The Saunterer

Thomas Henry Huxley sees through the Economic Emperor’s clothes

    Here is what Huxley said:

There is a well-worn adage that those who set out upon a great enterprise would do well to count the cost. I am not sure that this is always true. I think that some of the very greatest enterprises in this world have been carried out successfully simply because the people who undertook them did not count the cost; and I am much of the opinion that, in this very case, the most instructive consideration for us is the cost of doing nothing. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 305.)

    The Art Institute of Chicago is one of the very greatest enterprises in the world. Those running it treat economics in the least meaning of the word.
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    For a brief biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, click here.

Utah Senator Bob Bennett on government funding for remote Amtrak routes

    Sense to Utah Senator Bob Bennett means just one thing: financial sense. Here he is explaining why he’ll vote to cut Amtrak’s funding this year:

Rail passenger service across very large numbers of miles between cities that don't naturally connect to each other simply doesn't make sense. . . . [People’s reasons for keeping Amtrak’s remote routes] all come down to nostalgia for the rail service that we all knew when we were young.

    For noneconomic and non-nostalgic reasons, I have for the last several years ridden Amtrak's California Zephyr from Salt Lake City to Chicago. The trip creates the tenor for getting the most from a day in The Art Institute of Chicago. From Chicago I go by Amtrak to Pittsburgh and other museums. My reasons for choosing Amtrak:

    The social reason. The round trip gives me an appreciation of the lives of thirty people I dine with. Today I remember a number of them and have corresponded with several.

    The geography reason. In my private compartment, I read and watch the passing countryside, free of billboards and strip malls, the America that nine of ten Americans have never seen.

    The “conducive to reflecting on life” reason. If I just wanted to be in another city I would fly there. I want the slow pace, conducive to reflecting on life, that comes with rail travel.

    Also generally lost sight of, Amtrak serves riders who are too large to fit in airplane seats, have health needs best met by a private compartment, or are so afraid to fly they won’t. And if terrorists ever halt air travel, the nation will value the option Amtrak provides.

    Unscheduled delays are common; the passengers don’t care. Time isn’t money inside the Zephyr.

    Does a life that everywhere has to make financial sense deserve to be called life?

Charlie Chaplin on teachers using salesmanship

    Charlie Chaplin has the following passage in his autobiography:

If only someone had used salesmanship, had read a stimulating preface to each study that could have titillated my mind, infused me with fancy instead of facts, amused and intrigued me with the legerdemain of numbers, romanticised maps, given me a point of view about history and taught me the music of poetry, I might have become a scholar. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 211.)

    Wouldn’t that have been a shame. On the other hand, in general, . . .

    Reader, think back. Have you had any teachers like this? If yes, do you now believe it mattered to what you have become?

Primo Levi on the formative value of manual work

    Chemical substances that were once analyzed manually are now analyzed with machines. Apart from gains in efficiency brought by automation, Primo Levi saw one area of loss:

Another virtue that the chemist’s trade develops is patience, not to be in a hurry. Today chemistry is completely changed; it is rapid chemistry. Today the analysis of a mineral is no longer manual. It is done by machine and takes a few minutes, where before it took weeks. Naturally, it was inconvenient having to work a whole week to analyze the mineral, but this made it possible to develop other virtues, which in fact are those of perseverance, not getting discouraged, assiduous application. . . . It is clear that from a practical point of view a machine-made analysis is more convenient. But manual analysis, like all manual work, has a formative value; it is too similar to our origins as mammals to be neglected. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.216.)

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For a biographical sketch of Primo Levi, click here .

Guns don't kill people; people kill people

      It’s true. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Bulldozers aren’t ripping up Cache valley, Utah; people are ripping up Cache valley, Utah. Bob’s credit cards didn’t bankrupt Bob; Bob bankrupted Bob.

    People are a means of affecting people and nature. And people will be more affecting as they gain means that are more facilitating. Guns are facilitating means. Bulldozers are facilitating means. Credit cards are facilitating means.

    What brought on this post is that in the midst of Sauntering through Act IV, ii, of Shakespeare’s play, King John, our eyes fell on these lines of King John speaking to Hubert:

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds / Makes deeds ill done!

    Suppose we take facilitating means to the limit: suppose anyone in the world could kill anyone else simply by wishing the person dead. The car in front cuts us off: wish him dead. The professor gives us a D; wish her dead. Would people deny themselves the use of death by wish? Or would the census figures plummet as the Golden Rule crumbles?

    Or suppose the day the Saunterer dreads comes, when the headline reads, “Cheap method of getting unlimited energy from water by hydrogen fusion is invented.”

    Facilitating means are not categorically a good thing. Can you think of any you wouldn’t want invented?

    How often does progress in facilitating means bring progress in the ends of living? Our answer to this vacillates, dipping every time we see a student using a cellphone.

    Won’t progress in facilitating means bring restrictions, laws limiting personal freedom?

    We Saunter out of this post with Henry David Thoreau’s line (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 320):

Thank God man cannot lay waste the heavens as he has the earth!

Dorothy L. Sayers on how real life problems differ from detective story problems

    In chapter 11 of her 1941 book on religion, The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L. Sayers explains four characteristics of real life problems that differ from detective story problems:

1. The detective problem is always soluble. It is, in fact, constructed for the express purpose of being solved, and when the solution is found, the problem no longer exists. . . . It is unwise to suppose that all human experiences present problems of this kind.

2. The detective problem is completely soluble: no loose ends or unsatisfactory enigmas are left anywhere. The solution provides for everything and every question that is asked is answered. We are not left with a balance of probabilities in favor of one conclusion or another. . . .

3. The detective problem is solved in the same terms in which it is set. Here is one of the most striking differences between the detective problem and the work of the creative imagination. The detective problem is deliberately set in such a manner that it can be solved without stepping outside its terms of reference.

    Taking for illustration the real life problem of unemployment, she says that we may suspect that the “problem of Unemployment” is not soluble in the terms in which it is set. . . . It limits us to the consideration of Employment only; it does not allow us even to consider the Work itself. . . . and that what we ought to be asking is a totally different set of questions about Work and Money. (She states some of the questions.)

4. The detective problem is finite; when it is solved, there is an end of it. . . . We really persuaded ourselves that peace was something that could be achieved by a device, by a set of regulations, by a League of Nations or some other form of constitution, that would “solve” the whole matter once and for all. We continue to delude ourselves into the belief that “when the war is over” we shall “this time” discover the trick, the magic formula, that will stop the sun in heaven, arrest the course of events, make further exertion unnecessary. Last time we failed to achieve this end – and why? Chiefly because we supposed it to be achievable. Because we looked at peace and security as a problem to be solved and not as a work to be made.

    In consequence of the above:

When we examine these four characteristics of the detective problem, we begin to see why it is so easy to look upon all the phenomena of life in terms of “problem and solution,” and also why the “solution” is so seldom satisfactory, even when we think we have reached it. For in order to persuade ourselves that we can “solve” life, we have only to define it in terms which admit of solution.

    To this the Saunterer adds that as for interdisciplinary problem solving, which involves people trained in a number of academic subjects, this cannot overcome the objection of claiming solutions to problems which do not admit of tidy, closed solution.

    The Saunterer leaves you with a possibility to ponder regarding the environmental and natural resources professions: Are the universities, with the problem solving techniques they teach, and with their capstone courses where students “solve” “real world problems,” producing less good than harm? Yes? No? Unanswerable? Silly question?

What the environmental planning profession should learn from the medical profession

    For one thing, it should learn to practice watchful waiting as a planning option.

    Recall the Saunterer’s post of November 14, 2005, where planners are renamed medicators. To it let’s add that medicators deal with two classes of problems: problems where attempts to solve them are required, and problems where attempts to solve them are elective (think of required surgery and elective surgery).

    The panda and gorilla and a multitude of species are in danger of being swept away. Watchful waiting is out; prompt planning is required to save them.

    In contrast, a tiny percentage of the population wants roads built through wilderness areas. Watchful waiting is in; prompt planning is not required to solve the problem of pleasing these people. For, time and doing nothing often make the desired state, and hence the problem, go away, and the original actual state is seen as perfect.

    Wants and values do change. With household items, a year is long enough for a change; think of garage sales. With costlier items, three to five years can be enough; think of the saying, “Your second happiest day is when you buy your boat; your first happiest day is when you sell it.” With environmental values, two or three decades can produce a change (think of the ongoing shift since Earth Day).

    The book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, is relevant reading for medicators and the lawmaker’s that order them into action, for it demonstrates the inevitable change in values from generation to generation. A large percentage of future generations may want wilderness areas, unspoiled by roads and the people they bring.

    If environmental agency medicators had a staunch willingness to prescribe watchful waiting for elective problems, biding time for at least two or three generations, just possibly time would produce the solutions.

Dorothy L. Sayers and environmental planning

    In chapter 11 of her 1941 book on religion, The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L. Sayers, while discussing the nature of problem solving, touches on the subject of medication:

There used to be a firmly-rooted belief that to every poison there existed “the antidote” – a benevolent drug which would exactly reverse, each by each, the effects of the original poison and restore the body to the status quo ante. There are in fact, I believe, only two drugs which are complementary in this way, atropine and physostigmine. . . . With other drugs which are used to counteract one another, the reversal of the effects is only partial, or is rather a counteraction of the symptoms than a healing of the mischief done to the organs. . . . In certain instances, one disease can be got rid of only at the cost of contracting another, as in the malaria treatment of syphilis.

    Sauntering has a way of bringing serendipitous treasures like this passage. It reminds us of some of the environmental planning by local, state, and federal agencies.

    To begin with, planners are medicators; their plans, medications. A wilderness area, say, exists in its actual state, when along comes a tiny percentage of 300 million people declaring a desired state, differing from the actual. With this, a problem is born: the wilderness is declared ill, in need of medication that will move (sometimes literally with bulldozers) the actual state to the desired. For this, medication is devised and given, yet brings regrettable by-products for which agency medicators prescribe new medications. On this goes to sickening overmedication. At no stage can there be a reverse, an undoing, a healing antidote to the mischief done to the environment.

    Name your top horror story.

Karen Horney and Albert Einstein on what and what not to tie one’s happiness to

    Hear Karen Horney:   

The mind’s only possession is thinking, is reason. Its goal is the truth. Hence happiness is the same as striving after the truth. For the truth is eternal, and the greater our striving, the greater our happiness. This is easy to understand, for happiness is absence of all influences from outside that threaten self-preservation.

An existence is defective, on the other hand, where outside influences predominate. Where intellect is hampered by passion, suffering remains. Thus the desire to please, voluptuousness, intemperance, greed, sensuality express surrender to the force of external things. There is suffering too if the mind strives for something transient, changeable, or where its noble striving attaches to perishable things. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 244)

    Hear Albert Einstein:

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.228)

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For a short biography of Karen Horney, click on: Karen Horney

Jack London on the pursuit of happiness in one’s career

    In a letter, Jack London explained two kinds of career happiness:

Every man, at the beginning of his career (whether laying bricks or writing books or anything else), has two choices. He may choose immediate happiness, or ultimate happiness. . . . He who chooses ultimate happiness, and has the ability, and works hard, will find that the reward for his effort is cumulative, that the interest on his energy invested is compounded. The artisan who is industrious, steady, reliant, is suddenly, one day, advanced to a foremanship with increased wages. Now is that advance due to what he did that day, or the day before? Ah, no, it is due to the long years of industry and steadiness. The same with the reputation of a business man or artist. The thing grows and compounds. He is not only “paid for having done something once upon a time,” . . . but he has been paid for continuing to do something through quite a period of time.

    In another letter, he added:

A choice of ultimate happiness in preference to proximate happiness, when the element of chance is given due consideration, is, I believe, the wisest course for a man to follow under the sun. He that chooses proximate happiness is a brute; he that chooses immortal happiness is an ass; but he that chooses ultimate happiness knows his business. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.169)

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The Utah State University Library has a Jack and Charmian London collection. Find out about it by clicking on:  USU's London Collection