The Saunterer

Albert Camus of the value of chastity

    It was a great truth that Albert Camus uttered when he said:

Unbridled sex leads to a philosophy of the non-significance of the world. Chastity on the other hand gives the world a meaning. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 203.)

    For a brief biography of Albert Camus, click here.

Plutarch on the inability to measure what really matters

    Economics puts faith in the willingness to pay method for measuring the price of wilderness. Yet in all things that really matter, what really is of value, knew Plutarch, is beyond measurement:

A citizen of ancient Rome sought to divorce his wife, and as a result was severely chastened by his friends, who asked: “Was she not chaste? Was she not fair?” The Roman held out one of his shoes. “Is it not well made?” he said. “Is it not also new?” And when they agreed that the shoe was both well made and new, the Roman replied: “Yet none of you can tell where it pinches me.”

    For a brief biography of Plutarch, click here.

John Stuart Mill on the need for much wilderness per person

    To put it mildly, the principal fault that the Saunterer finds with the economics community today is its fault of neglecting the importance of having an abundance of wilderness. Somehow that fault slipped in since the time of John Stuart Mill, an early economist, who wrote:

It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. . . . Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds, or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 255.)

    For a brief biography of John Stuart Mill, click here.

Margaret Anderson on the natures of love

    Margaret Anderson defined two kinds of love:

In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person. (Quoted from Margaret C. Anderson’s The Fiery Fountains: the autobiography; continuation and crisis to 1950, New York: Horizon Press, 1969.)
    For a brief biography of Margaret Caroline Anderson, click here.

Marshall McLuhan on the meaning of “the medium is the message”

    Marshall McLuhan presented his great perceptive idea in his book, The Medium is the Message. We think he better expressed it in parts of his letters, where he put it in plain words for correspondents who didn’t understand it. Combing through the Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Oxford University Press, 1987), we found these entries: 

    To say that any technology or extension of man creates a new environment is a much better way of saying the medium is the message. Moreover, this environment is always “invisible” and its content is always the old technology. The old technology is altered considerably by the enveloping action of the new technology. [Quoted from a letter to John Culkin, September 17, 1964]   

    Over and over I’ve talked to groups and individuals about new technology as new environment. Content of new environment is old environment. The new environment is always invisible. Only the content shows, and yet only the environment is really active as shaping force. As Drucker shows . . . , in every situation 10% of the events cause 90% of the events. The 10% area is the sector of opportunity, the 90% area is the area of problems. The opportunity or environmental and innovational area is ignored. All sensible people deal first with problems - that is, the dead issues. . . . To deal with the environment directly is my strategy Harry. To attack the new environment as if it were an artefact capable of being molded. [Quoted from a letter to Harry J. Skornia, October 3, 1964] 

    I hope you can understand my satisfaction in hearing that you are about to query the observation that “the medium is the message.” I had to get out of the U.S. when people began to accept this without understanding it. It is much safer to have it rejected by people who don’t understand it. . . .
    What I am saying is what Wordsworth said in his phrase: “the child is the father of the man.” This seemed like a wild statement at the time. All he meant was that youthful environments shape adult attitudes. All I am saying is that any product or innovation creates both service and disservice environments which reshape human attitudes. These service and disservice environments are always invisible until they have been superseded by new environments. [Quoted from a letter to Jonathan Miller, April 22, 1970]

        For a brief biography of Marshall McLuhan, click here.

Save the planet through YouTube

    My slowly Sauntering eye has just fallen upon “Can YouTube Save the Planet?” by Reuben Clements, David Bickford, and David J. Lohman, a one-page article in the  September 2007 issue of The Scientist. Here is the main part:

    We are calling on scientists around the globe to register with YouTube and post one or more video clips depicting species and habitat loss, regional effects of climate change, or environmentally unfriendly activities that people continue to commit despite repeated warnings. . . . We, together with the editors of The Scientist, have created a dedicated channel on YouTube to host these videos. . . . In response to the question: What is the one thing, the most urgent thing, that everyone can do to tackle global warming? Al Gore replied: “Well, first of all, learn about it.” Gathering a series of local videos will create a global lesson of the damage being caused by climate change and other anthropogenic disturbances in a way that would not be possible with one or a few groups of scientists. Providing visual evidence of environmental woes worldwide through YouTube will create a compelling message for the public and governments alike that will be difficult to ignore any longer.

    I urge all environmental researchers to keep their video cameras at the ready, and make compelling clips that document just how far the destruction of Earth goes.

    To bring up the dedicated channel on YouTube, click here. (Authors Clements, Bickford, and Lohman are at the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore.)

Nikita Khrushchev on America’s insane direction

    Seeing the inventions in the American model house at the Moscow Fair in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev remarked to Vice-President Nixon:

Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?

    For a brief biography of Nikita Khrushchev, click here.

David Ormsby Gore on the ultimate tragedy

    Although David Ormsby Gore was thinking of political tragedy when he made the following remark, there is a tragedy worse than political tragedy, and worse than economic tragedy. It is ecological tragedy: global warming and loss of species.

It would indeed be the ultimate tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more noble than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.

    For a brief biography of David Ormsby Gore, click here.

Llewelyn Powys on how to acquire a powerful writing style

    To acquire a powerful writing style, acquire a powerful soul. Llewelyn Powys tells how:

If I were to be asked by any young person the best way to acquire a style I would tell him to live intensely. The style of a man is the direct result of his passion for life. Learning and scholarship are of small value here. Style is the affirmation of a man’s heightened awareness of existence and always grows up from within, from out of the marrow of his bones. . . . Powerful and original characters write in a powerful and original way, shallow and commonplace characters write in a shallow and commonplace way. Style has to do with the grace, health, and vigour of a man’s soul. It is a secret thing dependent upon a natural depth of feeling and no amount of playing the sedulous ape can pass off as authentic what is in truth counterfeit. (Quoted from “Letter to Warner Taylor,” Types and Times in the Essay, by Warner Taylor. London: Harper & Brothers, 1932.)

    For a brief biography of Llewelyn Powys, click here.

Alfred North Whitehead on the possible tyranny of a majority

    As Lucien Price tells it,

Whitehead remarked that among the eighteenth-century thinkers there was a clear prevision that the tyranny of a majority might be more onerous than that of a despot. Continuing, Whitehead said, “Historians never sufficiently credit the man who averts a catastrophe. I am thinking of Augustus Caesar. It has always been a marvel to me that Rome could produce, just when they were most wanted, two such men of genius as Julius and Augustus.” (Quoted from page 122 of Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as recorded by Lucien Price, Little, Brown and Company, 1953.)

    For a brief biography of Alfred North Whitehead, click here.