Adding and Subtracting

Who was the first person to speak of sculpting marble as releasing the figure from the surrounding mass of stone? Looks like it was Michaelangelo. At least, he is first credited with the idea (I wonder if sculptors in the ancient world thought of their work that way), which has now become common currency among the public at large. But Michaelangelo’s way of seeing the task of a sculptor applies only to subtractive methods of sculpting, not to additive methods used by artists working in clay or wax, which naturally comes to my mind since the Artist in my life worked in wax. 

 

What occurred to me today, however, was a question about writing: Is writing additive or subtractive? The argument could go either way, couldn’t it?

 

Writing as an additive art: One begins with a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen. No words appear until the writer adds them. The result may fill hundreds of pages (forming a novel) or produce only a few lines surrounding by empty space (as in a haiku).

 

Writing as a subtractive art: Artists of the written word have at their disposal entire languages, and produce work by selecting words and sequences of words. In the editing process, what has been written in draft is often further pared down (e.g., eliminating an adverb by choosing a stronger verb).

 

Shall we take a vote? 

Sadly – and this really does make me sad; I shake my head in sorrow – as I was doing a search for additive vs. subtractive sculpture, wanting to include a link to a broader discussion, a site popped up with a woman’s face and an invitation to chat with her about my project, with the promise that a “completely original” essay could be written for me and delivered to me in three hours. That is, I could buy something and pretend it came out of my own head and heart. No, thank you. (And I want to add, “And you should be ashamed of yourself!”)

 

This post was NOT written by “artificial intelligence” (I always want to call AI “so-called”) but by one aging, human, small town bookseller, musing (as she so frequently does) on the subject of words. I have had guest bloggers write occasional posts, but they are all real people, too, presenting their own thoughts and words. Comments by real people, willing to write and speak for themselves, are always welcome, too. 

 

If you comment, how will I know you are real? You can verify my reality by stopping in at Dog Ears Books, 106 Waukazoo Street, in Northport, Michigan, because mine is a real bookstore, an open shop, where you get to see and touch the books in person before you buy. What a concept! Real indie bookstores – adding to the lives of community for hundreds of years! Dog Ears Books hasn’t been around as long as Livraria Bertrand, but we are celebrating our 30^th birthday this summer, so do stop by when you’re in the neighborhood.

This was 2015. Still have the same sandwich board in 2023.

Tiny Bookseller Claims Title

(This was just to lure you in!)

One of the occasional hazards of baring one’s soul passionately on serious subjects is that it can invite hostile comment. After I allowed myself a blogging outburst recently – sick and tired of holding back diplomatically in the face of continual and repeated public outrages, I should add – a hostile comment came my way from an anonymous source. In that first comment from Anonymous, I was called an “agitator” and a “nihilist leftist.” Anonymous also called me a “book enthusiast,” which would not be my own chosen self-descriptor but one I don’t find offensive. “Nihilist leftist,” though? That's just plain not who I am. A little left of center, maybe. Nihilist, never! As for agitating, maybe I should do more, but generally I try to be take a diplomatic route. The post in question was a departure from my usual public persona. It was a cry of anguish. 

That’s all background to what I want to say today. Because today Anonymous came back with a second comment, which in a roundabout way seems to imply that I am a “slave” to some kind of “circular rhetoric” promulgated by some unnamed group of “masters.” 

Anonymous is difficult to answer – impossible to respond to directly, as s/he makes only unsupported assertions, not arguments, and does not make clear any of the connections vaguely implied. And why would Anonymous bother to argue with me, since s/he clearly believes I am not an independent thinker but a mental “slave”? Okay, so Anonymous doesn’t argue. More to the point, though, why does Anonymous bother with me at all? Perhaps the idea is to convince my handful of readers to throw me overboard? We few, we happy few!

Well, the best events in my sequestered, self-quarantined life this past week have been a few private, personal, honest, heartfelt and respectful exchanges with people whose views are very different from my own. We spoke to each other. We heard each other. We felt respected by each other. As different from potshots from an anonymous source as June is from January. 

But it isn’t the anonymity that’s so bothersome, because some people don’t have Google accounts and don’t want Google accounts, and I don't have a problem with people who comment as Anonymous. What’s so troubling is the lack of context, absence of argument, and omission of any citations or examples to help me make sense of the accusations against me, so that what could be genuine dialogue remains instead a hollow mockery. And surely, I think helplessly, the fog of name-calling from Anonymous hides some deep hurt. There is a person behind the veil of anonymity, after all, someone who is hurt and afraid and angry, as well as someone who doesn’t know me at all. Someone I cannot reach, don't know how to connect with. That is the sad part, the part that troubles me.

One little laugh brightened the gloom, however. Anonymous referred to me as a “tiny book seller.” Tiny! Not as tiny as I used to be, many long years ago! Now in my eighth decade of life, I might just as well be called a “little old lady bookseller.” Perhaps, though, “tiny” refers to my business rather than to my person, and it’s true that I have never been able to afford paid employees and have struggled along for years with a single part-time volunteer. Yeah, that’s pretty tiny. 

Tiny but independent! Not subject to a corporate straitjacket, not held back by a board of directors, not burdened with business debt (although offers to plunge into debt have never been lacking), and certainly not shackled to any particular viewpoint other than my own, which has shifted and evolved over the decades and may yet enlarge and mature as long as I have my marbles. 

Once a customer from France asked me the secret of my success (i.e., survival) in the age of the online behemoth’s world domination. I told him I am stubborn. 

So let me claim, here and now, the title that Anonymous has foisted on me and declare myself to the world as the Tiny Bookseller! Tiny -- and fiercely, stubbornly independent. As a little third-grader I tutored once in reading said to me once, so memorably, “That’s what I am, and I’m proud of it!”

Stubbornly, independently yours, 

The Tiny Bookseller of Northport, Michigan

You don’t have to read between the lines.

Anyone can be a book critic. All you have to do is read each word, each sentence, each paragraph carefully, generously but analytically, and then weigh the author's overall vision as well as the book's details against your wealth of background cultural knowledge. And the way to read a review is just the same. So in today’s post I invite you to come along with me for the reading of a book review and the questions and reflections it prompted in me. I don't imagine we will be a large party, but we happy few can enjoy ourselves.

Saturday morning, having come to the last page of a book I'd been reading, I picked up a New York Review of Books, the Nov. 21 issue, and found in it a stunning review by Robert Kuttner of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. Having thoroughly appreciated Kuttner’s Everything For Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets, I was eager to read what he had to say about Deneen’s book, which was published last year to wide acclaim and has already been issued in an expanded paperback edition.

A careful reader and astute reviewer, Kuttner wastes no time in accusing Deneen of setting up a straw man argument. 

Liberalism is not and never was merely, as caricatured by Deneen, ‘the greatest possible freedom from external constraints.’ Rather, it is fundamentally about limiting abuses of public and private power and creating space for free inquiry. 

What Kuttner calls the 'liberal project,’ then … “included the rule of law, limits on inherited privilege, constraints on arbitrary power, freedom of conscience and speech, and reliance on liberty to develop a natural aristocracy of talent” — all features we might hope to find flourishing in a democratic society. It was not about encouraging individual excess or magically freeing mankind from constraints imposed by nature, as Deneen would have us believe. Thus Deneen's cartoon version has little relation to either the origins or historical development of true liberalism.

Of course, the point of setting up a straw man is to have an easy target, so it is probably not surprising that Deneen goes on to blame his cartoon 'liberalism’ for every woe of modern society. He conveniently ignores the fact, Kuttner points out, that much of today’s so-called ‘conservatism’ [so-called is my addition] takes its starting point with libertarianism, not classical liberalism, and it is this hybrid libertarian ‘conservatism,’ not liberalism, that has led to such modern ills as 

...the commercialization of health care, the commodification of education, the sale of private data, the outsourcing of employment, and the economic collapse of entire regions….

Even given the easy target he has created, Deneen still resorts to cherry-picking quotes, according to Kuttner, thus misconstruing and misrepresenting Locke, Toqueville, and others.

I have read enough of Locke and Tocqueville to side easily with Kuttner on the cherry-picking question. Also, having taught as well as studied logic, I am alert to the trickery of a straw man argument. Finally, as a one-time though not long-term follower and advocate of libertarianism (I got over it), it didn’t take Kuttner to open my eyes to fairly recent radical changes in American so-called conservatism and in today's Republican party. (My father would not recognize his party today.) What today’s Republicans call conservatism, religious avowals aside, is “based on a common embrace of corporate capitalism,” an ideal in which [here I extrapolate] privatization, i.e., having "everything for sale” — banking, education, health care — is the only legitimate goal.

Perhaps Kuttner’s most serious criticism, though, is the one he makes on pragmatic grounds -- and here, as a self-described romantic pragmatist, I perk up my ears. This will be the payoff! Deneen, he tells us, having indicted what he calls liberalism, offers no idea whatsoever about what would support democracy better. Surely it would not be the “Benedict Option,” that  option that counsels forming groups to retreat from secular society. Such orthodox religious communities, guided only by religion precepts and without liberal, secular safeguards to rights, would hardly be immune to autocrats and would-be dictators. And here I note that the position of women in such communities is almost always subservient, submissive, and silent. Deneen has already decried the emancipation of women, so now any remaining doubts I may have had are dispelled.

"Democracy does not work perfectly," Kuttner admits, but what system of government ever has? Before the state was overrun by the market, democracy worked better than it's working today, but whatever form it takes, Kuttner does not see -- and Deneen does not offer -- a viable alternative. 

...All of the alternatives are even more corrosive of human dignity and personal virtue. Liberal democracy may indeed be under siege; but if we are to constrain the tyranny of dictators on one flank and the rule of overweening global corporation on the other, democracy is all we have.  

- Robert Kuttner, "Blaming Liberalism," The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2019 

The book Kuttner reviewed was Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen (Yale University Press, 2019).

Disclaimer: Some readers might consider that, as an emancipated woman, I am biased in favor of liberalism, and they would be correct. I would say, however, that my bias is the result of being persuaded by facts, logic, and experience, not an undisciplined outgrowth of ignorance or brainwashing.

But that's not all I think.

So now, my take: 

The more I survey this whole messy political stew, the more I mistrust both socialists on the far left and libertarians on the far right, and I mistrust them on pragmatic grounds; therefore, insofar as socialist ideology has saturated progressive movements and libertarian ideology has certainly taken over and cannibalized what used to be conservatism, the more and more I mistrust all ideologies and ideologues. To say either that government intervention and regulation is always (socialist) or never (libertarian) the correct prescription to social problems — the extreme opposing ideological positions — strikes me as so short-sighted as to be downright blind to reality. 

Kuttner’s own view is more nuanced, but I wonder if even his prescriptions have the flexibility I see as absolutely necessary. It’s been a while since I’ve read Everything For Sale, so I cannot say with certainty that he would put whole domains under government oversight and leave other entire domains completely free-wheeling. Banking, education, and health care are, as I recall, fields in which he advocates government regulation, and while I have no quarrel here in general, I would still not have the federal government regulating every aspect of banking, education, and health care in every state of the union. Neither would I leave domains on the free market side of things absolutely free. Think about it. How can the two domains possibly be completely separate, when manufacturing necessarily affects health, commerce necessarily involves banking, and the education of youth comes before entrance into any section of the workplace?

What makes more sense to me is to have general federal safeguards enforced and leave the fine-tuning of details to the local level (regional, state, town -- whatever is appropriate), since conditions on the ground vary so widely from one part of the country to another. Imagine, for instance, a hospital and its procedures for admittance, care, and billing. Doesn’t it make sense that the situation in Los Angeles will be vastly different from that in a farm town in North Dakota or an isolated mountain community in eastern Kentucky or a university teaching institution in Illinois? A procedure that works in one place may be very ill-suited in another. The mix of public and private funding and control, therefore, will also vary, and we should expect that variation.  There must be room for variation to meet local needs. 

It is foolish, when advocating social policy, to ignore variations of climate, physical geography, culture, history, and demographics across a country as large as the United States — almost as foolish as believing that some populations of the nation can be governed and protected by law while others can operate as gangsters.

Pragmatism, as a social philosophy, does not say that whatever course of action gets me the most is the right thing for me to do. That is a perverted view sometimes attributed to so-called “pragmatic” individuals in business. Pragmatism is not egoism ("what’s best for me is best”). Rather, pragmatism tells us that we should look for policies that work to achieve community goals, local or state or national. Sometimes but not always a government hands-off approach will be best. Sometimes but not always a government program will solve a particular problem. What I am advocating, you see, is attention to particularity. What approach is best for a particular community problem? Can we set up a small test and see how it works out? Which aspects of the results will then be applicable to some other community, and which ones do not travel well? It is exactly this kind of experimentation that is the justification for a federal system.

All too often politicians and Americans and, I suppose, human beings in general want a “hammer mechanic” solution: I’ve got a hammer, and I’ll just pound until this thing is fixed! Not generally the best approach, I’m saying, whether you hammer from the far left or the far right. An ideological hammer will generally create as much mess as it tries to eliminate, leaving you no further ahead. 

Surgery is not always the best answer. Neither is avoiding surgery always the best answer. 

That’s my two cents’ worth, anyway.

You Probably Think He Was On YOUR Side, Don't You?

It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eye-witnesses whom I believe to be reliable . . .  

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. 

- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, quoted in Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens says of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia that it remained “an obscure collector’s item of a book throughout Orwell’s lifetime.” Not, in other words, a bestseller or anywhere close. Why would this be so? The answer given by Hitchens, one that makes complete sense to me, is that both the official and the popular views of the war in Spain relied on what I call a “two sides” formula. You know, the way we are told and so often tell each other that it’s so important to hear both sides of any issue or story? As if there are only two versions, the two clearly distinct from each other? That’s certainly the way the war in Spain was framed — as a conflict between conservatives (Catholic Nationalists, they called themselves; others called them Fascists) and communists (although some were grassroots socialists and others Stalin’s forces). Given the frame, which side any particular person saw as good and which as bad depended on that person’s ideological commitments rather than on more complicated facts, let alone whole truth. 

One must close one’s eyes to the virtues of one’s opposition in order to construct an inhuman enemy. 

Orwell was on the ground in Spain, an active fighter on the Left but also a man who saw clearly, first-hand, the way the anti-fascist revolution was betrayed by Stalin’s ruthless subversion of forces fighting for Catalonian independence. What were his options when he realized what was really going on? Stay with a local, independent Left and be tortured, even murdered by Stalinists for not being a loyal Communist? That happened to others he knew. Go with the Stalinists, the internationally recognized Communists, and betray the revolution or switch sides and become a Fascist? Neither of those would have been Eric Arthur Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell.

He chose to escape and tell the story, but it fell on deaf ears. The world had chosen sides, each one saying, “With us or against us!” Thus, one could only be seen — by the “other side” — as Fascist or Communist.

Sound familiar? 

Here’s an irony for you: not only did Orwell back then have those on both the Left and Right who hated him — he also has admirers on both sides today. Today’s liberals are sure he was warning against the dangers of fascism, now imminent, while today’s conservatives say he warned against socialism, their especial bugaboo. Everyone wants to think Orwell was singing their song. Hitchens takes a chapter each show that both groups are wrong and can only turn Orwell into their saint by cherry-picking their quotes, but that’s all more than I am going to try to summarize here. You’ll have to read Why Orwell Matters for yourself— and then go back and read Animal Farm and 1984 again. One thing is certain: Orwell was warning the world about future dystopian possibilities.

One of several things that frustrates me about debate, in general (consequently, also about the adversarial American justice system), is the usually unquestioned assumption that there are always and only two sides to a question and that one one of them — and only one — is true, thus the other false. From the assumption, it follows that positions taken must possess the form of affirmation/negation: I’m right, you’re wrong. To acknowledge that there is anything to be said for one’s opposition is seen as weakening one’s own case, giving “comfort to the enemy. 

Recognizing a much more complicated truth, Orwell in his day was caught in the crossfire. The same thing happens today in our country to many politicians who don’t adhere to a strict party line. Determined to vilify those with whom they disagree, Americans seem willing to give up truth. Why?

"Power is not a means; it is an end. 

"… The object of power is power." 

- George Orwell, 1984

I once had lively discussions on ethics and politics with a graduate school friend who had been the first woman in Ethiopia to graduate from university with a B.A. in philosophy. Our very different undergraduate educations, as well as wildly divergent life experiences, inevitably resulted in very different views at the opening of each discussion. But it was, each time I looked back afterward on the course of our conversation, energizing and delightful to realize what had taken place as we argued. I cannot remember a single time when one of us claimed victory and the other admitted defeat. Instead, by the time we had hashed through our subject for several hours, we always came to a more nuanced understanding of the issue at hand, an acknowledgement that black-and-white could not contain it at all, with the result that the two of us, together, now agreed on and occupied a new, third position not envisioned in our initial disagreement. Such a result would fall far outside the parameters of the rules of debate. It would not have made, for either of us, a big splash in professional academic philosophy circles, either. But we felt satisfied that we had both advanced toward truth in those discussions, as well as finding common ground. While it should not be impossible, in principle, to achieve similar results in the halls of Congress — if Congress were actually functional and all members focused on getting work done — it seems to have become nearly so in recent years. 

Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda.  

- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

As far as I’m concerned, that single sentence from the passage that Hitchens quotes is sufficient to establish that Orwell still matters today. His is a warning we would do well to understand and heed.

Time Also to Think

The image above (not a very good one) doesn't show this morning's sky. I referred to the moon over the barn on June 30 but was unable to upload my image then, so here it is on July 3. Sadly, I remain unable to upload the image from Fleda Brown’s TEA event at Dog Ears Books. The moon was on my phone, Fleda on the Artist’s camera. Technical challenges continue. 

But each night continues to give way to another day, and up at 4:30 a.m. on this day before the 4th of July, I picked up a book set aside a year ago or more, about halfway through, The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. One reason I set it aside was my inner editor’s constant carping: I wanted more smoothly flowing sentences, cleared of unnecessary obstructions, and I found repetitions annoying, jumbled chronology confusing. My other reason was more personal: Since first making the acquaintance of Henri Bergson’s work, I have loved him, and to read an account of the “controversy” during his lifetime, controversy fomented by interested philosophers, scientists, and journalists who pitted him against Einstein as if the two were boxers in a ring — well, it was just too, too sad. Bergson and Einstein had very different concerns,  therefore different thought objects, definitions, and arguments, and neither was vitally interested in the other’s chief concern. How does a downhill skier compete with a figure skater? Skiers will judge for one, skaters for the other, ¿claro?

Philosophy stimulates thought in ways different from the stimulation of fiction. My mornings this summer more often begin with novels, but life used to be very different. Back in graduate school days, all my mornings began with philosophical arguments. One night, I recall, I slept not at all, so furious was I with Bertrand Russell’s clumsy attack on Bergson, whom he had completely failed to understand. I spent that night spent writing furiously, arguing with one dead philosopher for his failure to comprehend another! 

During my first year of graduate work, in fact, the only way I could go to sleep at all most nights was to turn to the familiar novels of Jane Austen. I had all of them lined up at the head of my bed, so that when I reached the last page of one I could pick up the next, working my way to the end the line and then starting over at the beginning. Jane Austen was a comfort. Bertrand Russell was not. 

But mornings — ah, it is not such a bad thing to have one’s mind jolted awake by thought in the morning! And today it occurred to me long before sunrise that while certain philosophers have criticized what they disdainfully call “the god’s-eye view,” a perspective they say human beings often try to assume but can never realistically inhabit, the “subatomic view” is just as much outside human experience. Solid objects are not solid, the physicist tells us. Solidity does not exist! Accepting that there are gaps and spaces between atoms, what has this to do with life as we live it? With the “too, too solid” nature of our bodies and floors and the earth itself in terms of our experience (though we gardeners know healthy living soil to be full of earthworms and fungi and bacteria — anything but “rock solid”)? My question is, why is the subatomic view to be preferred? Why is it any more legitimate than the view from heaven? If one of those perspectives is suspect for being outside our experience, surely the other is, also.

Then, unbidden, an image of a doe and fawn comes to my mind. Not bothering their heads with philosophy, they stand motionless by the side of the road, the fawn obedient to its mother’s signals. Be still. Watch me. Listen. Follow me when I let you know it’s time. In some ways we share a world with deer, and in other ways we inhabit very different realms. Venn diagrams, our lives are, intersecting only at one edge, forming a delicate lentil of overlap. 

After a while the sky to the west takes on a rosy tinge, reflecting sunrise, and Sarah and I stroll out into the grass. She takes off like a shot toward the barn. Must have seen a rabbit. Thing is, she often doesn’t see the rabbits if they don’t move.

Dog, rabbits, deer. They are closer to my notice and understanding than gods and atomic particles, but even to pay attention to these other creatures means taking a break from the books. Not just “the books,” as in novels and philosophy, history, economics, and such, but “the books” in terms of the profit-and-loss thinking necessary to running a largely seasonal business during “high season.” 

And it occurred to me also this morning that running an essentially one-person business, as I have for 25 years now, is a lot like conducting a second marriage alongside and simultaneously with the first. There is the anticipation stage, preparation for the initial launch (engagement). Then one goes public (wedding), followed by the leap into a honeymoon, the nature of which can never be precisely foreseen, and further surprises of life together. If the business is successful, one year follows another, but none is ever just like the previous, as each brings new challenges to be met. Children? Well, as a bookseller, though my guest authors are adults, I have almost family feelings for the authors and books I choose to promote.

My husband, as friends and regular readers know, is an artist — “the Artist,” I have taken to calling him lately — and so he too has another “marriage” on the side. Art has been his life for over half a century, while I have been married to a bookstore for only a quarter-century. How does that work out for us? Are we jealous of each other’s other partners? In a word, no. There are occasions when one of us, in fact, gives priority to the other’s other partner over our own. At those times we are each other’s support system. At other times, I go my way with the books, the Artist goes his way with painting, and we come back together with new stories to share, and that’s good, too. 

All these marriages — that of two human beings, of one with a business, of the other with his art — also involve many more people. Some friendships blossom and fade, others persist and deepen, but every single one of them has a place in the rich marriage history. 

These are some of my thoughts this morning, before sunrise, when I have time to think, to let my mind roam.

Happy 4th of July, everyone! And don’t forget, our TEA guest (Thursday Evening Author) this week, on July 5, is Kim Schneider. That’s at 7 p.m. on Waukazoo Street, so join us if you can — and bring your visiting relatives! They’ll pick up all kinds of ideas for how to entertain themselves when they visit you.

Photo of long-ago photo. Who remembers that place and time?

Beautiful Mornings Not For Sale

On one morning’s drive into Willcox, a song came into my head, and once it was there it stayed for several days. “Who Will Buy?” My first and unforgettable introduction to it came during a high school talent show, when a schoolmate sat alone on a stage and sang her heart out. “Who will buy this wonderful morning?” the song begins. A later verse asks, poignantly, “Who will buy this wonderful feeling?” and the song’s final, plaintive question, “What am I to do/to keep the sky so blue?” is answered only by the desperate, doomed wish: “There must be someone who will buy.” 

We cannot, of course, put a beautiful morning or a wonderful feeling in a box, tie it up with ribbons, and take it out when we feel blue. We know very well that life doesn’t work that way. But having such mornings and such feelings — and remembering them — and holding onto the likelihood that they will come into one’s life again, no matter how bleak a particular present moment might appear — those are the realizations that song has always brought me. And while the idea of buying special moments and feelings is a strange one, something we know to be impossible, at the core of the absurd idea is an essential and crucial knowledge, that of value beyond price. 

A friend sent me The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, by Michael McCarthy, a nonfiction book filled with sobering facts, to put it mildly: The world population of human beings doubled between 1960 and 2000, from 3 billion to 6 billion, while at the same time the world economy was multiplied by a factor of six; we have done away with fully half of the world’s rainforests; twenty percent of vertebrates are threatened with extinction; etc. We human beings have become aware of the problems created by our species, and we see what needs to be done, but our habits and desires and super-monkey ingenuity get in the way of reducing our destructive impact on the planet that is our home. Instead, our impact grows by leaps and bounds, and the natural world of which we are a part, on which we depend for our very lives, is destroyed piece by more and more enormous piece.

One argument frequently advanced to convince us to change our ways is that of “sustainable development.” It’s an idea we can understand, but it demands the sacrifice of self-interest — a tough sell. Another attempt at persuasion is the utilitarian argument, appealing to our self-interest. The second argument relies on the fact that we are dependent on nature, which implies that the value of saving our natural environment far exceeds the quick profits to be made by destroying it. But the utilitarian argument’s recognition of value requires commodifying nature and putting a price on various obviously useful aspects of it, leaving other features without defense. 

Hence McCarthy’s attempt at a wholly different kind of defense of nature, an argument for protecting the air, earth, water, and living species of our world that relies unabashedly on his own personal experiences. 

We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy. 

Joy is the feeling expressed in the song that came to my mind as we crossed the desert and drove along the edge of the playa with mountains surrounding us in every direction. Beautiful morning, wonderful feeling. Why do I love this bleak landscape so? It is nothing at all like northern Michigan, with its lush green, moist spring, and yet the same joy that lights so many of my Michigan mornings comes to me here in Arizona. Like the Great Lakes hills and shores, the desert offers a vast expanse and offers room for the spirit to expand. My Michigan eyes, drawn at home to lakes and tree-crowded horizons, here are drawn again and again to mountains. 

And, as happens so often in Michigan, smaller details of my desert surroundings gladden my heart. A sudden splash of color along an otherwise muted roadside — “Oh, stop! Go back! What was that?”

desert verbena

One day it was desert verbena, and having seen it once I look for it again and again, even as other blossoms come along to delight my eye, and even as I scour the more distant views in hopes of seeing species of the wild animal kingdom.

golden smoke

penstemon

Mexican poppy

A group of eight to ten deer one morning surprised Sarah and me on our morning walk. (Sarah noticed them first, when one of the animals shifted position.) The group was initially only fifty or sixty feet from us, but as we turned to watch, they began moving slowly back toward the mountains, vanishing silently into the mesquite as if they had never been there at all. I kept looking, however (as did Sarah), and after a minute or two, one at a time, like a Jack-in-the-box, a deer would appear above the mesquite, as if propelled upward on springs! After the third or fourth deer-in-the-air, I realized they were jumping a barbed wire fence. No photographs of that episode in our desert morning, but it’s bright in my memory.

Another morning’s expedition, a walk around the bird-watching lake, brought another wildlife surprise when a jackrabbit ran across the road in front of us. Those ears! Wow! No time to employ the camera, not for that hare or for a second jackrabbit bounding away from the lake and into the tall grass, but seeing them was thrilling. Then there are hawks….

Morning or evening, hawks are easier to photograph, as they are so often to be found, like the verbena, right along the road, and just outside the back door of the ghost town cabin, the little canyon towhee is a frequent visitor. “Confiding,” one of the bird guides calls this species. I might call the bird “brave” or just plain “sensible,” as it seems to realize we pose no threat and that we can happily co-exist in close proximity, and I love to sit out in the sun with my book and camera and wait for opportunities to photograph the sweet little towhee. Such a simple pleasure feels extraordinary.

Here’s something else I’ve realized about my joy in the desert and mountains: The weather right now is as warm as any Michigan summer, but at home in the summer in Michigan, where vacationers will be relaxing on the beach, frolicking in the waves, and hiking woodsy trails, I will be spending most of my days indoors, in my bookstore. Here and now, though, I can be outdoors all day long, if I so choose — feeling the sun and breeze, soaking in the warmth, hearing and watching the birds, and generally drinking in my surroundings with all senses open to the world. It is this freedom to be out in the open spaces and to feel part of the world, rather than apart from it, that makes every ordinary day an adventure and every moment a fresh and priceless joy.

I cannot put these mornings in a box, and they cannot — thank heaven! — be bought and sold, but I will take precious memories home with me, in the words of the song, “to last my whole life through.”

Oh, Those Lofty Elevations!

The combination of lower temperatures for Arizona and several days of precipitation have changed the looks of the higher mountains. Both the Chiricahua and the Pinaleno ranges are now capped with snow on their highest peaks. When the forecast called for “snow at higher elevations,” my heart soared, and now as we drive from Wilcox back to Dos Cabezas, for a long stretch of road we can see snow on both mountain ranges, one off on our left and the other ahead of us. The high desert world looks “right” again to me, that is, it looks as I remember it from the first winter we spent here. 

It’s strange how what is familiar can so often seem what is right and how the unfamiliar can seem wrong. It’s part of humanity’s near-sightedness, I suppose, perhaps the result of our short life spans as individuals. Even history, the bigger picture, we are all too often eager to justify as the only right way events could have transpired, simply because that is the way they did transpire. From this moment, everything that preceded it was necessary for us to get here, but back there, was it necessary that we take this path?

And so, back to the history of our species. I’ve put it off long enough, spending my days walking the dog, riding around with the Artist, doing little household errands and tasks, concocting meals (all very simple — nothing ambitious), getting more acquainted with neighbors and the neighborhood, and reading about the natural habitat of southern Arizona. Would you believe that a large, multi-armed saguaro cactus can take on over 1,000 pounds of water in a heavy rain? Of that they can live to be 150 years old? More about that sort of thing another time. 

For today -- I hope you can bear with me -- I return to Adam Smith.

The second chapter of The Wealth of Nations, “Of the Principle Which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labor,” pursues Smith’s thoughts about the division of labor he introduced in the first chapter. Human beings did not intentionally set out to achieve the great advantages conferred by the division of labor, he says. They did not envision “the general opulence to which it gives occasion.” Early man was not, that is, seeking to advance his simple society to some lofty level of industrialized civilization. No, the division of labor is simply an “original principle” of our species, hard-wired into us, or, more probably, a consequence of language that human beings naturally exchange and cooperate. 

Certainly, one human being may fawn on another to attract attention in hopes of being given a handout, but it is not our first recourse, when we have other means at our disposal. Instead we address one another’s self-interest. 

Give me that which I want, and you shall have that which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.

Even a beggar, Smith writes, has “the greater part of his occasional wants supplied” by exchange rather than begging. With coins tossed to him, he buys food. Clothes tossed his way he may exchange for others he likes better. Etc.

This kind of exchange is the first division of labor. 

When one member of a tribe of hunters makes better arrows than another, he is able to exchange arrows for game shot by his companions, and thus his work becomes a specialty “business” by which his wants can be supplied. Other men [always men, I notice, though one can easily imagine an outstanding seamstress achieving similar standing] specialize in other kinds of work, encouraged by success in their respective fields.

[W]ithout the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted.

But as human beings — or, as he has already noted, as a species that developed symbolic language — this natural “disposition” develops in a way that “the most dissimilar geniuses” come to be “of use to one another….” Different men, so alike at birth, develop a diversity of talents and bring those talents to form 

…a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men’s talents he has occasion for.

Smith’s general claims about human beings in this chapter seem fairly uncontroversial. The omission of women from his account is standard for his time. Also, we might note that at this early stage of social exchange (in Smith’s theoretical reconstruction of history), men have not yet become machine parts. They are more artisans than industrial workers. The maker of arrows that Smith asks us to imagine fashions each arrow himself, from start to finish, and no doubt takes pride in his work. The “division,” therefore, is between one kind of work and another, not the breaking-down of one kind of production into component steps.

What I have said so far, other than the observation on the omission of women, is fairly strict exposition of Smith’s chapter. I would like now to take a few moments to look more closely at a few sub-claims, one about human beings but first those about non-human animals. 

Other animals, Smith asserts, never exchange peaceably, and neither do they intentionally cooperate to achieve a greater goal than one could achieve alone. 

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.

Study of animal behavior has advanced by leaps and bounds since Adam Smith’s time; nevertheless, I will not take up an argument against his denial of peaceable exchange in nonhuman species. I don’t know enough to take that on. When it comes to the question of cooperation, I feel on more solid ground. 

It’s interesting that Smith denies the theoretical Hobbesian man, that “solitary” individual, with his “nasty, brutish, short” life. Even in the early tribal societies he imagines, he sees exchange and cooperation as essential to survival. While not going as far back as John Locke to see the family as the first society, with two equal adults sharing responsibility and cooperating for the sake of their offspring, his account avoids the “war of all against all” envisioned by Thomas Hobbes. In a way, his is a kind of middle ground between the Locke and Hobbes. As did Locke, he sees cooperation as part of group life from the beginning for human beings; like Hobbes, however, he sees self-interest as the sole motive. 

The whole business of attributing motives, whether to individuals or groups or species, can be highly suspect, so let’s leave it to one side. The question I want to address is whether cooperation is uniquely human, and I will assert here, against Smith, that it is not. 

Enough studies have been made of, for instance, wolf packs that my denial should be practically unnecessary. One pair of wolves, the alpha male and alpha female, is the breeding pair in a small, extended family. When the pack goes out on the hunt, the alpha female may well be one of the hunters, leaving her young behind in the care of a lesser hunter. That wolves cooperate strategically on the hunt is also well documented. It is not, as Smith speculates in his example of two greyhounds, “the accidental concurrence of their passions” focused on the same object at the same time. 

Other species exhibit cooperation in different ways, and scientists since Smith’s time have also made studies of interspecies cooperation. They may not speak to one another in symbolic language, and they certainly do not write books and entertain philosophical theories, but nonhuman animals have much more active brains than was commonly thought in the eighteenth century. 

All of which, of course, is completely irrelevant as far as addressing the “wealth of nations” is concerned. Nonhuman animals are not Smith’s concern. My objections are, therefore, moot, are they not?

Another strand in Chapter II that I want to pick up may be somewhat more to the point, but here I make no argument at all. I only stop on the passage because it amuses me so. As Smith points to different specialties taken up by different mature adult men, musing that as they came into the world they were, “perhaps, very much alike,” he cannot help pointing to “the philosopher” as one of the specialized adults. 

The difference between … a philosopher and a common [sic] street porter … seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.

Further down the page, 

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, as a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog. Those different tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species, are of scarce any use to one another.

Okay, maybe I do have an argument to make. (My mother used to say, “You would argue with St. Peter himself!” That is what it means, I’m afraid, to be a philosopher.) I have no difficulty seeing what use a street porter might be to a philosopher, but I have a great deal of trouble coming up with an idea of the philosopher’s usefulness to the street porter. And I am, by inclination and education, a philosopher! How are we philosophers, I wonder, useful to others in society? How does philosophy further the cause of “progress”? Of what use are my ramblings here, to anyone, myself or others, except as I divert myself (and perhaps one or two others) for a little while?

I said above that I would leave motivation to one side, but I want to renege on that statement. Smith’s philosophy, we might remark, serves well as justification for behaviors stemming from the self-interest motive he has singled out as the driving force of humanity and the very motor of civilization. But as Kant realized, any individual’s motives are opaque not only others but even to the individual himself, and I would ask, if one accepts that, how can the motives of a group or a species be any more transparent? 

I also said that nonhuman animals are irrelevant to Smith’s argument, but my thoughts will not leave the animals out of the picture, either. I never can leave what I see as derogatory or at least dismissive observations on dogs without making objections.

When Smith looks at a species whose members are “of scarce any use to one another,” he not only singles out dogs but looks at individual dogs of different breeds — a very problematic proceeding, in my opinion. First of all, the breeds he chooses — mastiff, greyhound, spaniel — have been developed by human choice, not by natural selection. Each breed’s characteristics were selected by man, so why should the character of one dog breed be useful to a dog of another breed? In many cases, it is the cooperation of dogs of a particular breed with their owners or handlers that has been bred for. That is probably relevant to Smith’s argument only as it shows yet another human specialty, but does not the specially bred and trained dog do its work for man out of self-interest, too, just as he says human beings trade work out of self-interest? And wait — what of the working dog (and there are such) that is not happy unless working? It may be housed and fed, but its spirit languishes. How would that be explained? A dog with “mind” or “spirit”? Not helpful to the distinction Smith is eager to make. No, he has certainly given dogs short shrift. And human beings, I think, too, in the process. 

The case of nondomesticated animals would be more pertinent to Smith’s discussion of “nature,” but here he leans back, without evidence, on his original statement:

Each animal is … obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature has distinguished its fellows. 

Well, we must proceed carefully here, it seems. A herd of buffalo on the Great Plains, for example, may derive advantage from the simple circumstance of being together, but do members of the herd exhibit a “variety of talents”? If not, Smith might say we cannot call their being together cooperation, that they are simply a congregation of “separate,” “independent” individuals. If cooperation is defined in that way, has the deck been stacked? Or has the philosopher assumed a conclusion to use it as a premise?

Back to those wolves for a moment, please. Some are better hunters than others, and some are more successful breeders. All, moreover, are products of natural selection, not human breeding programs. That dogs of different breeds do not naturally cooperate with each other proves nothing, either of dogs or of humans. Wolves might better illuminate the discussion, had Smith been privileged to have a knowledge of wolves not available in his time. Since we do have that knowledge, we need not accept his every statement — and denying statements here and there may have an effect on how we evaluate his overall claims and conclusions. Time will tell.

As for philosophers and their specialized work, one could easily claim, I think, that philosophy has wrought as much ill as it has brought benefit to human society. That aside, we might ask more immediately, what advantage does a plumber gain from exchange with a philosopher? Clearly, it would be nought, if not for money. But we are still two chapters away from the development of money in Smith’s account, so perhaps those philosophers will earn their keep, after all. Stay tuned! 

But never fear, we will take many breaks along the way for the natural world, travel adventures, and scenes from ghost town, high desert, and mountain landscapes. I would not tax the patience and forbearance of my handful of readers too far by imposing philosophy in every post.