the sands of time
Footprints that perhaps another sailing
on lifes dreary main
A forlorn a shiprecked brother
Seeing may take heart again.”

It seems to me that is a purpose worth striving after. Oh may it not be only a purpose. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 217.)

    For a brief biography of M. Carey Thomas, click here.