An annual dive into the Rand think-tank calendar, splashing liberty and homilies for all

It has been my custom, in recent Januaries, to review the new Rand calendar.

Rand is the think tank in Santa Monica. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I assume it contracts to think about certain problems for various clients, and it employs a number of extremely bright men and women to do the thinking.

For each month, their annual calendar offers a quotation from some towering intellectual, together with a drawing of its author. The authors are usually writers, scientists or statesmen of note. Most of them are dead.

Having no spiritual connection, I feel the need of some inspiration at the beginning of each year, and the Rand calendar provides it.

Usually the quotations illuminate some abstraction such as liberty, freedom of speech or the obligations of the individual to society, and they have a nobility of style that makes me tingle.

Actually, my character was formed by homelier advice, such as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” and “Waste not, want not.”

But the Rand quotations ring with warnings about the danger of losing our precious freedom, and I recommend them to you.

It may be appropriate first to recall a remark by Oscar Wilde, of which I have been recently reminded by the encyclopedic Edgar A. Shoaff of La Canada: “The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.”

For January, 1987, Rand gives us a few words from the 17th-Century English thinker, Francis Bacon:

“If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.”

I’m not too sure that doubt always leads to certainty, but it is the classic scientific attitude, often endorsed by Rand’s voices.

For February, Ralph Bunche says of peace: “In the final analysis, there is but one road to peace and that is the road of human understanding and fellow-feeling, of inflexible determination to achieve peaceful relations among men.”

Well, we know that, but how do we get people to love their neighbors?

For April, poet W. H. Auden observes, “In a civilized society . . . orthodoxy can only be secured by a cooperation of which free controversy is an essential part. For what at the time appears to be a heresy never arises without a cause. . . .”

For May, scientist Loren Eiseley warns his fellows against prejudice: “Like other members of the human race, scientists are capable of prejudice. They have occasionally persecuted other scientists, and they have not always been able to see that an old theory, given a hairbreadth twist, might open an entirely new vista to the human reason. . . .”

For June, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges compares other products of our technology with the book: “Among the many inventions of man, the book, without a doubt, is the most astounding; all the others are extensions of our bodies. The telephone, for example, is the extension of our voice; the telescope and the microscope are extensions of our sight; the sword and the plow are extensions of our arms. Only the book is an extension of our imagination and memory.”

Borges said that in 1983, when the computer was already a fact of intellectual life. But he probably wrote longhand.

For July, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is eloquent on freedom of information: “We welcome the views of others. We seek a free flow of information across national boundaries and oceans, across iron curtains and stone walls. We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

The picture is of a thoughtful Kennedy, half smiling, with his right hand drawn up against his chin, and his plastic-rimmed glasses folded over the knuckles. God knows he was the best- looking President we’ve had in this century. (Harding was handsome, but he looked too much like a crooked undertaker in a 1930s Warner Bros. movie.)

For August we have our old favorite, Ralph Waldo Emerson, advising us, in that simple, familiar, Emersonian cadence, on the rewards of success in one’s work.

“Success in your work, the finding of a better method, the better understanding that insures the better performing, is hat and coat, is food and wine, is fire and horse and health and holiday. At least, I find that any success in my work has the effect on my spirits of all these.”

For September the philosopher John Locke advises us in homely English that absorbing information is not enough:

“Those who have read of everything are thought to understand everything, too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections: unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.”

For October, Emily Balch, the Nobel laureate, makes her point with a simple metaphor:

“We must remember that nothing can be woven out of threads that all run the same way. . . . An unchallenged belief or idea is on the way to death and meaninglessness.”

So, in 1987 let us read, think, challenge, and tolerate; and remember--the other guy may be right.