Twenty Years Too Early

Michael Schudson, on the profession of journalism:

Nineteenth-century journalism was certainly concerned that newspapers might not tell the truth. But the nineteenth-century worry was exclusively about intentional shadings of the truth for partisan ends. The concern was about the danger of partisan views. The twentieth century added the danger of partial views, the inevitable selectivity of facts, the inevitable exercise of judgment in interpreting the real world. The nineteenth century worried about journalists’ intentions and what they wanted to do. In the twentieth century, there is an additional concern about journalists’ attentions and what they are able to see and do. In the nineteenth century, there was fear that journalists would not simply record the world but would think about it and promote their own thinking. In the twentieth century there is the new worry that journalists will simply record and will not think, thereby promoting someone else’s thinking, namely that of the government and other powerful interests.

From ‘The Profession of Journalism in the United States’, in Nathan Hatch, ed., The Professions in American History (1988), p. 154.

Definition

A university is a place where you are on a first-name basis with people who are so important that they never have time to meet with you.

Monday Quote Frenzy: Dostoyevsky disagrees with rational choice theory

From Notes from Underground, as translated by Andrew MacAndrew:

But then, one might do anything out of boredom. Golden pins are stuck into people out of boredom. But that’s nothing. What’s really bad (this is me speaking again) is that the golden pins will be welcomed then. The trouble with man is that he’s stupid. Phenomenally stupid. That is, even if he’s not really stupid, he’s so ungrateful that another creature as ungrateful cannot be found. I, for one, wouldn’t be the least surprised if, in that future age of reason, there suddenly appeared a gentleman with an ungrateful, or shall we say, retrogressive smirk, who, arms akimbo, would say:

‘What do you say, folks, let’s send all this reason to hell, just to get all these logarithm tables out from under our feet and go back to our own stupid ways.’

That isn’t so annoying in itself; what’s bad is that this gentleman would be sure to find followers. That’s the way man is made.

And the explanation for it is so simple that there hardly seems to be any need for it – namely, that a man, always and everywhere, prefers to act in the way he feels like acting and not in the way his reason and interest tell him, for it is very possible for a man to feel like acting against his interests and, in some instances, I say that he positively wants to act that way – but that’s my personal opinion.

So one’s own free, unrestrained choice, one’s own whim, be it the wildest, one’s own fancy, sometimes worked up to a frenzy – that is the most advantageous advantage that cannot be fitted into any table or scale and that causes every system and every theory to crumble into dust on contact. And where did these sages pick up the notion that man must have something that they feel is a normal and virtuous set of wishes; what makes them think that man’s will must be reasonable and in accordance with his own interests? All man actually needs is independent will, at all costs and whatever the consequences.

Monday Quote Frenzy - John Masefield on Marco Polo

John Masefield wrote a foreword for a 1908 edition of The Travels of Marco Polo. He seems to have liked voyagers, as he also did the foreword for an edition of Dampier's travels. Henry Miller picked it up and referred to it in his story 'My Dream of Mobile', which is included in the collection The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. I think it relates not only to the physical traveler, but also to the intellectual, wandering among books.

It is accounted a romantic thing to wander among strangers and to eat their bread by the camp-fires of the other half of the world. There is romance in doing this, though the romance has been over-estimated by those whose sedentary lives have created in them a false taste for action. Marco Polo wandered among strangers; but it is open to any one (with courage and the power of motion) to do the same. Wandering in itself is merely a form of self-indulgence. If it adds not to the stock of human knowledge, or if it gives not to others the imaginative possession of some part of the world, it is a pernicious habit. The acquisition of knowledge, the accumulation of fact, is noble only in those few who have that alchemy which transmutes such clay to heavenly eternal gold…. It is only the wonderful traveler who sees a wonder, and only five travelers in the world’s history have seen wonders. The others have seen birds and beasts, rivers and wastes, the earth and the (local) fullness thereof. The five travelers are Herodotus, Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar and Marco Polo himself. The wonder of Marco Polo is this – that he created Asia for the European mind….

Monday Quote Frenzy: Two from Karel Čapek

Quoted by Ivan Klima in his introduction to War with the Newts:

You don’t see two bales of hay, but thousands of straws. Straw by straw you gather what is good and useful in the human world; straw by straw you discard the chaff and the weeds. You don’t cry out because of the oppression of thousands but because of the oppression of any individual; you’ve had to destroy the one truth in order to find thousands of them…. Ultimately, for want of anything more perfect, you simply believe in people.

Čapek in a 1926 letter to the New York Sunday Times:

Do you recall how Homer depicts Achilles’ shield? It took one song of the Iliad for the blind poet to describe how that shield was made; in America you would have made a casting and produced tens of thousands per day; granted, shields might be made cheaply and successfully this way, but Iliads could not…. To my knowledge, American efficiency concerns itself with multiplying output, not life. It’s true that man works in order to live; but it is evident that he lives also while he is working. Once could say that European Man is a very poor industrial machine; but this is because he is not a machine at all.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Sallust

This is from the beginning of Sallust's The War Against Jugurtha, from a new translation by Michael Comber and Catalina Balmaceda. Sallust was an areteicist, who was already complaining about the declining ethical standard of the Roman senatus populusque before the Republic had fallen. He was roughly contemporary with Cicero, but they were not friends.

It is unreasonable for men to complain that their nature is weak and short-lived, and ruled by chance, not by virtue. For, upon reflection, you would discover that, on the contrary, there is nothing greater or more excellent than man’s nature and that what is lacking is not strength or time, but rather energy. What guides and rules human life is the mind. If this pursues glory by the path of virtue, it has power, might and fame in abundance, and is independent of fortune, which can neither give anyone honesty, energy, and other good qualities, nor take them away. But if, enslaved by base passions, it has sunk into lethargy and the pleasures of the body, brief is the enjoyment of its ruinous appetites; then, when strength, time and talents have been frittered away through laziness, the weakness of human nature bears the blame, and the real culprits shift the responsibility from themselves to their circumstances. But if men pursued good things with as much eagerness as they show for what is against their interests and unprofitable – and often even dangerous – they would control events instead of being controlled by them, and would reach such a height of greatness and glory that from mere mortals they would become immortal.

Cicero on the Stimulus Package

Several state governors have said that, in order to assert their position that the stimulus package is a bad idea, they will refuse all or part of the money. Cicero, however, recommends the opposite approach, in this anecdote from the Tusculan Disputations, Book III, Section XX, as translated by J. E. King for the Loeb Classical Library:

The famous Piso, named Frugi, had spoken consistently against the Corn-law [the Lex Frumentaria of 123 BCE, proposed by C. Sempronius Gracchus, and later called the lex Sempronia]. When the law was passed, in spite of his consular rank, he was there to receive the corn. Gracchus noticed Piso standing in the throng; he asked him in the hearing of the Roman people what consistency there was in coming for the corn under the terms of the law which he had opposed. ‘I shouldn’t like it, Gracchus, to come into your head to divide up my property among all the citizens; but should you do so I should come for my share.’ Did not the words of this serious and sagacious statesman show with sufficient clearness that the public inheritance was squandered by the Sempronian law?