robertlesliefielding stories

The value of education

“I wish for a world of peace and harmony; a world of literature and knowledge where people are valued for what they know rather than what they own. Life is more than just monetary success; it's about making a deeper impact, seeking a more meaningful purpose and touching people's lives in a profound way.” Fatima Surayya Bajia
http://gulfnews.com/life-style/people/power-of-the-pen-1.637523
Fatima Surayya Bajia is a well known Urdu dramatist. She didn’t receive a formal education yet is still held to be an eminent intellectual. Here she discusses the value of education and its role in shaping people’s lives and the lives of nations.

Dialogue

Robert Leslie Fielding: You are not formally educated, and yet here you are saying, in effect, that education plays a major part in shaping a person’s life.

Fatima Surayya Bajia: That is correct. I did not receive any formal education to speak of and yet I do indeed value education.

RLF: Could you tell us why you feel that way?

FSB: Certainly. Let us take other benefits in life, and compare them to the benefits offered and provided by being educated.

If you asked people what benefit they would most like in their lives, most would say they wished to be wealthy; to have a lot of money.

RLF: I think everyone would think that the most attractive benefit. What do you think?

FSB: I can fully understand why people want to be rich, but I think that if they really think about their lives, they would want to be healthy first and last.

RLF: Sure, that is right, but after being healthy, which obviously comes first, being wealthy would seem to be the most popular choice.

FSB: There, you have hit the nail on the head, by using the phrase, ‘the most popular’ – people think that way because being wealthy is a part of the dominant myths in modern culture. Everybody wants to be rich, so why shouldn’t I? That is the way people think.

RLF: Then how can you argue that it isn’t necessarily so.

FSB: I am going to argue that being wise, being knowledgeable, being educated, in other words, benefits people far more, in the long run.

If you think about life – three score years and ten, one’s life has to run through a lot of phases or stages. Life goes through infancy – a time we think we know very little, but actually the time when most is learned; through childhood, when formal education comes to the fore, but yet when the influence of parenting is at its peak, through youth, when there is sometimes a certain amount of rebellion, but is still characterized both by formal learning, in higher education, for example, and in vocational learning, once a young person gets a job; to young adulthood, characterized chiefly by marriage and by giving birth to children – also characterized by learning, and by teaching too – teaching one’s children, as well as learning something about oneself as one brings up one’s own youngsters, then middle age, which, for most people, is an age of consolidation, using what one has learned to make a good life, and then to old age, in which one has time to reflect on what one has learned in that long life.

Is that life not fulfilled by means of education? Of course, money plays its part, but, I would argue that the part it plays is merely a facilitative one – it allows you to live – physically live well, having food in your stomach and a roof over your head. It is education that plays the major part in each and every stage of a life – all life, and to deny that would be to deny many things, and be denied them to.

RLF: Can you give examples of what would be denied by denying someone the advantages education offers?

FSB: Of course. To live without education would be to live a life that could not really be said to be a life in the true sense of the word. We speak of the good life. What is that? It is merely having enough food to eat, having a roof, however splendid a roof, over one’s head? Surely not.

The good life is that which is spent being responsible – for one’s kids, for oneself and one’s partner, and for the community, society and for the environment in which we all dwell. We cannot count any life good if we leave out even one of those.

The key to living life to the full, taking into account what I have just said, is being rational, thinking carefully before acting. We cannot ignore each other, we cannot ignore our surroundings – near and more global, and therefore, we cannot ignore the role and the value of being educated.

To be educated, what we used to call being ‘book learned’ has changed beyond all recognition as the technological world encroaches on all our lives. And although some say the value of books is lessened in this age of computers, the role of reading and understanding is just as important as it has ever been. To understand the world in which you live is the most vital undertaking you can have.

For consider a person without this understanding – or at least, a wish, a propensity to understand. Such a person would surely fall foul to all the ills of the world – moral, social and physical. A young person just going to university, is educated, not just whilst she is in the classroom, in the lecture theater, or in the library or study, she learns much from being with other students.

Going to university is many things, but one that is least mentioned is that part of studying at university with people of one’s own age – people from different parts of the same country – people you would hardly be likely to meet in any other way, other than on a university campus.

Society – a nation – a community, is held together more closely by contact, and by that I do not just mean being in the same shopping mall, but interacting in ways that are meaningful.

To be denied that chance – the chance to interact with one’s peers from wherever they come from, is to be denied the opportunity to engage in the important work of building a nation, of building a society, of building an entity we call a nation.

RLF: Exactly right. What nation is worthy of the name if its young people aren’t educated together in one place – in a university. The home is truly important in life, but it is in leaving home that we truly grow as people, is it not?

FSB: It surely is. Insularity – isolation – selfishness – are not beneficial to nation building, to building a fuller, more wholesome, more rounded personality. The values we get from our parents – moral, religious, functional and psychological and philosophical, are the bedrock upon which the young grow and flourish into maturity. Socializing in educational pursuits is a great second to parental education.

If we grow with others, we grow within ourselves and we are, in turn, then much better equipped to bring other children into the world. Education in all its forms is the key to life.
Robert L. Fielding

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Sources
Thoreau Reader - http://thoreau.eserver.org/
Life and works - http://www.transcendentalists.com/1thorea.html
Thoreau and the environment - http://www.walden.org/
Quotes - http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Henry_David_Thoreau/
Thoreau Center for Sustainability - http://www.thoreau.org/
The Blog of Henry David Thoreau - http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/
The Thoreau Camp and Thoreau Center - http://www.thoreau.com/Club/Scripts/Home/home.asp
Ecotopia - http://ecotopia.org/ecology-hall-of-fame/henry-david-thoreau/
The Thoreau Institute - http://www.ti.org/
On Thoreau’s Walden - http://www.stevencscheer.com/thoreau.htm
Stanford University - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/
Henry David Thoreau Foundation - http://thoreauscholar.org/
Henry David Thoreau talks – the good life
If I were to ask anybody what they thought the good life consisted of, they would most certainly mention money. Some would undoubtedly talk about health, the type of home they wanted to live in, their freedom to do as they pleased, and the things that centred around themselves and their family.

Ask Henry David Thoreau, who lived alone in the woods near Concorde, Massachusetts, on Walden Pond, what he thought contributed to the good life, he might answer thus.

Henry David Thoreau: I suppose there are as many versions of what the ‘good life’ consists of as there are people trying to live one. Far be it from me to tell people anything. I can only really answer for myself.
Robert Leslie Fielding: To begin with, that seems to be at the heart of our question. There are as many versions of ‘the good life’ as there are people who think they know what it is and require you and I to follow their shining example.
HDT: That is well said, my friend. I have said many times that that government governs best when it governs not at all. I might add that those who think they know better how to live our lives, would do well to just get with living their own.
RLF: But that is not the way of the world, is it?
HDT: It certainly is not. There is something we Americans call ‘vested interest’, and although we have tried to organize our government in ways that prevent too much encroachment on our civil liberties, and the right of every person to choose to live his or her live as he or she pleases, still we find that we are beset by ‘good advice’.
RLF: What do you mean?
HDT: I simply mean that if there is such a thing as ‘the good life’ and I very much doubt whether it can be quantified or explained in any way that would help us to live it, this version – the one version, in liberal democracies, has to do with prosperity – financial prosperity, and any other view of what the good life is merely gets marginalized and dismissed as so much hogwash.

I can really only say what I know to be true for myself and hope that it works for you. I have spent much time pondering on the meaning of life – my life, here by the side of Walden pond.

I have sat at the water’s edge, here, disturbed only by the pulse of water skaters delighting in that curious phenomenon – the surface tension on water confined by banks. Here, sitting with all the company I ever need – I say to myself, ‘Question authority’, which you might wish to alter to, ‘Always question all authority!’
From those few, simple words comes a world of one’s own making – for what is anything calling itself ‘authority’ is nothing more nor less than opinion masquerading as something grander.

Reality is what we crave. Look at those crazy legged pond skaters, zigzagging between the rushes that litter the water’s edge there. What do they crave? They crave stillness, for without the stillness of the water upon which they skate so precariously, they would be submerged, or have to alight on a bulrush.

So it is with men; we are hurried this way and that, dashing to rhythms that are not of our own making, dashing headlong towards something that doesn’t exist – their ‘good life’, only to expire in the attempt to find it, to reach it and to dwell in it.

RLF: I also think that should any be fortunate enough to reach those destinations to which you allude, they continue to rush past it because of this obsession with movement, with ‘growth’.

HDT: I am reminded of the fisherman lounging in his rickety chair on the shore, chewing a straw, taking a brew, talking to his cronies, left off fishing for the day to enjoy the afternoon with his friends, when a city slicker comes up and asks him what he is doing – why he is lounging about when there are fish to catch, when there is money to be made.

The loafer replies that he has caught enough fish for that day, he has made enough money to keep him and his family, and since, as he says, “The other fish out there aint goin’ no place,” he is sitting chewing the fat with his pals.

But, the city man explains, “You could catch more fish, and earn more money.” The loafing fisherman asks, “Why?”
Our city gent, now in earnest, replies, “To buy another boat, of course, to buy a whole fleet of boats.”

Again, our straw chewing angler asks the same question, “Why?”

Now our man of the world senses he can turn this man’s life around; “So you can make a fortune!”

Again, the question comes, “Why?” and then is added, “What would I do with a fortune?”

The gent smiles knowingly. ‘These simple folk,’ he thinks. “You wouldn’t have to work hard at fishing, you could take time to do whatever you want to do.” He senses that his logic has won the day.

The loafer looks up at the gent, “I’m doing that now!”
Now why would an educated Harvard Business School educated man talk that way? Why is it that he doesn’t see the circularity of his argument? Why is he blind to what is so obvious to all except him?

RLF: He is caught on a treadmill, I suppose.
HDT: That is exactly what he is, my friend. He is caught up in some ‘immense, pecuniary mangle, as my good friend, Charles Dickens once put it in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The mangle grinds exceedingly small and forever grinds those that dare to get so entrapped.

Here is our tardy fisherman, taking the best of the day, the early morning, to do his daily work, and now here he is, having completed that work, taking a well earned rest from his labours, discussing the price of his catch or the heavy burden of tax he is required to pay by the folks in his own state capital.

RLF: Or he is talking of no such things; merely passing the time of day in what the city gent might call ‘idle chat’.
HDT: Let me tell you, my friend; that ‘idle chat’ is no less than the cement to binds this nation together. It is driven only by one man’s interest coinciding with another’s. Once it gains direction, with goals, it becomes something else; it becomes commerce, trade, and trade besmirches everything it touches. This country and most others are built up on it.

‘Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions.’

The first community, the first farmer who made what we now call ‘a surplus’ and thought how he could profit from it started it all. He invested something into those bushels of grain he couldn’t eat – he called it ‘value’, and he invited his neighbours to partake of something they probably had no pressing need of.

RLF: But it is done. We can’t turn back the clocks of history and pretend it isn’t so. Man trades, and lives by what he trades, surely.
HDT: Quite, except that I would go one step further and say that not only does he live by what he is able to trade, but that he also lives for that trade. It is trading, more than living that the man lives for. He is in competition now with his neighbor, and being so, feels himself more of a man if he can be the victor in that competitive activity.

Take our friend, the fisherman. Has he not learned to quell and quiet his desire to win, and decided instead, to live – to work to live, rather than the other way round.

RLF: You said, did you not, that you could well earn enough for your needs by merely laboring for no more than six weeks a year. Did you mean it?

HDT: Of course, I meant it, meant it and still do. A man is judged rich, not by the things he owns, which is the conventional, almost unthinking way of looking at success, but is rich by that amount that he can live without. Desire is pernicious when it is learned, is it not.

Take the desire to be rich – which is nothing much more or less than the desire to have more than one’s fellows. We are enveloped in comparisons, and what is being compared has value only in a culture of greed and material acquisition. Left to our own devices, we would only desire that which we could usefully use to enrich our lives.

So tell me, in what way does a row of zeros in an account lying in a vault, enrich anything? What enriches life is that which gives life – which contributes to it directly, and not what we are instructed to think does so.
Robert L. Fielding

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Sources
Thoreau Reader - http://thoreau.eserver.org/
Life and works - http://www.transcendentalists.com/1thorea.html
Thoreau and the environment - http://www.walden.org/
Quotes - http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Henry_David_Thoreau/
Thoreau Center for Sustainability - http://www.thoreau.org/
The Blog of Henry David Thoreau - http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/
The Thoreau Camp and Thoreau Center - http://www.thoreau.com/Club/Scripts/Home/home.asp
Ecotopia - http://ecotopia.org/ecology-hall-of-fame/henry-david-thoreau/
The Thoreau Institute - http://www.ti.org/
On Thoreau’s Walden - http://www.stevencscheer.com/thoreau.htm
Stanford University - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/
Henry David Thoreau Foundation - http://thoreauscholar.org/
Henry David Thoreau talks – the good life
If I were to ask anybody what they thought the good life consisted of, they would most certainly mention money. Some would undoubtedly talk about health, the type of home they wanted to live in, their freedom to do as they pleased, and the things that centred around themselves and their family.

Ask Henry David Thoreau, who lived alone in the woods near Concorde, Massachusetts, on Walden Pond, what he thought contributed to the good life, he might answer thus.

Henry David Thoreau: I suppose there are as many versions of what the ‘good life’ consists of as there are people trying to live one. Far be it from me to tell people anything. I can only really answer for myself.
Robert Leslie Fielding: To begin with, that seems to be at the heart of our question. There are as many versions of ‘the good life’ as there are people who think they know what it is and require you and I to follow their shining example.
HDT: That is well said, my friend. I have said many times that that government governs best when it governs not at all. I might add that those who think they know better how to live our lives, would do well to shut up and live their own.
RLF: But that is not the way of the world, is it?
HDT: It certainly is not. There is something we Americans call ‘vested interest’, and although we have tried to organize our government in ways that prevent too much encroachment on civil liberties, and the right of every person to choose to live his or her live as he or she pleases, still we find that we are beset by ‘good advice’.
RLF: What do you mean?
HDT: I simply mean that if there is such a thing as ‘the good life’ and I very much doubt whether it can be quantified or explained in any way that would help us to live it, this version – the one version, in liberal democracies, has to do with prosperity – financial prosperity, and any other view of what the good life is merely gets marginalized and dismissed as so much hogwash.

I can really only say what I know to be true for myself and hope that it works for you. I have spent much time pondering on the meaning of life – my life, here by the side of Walden pond.

I have sat at the water’s edge, here, disturbed only by the pulse of water skaters delighting in that curious phenomenon – the surface tension on water confined by banks. Here, sitting with all the company I ever need – I say to myself, ‘Question authority’, which you might wish to alter to, ‘Always question all authority!’
From those few, simple words comes a world of one’s own making – for what is anything calling itself ‘authority’ is nothing more nor less than opinion masquerading as something grander.

Reality is what we crave. Look at those crazy legged pond skaters, zigzagging between the rushes that litter the water’s edge there. What do they crave? They crave stillness, for without the stillness of the water upon which they skate so precariously, they would be submerged, or have to alight on a bulrush.

So it is with men; we are hurried this way and that, dashing to rhythms that are not of our own making, dashing headlong towards something that doesn’t exist – their ‘good life’, only to expire in the attempt to find it, to reach it and to dwell in it.

RLF: I also think that should any be fortunate enough to reach those destinations to which you allude, they continue to rush past it because of this obsession with movement, with ‘growth’.

HDT: I am reminded of the fisherman lounging in his rickety chair on the shore, chewing a straw, taking a brew, talking to his cronies, left off fishing for the day to enjoy the afternoon with his friends, when a city slicker comes up and asks him what he is doing – why he is lounging about when there are fish to catch, when there is money to be made.

The loafer replies that he has caught enough fish for that day, he has made enough money to keep him and his family, and since, as he says, “The other fish out there aint goin’ no place,” he is sitting chewing the fat with his pals.

But, the city man explains, “You could catch more fish, and earn more money.” The loafing fisherman asks, “Why?”
Our city gent, now in earnest, replies, “To buy another boat, of course, to buy a whole fleet of boats.”

Again, our straw chewing angler asks the same question, “Why?”

Now our man of the world senses he can turn this guy’s life around; “So you can make a fortune!”

Again, the question comes, “Why?” and then is added, “What would I do with a fortune?”

The gent smiles knowingly. ‘These simple folk,’ he thinks. “You wouldn’t have to work hard at fishing, you could take time to do whatever you want to do.” He senses that his logic has won the day.

The loafer looks up at the gent, “I’m doing that now!”
Now why would an educated Harvard Business School educated man talk that way? Why is it that he doesn’t see the circularity of his argument? Why is he blind to what is so obvious to all except him?

RLF: He is caught on a treadmill, I suppose.
HDT: That is exactly what he is, my friend. He is caught up in some ‘immense, pecuniary mangle, as my good friend, Charles Dickens once put it in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The mangle grinds exceedingly small and forever grinds those that dare to get so entrapped.

Here is our tardy fisherman, taking the best of the day, the early morning, to do his daily work, and now here he is, having completed that work, taking a well earned rest from his labours, discussing the price of his catch or the heavy burden of tax he is required to pay by the folks in Washington DC or his own state capital.

RLF: Or he is talking of no such things; merely passing the time of day in what the city gent might call ‘idle chat’.
HDT: Let me tell you, my friend; that ‘idle chat’ is no less than the cement to binds this nation together. It is driven only by one man’s interest coinciding with another’s. Once it gains direction, with goals, it becomes something else; it becomes commerce, trade, and trade besmirches everything it touches. Though this country and most others are built up on it.

‘Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions.’

The first community, the first farmer who made what we now call ‘a surplus’ and thought how he could profit from it started it all. He invested something into those bushels of grain he couldn’t eat – he called it ‘value’, and he invited his neighbours to partake of something they probably had no pressing need of.

RLF: But it is done. We can’t turn back the clocks of history and pretend it isn’t so. Man trades, and lives by what he trades, surely.
HDT: Quite, except that I would go one step further and say that not only does he live by what he is able to trade, but that he also lives for that trade. It is trading, more than living that the man lives for. He is in competition now with his neighbor, and being so, feels himself more of a man if he can be the victor in that competitive activity.

Take our friend, the fisherman. Has he not learned to quall and quiet his desire to win, and decided instead, to live – to work to live, rather than the other way round.

RLF: You said, did you not, that you could well earn enough for your needs by merely laboring for no more than six weeks a year. Did you mean it?

HDT: Of course, I meant it, meant it and still do. A man is rich, not by the things he owns, which is the conventional, almost unthinking way of looking at success, but is rich by that amount that he can live without. Desire is pernicious when it is learned, is it not.

Take the desire to be rich – which is nothing much more or less than the desire to have more than one’s fellows. We are enveloped in comparisons, and what is being compared has value only in a culture of greed and material acquisition. Left to our own devices, we would only desire that which we could usefully use to enrich our lives.

So tell me, in what way does a row of zeros in an account lying in a vault, enrich anything? What enriches life is that which gives life – which contributes to it directly, and not what we are instructed to think does so.
Robert L. Fielding

Thomas Hurka is a professor of philosophy working at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is widely published. Professor Hurka deals with what he sees as the futility of competing for goods, and instead urges us to compete in things of real value: discovery and creativity.
Dialogue
RLF: You have said that, ‘in our societies people compete primarily for material goods, which have no intrinsic worth. Without inequality—and without the false values it engenders—they could compete instead in excellence. They could strive to outdo each other in knowledge, discovery, or creative expression. Then their competitiveness, instead of hindering perfection, could spur them on. This is a further argument for distributive equality: By encouraging human competitiveness to aim at true goods, it makes an unattractive trait serve valuable ends.’

Do you really think it is realistic to believe that people will ever compete in excellence, and if they were to, what form would that excellence take? – excellence in what?

TH: To answer that question – your first one, it is surely necessary to look at the way people live their lives now, at this particular point in time. Once we have done that, you may ask your question again, and you may add to it whether you believe in what I do.

RLF: Fair enough, let us make a start; it is true that people compete primarily for material goods, I may say, material wealth. How is that at fault?

TH: Well, before I go on to say how it is at fault, I may first ask you to look where it has led us. Are not the world’s natural resources being used to choke us to death, poison the air we breathe and the water we drink; is not catastrophic climate change a direct consequence of this incessant competition for material well being?

RLF: I must admit that it is, but there are levels of material well being that are vital if a reasonable life is to be lived. Will you agree to that?

TH: I will indeed. We are not able to survive in a wilderness without warmth, security and the basic necessities of life, but we have gone well beyond competing for what is necessary – we compete for goods that we are programmed to desire. In these latter stages of mercantilism, marketing has come to the fore, promoting what is said to be vital but which is nothing of the sort. The best hallmark of a necessity of anything is to look at who benefits the most from it being supplied: produced and sold.

RLF: I am willing to allow that we often do compete for things that are unworthy of our attention and our desire. Now I would like an answer to the second part of my question: if people were to compete in excellence, what form would that excellence take? – excellence in what?

TH: In the physical realm, it is already underway; sportsmen and sportswomen compete against each other in excellence of physique and athletic prowess, do they not? And people like mountaineers compete in the excellence of endurance and technique.

RLF: These are two good examples, but I feel that you mean more than this, more than sports and outdoor pursuits. You spoke of knowledge, discovery, or creative expression, did you not?

What of those qualities, and do we not already compete in some? Are not undergraduates competing against each other when they are sitting their final examinations at university?

TH: You are right, they are. However, if we speak of means and ends, we find that the examinations students sit and pass are means rather than ends – means to a good degree and hopefully to well paid, interesting employment.

RLF: And what is wrong with that?

TH: Nothing at all. Man must live, and to live, he must work, that is obviously true.

RLF: Then you mean, do you, that for any object of study to be worthy of us, and not engender false values, it must be an end in itself.

TH: Yes, I do.

RLF: But how can that be in a world that runs on knowledge – knowledge with some direction, some point?

TH: The gaining of knowledge must have some point, I entirely agree, but the point of knowledge is invariably the acquisition of wealth or power or both, and it is that aspect of gaining knowledge with which I take issue. Why must everything we do have a number put on it – a value in pound notes or dollars or yen – why?

RLF: Most probably for the very good reason that we have no other, at least, few other yardsticks against which to judge anything anyone achieves.

TH: That is certainly true. If it were not so, a book about children indulging in and getting mixed up with wizardry would have much, much less value than a book about the value of knowledge, wouldn’t it? Whereas the reality is that our book about young people learning magic sells like proverbial hot cakes, while the book that would help humanity infinitely further out of the impasse it now finds itself in lies unsold in wharehouses.

RLF: That is rather a simplistic example, if you don’t mind me saying so.

TH: It is and I apologize for it, but have I not made my point, albeit somewhat cheaply? The habit and activity involved in the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake is called a hobby or a pastime – rarely an activity by which a man can live,

RLF: I suppose that we must use a different word; instead of the word, ‘acquisition’, I mean.

TH: Then let us look at something like understanding rather than knowledge.

RLF: How would you differentiate the two?

TH: By saying that we can know something without understanding it – in fact, I would go so far as to say that we usually do not understand much that we know.

RLF: Can you provide examples of what you mean?

TH: Certainly. You know that when things get wet, they cool too, don’t you?

RLF: Of course.

TH: But do you understand why?

RLF: Is it something to do with evaporation – that heat is needed or lost or some such thing? Try me with another.

TH: Very well, why is the sea blue in places and steely grey in others?

RLF: That’s easy. It is that way because it is reflecting what is above it; a bright blue sky will produce a blue sea below it, whereas a grey sky will be reflected in a sea of that same colour.

TH: So you not only know that fact, but you understand it as well. Bravo! Can you see the difference in those two aspects of the same phenomenon – knowing and understanding?

RLF: Yes, I can, but where does that get us?

TH: It gets us further along the road to understanding. We use that understanding to extrapolate and forecast, predict and explain that which we may not in fact actually be aware of fully knowing.

Someone has asked how it is we can learn the grammar of a language with a paucity of information to assist us. I think I have just provided an answer, albeit a partial one. Notice though that in going some of the way to providing an answer, I have illustrated what can be done with even a little understanding.

At university, I was told by one of my professors that his job was not to relinquish facts – answers, if you will, but to facilitate the production of questions in students’ heads – that, he said, was his real function at the university.

Understanding is essentially a creative process, going from what we do know, and moving, by a series of logical steps, a little further across the stream of knowledge until we reach a point on the bank at which we can say, ‘I understand how that works!’ or something like it.

RLF: That is all fine and dandy, but we have few opportunities, most of us, for this. We cannot all be theoretical physicists, you know.

TH: I agree; we cannot. What we can do, however, is take an interest, an active interest in our children’s education, as well as in our own education, for education is something that is a lifelong process, or should be.

RLF: I see that you are being much more practical now; that in fact, most people do stop learning as early as possible. At least they cease to learn as a conscious process, beginning by saying something like this: ‘I would like to find out about X’. – where X is something more fundamental that merely the time of the next bus or the cost of soapflakes.

TH: Precisely put. We are all learning new things every minute of every day. It seems though, that we discard most of what we learn, or at any rate, we discard as much as we can. It is almost as if we do not wish to overload ourselves with too much intellectual baggage.

The human mind is a wonderful thing – it is able to hold information and compute it in convolutions that even the biggest, most powerful computer would baulk at. And yet, we are creatures of habit, only doing what we know, leaving off undone that which is less certain.

RLF: In that there is safety. We must protect ourselves from too much uncertainty.

TH: That may be more important, more relevant to what we are talking about than you think.

There is safety in numbers, is there not? I do not need you to answer, I am merely thinking aloud. There is safety in numbers, and in being conventional. The man who stands out as a scholar is most likely to be one who is scorned for his scholasticism, is he not?

RLF: He is. Such a one is usually marked out as being in want of common sense, and it is only the most enthusiastic who continues in his way of learning in the face of such ridicule.

RLF: Do you mean that humankind has a propensity to value ignorance rather than wisdom?

TH: I think we all pay lip service to praising the wise, while at the same time secretly shunning its products, yes.

We should use the road less traveled, as the poet urges us to, but I fear we invariably favour the road more well trodden to that other, more adventurous one.

I should like to continue this talk at some later date.
Robert L. Fielding

William Wordsworth: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers!"


Getting and spending

RLF: Your short poem, ‘The World is too much with us’ deals with something close to your heart, doesn’t it?

WW: Close to my heart, true, and should be close to everyone’s if they have eyes to see and can recognize what is plain for all to see.

We have reached a place in our history, our development as a people worthy of our glorious past, at which none dare gainsay, or so it appears; all are in accord, or so it seems, with the way of the world.

RLF: Which you say is, ‘too much with us’ – what do you mean, Sir?

WW: Why precisely what I say, that the affairs of the world – trade and commerce – getting and spending, to use my own words, are bound upon a course to o’ertake the affairs of the heart and mind.

Our days and our nights are taken up in schemes so gigantic that they make other, more valid and more integral ones to us as human beings, pale into insignificance, as do rays of sunlight through the icy blasts of winter. The one should melt the other, but rather, the rays separate elements – heat and light, freeze o’er and become as nought before the tempest’s wrath.

RLF: What are these gigantic schemes of which you so eloquently speak?

WW: As I have said oft enough ere now; our dealings measured in the currency of the balance sheet and the ledger. Has not our government ordered that private and public investment be channeled into grandiose ways in order that our Empire may flourish unseen to you and I bound within these shores. Are not our navies and our armies commencing warfare to increase our coffers – private and public, and is not our capital, and our lesser cities numbering many becoming nests of the unscrupulous and the dishonest.

RLF: But because a few in number, a very few in comparison to our twenty millions in our towns and in our villages, play this new game of supply and demand, must we all be drawn in – does this follow?

WW: Yes, it does, and although my behest is that it mayn’t, that it will so is surely as inevitable as acorns follows leaves on the boughs of our great oaks. For what is done betimes in London, will surely stir the brains, though sorrowfully not the hearts of some of our brightest and our best youth.

Will they not follow, selling their birthright, a poor bounty that it will become, if nothing is done to right the situation. I am sorely afraid that there will be nought to stand in their way. Man does not live by bread alone, but neither does he live by moral precepts – he is born of woman, and will return to the ashes whence he arose – he can do no other, I have assured myself more than once.

Talking to Mathew, my aging and cheery mentor, listening to him rent the air with admonishing the young, e’en though none could hear a word he spake, we both have not been encouraged by what we daily learn about our fellow man. That numbers have become the new mountain to climb, not words, ideas, notions, or anything remotely akin to love, but numbers – yes, numbers, have become that which is worshipped.

RLF: And why numbers? Which numbers do you mean?

WW: Those little numbers, ever increasing, and lining up in vertical columns neatly on the page, like so many columns of foot soldiers standing in readiness to be commanded forth together to conquer another’s failing industry – those numbers so beloved of financiers and brokers, beavering non-stop in the city to make those numbers work, no matter what falls because of them, taking no account of mankind save accounting him the same importance as land and what is being called plant, and called labour – those numbers.

RLF: Are we to be ruled by them in the way that a man representing little more than one field can sit in his seat in parliament, thus elected, to legislate in his own favour?

WW: That is it exactly, we are to be so ruled and the former places of dignity and noblesse oblige will be defaced and eradicated by balance sheets of these rows of numbers spreading out as far as the eye can see, sweeping all before them in their ruthless and ubiquitous logic until they are resorted to in the stead of even those corrupted representatives in the halls, libraries and offices of Westminster. We are to be ruled by whomsoever or whatsoever can show them to increase as the pages of the history of this land of ours are turned.

The balance sheet will become our winding sheet in its way and in the fullness of time, mark my words well, like the idiot boy we are, we will not stop until it is too late, until all the land, fell and fen, are given o’er to productivity and profit. Anon, it is happening even as we speak.

RLF: How?

WW: That is his lordship’s gamekeeper come to stop a poor woman from collecting dead and dried twigs from the underside of those hedgerows yonder, that mark the boundaries of his land where there usen’t to be any, being common land. See where the gamekeeper stands to block her way, and this a cold winter night which that good old woman has nought to stave off save those mean sticks she has gathered.

His Lordship wants for nought, and neither does the wage-slave he employs to look after his land, but yet they bar the way of the crone to save a halfpenny to fill the sacks full of such the man has tied down in some house or other in town – the bank he calls his own, so full is it with his great bags of money.

Tell me that is not a fine example, not a compleat allegory of that of which we speak. Tell me, is it not?

RLF: It is, Sire, but lo, Goody is mouthing something at his back, and watch how he shivers from head to toe, e’en in his well shod comforts.

WW: No good will come of it, just as no good will come of that treatment of the good old woman at the hands of the cruel agent of capital. The world, as I say, is too much with us!
Robert L. Fielding