The Saunterer

Gordon Gekko shows the flaw in Adam Smith’s invisible hand

    So far as the Saunterer is aware, no one has linked Gordon Gekko’s guiding idea with Adam Smith’s, showing the danger of Smith’s, who wrote:

Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. For by pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it.

    Now, Gordon Gekko, featured in the 1987 movie Wall Street, said:

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that “greed” - for lack of a better word - is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

    Wall Street (and much of Main Street) is packed with Gordon Gekkos, creating a perverted invisible hand that is wrecking the economy, the job market, and everybody’s pensions.

    (Adam Smith’s lines are from his book The Wealth of Nations, 1776, which we took from page 131 of God, Governance, and “Economic Man” by Gene W. Heck. University Press of America, Inc., 2009. Gordon Gekko’s lines are from page 4 of The Age of Empathy, by Frans de Waal. Harmony Books, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Adam Smith, click here. For images of and relating to Adam Smith, click here. For a brief biography of Frans de Waal, click here. For images of and relating to Frans de Waal, click here. For a bit about the movie Wall Street, featuring the character Gordon Gekko, click here. For images of Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko, click here.

Emily Dickinson on the White House state dinner

    At the November 24, 2009, White House state dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Nobodys were virtually absent. It was an evening for Somebodys. Which would you rather be - a Nobody or a Somebody? Emily Dickinson’s poem might help you decide:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - Too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! They’d advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one’s name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

(Poem quoted from page 1 of Reading Women’s Poetry, by Laurence Lerner. Sussex Academic Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Emily Dickinson, click here. For images of and relating to Emily Dickinson, click here.

George Orwell on the secret of rulership

    One of the endearing things about George Orwell is his insights, such as this one:

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

    Quoted from page 224 of Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell; Everyman’s Library, 1992. For a brief biography of George Orwell, click here. For images of and pertaining to George Orwell, click here.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on having children learn by discovering for themselves

    Calling a child “he,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared:

Whatever he knows, he should know because he has grasped it himself. Do not teach him science; let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason in his mind, he will stop reasoning, and become the victim of other people’s opinions.

    Today would sadden Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where classroom discovery by oneself is still largely a fairy tale.
    (Quoted from page 73 of The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau, translated and edited by William Boyd. Teachers College, Columbia University 1962.)
    For a brief biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, click here. For images of and relating to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, click here. For a brief biography of William Boyd, click here.

A poem of Robert Frost’s that good for memorizing

    Several of the Saunterer’s recent posts mentioned the good of memorizing poems and reciting them silently in private moments. Then, October 19, 2009, James Radford submitted a comment (under “Recent Comments” in the sidebar to the right) in which he discusses Robert Frost’s poem, “The Span of Life.” Only twenty words, it is now a part of us, there to recite and ponder anytime.

“The Span of Life”
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

    (Quoted from page 308 of The Poetry of Robert Frost: the collected poems, complete and unabridged, by Robert Frost. Henry Holt and Co., 1969.)
    For a brief biography of Robert Frost, click here. For images of and relating to Robert Frost, click here.

Gilbert Newton Lewis on how science gets its cathedrals

    Every field has its cathedrals, and Gilbert Newton Lewis reminds us of science’s:

There are ancient cathedrals which, apart from their consecrated purpose, inspire solemnity and awe. Even the curious visitor speaks of serious things, with hushed voice, and as each whisper reverberates through the vaulted nave, the returning echo seems to bear a message of mystery. The labor of generations of architects and artisans has been forgotten, the scaffolding erected for the toil has long since been removed, their mistakes have been erased, or have become hidden by the dust of centuries. Seeing only the perfection of the completed whole, we are impressed as by some superhuman agency. But sometimes we enter such an edifice that is still partly under construction; then the sound of hammers, the reek of tobacco, the trivial jests bandied from workman to workman, enable us to realize that these great structures are but the result of giving to ordinary human effort a direction and a purpose.
    Science has its cathedrals, built by the efforts of a few architects and many workers. . . .

    (Quoted from the preface of Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, by Gilbert Newton Lewis, published by Tokiwa Shoin, 1942.)
    For a brief biography of Gilbert Newton Lewis, click here. For images of and relating to Gilbert Newton Lewis, click here.

Estelle Ramey on a test for equality of the sexes

    Society is still short of sexual equality. You can judge the truth of that from applying Estelle Ramey’s test:

We will have equality when a female schlemiel moves ahead as fast as a male schlemiel.

    (Quoted from page 58 of The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls, by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. Oxford University Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Estelle Ramey, click here. For images of and relating to Estelle Ramey, click here. For a brief biography of Stephen J. Ceci, click here. For a brief biography of Wendy M. Williams, click here.

Henri Cartier-Bresson on excellence as mentor

    The best kind of mentor is the perennial excellence of someone’s work. Discovering such a mentor was Henri Cartier-Bresson’s fortune:

If it had not been for the challenge of the work of Walker Evans, I don’t think I would have remained a photographer.

(Quoted from a handwritten letter by Henri Cartier-Bresson which is reproduced in the front matter of Photographing America: Henri Cartier-Bresson / Walker Evans, 1929-1947, by Agnes Sire and Jean-Francois Chevrier, Thames & Hudson, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, click here. For images of and relating to Henri Cartier-Bresson, click here. For a brief biography of Walker Evans, click here. For images of and relating to Walker Evans, click here.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s method of creating personal peace

    We are about to give you a great bargain. You could buy a hundred self-help books on how to create personal peace that wouldn’t work as well as J. Robert Oppenheimer’s method, which lays it out in 176 words:

I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity. . . . I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire. . . . But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

    (Quoted from page 243 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, click here. For images of and related to J. Robert Oppenheimer, click here.

Vladimir Nabokov and Luke Jerram on pure science and pure art

    Recently Sauntering in the library, my glance fell on Stephen H. Blackwell’s The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science, The Ohio State University Press, 2009, to these lines (page 190):

Nabokov’s science was akin to his art in that it was essentially nonutilitarian from the standpoint of practical survival. He saw “pure science” and “pure art” as partners in the expansion of consciousness and the escape from the struggle for existence.

    To view the two partners joined together in artist’s Luke Jerram large glass “viral sculptures,” click here.
    For a brief biography of Vladimir Nabokov, click here. For a brief biography of Luke Jerram, click here. For Stephen H. Blackwell’s home page, click here.