Too Much!

This vignette comes from an article I recently saw in Balloon Juice.

The guy in the office next to me taught a course in financial math last fall, so at least a few times a week, I’d hear him say “rational market” to one of his students. A friend of mine teaches the course sometimes and told me once that he doesn’t like teaching it because he doesn’t believe the rational market hypothesis, so I asked the guy in the office if he believed in the rational market hypothesis. He said “yes, I think you have to, otherwise none of our mathematical models have predictive value.”

The author could have been Dostoevsky himself, and the title the author uses - I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man - probably is from Dostoevsky.

The description is immediately recognizable. Every one knows it's true and it's so abysmal that everyone can just act as if it weren't true and get away with it.

My first thought was of the amounts of money the students and their families pay teachers to do this. My second thought was of the damage such academics and their professions do to a society that relies on their expertise. It's simply beyond horror.

I just happen to be reading a classic book, E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, that recounts the history of what I have sometimes called the billiard ball theory of human life that enshrines the Newtonian sciences of the motions of physical bodies and mathematics. The Incomparable Newton and his acolytes were so astonishingly brilliant and successful in what they did that scholars are still trying to apply their assumptions and methods to everything, including human life.

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Hawkesbury, Ontario

Hawkesbury, Ontario. I love this old place. It’s on the Ottawa River, about halfway between Ottawa and Montreal. It’s about 80% native French speaking, but bilingual. It has the feel of there being lots of history back of it. Ontario has so many of these places like Hawkesbury where I would love to spend a long time. Mattawa is another. Cornwall, Summerstown. Ottawa. Oshawa. North Bay. Blind River. White River. Thunder Bay. Toronto. “Say the names, say the names,” said Ontario’s poet, “The Voice of the Land,” Al Purdy.

I get into Hawkesbury early on an overcast day in December, to pick up a giant paper roller on my flatbed and bring it back to a mill in New Hampshire for the next day. It's late afternoon by the time I am loaded and ready to go, but by that time the snow, “announced by all the trumpets of the sky,” is starting to fall. Small, drifting flakes at first, then slightly bigger ones, swirling down everywhere. I can see that this is going to be a real snowstorm and a difficult drive home, so I decide to stay right here in Hawkesbury for a few hour's sleep.

I pull into the parking lot of a nearby convenience store and go inside to ask for permission to park there for a couple hours. A young, decent bright, Canadian girl says “No Problem. Pas de problème.” She asks about my truck having a sleeper and I tell her that I just have a simple bed and table in there, but there are some big trucks that have all the comforts of a home: queen-size bed, refrigerator, satellite TV, shower, toilet, the works. I buy a sandwich and a fruit juice, and walk outside into the fast-falling snow, feeling the decency, kindness and humanity which I've just experienced.

It's dark by now and the lights of the parking lot show the snow really coming down. I climb into the sleeper, cover myself with a comforter, say my prayers, say my favorite names, and immediately fall asleep.

Four hours later I wake, get a coffee from the store, and get started down the road to the 417, the TransCanada Highway. The snow is about six to eight inches deep by now. Woods, fields, old wooden fences, a few houses give me bearings. I get down to the 417 and start toward Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Montreal. Here there are no fences, just wide open spaces with the wind blowing everywhere. I can barely see. There are no car tracks to follow, no plows, and the wind is blowing straight across the road and back again. “Where IS that road?” comes out of my throat a couple times. I think of William Henry Drummond's poem about the wreck of the Julie Plante on Lac-Saint-Pierre: “De win' she blow from nor' -eas' -wes',- De sout' win' she blow too,” That was right here in this part of the world, just down river a little way. “ “For de win' she blow lak hurricane.”

I reach Rigaud. There's a travel centre there with a Tim Horton's, lights on, open. I pull into the parking lot where there is now a team of four monster snow-fighting trucks. These are real plow trucks with big blades on front and sides, chains, magnificent machines, four of them sitting there idling while their drivers are inside the Timmy's having coffee. I know they know. One of them definitely looks sheepish. But I'm sure they all know the criticism: “Here I am out driving in the storm, risking my life, not even able to find the road, and you guys are sitting in Timmy's having coffee.” I heard it once expressed sarcastically over the CB by a driver who said “I ought to get a job plowing, that way I'd never have to go out on the road while it's snowing.”

I drive on to Montreal where the roads are plowed and lighted. I get over the bridges and out the other side to the eastern townships. Here the highway is plowed but with a well-packed-down surface just underneath the powder. I'm talking it real easy but these French-Canadian guys are just flying by me on their way up to Quebec City and Rivière du Loup, leaving great swirls of snow behind them as they disappear into the darkness in front of me. Magog takes forever, but I get there and turn south toward Stanstead and the border. The snow isn't letting up so I decide to stop for the rest of the night at Stanstead, where I know there is a truckstop. I'm just too tired to go further. The White Mountains, all that. The paper mill will just have to wait for their roller. No more. We all have limits.

The last thing I see before climbing into my bunk at Standstead are two old French Canadian guys at the pumps, fueling up their snowmobiles, fully dressed for the adventure with parkas, helmets, goggles, the whole bit, full of fun and adventure, having just the greatest time out there in the storm in the middle of the night.

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Good Old Socrates

I haven't read Plato's accounts of Socrates' words for over fifty years until today, when I happened to read the following from Phaedo:

 The aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.

You see, I have had this thing for a long time about death being the over-riding, all-important fact of our lives, but even my best friends are not with me on that. I myself can not think of anything more basic or important than understanding the reality and implications of death.

Cruelty to another person, or pride, or false belief, seem unacceptable once you you get the point, it seems to me. “Life is too short for this” has consequently come to mind in one form or another across my lifespan as a sort of talisman.

So I'm reading a bit more of Plato/Socrates and I come across this, in the account of Socrates trial:

The fear of death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may or may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.

They do put him to death, as you will remember, despite him saying such things as the following at his trial:

Be sure that if you kill the sort of man you say I am, you will not harm me more than yourselves. I am far from making a defense now on my own behalf as might be thought, but on yours', to prevent you from wrongdoing by mistreating the god's gift to you by condemning me.

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Progress, Midwestern Cornfields

Madame Necker,  the mother of Madame de Stael, wrote that “Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.” There are probably many others, especially conservatives, who have said or thought it. My own mother used to say that “People really don't change much over time. They just become more of what they are.” I've seen it written in reference to Vice-President Dick Cheney that "Men do not change, they unmask themselves."

That seems like a radically conservative, even deadening, thing to say, especially for those of us who want to see a better world. And yet I must say that it is probably usually true for conservatives, yes, but also for liberals whose views are really not very well tested.

There is a contrary tradition of belief in “Progress,” that society is improving slowly despite occasional setbacks, that science and its spread to all areas of life is the long-term trend. I immediately think in this connection of Condorcet. He and Madame Necker were almost exact contemporaries.

The profession of sociology arose in that context in France, primarily, but also later in the US in the context of immigrations. The first sociologists wanted to make their study “scientific,” and thus bring progress to society. Condorcet maintained his faith in that even though coming to a bad end.

My own take on the view that people don't really change is that it doesn't have to be so, although it may often or usually be so! Nothing is set in stone when it comes to people and their future. Their minds were not given them just for amusement, as Tolstoy put it in the Two Wars piece that I recently mentioned. And there is that old Russian proverb that Solzhenitsyn mentioned in his Nobel Lecture:

In Russian, proverbs about truth are favorites. They persistently express the considerable, bitter, grim experience of the people, often astonishingly: 'One word of truth outweighs the world.'

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The newly-planted cornfields through which I drive in Ohio and Indiana were exciting during the first two weeks of this month of May. The millions of plants grew rapidly, grew about six inches in two weeks and looked to be vigorous and healthy. But now, the last week of May, the plants are drooping and the fields dusty. The TV weatherman spoke last night of the possibility of a drought and of the fact that there was no snow here last winter. No one is saying a single word about the social issue of a man-made climate disaster, but I can see they are thinking about it.

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The Smallest Thing

I'm always astonished that the smallest things can have an importance far beyond the most elaborate, thoroughly thought-out, infinitely considered conditions.

The immediate instance before my eyes is that of a friend's visit in my kitchen here this morning. He has been in a serious despondency for a year or two due to several severe health problems in his family, loss of income, and the reconsideration of old misfortunes going back fifty years to his childhood. He was “down,” no doubt about it.

I was thinking as we were going back and forth, often quite passionately, across his reasons for feeling down, that there was nonetheless the possibility that he could nonetheless make a decision, a very small decision similar to the flipping of a small switch, that could change his unhappiness into happiness.

Dostoyevsky described a man who has been depressed for years who looks out a train window while at a platform in Zurich and sees a donkey braying. Just seeing that donkey braying brings back his good perspective.

I'm sure a lot has been said and written on the problem, even on Dostoyevsky's specific instance. The guy in the train undoubtedly had been thinking over his problem for years, consciously and subconsciously. But in the end, it seems to me that there is a decision, a seemingly infinitesimally small but necessary decision being made.

All I have to do is to remember the face of a beloved friend I once knew, or to think of a young boy I once knew who was like a son to me, or to think of the most amazingly good-hearted old lady I once knew, pure of heart, who truly and simply trusted in God. There are others, too. All I have to do to put an upside-down world aright is to remember just the very existence of even one of these people. Then the world makes sense to me and I see the miracle.

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Tolstoy, Scholars

Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace now, at the age of seventy, is a much different experience from when I first tried to read it in my thirties. I had experienced some life by then, but I still had not the preparation necessary to know what he was saying. Now, I find the book simply stunning, even breath-taking. 

Dostoyevsky has a reputation for profundity, for looking into the abyss, etc., but right now he seems like a shallow, and timid compromiser beside Tolstoy.

There were other things Tolstoy wrote that did deeply effect me when I was young and which did strike me as remarkably insightful even then. There is in fact a passage from his essay, Two Wars, which I automatically memorized and which has been central to my heart for forty years. He is discussing the Russian government's reaction to the Dukhobors:

The people of our time, especially the scholars, have become so dense that they do not understand, and in their denseness cannot even understand, the significance and the influence of spiritual force. A charge of ten thousand pounds of dynamite sent into a crowd of living men – that they understand, and in that they see strength. But an idea, a truth, which has been realized, which has been introduced into life to the point of martyrdom, which has become accessible to millions, is not force according to their conception, because it does not boom and you do not see broken bones and puddles of blood. Scholars (it is true, bad scholars) use all the power of their erudition to prove that humanity lives like a herd, which is guided only by economic conditions, and that reason is given to it only for amusement. Governments know what it is that moves the world, and so, from a sense of self- preservation, unerringly and zealously monitor the manifestation of spiritual forces, on which depends their existence or their ruin.

That is cutting edge today.

Just the part about scholars trying to show that we are like robots, the playthings of forces located in our environment or heredity, is very contemporary. It's all in our wiring, our genes and our conditioning or programming, is the present way it's said, perhaps with the metaphor of a computer somewhere in the background. I've actually spent many many hours wondering why scholars, of all people, try to advance this belief that we are all robots, without choice or subjectivity or intentionality or meaning or consciousness, even alterity, to use some of the vocabulary of the present opposition to these views.

The best explanation for the scholars' attitude that I can find, although there are surely others, has two parts. One part is that the attitude allows the scholars to feel superior to other people, smarter than other people. It has an ego-payoff that they art smarter than others. They don't contend that they themselves are unthinking robots – it's just the herd below them that is the plaything of such forces. And the second part of the explanation for me is that the “herd” believe the “scholars” know things, believe that the view is true, and this keeps the “herd” in control.

Tolstoy also discusses in this essay a letter he received from Colorado asserting that the Spanish-American war was a noble (sic) work.

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This May Morning

The latest best thing about my part-time job driving a truck is going out upon the land and seeing May arrive in the fields and small towns of Ohio and Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee and Michigan.

I imagine that we all have our own particular favorite articulation of the meaning of May deep within our souls, but one of my own is e. e. cummings' “I Thank You God For Most This Amazing Day.” There is a reading of the poem by cummings himself on youtube, and it has been put to music, as a hymn. But here is a reading of it that I'm sure he would have enjoyed:

Wordsworth's exuberance about May in the Ode is always with me, too, especially the bit about lambs in spring, and this:

     Oh evil day! If I were sullen

     While Earth herself is adorning

     This sweet May morning...

I see that cummings loved that Ode and read it aloud in its entirety in one of his six non-lectures at Harvard, prefacing the reading by saying that his mother wrote it out by hand and kept it always near her.

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