A Manifesto (but a friendly one)

Welcome, friends, family, acquaintances, AARP members, Tiktok influencers, bounty hunters, arch bishops, sailors, landlubbers, carnival barkers, judges, chimney sweeps, governesses, Daily Worker readers, William F. Buckley acolytes, members of team Edward, members of team Jacob, railroad hoboes who blow on empty jugs, and the man who sued Gwenyth Paltrow. This blog is for you. If none of the aforementioned titles apply, I regret to inform you that this blog is not for you.

It’s time for a blog post, the inaugural blog post. The blog post to end all blog posts. I’ve been hoping to start a blog for some time now, but being a student and being preoccupied with schoolwork, the blog was brushed to the side. Now that it’s August and I have some time on my hands, I feel, once again, the urge to create a blog.

This post will function as a sort of mission statement. It will be a few hundred words that hopefully capture the blog’s ethos. The blog’s writing style will most likely be subject to change. I’m in school for writing, so I write a lot, but this writing tends to be limited to short story writing, novel writing, and poetry. The blog post is its own genre, no different from a short story or a novel or a poem. The blog post has its own rules and structure and internal physics. I’m a complete novice at blog writing. In these first few posts, expect to see me groping and fumbling for a style.

The content of the blog will cover a range of topics and ideas, touching on politics, entertainment, lifestyle, arts, sciences—really anything that interests me. It will run the gamut. There are so many fascinating things in the world. There are so many subjects and events and ideas that are worthy of our attention. A professor of mine often stresses the need to read whatever “lights up our filaments.” He’s absolutely right. All too often we find ourselves limiting our scopes, drawing our horizons in, confining our interests until they fit on the head of a pin. We aim to have a very specialized knowledge of something, maybe of the textile industry in the UK during the late 19th century with a concentration on woolen garments (just spitballing here), at the expense of a broader, richer knowledge—the textile industry in its entirety. Dilettantes get a bad rap, in my opinion, as if it’s a sin to be anything less than an expert on something. For the past year, I’ve been teaching myself guitar, and even though I’m not an expert, I find myself more appreciative of the music of Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. Johnson and Hooker, two consummate blues musicians, created a rich body of work, and if I hadn’t taken up the guitar, I would’ve been unaware of how truly magnificent their music is. So maybe we should all pursue anything that interests us, no matter how daunting or arcane the subject appears. It will deepen our appreciation of things.

Blog Post #1

On Specialization.

Now that I’m in a rhythm, I think I’ve hit on the topic of this first blog post. The topic is specialization—not the kind economists talk about, whereby a pencil, thanks to the magical processes of specialization, is sold for a nickel instead of thousands of dollars. No, not that kind of specialization. I’m talking about personal specialization. And by personal specialization, I mean focusing all of your time and energy on one, maybe two activities. This activity may be your job. It may be a hobby of yours. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t let this job or hobby prevent you from pursuing other interests.

Transcendental philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson warned against the dangers of this kind of specialization. In 1837, Emerson spoke before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University. His speech was an electrifying call to intellectual arms. He warned the students about specialization.

"It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man…Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all…In the divided or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his…unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

Emerson presents a world plagued with specialization. People have been delegated a function, and their existence is limited to the fulfillment of that function. Again, these words were spoken in 1837—before America industrialized. Emerson’s words were nothing if not prescient. If they were fitting then, how much more so today, in the epoch of robot vacuum cleaners and AI? He’s right, of course. We shouldn’t want to be good fingers, impressive elbows, irreproachable necks, sumptuous earlobes. We should want to be the whole human. Later, Emerson hammers the point home, saying:

"Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself."

We’re all capable of so much. Each one of us possesses ability, and it’s up to us—it’s our obligation—to use this ability. Don’t just watch sports, play them. Don’t just read short stories, write them. Stop studying paintings. Paint your own. Do not satisfy yourself with someone else’s creative work. Create something yourself. As Emerson says later in his speech,

"Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books."

Now I want to point to someone who illustrates the virtues of not specializing, of having a broad scope of interests. The impulse is to pick a person like da Vinci or Descartes or Benjamin Franklin—renaissance men. But I think it would be more interesting to cast these conventional figures aside and focus on someone more unusual, someone unexpected. And so I present before you the proud founder of the United States’ first volunteer cavalry. He was a police commissioner, a colonel, an assistant secretary of the navy, and the governor of New York. He was also the 26th President of the United States. His name was Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt was a writer first and a politician second. He was prolific a writer. Among his heroic output of over 40 books, were biographies, comprehensive histories, memoirs, travelogues, and military treatises. He wrote books on Oliver Cromwell, on the history of New York, on the settling of the western frontier. He captivated audiences with personal anecdotes and with his adventures as a cattleman in the Dakota territory.

The Naval War of 1812, Roosevelt’s greatest literary success, was his debut publication. The work was the definitive text on the naval aspects of the war of 1812. It is a scholarly, fact-loaded book, and Roosevelt finished it soon after graduating from Harvard. The research for the book awoke in him a fervent interest in the Navy, an interest that would abide in him for the rest of his life. During his research, he learned of the decisive role navies play in modern war, and the critical link between a powerful navy and a strong empire. He would champion America’s expansion of the navy for the rest of his life. Considering the rapid expansion of navies that preceded and, arguably, helped precipitate World War 1, it is hard to disagree with Roosevelt’s opinion that a strong navy is vital.

Besides Roosevelt the writer and Roosevelt the politician, there was also Roosevelt the naturalist, the man who felt the pull of nature in his very marrow. He grew up fascinated with animals. As a child, he amassed a small collection of birds he’d shot. He studied them closely and his collection grew, and some of his bird specimens eventually made their way into the Smithsonian. During his freshman year at Harvard, Roosevelt was torn between his love for nature and a desire to live a comfortable life. In the pages of his autobiography, Roosevelt writes,

“[I]n my freshman year [my father] told me that if I wished to become a scientific man I could do so. He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it I must make it a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up such a career and do non-remunerative work of value if I intended to do the very best work there was in me.”

Almost everyone can identify with Roosevelt here. Many of us have to make similar decisions. We have to choose between pursuing a career we are passionate about, at the expense of material comfort, and a career that we are less crazy about but one which affords comparatively greater material comfort. Roosevelt, again like many of us, decided to ignore the problem entirely. He’d defer the matter to the fates.

After graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt stumbled off to law school at Columbia, before becoming interested in local politics, dropping out and becoming an assemblyman. Despite pursuing a career as a politician, which was almost as distasteful to his aristocratic milieu as a career in natural history (politics, especially New York politics, was dominated by sordid characters like Boss Tweed and Roscoe Conkling), Roosevelt’s interest in birds and nature did not end with graduation. A lifelong learner, he continued to school himself on different species of birds. He continued to read large and ponderous tomes on birds. He continued to observe birds in nature with the aid of binoculars. He continued to write about birds, too. His interest in birds didn’t die with his birth as a politician.

So there was Roosevelt the writer, the politician, and the naturalist. There was also Roosevelt the athlete. The Roosevelt who played a hiking game called point-to-point where you tramped off in a certain direction and had to overcome whatever obstacles befell you. Large hills had to be summited. Rivers had to be forded. Rocks were climbed over. It was an activity that gave Roosevelt and his stout constitution much pleasure. The secret service agents scrambling to keep up with him found it less enjoyable.

Tennis, horseback riding, swimming, and boxing are just a few more sports the 26th President liked to participate in. The sport nearest to Roosevelt’s heart, though, was hunting. He hunted grizzly bears, deer, buffalo, anything wild and with a pulse. And while hunting may be a problematic pastime, it’s hunting that deepened Roosevelt’s appreciation of nature. All of those lonesome hunts in the Dakota territory, riding for miles and miles across the stark red badlands, where nothing could be heard save the falling clop-clop of the hooves of Roosevelt’s horse, and where nothing could be seen save the tall buttes that glowed like embers in the Dakota sun—it all deepened his appreciation of the natural world. It’s tempting to condemn anyone who hunts, especially someone who hunted as savagely as Roosevelt. But hunting also revealed nature's splendor to Roosevelt. If he hadn’t been a hunter, who knows if he would have been a conservationist.

A large part of Roosevelt’s success as a politician can be attributed to his broad knowledge and diverse interests. It’s what enabled him to talk to people of different backgrounds. He could talk to grizzled military men about the navy. He could talk to scientists about the latest scientific advances. He could discuss literature with writers. Just look at Roosevelt’s colorful mix of friends. He numbered creaky, urbane politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge, and hardy western gunslingers like Seth Bullock among his closest friends.

So I encourage everyone to be more adventurous. If you hail from the humanities, try doing some algebra. If you're an engineer, write some poetry. Pursue whatever you fancy. Explore any subject that piques your interest. Don't worry about understanding or not understanding. Don’t worry about being good or not. Don’t concern yourself with the judgment of others. “It is not the critic who counts,” Roosevelt said. It’s the person “who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”

Enter the arena. Follow Emerson’s advice. Do not delegate your learning to others. Do not ignore a subject that fascinates you, that delights you, that makes your hair curl, just because it falls outside the scope of your career. In the words of Bob Dylan, “you shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you.” Live and learn passionately. Live and learn curiously. Live and learn greedily.

On a final note, I’d like to dedicate this project to Dean Thompson, a man who drank life to the very last drop. His friendship was sweet. His company was as heady as the bourbon he drank. His presence was warm, like standing in sunshine. He will be missed, greatly.