In Praise of a Duomath

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While editing Wall posts from back in 2002, in preparation for the “Wall book,” it struck me that in those early days I was more prone to shoot off quick, and shorter, posts than I do these days. There appears to have been some “good news/bad news” associated with that practice. The bad news was a number of typographical and usage errors that I now find unacceptable. The good news was that I would send you thoughts I found interesting without waiting for a full-blown essay to evolve. It is in the spirit of that “good news” that I send you this somewhat shorter post.

According to Wikipedia, “a polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much,” Latin: homo universalis, "universal man"^]) is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas—such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.”

Left unaddressed in this definition is the question of just how many “maths” one needs to master before becoming a polymath. Three? Eight? A dozen? Having been math phobic from an early age, the question never arouse for me. However, I am concerned that this attention to the poly may blind us to the equally praiseworthy accomplishments of various “maths” less “poly” in nature.  

I have been spending several hours a day in the company of one such - let us call her a “duomath": Helen Macdonald. Well, not in her actual “company.”  The young woman doesn’t know me from Adam, nor I her, except for the acquaintance I can claim from listening to her read her book H is for Hawk. I am far from the first to notice that this is an exceptional book. It garnered her the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize, The Costa Book Award, and the 2016 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. So the first “math” of this duomath is that the young woman (born in 1970 - so young from my perspective) writes wonderfully well. She has an almost magical ability to use words in a way that allows us to see and feel the world through her senses. The prose becomes poetry, without the cloying pretension that can subvert a work so artfully crafted as Hawk. And I should note that my perspective is honed from a long lifetime of reading (born in 1948 and still counting - so long from my perspective) at a pace many would find borderline obsessive. It is not unusual for me to read a book a day, and I always have at least a couple open somewhere. So let me assert in a phrase some will find both ageist and sexist— the girl can flat out write!

It is the second math in combination with the first that is making my current experience unique. Ms. Macdonald reads the book herself. This is most often the kiss of death in the evolving world of audiobooks. An author somewhere becomes convinced that only they can give life to the “inner voice” of their successful work, somewhere a producer caves, and somewhere a possibly decent audiobook dies. It is true the Ms. Macdonald is by far the dominant voice in the work. The only exception being the occasional, brief appearance of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King and fellow falconer. So Macdonald avoids the quicksand of a multi-voiced drama. That being said, let me again opine — the girl can flat out read! 

So what is the bad news? There is some. We need to keep in mind that the work has been called a "misery memoir.” And it is a dissection of despair, a tapestry that Macdonald wove from the varied threads created by the grief she felt at her father’s untimely death and the simultaneous existential challenges and revelations manifest in the training Mabel, her goshawk - the most intractable of all raptors. It is important, I believe, to assert that she did not write this book for us. In all likelihood she probably did not want to write this book. Rather it seems she had to write the book in order to master her soul, to move past her past into a future beyond one of numbing grief.

It is in her moments of deepest revelation that I am reminded that genius and insanity claim apartments in the same building. The writing is often genius, a genius that often chillingly depicts the near insanity of deep depression. Macdonald’s reading does reveal the achingly beautiful “inner voice” of this book. But that is the voice of a deeply shaken, fragile young woman. The work is not balm for those similarly disoriented. In terms of Distilled Harmony, this is a work of discord. Macdonald does eventually make her way to a kind of harmony, but the telling of her tale remains a dark tale of survival. Not a pean to victorious harmony. Were she my daughter, as she chronologically could be, and I had read this book, I would be terribly concerned. But then, were she my daughter, and were I still alive, there would have been no reason to write the book.

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Disrupting Disruption

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I’m not quite sure who or what we are supposed to be disrupting this week. I certainly do not know if I am missing a major “disruption” event, and I am woefully ignorant of what hashtag I should follow to keep informed regarding the disruption.  Truth be told, the whole “hashtag” thing has passed me by - other than a silly game we used to play in the sixties with a pipe and glazed donuts.  But I digress. 

The point is that disruption is simply philosophically at odds with the first and primary tenet of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony.  To disrupt something is to introduce discord, and that stands in direct opposition to the notion of fostering harmony. 

However, let me point out that fostering harmony is not the same as opposing change. Quite the contrary. It is the existence of discord that mandates fostering harmony.  So in that regard fostering harmony and the multiple “disruption” movements share similar motivations - meaningful social change.  It is in the preferred avenue to change that harmony diverges from disruption. Disruption rests on the idea that if you cripple something - an industry, attitude or norm, for example - something preferable will arise from the ashes of the aftermath.  I suppose I am old enough to be nervous about that assumption.  Which brings me to a thought that has been intriguing me recently. 

There is this old saw that asserts that folks tend to be liberal in their youth and grow more conservative as they age. It is probably accurate - but only to a point. Most likely, such a change is not so much a case of shifting political philosophy as it is a case of variations in the application of experience.  Let me clarify.  Babies awake each morning to a world that is largely new.  Because, for them, “all my life” is a brief burst of time: “When I cry the big people feed me. It has been that way ‘all my life.’” As we age “all my life” expands, as do the histories against which we judge reasonable courses of action.   

It is no accident that the “disruption” movements seem disproportionately fueled by “digital natives” - people born after the Internet went public in 1994.  They have lived “all their life” in a world unimaginable to their ancestors.  My parent’s, and certainly my grandparent’s life-views were indelibly shaded by World Wars I and II, and the Great Depression of the mid-20th century. Caution was inbred. Take it slow. Tomorrow could easily be much worse than today.  It is easy to see how that inclination to pessimism could lead one to believe that a cautious conservatism was an inevitable part of growing older, and theoretically at least, wiser.  

That is not the reality experienced by today’s digital natives.  They have lived “all their lives” in a digital environment which changes everyday.  It may be as seemingly insignificant as changing the way they connect with their social media “friends,” or the more subtle, but infinitely more important change that social media have brought to the very concepts of “friend” and “friendship.” The germane point is that digital natives have grown up believing that if something changes today, and that change isn’t what you had in mind - no problem - it can be easily changed again tomorrow.  Napster disrupts the music industry, but then swiftly disappears and is replaced by iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, etc.  Electronic publishing disrupts traditional publishing which responds with ebooks, Kindle, and other digital platforms. So for digital natives disruption is a good thing because the resultant chaos shakes out in change that, eventually, seems to be largely positive.  It has been that way “all their lives.” 

Distilled Harmony sees change differently.  Disruption is just another word for discord and, as I said earlier, stands in opposition to harmony.  From a Distilled Harmony perspective any positive change must move us away from discord toward greater harmony. Hence, guided harmonic change assumes that you need to know where you are going before you destroy where you are.   

Think of a kid playing with a bunch of colored blocks.  S/he looks at the tower that had been left behind by the previous play group.  Not liking that particular tower, the kid knocks it down and begins to build a whole new tower, more to his/her liking.  No big deal as long as we are talking about children and towers of colored blocks. But when we are talking about major industries and institutions, the adults in the room have to step up. 

From the perspective of the Distilled Harmony moral philosophy, there are a number of towers in our culture that are seriously, rapaciously, out of tune. Education, domestic poverty, social and economic inequities, health care, insurance, environmental stewardship, political transparency; each often sounds a discordant note worthy of its own discussion.  But taking on those major discordancies is not the point of this essay.

Rather, the point is to assert that to disrupt the current reality without a significant harmonic replacement in mind is the behavior of a petulant child trashing the tower in the playroom. S/he assumes that they can build a better tower, and if not, well, then someone else will.  Again, that is almost cute if we are talking about somewhat ill-mannered children and colored blocks. But in the grown-up world it is reckless and irresponsible. To resist that form of almost casual disruption is not a case of conservative versus liberal, it is a case of championing harmony over discord. And that is wise at any age. 

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