The Saunterer

Sze Tsung Leong on the culture of shopping

    More and more the U. S. is becoming a culture of shoppers, which Sze Tsung Leong explains this way:

Not only is shopping melting into everything, everything is melting into shopping.

    (Quoted from page 27 of Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What, by Lee Eisenberg. Free Press, 2009.)
    For information about Sze Tsung Leong, click here. For information on Lee Eisenberg, click here.

John Muir on stupidity as the defining trait of humans

    What a sad combination. People refuse to curb their numbers, and people refuse to control their lust for material things. John Muir:

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, -chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. . . . It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods, –trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time - and long before that - God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools. . . .

    (Quoted from page 343 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here. For images of and relating to John Muir, click here.

The Saunterer on the danger of not going all out to prevent global warming

    When we are exposed to a dangerous, fickle mystery, we should follow what is known as the precautionary principle. And as John Cox explains in his book Climate Crash, there is no more dangerous, fickle mystery than Earth’s climate system:

The climate system is nonlinear, which means its output is not always proportional to its input - that, occasionally, unexpectedly, tiny changes in initial conditions provoke huge responses. It is chockablock with feedbacks, loops of self-perpetuating physical transactions, operating on their own timescales, that amplify or impede other processes. This constant cross talk of positive and negative feedbacks is said to be balanced, more or less, at various critical thresholds in the system. Forced across such a threshold, by whatever external or internal triggering mechanism, important variables begin gyrating or flickering, and the system suddenly lurches into a significantly different semistable mode of operation, a new equilibrium. All of these variables, all of these timescales, make for a system that is full of surprises. . . . Climate is a precariously balanced nonlinear system that lurches between very different states of coldness, dryness, wetness, and warmth.

    Now, the precautionary principle is defined in “The Precautionary Principle in Environmental Science,” by David Kriebel et al. Environmental Health Perspectives. Vol 109, No. 9, September 2001, as:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

    (The passage by John Cox is from page 9 of Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, by Stewart Brand. Viking Adult, 2009.)
    For more on the precautionary principle, click here. For information on John Cox’s book Climate Crash, click here. For a brief biography of Stewart Brand, click here. For images of and relating to Stewart Brand, click here.

John Maynard Keynes on why capitalism wrecks our quality of life

    Though the reason is obvious, John Maynard Keynes puts it memorably:

We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendours of nature have not economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend.

    (Quoted from page 17 of The New Economics: A Bigger Picture, by David Boyle and Andrew Simms. Earthscan, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of John Maynard Keynes, click here. For a description of The New Economics, click here.

Immanuel Kant on using laughter to ease the miseries of life

    Listen to Immanuel Kant:

Voltaire said that heaven has given us two things to counterbalance the many miseries of life, hope and sleep. He could have added laughter, if the means of exciting it in reasonable persons were only as easily attainable, and the requisite wit or originality of humour were not so rare.

    Feeling a bit low? Try the cure of Immanuel Kant's idea by clicking here.

    (Quoted from page 137 of Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant. Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2005.)

    For a brief biography of Immanuel Kant, click here. For images of and relating to Immanuel Kant, click here.

Emmanuel G. Mesthene on the great deficiency of home schooling

    Although he meant it for education in general, Emmanuel G. Mesthene’s idea has home schooling in its sights:

The challenge to education is indeed staggering. Teachers who have been brought up to cherish the stable must take the children of parents who have been brought up to cherish the stable, and try to teach them that the stable, the unchanging, is unreal, constraining, a false goal, and that they will survive in an age of change to the degree that they become familiar with change, feel comfortable with it, understand it, master and control it.

    (Quoted from Emmanuel G. Mesthene’s essay, “Learning To Live With Science,” Saturday Review, July 17, 1965, page 17.)
    As a professor, most of my students don’t shine at mathematical subjects. Shouldn’t we all be angry at the thought of some of them later becoming home-schooling parents, making a mess of teaching their children mathematics and physics, and tacitly promoting a stable view of the future? And often home-schooling parents are religious, believing that prayer works, that if the human race gets in a tight spot, as with global warming and the population bomb, what they call God will bail us out. As hard as it is to get pseudoscience out of the class room, getting it out of home schooling is hopeless.
    For a brief biography of Emmanuel G. Mesthene, click here.

Winston Churchill on architecture as teacher

    We spent our elementary school years in an Art Deco school building that cut no corners on costs. This, we feel sure, shaped us fundamentally, perhaps as much as any of our teachers, proving Winston Churchill’s idea:

There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.

     School buildings today are ticky tacky boxes. Great buildings, governments forget, teach.
    (Winston Churchill is quoted from page 1 of Why Architecture Matters, by Paul Goldberger. Yale University Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Winston Churchill, click here. For images of and relating to Winston Churchill, click here. For a bit about Paul Goldberger, click here. For images of and relating to Paul Goldberger, click here.

Isaac Asimov on the greatest idea ever

    What is the greatest idea ever? It would be the idea which if neglected would cause the most harm to life, perhaps ending it. Thus none of the ideas in the Bible deserves to be called the greatest idea ever.
    What idea is most deserving? We nominate this idea of Isaac Asimov:

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

    This idea covers all scales. It holds for the world of the individual. It holds for the world of the family. It holds for the world of each country. It holds for the whole world. And most troubling to the Saunterer, it holds for all ranks of decision makers in a world well into the depths of overpopulation and now facing global warming.
    As for the worst idea ever, we nominate an idea of certain religions. It is the religious precept to congest Earth with people. This precept is largely the cause of a runaway human population that is fifty times more than a defensible number, fouling our nest, Earth.
    (We quote Isaac Asimov from page 79 of Inside the Black Box: The Simple Truth About Quantitative Trading, by Rishi K. Narang. John Wiley, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Isaac Asimov, click here. For images of and relating to Isaac Asimov, click here.

Michael C. Meyer on water as an ancient root of ethics

    Michael C. Meyer writes an interesting idea when he explains:

Water helped ancient man learn those first difficult lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society. Even the most rudimentary irrigation system required organization, discipline, cooperation, and a measure of social cohesion. Mutual need begets mutual aid. Notions of sharing, of equity, of compromise, and of the common good first floated precariously on this liquid foundation to be later cemented in philosophical thought and codified law.

    (Quoted from page ix of Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850, by Michael C. Meyer. University of Arizona Press, 1984.)
    Michael C. Meyer is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Arizona.

Richard Livingstone on the chief disease of our times

    And what is the chief disease? Listen to Richard Livingstone:

For the teacher to have clearly in his mind this distinction of means and ends, and the need for higher ends, to feel that he is training his pupils to live a life that is a symphony and not a series of disconnected noises - even if they are beautiful noises - to see that while they acquire the means which they need for the practical purpose of life, they should also form an idea of the end at which they should aim. If that could be done, we should have cured the chief disease of our times. If you want a description of our age, here is one: The civilization of means without ends; rich in means beyond any other epoch, and almost beyond human needs; squandering and misusing them because it has no overruling ideal; an ample body with a meager soul.

    (Quoted from page 58 of Teaching and the Case Method, by Louis B. Barnes, C. Roland Christensen, and Abby J. Hansen. Harvard Business School Press, 1994.)
    For a brief biography of Richard Livingstone, click here.