ParisTampaBlog

There are many who say things better than I do. It seems to me that I’ve known that forever, and have a long ingrained habit of keeping the thoughts and words of others that I most admire in several thousand books on my library shelves where I can look at them, read the spines, be secure in their presence, much like in the presence of good friends.

Now and more and more the Internet has become for me a kind of digital book shelf, so far without bounds, holding it its possession the thoughts and words of not only the thousands of authors on my shelves, but those of  thousands, tens of thousands of others, whom I continue to discover and recognize as kindred souls.

Today I happened to be looking on the web for an entry that would help me to better understand the places of reason and common sense in our lives. For it seemed to me that more and more the two were not only neglected but going their separate ways, whereas at one time, at least in my lifetime, they were together. Our country’s leaders, as I go on trying to show in my blogs, show too little of both reason and common sense in their words and actions. What’s principally wrong with our country may very well be no more than this, that the members of Congress have forgotten that 2 plus 2 is four.

My father was what I would call a “common sense” person. He looked to common sense for answers to the problems of the day, thinking probably mistakenly that he had found them, and he was continually taken aback by the failure of the leaders of the country to display any of what, at least he thought was common sense.

I would call myself, in contrast to my father’s being a common sense guy, a reasonable person, but I too am continually taken aback by the failure of the leaders of the country to display, in this regard, reasonableness in their words or actions

Anyway, while looking for a discussion of reason and common sense on the Web, and the differences, or likenesses between them, I hit upon George Santayana’s “Reason in Common Sense.” Reason in, not and common sense. And although his words weren’t exactly what I was looking for they were words, like those so many other thinkers and writers, that spoke directly to me and that I would try not to forget.

His words, again like those of many others, helped me with my own thinking, perhaps made me more reasonable? Here again (again because it happens often, given the wealth of great ideas on library shelves and in digital data bases) was someone who spoke for me much better than I could speak for myself.

His words, as those of so many of the men and women behind the spines on my bookshelves, provoked thoughts of my own. For example, and almost immediately as I began to read the passage below, I  thought of Diane Ravitch and her recent book,  The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and I said to myself that if she had read Santayana, and in particular this quoted passage, before she wrote her book, she may not have written it at all, his thoughts making hers suddenly trivial. Or she would have written a totally different book than the one she did write, the one I wrote about in an earllier ParisTampaBlog.

Now, with no further ado, here is the passage from Santayana’s Reason and Common Sense:

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when ex­perience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that hap­pens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile re-adaptation.

In a moving world re-adaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a genera­tion plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its les­sons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.

I am not sure that a humanity such as we know, were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a more exhilarating prospect than a humanity having indefinite elasticity together with a precarious tenure of life. Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

The human savage craves a freedom and many a danger inconsistent with civilization, because independent of reason. He does not yet identify his interests with any persistent and ideal harmonies created by reflection. And when reflection is absent, length of life is no benefit: a quick succession of generations, with a small chance of reach­ing old age, is a beautiful thing in purely animal economy, where vigor is the greatest joy, propagation the highest function, and decrepitude the sorriest woe. The value of safety, accordingly, hangs on the question whether life has become reflective and ra­tional.”

OK, that’s it. And as there wasn’t much there about the comparison between reason and common sense that I was looking for I’ll have to go back to surfing the Web. Maybe that will lead to another Blog, Reason and Common Sense, Two.

Columbia University’s Pierre-André Chiappori, as cited by Guy  Sorman in the City Journal, says:

“Academic life in the U.S. is determined by competition at all levels, he adds. ‘It’s often said that American universities recruit only the best among the Europeans. I would say instead that we become better because we are immersed in permanent competition. I would have been better at what I do if only I had come earlier to the U.S.’”

What if our schools were to accept his judgment, that we become better at what we do because of the competition? It’s certainly true of athletics, which is all about competition. Why might it not also be true of learning, say, math or history?

But, whether or not it’s true is for more and more of us no longer a pressing issue. For we have become, not only in our schools, but also in the way we raise our children, afraid of competition.

We’re afraid of  turning off or away all those who can’t or won’t or don’t want to compete. And with reason, for that does happen.

And it can get ugly, as one can readily see in a large family with competing children. For there will always be winners and losers. And because of this we go out of our way and try to lessen the harm done, by such things as having all the children speak up in turn at the family dinner table, by being sure that all the kids in the classroom are raising their hands and asking questions, and by countless other similar esteem promoting actions.

But of course our efforts are mostly in vain. Competition is, as they say, in our genes, and our memes. It’s a part of everything we do. We can’t do away with it.

Rather than try we ought to accept the truth of what Chiappori says, and allow the few to enjoy the great benefits, to themselves and the larger organization of which they are a part, that come from competition, while trying at the same time to lessen the downside, the discouragement that will probably fall upon the many.

In any case, that’s reality. That’s also what’s going on between nations as they compete for global market share. And because of the competition, and the greater productivity and greater wealth arising therefrom, hundreds of millions who have only known poverty in their lives are now working and earning money and becoming the first of their families to move up into the middle classes.

Now this from the Wall Street Journal’s Thomas Frank. Another reasonable voice, this one on the Right.

There are few things in politics more annoying than the right’s utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word “freedom” that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.

We are living, I believe, in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed. On the plus side, the end of the cold war, the revolution in communications technology, great scientific achievements such as the completion of the human genome project; in the minus column, a new kind of war against new kinds of enemies fighting with terrible new weapons. We will all be judged by how we handle ourselves in this time.

What will be the spirit of this frontier? Will we give the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like their hate-filled, illiberal mirror image, or will we, as the guardians of the modern world, as the custodians of freedom and the occupants of the privileged lands of plenty, go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice? Will we become the suits of armour our fear makes us put on, or will we continue to be ourselves? The frontier both shapes our character and tests our mettle. I hope we pass the test.

Today in op ed piece in the N Y Times Paul Krugman said this:

“What Obama needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.”

Could be.

During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child’s neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.
(from Matthias Küntzel, A CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION TAKES OVER,  Ahmadinejad’s Demons, TNR, 4/24/06)

“For [Obama's] beloved middle ground is elusive, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. As Updike noted in 1966, ‘It is in middles that extremes clash.’

“Or, as he wrote 40 years later in ‘Terrorist,’  ‘History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust.’
Our hopes, not least.”

(Roger Cohen, writing in the New York Times, 6/08/2009)