Pope Boniface III reigned in officer in the year 607AD for fewer than 10 months.
I've long been thinking about royalty and the lessons of royalty in the context of what moral framework any human should use if they don't want to be consider, or to think like a peasant. I have been particularly concerned with those enticements made to Americans of no great talent or social position to secure their [manufactured] consent. Call it the marketing of democracy. And of course I've been thinking about such enticements in the context of what someone in my economic position or better actually gets back from those more recent entitlements in the post-Roosevelt era.
But what really struck my fancy this weekend, as I spent a bit of time in NYC, and especially on Fifth Avenue in the men's department of Bergdorf's and on the sidewalk in front of Tiffany's was the extent to which much of our rich folly is more or less permanent.
The first thing that I thought was that it will take an awful lot of destruction to empty out NYC.
But here's the other thing. If we're talking economic destruction, and not a WMD attack, there is a good lot of brain dead inheritance that can keep certain aspects of NYC working. IE Real Estate. It takes relatively little skill to be a landowner, and if you neither buy nor sell, but merely sit on the property and collect rents, well a simple amount of prudence is all it takes. Lefrak City remains Lefrak City.
Now here's the third thing. From a Gapminder perspective, the average American peasant is still two orders of magnitude wealthier than several billions of humans on the planet. There are certain lots of arcanities he needs to know in order to negotiate our society, but in a way they are the same as the brain dead inheritance of NYC real-estate.
Such notions were foggily fixed in my mind as I wrote the following:
I think all of this goes to show how little of our education in the first world is actually practical. Whenever I read of how stupid Americans are, I instantly think of how intelligent they actually need to be. It is a question central to the matter of progress and the degree to which the learned population is actually willing to profit from their relative advantage.
It certainly stands to reason that if the washing machine, for example, had never been invented and people had to wash their clothes by hand, they would have much less free time to educate themselves idly. And I believe this to be the case for most of the conveniences we enjoy, more recently Google, Wikipedia and even Wikileaks.
How stupid are all of us, and how intelligent do we really need to be? I say we really don't need to be as intelligent as we need to be self-suficient. So long as we have human bodies and minds, there are fixed dispositions we are bound to provide or have provided for us. After all, we are killer apes and there will always be trees we will climb, chests we will beat, poo we will fling.
There is something special though, I think, about those we allow to lead us, and I think it has everything to do with the mastery of such lattices of thought those of us with luxurious spare time indulge. Reading Swift, I am much reminded of how, in Gulliver's Travels, he must negotiate his position from total ignorance of a culture to some basic mastery of it. I am particularly noticing his use of the term 'people of quality' but first in describing their physical attributes - noting as he does the particular [im]perfections of their proportions. To wit:
He is taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court; which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders. His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic.
Passing the physical sniff, we allow for the ineffable - that of learnedness, or dignity, or class, or whatever our fashion might be. As I consider the realms of liberal arts education and the subjects they take up at great exhobitant cost, I wonder exactly how one might calculate the amount of waste in some global terms. What does a PhD in History give us that Boniface III doesn't? Or what did Boniface III give the world that a PhD in History does not? I would naturally be of the opinion that neither would give us so much as did Faraday or Liebniz, but that's my bias.
I think our occupations are mostly self-serving and that we entertain ourselves with the fetish of accomplishment. It has been many years since I considered much of our cultural diet mostly a semiotic swamp, and I tend to forget that I have some interest in returning to that view, which started off as cynical disbelief and returns to me as sad disappointment.
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