Polytropy

I’m going to make some comparisons here, even some likenings, mainly between

• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), especially chapter 2, and
• Wendell Berry, “Conservation is Good Work” (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1993; reprinted in Essays 1993–2017, Library of America, 2019).

Pirsig recounts a motorcycle trip west from Minnesota across the prairie. The riders pass through Yellowstone National Park, but Pirsig does not like it. At least his former self did not like it. This is in chapter 12 of ZAMM:

The guided-tour attitude of the rangers angered him. The Bronx Zoo attitudes of the tourists disgusted him even more … It seemed an enormous museum with exhibits carefully manicured to give the illusion of reality, but nicely chained off so that children would not injure them.

For Berry, such parks set the wrong standard for what should be conserved:

Right at the heart of American conservation, from the beginning, has been the preservation of spectacular places. The typical American park is in a place that is “breathtakingly” beautiful or wonderful and of little apparent economic value. Mountains, canyons, deserts, spectacular landforms, geysers, waterfalls – these are the stuff of parks. There is, significantly, no prairie national park.

I do see that Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve was created in Kansas in 1996.

In developing my comparisons in this post, I shall call also on

• Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill” (1930), and
• Yuval Noah Harari, “‘Never summon a power you can’t control’: Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world” (The Guardian, August 24, 2024), an excerpt from his 2024 book Nexus.

One may ask whether I can bring all of my material under control – that was a theme of my previous post, “Omniscience.”

Collingwood has a sort of warning about making comparisons, in “Notes on Historiography: written on a voyage to the East Indies 1938–9.” The warning is in the selection from the “Notes” that editors William H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen thought worth including in

• R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History: And Other Writings in Philosophy of History (Oxford, 1999).

The selected notes were apparently thought particularly relevant to Collingwood’s ensuing drafting of “The Principles of History” (which he could never finish – he wrote instead The New Leviathan, 1942). Here is the note that I am mainly interested in:

The Comparative Method

This is the apotheosis of anti-historicism in a positivistic interest. You cease to care about what a thing is, and amuse yourself by saying what it is like. (A critical discussion of the idea of similarity would be useful here.) Imagine a ‘comparative pathology’. This condition is like nasal catarrh (but it is scarlet fever).

I brought up this passage

• in “Bosphorus Sky” (2014), when I found myself, sitting under what the title referred to, comparing verses of poetry on the basis of their sound;
• in “Figs” (2021), inspired by Rilke’s address to a fig tree in the sixth of the Duino Elegies: here, I
  • set out the Collingwood passage as contrasting with one by Georges Perec, whereby the whole point of studying a jigsaw-puzzle piece is to see how it fits with the others;
  • quoted a Monty Python sketch in which two people try to fit philosophers together by finding common letters in their names.

Since I am making continued use of the note of Collingwood called “The Comparative Method,” let me set it in some context. It is preceded (in the 1999 edition) by “No Beginnings in History,” which says,

History is about something that doesn’t begin and doesn’t end. It is connected with things (e.g. individual human lives) that begin and end, but there is no history of these things.

There will be objections, such as, “Isn’t biography a kind of history?” It is not. Collingwood compares the two pursuits, in the draft of “Principles of History” that we have:

Biography is not history, because its methods and interests are different. Its methods are scissors-and-paste; its interest is a ‘gossip-interest’, based not on the desire to get at the thought embodied in an action, which is the desire underlying historical work, but on a combination of sympathy and malice which are the emotions aroused in one animal by the spectacle of what another animal does and undergoes.

In short, history is about thought; biography, feeling. For example,

It is matter of biography, not of military history, that Wolfe was thinking about Gray’s Elegy during the early stages of his assault on Quebec. It would have been matter of military history if he had allowed Gray’s Elegy to interfere with the assault.

Gray may have been thinking about the Elegy, but this detail is only biographical, if the point of mentioning it is how it makes the reader feel. However, all I know about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham is that some Anglophone Canadians are said to mention it when getting upset over Francophone demands. An American once mentioned the battle to me, when he was arguing that the British should have made the French Canadians learn English. In “Re-enactment,” I talked about an historian who professed to be an admirer of Collingwood, while not recognizing Collingwood’s distinction between thought and feeling.

According to Collingwood’s note called “No Beginnings in History,” if you want to see absolute beginnings, they are provided by myths, of which Collingwood gives three examples:

1. “Livy and the origin of Rome.”
2. “Hobbes and the origin of Civil Society.”
3. “Freud and the origin of morals.”

Concerning that third example, a brief search has given me two sources that may be worth further contemplation, though I do not propose to engage in much of it here:

• David H. Jones, “Freud’s Theory of Moral Conscience” (Philosophy, 1966; summary of a doctoral dissertation in the philosophy department of Harvard):

  the claim that Freud has explained the genesis and function of moral conscience in human beings is false … Freud is not talking about moral conscience in his theory of the super-ego … he often used moral terminology ambiguously to describe and explain non-moral phenomena.

• Molly S. Castelloe, “On the Origins of Morality: Rethinking Freud’s vision of good and evil” (Psychology Today, September 26, 2013):

  An authentic moral sense emerges not from external demands, but from within. Traits such as kindness, empathy, compassion, and pity need not be whipped into being. They are rooted in the infant-caregiver relationship, which Freud could not clearly see. Specifically, they originate in maternal nourishment and the feeding of a child in the early months and years of life. It is not just milk received by the baby, but also sweetness … How often have you seen an infant trying to feed their mother?

  Eros is this desire to give back for the love one has received.

  We have an instinct for affection that leads us to identify with the nurturer and a wish to provide as we have been provided for. “Conscience” is this affection …

One might look instead at Genesis, chapter 2, for the origin of moral conscience:

9 And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

This is another myth, but perhaps less likely to mislead us into thinking we can tell whether somebody is good or bad from how they were raised.

At the head of Collingwood’s “Notes on Historiography,” before “No Beginnings in History” and “The Comparative Method,” there comes a long note called “Historical Naturalism.” This establishes the general theme that history is not some other science, such as biology. I took up the theme myself in “Biological History” (2023), where I understood some stories of Somerset Maugham as making the same point. I supplemented that post recently with “Just World,” centered on an argument by Parmenides.

All of this might be kept in mind as I go along saying that this is like that.

Likeness might be inferred, even by AI, from the use of the same unusual word, such as “gumption.” Wendell Berry uses it at the end of “Conservation is Good Work”:

The point of all this is the use of local buying power, local gumption, and local affection to see that the best care is taken of the local land. This sort of effort would bridge the gap, now so destructive, between the conservationists and the small farmers and ranchers, and that would be one of its great political benefits. But the fundamental benefit would be to the world and ourselves. We would begin to protect the world not just by conserving it but also by living in it.

This takes me to chapter 26 of Zen and the Art …:

I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin,” seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm.” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. See how that fits? A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.

Pirsig continues with practical advice on avoiding what he calls “gumption traps.” An example of such a trap is forgetting a part when reassembling your motorcycle. One solution is to keep a lab notebook.

When they talk about gumption, do Berry and Pirsig mean the same thing? Let’s see.

Yuval Noah Harari says,

… human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans. Accordingly, it isn’t our individual psychology that causes us to abuse power.

I would observe that it requires cooperation to

• mine every last deposit of fossil fuel, or
• form a political system in which
  • the freedom to wield deadly weapons is almost absolute, or
  • the head of one branch of government is given control of all.

I see the idea now in Berry’s essay:

There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.

For example, the yacht of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos

produces an astounding minimum of 7,154 tons of greenhouse gasses annually – roughly 447 times the entire annual carbon footprint of your average American.

Bezos did not build the yacht by himself, nor does he operate it that way. Apparently some of his support staff follow on a second yacht; I had not heard that before.

Focusing on computers, Harari concludes,

… there is a new alpha predator in the jungle. If humanity doesn’t find a way to cooperate and protect our shared interests, we will all be easy prey to AI.

Will knowing this lead to cooperation? I don’t know.

Berry does see salvation in the individual; at least, it can come only from there. Here is the context of my last quote of him:

I must admit here that my experience over more than twenty years as part of an effort to influence agricultural policy has not been encouraging …

However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand. There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people. We acquiesce in the wastefulness and destructiveness of the national and global economics by acquiescing in the wastefulness and destructiveness of our own households and communities. If conservation is to have a hope of succeeding, then conservationists, while continuing their effort to change public life, are going to have to begin the effort to change private life as well.

Conservationists have urged

• turning off unused lights,
• putting a brick in the toilet tank,
• using water-saving shower heads,
• setting the thermostat low,
• sharing rides,

and so forth.

Berry calls these things, “pretty dull stuff.” I’m not sure why. I tried to do all of them. My mother was most resistant to the ride-sharing business. If two different people wanted to travel to the same place, a hundred miles away, on the same day, but at different hours, let them take two cars, she said.

Berry’s “and so forth” might include recycling. I don’t know how many people are like the grad-school classmate of mine who thought owning a car was balanced by putting empty aluminum cans in a special bin.

At my father’s funeral in Louisville, Kentucky, Wendell Berry’s home state, the Unitarian minister mentioned something that my father’s widow must have shared with him: my father had never owned a new car.

His cars were always used. I never thought I was in competition with him, but I have never owned a car at all.

Recycling may be largely a scam. However, in Istanbul at least, people find it worthwhile to drive around in trucks, looking in trash bins for cardboard and plastic bottles.

Berry continues:

But I’m talking about actual jobs of work that are interesting because they require intelligence and because they are accomplished in response to interesting questions.

“They require intelligence.” So-called “artificial intelligence” would impress me if it could answer such questions as how to get Russia out of Ukraine. Berry’s questions seem as difficult, at least if supplying an answer includes enacting it:

• What are the principles of household economy, and how can they be applied under present circumstances?
• What are the principles of a neighborhood or a local economy, and how can they be applied under present circumstances?
• What do people already possess in their minds and bodies, in their families and neighborhoods, in their dwellings and in their local landscape, that can replace what is now being supplied by our consumptive and predatory so-called economy?
• What can we supply to ourselves cheaply or for nothing that we are now paying dearly for?

To answer such questions requires more intelligence and involves more pleasure than all the technological breakthroughs of the last two hundred years.

If one person takes pleasure in finding answers, maybe others can too. It will involve recognizing, says Berry,

the inadequacy of the language we are using to talk about our connection to the world.

I don’t know about this. It sends me for a moment to Virginia Woolf:

to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.

Yes it does: “shiver” and “headache”! She must mean something else:

It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself …

Ready-made phrases are what Orwell warned against in “Politics and the English Language” – but AI writes with them, as Hollis Robbins points out in “How to Tell if Something is AI-Written.” I hope to take up these things in a future post (which exists in rough form in my computer – it will become the next post, “Artificial Language”). Meanwhile, Woolf is talking about expressions longer than phrases:

Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no …

If one is going to write such works, I don’t think one has to coin new words. If you make up a new word, are you not going to have to explain what you mean, in old words?

Berry’s beef is with the word “environment,” which

means that which surrounds or encircles us; it means a world separate from ourselves, outside us.

How can you care for such a world? You become like the mechanics who did a crappy job on Robert Pirsig’s motorcycle. Why did they do it? This in chapter 2 of Zen and the Art …:

… the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing – and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

Pirsig’s word “work” is just the one that Berry wants to use, as he explains:

And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing …

The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” … All of us are responsible for bad work, not so much because we do it ourselves (though we all do it) as because we have it done for us by other people.

Pirsig had tried to get his motorcycle fixed by other people,

because I thought it wasn’t important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details and maybe having to order parts and special tools and all that time-dragging stuff when I could get someone else to do it in less time …

Pirsig found out that the work was important enough to learn – to him at least.

… it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century.

I guess I’m not sure what would be wrong in the 20th century that was not already wrong in the 19th; however, an exploration of this is in another draft post – which will turn out to be “The System.” Meanwhile, Pirsig continues:

I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

The sheared pin was the source of the problem that Pirsig had tried to get the spectator mechanics to fix. They couldn’t do it.

Berry too will make haste only slowly:

If we think of this task of rebuilding local economies as one large task that must be done in a hurry, then we will again be overwhelmed and will want the government to do it. If, on the other hand, we define the task as beginning the reformation of our private or household economies, then the way is plain. What we must do is use well the considerable power we have as consumers: the power of choice. We can choose to buy or not to buy, and we can choose what to buy. The standard by which we choose must be the health of the community – and by that we must mean the whole community: ourselves, the place where we live, and all the humans and other creatures who live there with us.

In the beginning, we saw Berry’s observation that some “conservation” conserved only land that industry didn’t want anyway. Thus conserved land didn’t include prairie, which could be farmed or grazed.

Riding a motorcycle across the prairie, Pirsig thinks of Sylvia, who is riding behind John on the other cycle:

In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, “See? – See?” and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it.

If he has no names for something that he recognizes, why does not Pirsig, as a Yankee, heed what Virginia Woolf was saying about the man with a headache?

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. For who of English birth can take liberties with the language? To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our help and set the springs aflow.

I’ve crushed together some writers, to see if something will drop out.

If you are bored in the city, you think the problem must be yours; out in the open land, not. That may be what Pirsig is saying, but there must be more.

As far as I can remember, the places where I have lived long enough to receive mail are, in order of first residence:

1. Alexandria, VA
2. Annapolis, MD
3. Santa Fe, NM
4. Berkeley Springs, WV
5. Hyattsville, MD
6. Greenbelt, MD
7. Washington, DC
8. Toronto, ON
9. Urbana, IL
10. Berkeley, CA
11. Ankara, Turkey
12. Hamilton, ON
13. Fulya, Şişli, Istanbul, Turkey
14. Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul, Turkey

I’m afraid living on the prairie in Illinois was the least pleasant, for me. Probably that had more to do with my personal life than the land itself.