In Living Out Of My Time

Watching television, including
CBC
and
TVO,
with which I had so much to do, and especially the programs
on museums, with which I also had so much to do, I realize to what
extent I do not belong. Those working under good pension schemes
retire after 35 years of service or less, and so people retiring today
from jobs in media and museums came into them as fresh recruits
just as I was completing my 35 years of service, and moving on.
They are the authorities now, and I am a generation "out of touch",
wondering what my opinions could possibly offer, or matter.
Yet perhaps that is too pessimistic. Very recently, I was asked to
give an interview for an article to mark the 60th anniversary of the
Canadian Museums Associations,
of which I am the only surviving founder and original member.



This is, of course,
how time flies.
Space travel is old stuff to the new retirees of today. Television
was old stuff in my day. My father worked for
Alexander Graham Bell,
and was out of university with three degrees by the time the
Wright brothers
flew. As I watch war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is all so
familiar to me at 92 — the good guys, the bad guys, loyalty,
slogans — and I remember that Germans and Italians were once
our enemies, then the Japanese, and now terrorists of all origins.



Of course, I am loyal, but sometimes confused as to whom that
loyalty should be directed. My grandfather was born British in
Nova Scotia, and as a blacksmith working in Virginia at the
outbreak of the
American Civil War,
was not yet Canadian —
Confederation
wouldn't happen for another six years. Since it was not his fight
(the Civil War, that is, not Confederation), he lit out for
home.
Now I am Canadian, watching on this TV gadget the never ending
struggle to determine what I am supposed to be loyal to.
Do you wonder that I feel like a spirit come back from the dead?

The Security Of The Insecure

Constantly, we, or at least I, deal with those who are sure
of something, usually of themselves generally. Of course, this lets
them get through each problematic day with an assurance that the world,
indeed the cosmos, is as they know it to be. That there are
millions of published papers
dealing with new insights into matters of science and of ourselves
as individuals and groups, concerns them not.
They know, and that is that!



The crux, or crutch, of all this is that if they recognized that
nobody knows very much -- in light of all these published
papers -- then the proper position would be "tell me more".
Only those who are secure in the sometimes hard-won awareness
of their partial-knowledge / partial-ignorance condition,
can relax in the security that they do not know, and therefore
can learn.



To me, the question is: Why can't we be content with our very
obvious inadequacies? We accept that foxes,
cows, ants, elephants,
and so on, cannot know everything, so why not accept that neither
can we?



The risk, no, the fate of someone who "knows" all is disaster
when it inevitably turns out that he/she does not.
I could rest my case, and I think I will.

Rumsfeld And The Reverend: Pretty Poor Stuff

I remarked in the last post about comments made to a preacher who
was satisfied with his orations. Here's another one: A preacher
was glowing with pride as the church members made their way out
of the sanctuary, and he asked an honest old farmer what he thought
of the sermon. The farmer, who just had to be truthful, shifted
his Sunday allotment of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other
as he gave his verdict. "I was in the back pew, Reverend, and the
people up front were swallowing up all the best parts, so what
got back to me was pretty poor stuff, pretty poor stuff."



Often this is the case. Right now in U.S. politics we have seen
the departure of
Donald Rumsfeld
and the startling power shift in the
Congress.
This is, of course, the fallout from the voters in the world's
most powerful country telling their Chief what they think of him.
His performance does not fit his statements, and what the people
really heard was not honest confidence but desperate bombast,
or to quote our church-going farmer, "pretty poor stuff".
Another familiar quotation that comes to mind is
Abraham Lincoln's
"You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of
the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people
all of the time".



Those responsible for misleading us don't always intend to mislead,
as they often sincerely believe what they say. Some simply want
to be followed, to be important, and they adopt causes and speak
accordingly. But eventually "the truth will out", and what gets
to "the back of the church" is "pretty poor stuff" indeed.
So what's the message for us in all this? To warp a couple
of well-known sayings: Listen before you leap, and listen
with your eyes open.

Before Blogs ...

... we had wise sayings. Many blog articles, like this one, are
just strung-out ways of passing on things that are clever, and
maybe even wise.
One that I'll always remember is the following anecdote: A young
clergyman had preached a trial sermon at a prominent, not to say
prosperous, church, and he was sure it had gone well. After the
service, he stood at the door and shook hands with the parishioners
as they filed out. At the end of the line was a little old lady,
who held his hand, looked up at him, and quavered, "Young man,
has anyone ever told you how wonderful you are?" "Why no,"
he said, nearly choking in his attempt to be modest.
She replied, "Then how did you ever get the idea?"
Now how could anyone improve on that put-down?



Some wise sayings are so obvious that they almost don't
seem wise, as in two of my favourites that I've used
before -- the Scots' "Many a mickle makes a muckle", and the
German-American "Too soon we get oldt, too late we get schmardt".
In keeping with these is the comment by
George Bernard Shaw:
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more
useful than a life spent doing nothing".
And then there are the
Proverbs of the Bible,
and
Ali Baba
and the stories from Arabian mythology. In fact, I suspect the sayings
of any ethnic literature would be gold mines for blogs.
What are
Aesop's fables
but ready-made blog posts? In modern times, our
comics of stage, screen and Internet are of the same tradition.



Blogs are so easy, so convenient, so quickly disseminated to millions,
that they are here to stay, while they mine the resources of the
recent and distant past. Now I should finish with a good one,
but I am sleepy, so I will just say "Come back", because I know
I'll have something clever when I awake.

Don't Throw Out The Baby With The Bathwater

It is easy to make a case that we think in discrete steps when
trying to move from uncertainty to decision, and often each step
can involve a binary choice: Is it this, or is it that? A left
turn at the bridge, or a right? Fries or baked potato?
The sort of thinking many of us, including myself, regard as the
best the human mind can produce is the merciless process we call
scientific reasoning,
which is of this discrete kind. However, this wonderful method
of either/or can become a ruthless weapon in the hands of those
who start from unexamined premises, and demand that any opponent
stand, or preferably fall, based on the inexorable conclusions.



My point, if I still have it, is that we must be clear about
any position that is up for a "yes" or "no". History, whether of
philosophy, or religion, or empires, or families, records that
many a "no" threw out all sorts of promising implications that
were never considered. Truly
Thoreau's
"Simplify, simplify" has been much abused.



Gravity, which seems as obvious as an apple falling off a tree,
looks quite a bit more complicated when we consider that it holds
together the solar system, with its elliptical orbits, each of them
falling smaller as
time goes by.
Anyone bitten by a "vicious" insect can think badly of insects,
while enjoying no end of fruit made possible by insect-enabled
fertilization, not to mention honey from bees, or the beauty of
flowers whose function is to entice these insects to do their jobs.



If the oft-muttered wish, "Rain, rain, go away", were actually to be
granted, the consequences would be dreadful, and ultimately fatal,
as a desert climate crept over the earth. The counterbalancing maxim
has also been spoken over and over: "Be careful what you wish
for -- you might just get it". Or, as I'm fond of saying,
"It's not that simple".



So the lesson is to identify your premises, and then proceed
logically to a conclusion. In other words, make clear what it is
you are really talking about.

What Happened To The Paper Shortage?

I take in too many newspapers, in order not to be left behind on
something. The result is that I have difficulty getting them all
ready for garbage day. Very little is
real news,
and not much is
original opinion about what news there is; in fact, most
of the "opinions" are very predictable, correlated to whatever
newspaper is printing them. The majority of the paper surface
seems to be advertising, including numerous full-pages sprawls
that are so image-oriented one has to guess what is being sold.
One thing is sure:
it makes foolishness of all the fuss some years back about a
paper shortage, and the accompanying urgings to recycle, or just
to use less. Maybe you understand how this shortage became a surplus,
but I sure don't.



Paper is a commodity, and demand brings supply, which can, I
understand, lead to surplus (unless there's a shortage, right?).
Another commodity is oil, which seems
perpetually threatened with extinction, if you listen to the right
voices. The resulting price fluctuations have the potential to change our
way of life, and to determine whether the U.S. will be the
top dog,
or will it be Russia? Between these two, oil and paper, there
is a drastic difference in that no more oil is being
produced, as it requires many millions of years of geological
activity, while trees for paper are growing all the time, assuming
we don't cut them down all at once.



Surpluses and shortages bring us to the economics of the market
system. This is just as interesting as any topic of the day.
"Free" enterprise apparently includes the freedom to squash
competitors and create a monopoly -- which of course your
competitors were "free" to do as well -- paying off
politicians in the process, if that helps. Whatever it was
all about, the "paper shortage" was interesting, and, I must
say, had some lasting effects. My wife still makes sure all
the toilet paper rolls end up in the right bin.

The Law

Once I was told by an extremely good lawyer, who happened to be
Lieutenant Governor of
Nova Scotia
and senior member of a firm put together by a member of
my father's congregation, that I too should have been a lawyer,
but that the first judge I appeared before would have had me hanged
out of jealousy. In revisiting this remark, my defense is that
I have never pretended to undue modesty. In fact, what modesty
I do have, I am quite proud of. Anyway, back to "the law",
if you recall the title of this column.



The law is an institution, a very human institution, and, of course,
depends on the premises of those establishing it, which in turn
depend on the definitions of the words in those premises.
Rapidly we come full circle; to quote
Humpty Dumpty:
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean --
neither more nor less." (To which Alice demurred, "The question is,
whether you can make words mean so many different things". And
Humpty replied, somewhat ominously, "The question is, which is
to be master —- that's all".) If we pursued this line of
reasoning, we would find that making law, administering it,
amending it, and understanding it are all impossible, in a certain
sense.



So definitions are impossible to get any absolute agreement on,
although there is no lack of trying -- witness the
Charter of Rights,
with its "notwithstanding" escape hatches.
I would recommend that we have a Common Law, like the U.K.,
where we have judges refer to past decisions and defend
departures from them. And the meanings of all the words in
that previous sentence are perfectly clear, of course.

Cannibals All (or: You Eat What You Are)

Most forms of life on earth, including humans, lack the ability to
manufacture internally all the chemicals needed to sustain themselves.
To obtain these substances, they eat other creatures that can
manufacture them. This happens all the way up the food chain. At
the top we have ourselves, who eat just about anything, including
vertebrates, crustaceans, plants, fruits, insects, the lot.
Put differently, we eat our fellows who eat their fellows. And if
that's not
cannibalism,
please explain what is, while I take time out to have some shrimp,
mushrooms, and a nice pork chop.



Seriously, the best food, or at least the best protein, is that
which is most like our own. Of course, eating others of our kind
gives rise to social problems, and is rare as a result, but it
happens. In times past, among some of the Pacific Islands peoples,
since a butchered human very much resembled a butchered pig, it
was referred to as
"long pig".
I presume these cannibals ate only their enemies, not their family members,
no matter how tasty they may have looked. Most of us have accepted
that humans are precious in the sight of God, while ordinary pig,
or "short pig", is OK nutrition.



Disturbingly, the fact remains that protein is best when nearest
our own, but religious leaders, politicians, and relatives are
against what this implies. Long pig is nutritionally ideal, however
stick to the shorter variety. Next time you're stranded
on a desert island with a small group of people, and you're tempted to change
your ethical stance, ask your priest or lawyer first.
Fish is good.

Many A Mickle ...

It is a drowsy, cloudy, rainy Sunday, and I have turned on the TV
to get the weather. Listening to the forecast reminds me of the
heavy storms
that have battered our continent in the recent past.
Houses and people were washed away, with many deaths.
This is one more reminder that
"many a mickle makes a muckle",
but of a different type than I had in mind. Raindrops add up.



Lately, I have been hearing from relatives who have been influenced
by my advice to them, my advice from
The Richest Man in Babylon,
to put away at least 10% of income, never to be spent
but to be invested very carefully. As time goes by, taking few or
no chances, you will become better off, maybe very much so.
Begin young, and your "mickle" will indeed become a "muckle".



Populations are like this, including human populations; the effects
of a few more being born than dying, or vice versa, can be profound.
Tip the balance
slightly in one direction, and the population
can alter drastically. If it grows, we have pressure
on land, transportation systems, food supply, and health services.
If it shrinks, we may choose to increase immigration to compensate,
with accompanying changes in religious mix, labour relations, crime,
sports, and more.
In a similar way, gradual geological changes, like grains of sand
deposited as a river curves and slows, result in vast volumes
of material being spread over great sedimentary plains.



To say it again, "many a mickle makes a muckle". And to back up
a couple of paragraphs, put some money away, now and often.

The Red Queen

When Alice complained that they were not getting anywhere with
their constant running, the Queen said that in Wonderland it always
takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.



Most of us do struggle to keep up, and in my case it has to do with
paper. I get too many newspapers and magazines, including the
New York Sunday Times.
I spend as much time at the kitchen table throwing away papers
into a box as I do eating.



The solution is simple. I must stop getting some things, but which
ones? Also, I must conquer the backlog of many hundreds of pages
torn out for later. Well, this is later. If I don't
conquer this mountain, Mrs. Red Queen, I'll never get to the
quietly waiting pile of requests from all the charities. I've given
to over 100 of them, and mail from new ones keeps arriving, thanks
to the efficient computers that spread my information around, and
systematically churn out bulk mail. Between papers and charities,
I am cornered.



My spare time is gone, and I wonder how I ever held down a steady
job, or indeed paid any attention to my own family, who appeared
from somewhere, somehow. Is it fear of something, or instinct,
or just habit that makes me like this? And what do I mean by
just habit?



Maybe I should read
Alice
and
Through the Looking Glass
again, or consult the Red Queen myself. If I weren't so busy,
I'd get around to that.



Right now I'm off to bed, because I have so much to attend to
tomorrow.