The Saunterer

Daniel C. Dennett on the dreadful increase in population

    Daniel C. Dennett puts it in this perspective:

The visionary engineer Paul MacCready has made an arresting calculation: ten thousand years ago, human beings (plus their domestic animals) accounted for less than a tenth of 1 percent (by weight) of all vertebrate life on earth and in the air. Back then we were just another mammalian species and not a particularly populous one (he estimates eighty million people worldwide). Today, that percentage, including livestock and pets, is in the neighborhood of 98! (Quoted from page 370 of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel Clement Dennett. Viking, 2006.)

    For a brief biography of Daniel C. Dennett, click here. For his home page, click here.

Robin Blaser on what poetry is for

Poet Robin Blaser gets right to the point:
    The real business of poetry is cosmology.
(Quoted from page 141 of The Constant Fire, by Adam Frank. University of California Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Robin Blaser, click here. To learn about his work, click here.

Jane Jacobs on why planned urban areas don’t work

    In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs explained the problem about planned cities and urban areas. It’s that people need to be on what she calls “sidewalk terms,” and that cannot be planned into existence. James C. Scott gives the following summary of it, noting that “a grocer, candy-store owner, barber, butcher, dry cleaner, or bookshop owner” incidentally function as owning places where people become casually acquainted:

[This is] is one of the many public functions of private business. These services, Jacobs notes, are not the outgrowth of any deep friendship; they are the result of people being on what she calls “sidewalk terms” with others. And these are services that could not plausibly be provided by a public institution. Having no recourse to the face-to-face politics of personal reputation that underwrites social order in small rural communities, the city relies on the density of people who are on sidewalk terms with one another to maintain a modicum of public order. The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of crucial but often invisible public amenities. A person didn’t think twice about asking someone to hold one’s seat at the theater, to watch a child while one goes to the restroom, or to keep an eye on a bike while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich.
    . . . The formal public institutions of order function successfully only when they are undergirded by this rich, informal public life. An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place. Jacobs admits that each of the small exchanges of informal public life - nodding hello, admiring a newborn baby, asking where someone’s nice pears come from - can be seen as trivial. “But the sum is not trivial at all,” she insists. “The sum of each casual, public contact at a local level - most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone - is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. And above all, it implies no private commitments.” (Quoted from page 136 of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott. Yale University Press. 1998.)

    For a brief biography of Jane Jacobs, click here. For a brief biography of James C. Scott, click here. To preview Seeing Like a State, click here.