George's Will's Great Detachment

 

Just add people

I've been broadening my "algorithm" to include more conservative voices.  I want to be able to see both sides of issues, to avoid living in a silo where I am right all the time and never learn anything but what my own brain tells me.  So, I read George Will a bit more often than I used to.  So far so good.  Sometimes I am shocked to find myself agreeing with him.  Sometimes, it's more like "hmm, I didn't think of it that way."  

Today's opinion piece in the New York Times  was in the realm of:  "Now hold on there, George!"  Here's the trigger:

When you look at these trends through a political lens, the power of the autonomy ethos becomes clearer. In general, conservatives believe in economic freedom (low taxes, fewer regulations) but social obligations (faith, family, flag). Progressives tend to favor economic obligations to reduce inequality but more social autonomy to live whatever lifestyle you choose.

Could be a case over-simplification, could be my own over-reaction, but I was reading his discussion of the trends toward this "great detachment" that we seem to be experiencing in the US and nodding my head right up until he put the progressive label on me and then completely got it wrong.

Well, he got me wrong.  And he got Ethical Culture wrong.  That's probably because Ethical Culture is so tiny-small and more than a little bit of a hairball these days.  So let me back up to the moment before my brain heard the sound of screeching brakes.

Will is arguing---along with Curt Collier and others who pay attention to the trends of the past half century or so---that social engagement is falling in the US and that that, to a large extent, is due to the emphasis on individualism and the elevation of efficiency and wealth as the two primary goals of life.  (Neither of them have particularly emphasized the efficiency part, but it's hiding in plain sight when they talk/write about this.)  These issues were factors in American society much before either of these guys---or most social scientists---quite figured it out.  

Felix Adler spoke repeatedly about the mistake of centering one's life goals on the accumulation of wealth.  He spoke of the duties that such accumulation created and the obligation to veer away from the hoarding mindset to one of sharing and investment in a better future.  He also reminded us that, while our supreme aim is to become better, more ethical human beings, we could never do that without engaging with other human beings in relationships founded on mutual respect and concern.  Efficiency and emphasis on individualism and the accumulation of wealth for its own sake were all factors that worked against us in becoming the ethical beings that we might want to be, and his whole platform was aimed toward overcoming those factors.

Or so it seems to me.  Now I have to go back and document each point that I raise in that last paragraph, since these are impressions, the sense of Adler's writing---and my overall understanding of Ethical Culture---that have been formed in recent years by reading (and editing) some of the many lectures by Adler (and others) that have never made it very far outside of the building at 2 W. 64th Street in Manhattan.  

When I do get that documentation accomplished, I should probably explain to George Will that it is not a political thing, but a worldview thing---a religious thing, if you will.  Will is careful to note---  

I want to reiterate something. These are averages. Be careful how you apply social science data to your individual life, because your life is filled with things social science can’t see: your unique circumstances, tastes, spirit.

---to which I reply "Well done, George!"  But more love and more marriage are not necessarily the answer to our "great detachment."  And neither of those things are political and should definitely not be turned into political positions.  Indeed, I would be more pleased to have the "progressive" label a little less liberally applied to anyone to the left of Attila the Hun.  

The Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th century was assisted very strongly by the Ethical Culture Movement.  No matter whether EC was in the driver's seat or part of the team pulling the wagon, Adler and his philosophy was part of the impetus to improve the community, and the focus was on creating and maintaining relationships across all of the boundaries that human biology and thought sought to create.  That, I think, is why our great detachment has occurred: When we fail to see that social good based on ethics is, after all, social, we lose both the social and the good.  

Our great detachment is accompanied by great division, as we divide ourselves into groups (conservative vs progressive!) (male vs female) (white vs non-white) (Christian vs non-Christian) (American vs non-American) (etc.) (and so on) (endlessly).  When ethics is made central in our lives (and our thoughts), then every single thing that we do---drink water, eat food, wear clothes, breathe air, vote, buy a house, read a book (and so endlessly on)---connects us to other humans.  Our awareness of that fact is the beginning of acknowleging and engaging in a relationship that links us to where the water came from, how we use it, where it goes when we are through with it, even the systems that turn hydrogen and oxygen into water.  We are never alone when we take that sip of water.  

Similarly, we are not alone when we walk through the grocery store, pushing our cart.  Nor in our car driving to work.  And so endlessly on.  Will is emphasizing romance and love for a single other human as the significant factor in the great detachment, but the detachment is more fundamental.  When we fail to see the human faces around us as persons with whom we (already!) have a connection, we fail to allow ourselves to experience the connection that we need to remain human, and we deny ourselves the opportunity to become our better selves.  

 

The Dark Side of Bibliography

 

Bibliographies are bad for bibliophiles!

I've taken a few days over the "holidays" to rest from the barrage of meetings and emails and general busy-ness of my life in Ethical.  "Rest," in this case, came in the form of work on the Bibliography of Ethical Culture, a project that has been ongoing for at least the past 4 years.  My working draft is a messy 90 pages long now, since I tend to slap in items that are unformatted as I find them, expecting to get back to them later.  "Later" is sometimes slower than I might wish.  

In any case, I chose the route of creating an inventory of the Adler Study at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  That's a fairly mindless task (and, so, restful) that involves entering data in the correct bibliographic format (CMOS, of course) over and over again.  But there are also the tasks of decrypting the old-style fonts (Fraktur is a definite challenge), adding the correct diacritical marks (alt code is not a handy as one might wish, and umlauts are definitely slippery), and locating the publication date.  Some texts publish that date on the title page, except that that date may be the date when it was printed and not the date of copyright.  Some texts can confuse edition with the number of the printing (is it the second edition or the second printing?).  

Such questions that arise in documenting individual texts require some additional research.  If the book is available, that means flipping the page and looking at the verso.  Unfortunately, I did not always have that.  Indeed, I was working from photographs of title page and verso, and, sometimes, the image of the verso had not been taken or included.  The next resource in such cases was Google.  Indeed, I would estimate that at least half of the time spent in documenting the books in the Adler Study meant searching the internet for additional information about the text.  Some searches were simply for translation.  My German is rusty.  French and Latin are not in my toolbox.  It was helpful to have Google translate the text so that I could confirm whether I was documenting the volume number or the edition; the author or the editor.  

Googling became especially helpful when my source did not include a date of original publication or copyright.  Many of the older works that are in the Adler Study have been digitized by Google or Microsoft (and others) and are available in various online repositories.  Time after time, I went to the Internet Library (archive.org) or Hathi Trust to see the books that I was trying to document from the photograph of a title page.  Sometimes, the books themselves were less helpful than the meta data provided by these repositories, which would indicate their best deduction regarding the original date of publication.  Those dates are now entered in brackets in the Bibliography, to show that they are based on secondary evidence rather than the book itself.  Putting it mildly, early publishing was not always set up to suit 21st Century ideas about the necessary data for documentation.  

These sorts of "problems" were actually adventures for a bibliophile.  I greatly enjoyed seeing the old style fonts, the excessive titles included before we had dustcovers with multiple blurbs, and interesting shifts of publishing houses over the decades and centuries of their existence.  

The dark side of bibliography, however, appears when the task is to identify authors who are listed only with their initials and a last name.  Occasionally there are not even the initials.  The author of Hume is given as "Professor Huxley."  Which one?  (Thomas Henry, of course, but you had to know that or look it up.)  Another contribution to the dark side is determining what the book is actually about.  This can mean checking out the table of contents, but oftentimes it means reading an interesting looking chapter.  Then, of course, there are the references to other books and articles which might be related, but are still interesting looking, and there goes another hour or two.

Still, it's not the time that is of concern.  We have become, over the past many decades, too invested in the notion of efficiency.  We invented clocks and are now ruled by them.  The artificial divisions of the days, despite what the sun and the earth's orbit around it tell us, have become taskmasters, telling us when to arise and work and when (maybe) to rest.  They do not tell us the hours of leisure and learning and companionship with the ideas of the past, the thoughts of the future, and, all too often, the enjoyment of the present.  The time spent in documenting the Adler Study was well spent as a service to others who will follow this trail of breadcrumbs with new questions, seeking new answers, but it was also delightful. 

The dark side is actually the sad fact that documenting these books means that I also need to add them to my library.  The image above shows some of many bookcases in my home.  The picture shows a good day, when the books have been organized and neatened for "picture day," but many of the shelves are now untidy, with books removed for reference or reading.  Other books are stacked around on tables.  And, sadly, on chairs, too.  There's a small pile on the floor beside my desk of the most recently referenced.  The whole house, in fact, is evidence that I don't need to add any more books, and yet . . . this most recent round of "resting" with the Bibliography has led to that most undesired of results:  I have ordered more books.  Three times in the past three days I have been overcome by the need to see, touch, read, own a book.  So I ended up ordering eight new additions to my overcrowded and overflowing bookcases. 

Addict that I am, I am so not sorry.  Indeed, I can hardly wait.  City States of the Swahili Coast.  Gods of the Upper Air.  Enlightenment Now.  How did I get to these particular books from the work on Felix Adler's study, filled with so many works of the 19th and early 20th century?  Hellifiknow!  But it was definitely fun.  And restful. Very restful.

More from Doctorow

Well, not from Cory Doctorow personally, although, if he checks out the occurrence of his name on the internet, I'll at least wave "hello!"  Actually, I didn't want to title this post with Doctorow's new addition to the English languhage:  Enshittification.  I do not, however, mind calling it to mind by name-dropping.  And now, that I have blurted out the term, I'm ready for another rant about the enshittification of my world. 

😡

And here it is.  I am really annoyed with Pentel.  I have a number of pens hanging around, and I do tend to use whatever is handy, so none of them are going to waste.  However, I really like gel pens.  And, well, I really like to write with turquoise ink.  In the days when I used a fountain pen, that little bottle of Skripto ink was my favorite, and I used it for years.  These days, for whatever reason, I use fountain pens rarely and must depend on pen manufacturers to meet my need for turquoise.  

So I bought pens from Pentel.  And I bought refills.  It's bad enough to be using a plastic pen, I know.  Using refillable pens is the least I can do to try to mitigate the waste of this mode of writing.  

Imagine my frustration when I found that Pentel's pens can't be opened to replace the ink.  

Now I know that there are instructions out on the internet to help us poor clods figure out how to open the pen.  What I want to know is:  Who designed a pen that needed such instructions?

And just as importantly:  Why are they lying?

I've tried to wrap the barrel with materials that give me more traction.

I've tried using pliers.  

It won't open.

Now you might think that an old lady might just be too weak to open these pens.  I'm not too weak to open any of my other pens, so, again, I ask:  Who would design a pen to be so difficult to open that not even tools can be used to open it?

And why?

Is this yet another case of corporations designing products to promote waste while they rake in more money?  Aifinkso.  And so this is another corporation that will be checked off my list.  No more Pentel for me---even if it does mean I will have to reduce my use of turquoise ink.  I'll use up what I have, break 'em down for recycling, and stick to pens that do open for refills---if I can find any that will take standard sized refills.

😡And why are the refills not standard-sized?

The Ethics of Printing

No yellow, no print; no chip, no print;
I've had enough!

Long, long ago, in galaxy far . . .

Well, back when I got my first desktop computer (IBM PC, two floppy drives, 128K RAM) and a dot-matrix printer, the whole set up, including the word processing software to run it (WordStar, baby!) cost $5000.  I had to take money out of my retirement account to pay for it because it was, actually, a major life investment.  And it paid off.  I ran two non-profit organizations with that computer, and my husband completed his bachelor's degree just before his 50th birthday.  Major life investment.

Since then I've gone through several changes in operating software, multiple word processing programs (does anyone use WordPerfect anymore?), and a few printers.  I'm about to say "enough!"  

Where this is headed is the same place that Cory Doctorow is going with his "enshittification" writings.  (He did start talking about this well before the new book, so it's not like there weren't warnings.)  For me, it's the printer.

The fun thing about those old dot matrix printers is that, if you were cheap (I like to think of myself as thrifty), you could re-ink the ribbon and keep using it for years.  Nowadays, we have printers with ink "cartridges" that you just pop in when you need 'em.  They even print in color.  But the cartridges are getting more and more expensive.  And while they can be recycled, they are not easily refilled and reused.  HP is among those who have set their equipment up to check the cartridges for embedded chips that indicate that the cartridges were manufactured by HP.  No HP chip, no print.

I just had to order new cartridges for my HP Officejet Pro because the yellow cartridge ran out of ink, and the printer would not print without it.  Not even in plain old black (of which there was a plentiful supply remaining).  Ordering meant that I had to interrupt my work to deal with the problem.  I checked a local office supply store and Amazon and decided that I would order the overnight delivery from Amazon because I was just too tired to drive to the store and get the yellow cartridge.  Amazon promised to have it at my door by 8:00 a.m., so I went for the whole thing and ordered the entire set of four cartridges.

Amazon, however, failed to deliver.   Around 11:00 the next morning, when the notification indicated that the cartridges would in fact be delivered the next day, I went to the office supply store to buy the yellow cartridge.  Interestingly enough (not), when I got back home, the package from Amazon had been delivered.  Later than promised, yes, but earlier than their faulty notification system indicated.  

I popped in the locally purchased yellow cartridge and went back to work.  But the whole incident grated.  The price of the set of cartridges is more than the cost of a new printer (admittedly a cheap one).  The whole set up is just that:  cheap equipment, expensive operations.  This happened with Adobe Acrobat.  It is happening with Windows (now they want us to throw out our old--still functioning--computers to upgrade the operating system).

I've had enough.

I am shopping for a new printer now.  This old one is starting to have some problems with the duplex function, so I am expecting that it will be wearing out soon.  The non-yellow cartridges still have some ink in them, so I will use the printer until it stops working or another cartridge runs out of ink, but, when it stops working--for whatever reason--I'm hauling it to Best Buy for recycling.  I will also buy a NOT-HP printer, because I am through supporting their business model.  And I will get a printer that uses ink tanks instead of ink cartridges.  

I still try to use less paper, avoiding printing unless it seems absolutely necessary.  I print on both sides whenever I can--and, when I clean out old files, I use any single-sided sheets that I can find for printing drafts.  But paper is not the only concern in printing, and the (next?) biggest concern for the environment seems to be the plastic waste that is generated because of manufacturing practices and the business model.  I broke with Adobe.  Now it's HP's turn to lose a customer.  I'm looking at Microsoft and Google next.  Amazon needs to be on the list as well.  

Yes, I am setting myself up for more work.  More trips to the store, less convenience.  I may actually have to learn new ways to use the computer, but I really am tired of being used to make billionaires richer while they turn the planet into a garbage dump.  I'm just going to have to go to bricks and mortar stores, shop around, and appreciate the experience of being a customer, not a cash machine.