Fire and Knowledge

Many a man, brought up in the glib professional of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 81.

When asked about Amazon’s Kindle, Steve Jobs replied:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore…. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

He’s wrong according to his own statistic. If 40% of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year, 60% read one or more books. Everyone I know reads a little, and many read multiple books a month. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has sold 117 million copies and it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s a lot of books for people who don’t read. And if “the whole conception is flawed,” why is the Kindle out of stock? It seems reality has the audacity to disagree with Steve Jobs.

So it wouldn’t surprise me if Steve changes his tune in a few years and releases an elegant e-reader. I hope somebody does, because it doesn’t exist yet.

Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivate land: grass-finished steaks for everyone.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 326

People have always used clothing not only (or even primarily) for covering, but for communicating. The symbolic use of clothing is in many ways like a language, with a grammar or syntax that allows for a range of expressive acts. And what a rich language it is, with regional and demographic dialects sophisticated enough to permit jokes, ironic statements, even slang and metaphor.

What we wear speaks volumes about who we are. Our clothes reveal our age and income, our education and our social class; they reveal our current attitudes and political beliefs, our gender and even our sexual orientation. They play an extraordinary important role in mate selection. Clothing is also an extremely accurate guide to the time in which we live—notice how clothing (along with hairstyles) is the easiest way to date old photographs.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 163

Openness emerges when two or more individuals become willing to suspend their certainty in each other’s presence. They become willing to share their thinking and are susceptible to having their thinking influenced by one another. And … in a state of openness, they gain access to depths of understanding not accessible otherwise.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 284.

The most fundamental reason why there is no such thing as an objective or “real” value is that there would be no rational basis for economics transactions if there were. When you pay 50 cents for a newspaper, obviously the only reason you do so is that the newspaper is more valuable to you than the 50 cents is. At the same time, the only reason people are willing to sell the newspaper is that 50 cents is more valuable to them than the newspaper is. If there were any such thing as a “real” or objective value of a newspaper—or anything else—neither the buyer or seller would benefit from making a transaction at a price equal to the objective value, since what would be acquired would be of no greater value than what was given up. Why bother to make the transaction then?

On the other hand, if either the buyer or the seller was getting more than the objective value from the transaction, then the other one must be losing—in which case, why continue to get cheated? Continuing transactions between buyer and seller make sense only if value is subjective, each getting what is worth more subjectively.

–Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 35.

Our country is not being destroyed by bad politics; it is being destroyed by a bad way of life. Bad politics is merely another result.

–Wendell Berry, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 37

“Our ugly little species, weak and ugly, torn with insanities, violent and quarrelsome, sensing evil—the only species that knows evil and practices it—the only one that senses cleanness and is dirty, that knows about cruelty and is unbearably cruel.”

–Joe Saul in John Steinbeck, Burning Bright (1950).