Thoughts on a Think-Tank Calendar

Once more, as the new year begins, I turn to my RAND calendar for guidance.

The RAND calendar is published by the Santa Monica think tank, and it reflects that corporation’s commitment to ideas.

Each month is accompanied by a quotation from some man or woman of achievement. This year the predominant theme is freedom.

It is proper that in this country, where we have so much of it, we should be preoccupied with freedom, and ever ready to preserve it. Simply in the number of immigrants who flock to our shores we should see its power.

For March, Leo Tolstoy holds that freedom is the force behind all our being: “All men’s instincts, all their impulses in life, are only efforts to increase their freedom. Wealth and poverty, health and disease, culture and ignorance, labor and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are all only terms for greater or less degrees of freedom.”

I can see that the wealthy are freer than the poor; the healthy freer than the sick; the educated freer than the ignorant; the full freer than the hungry. But are those who labor freer than those who are at leisure? Are the virtuous freer than the criminal? In the first instance perhaps Tolstoy should have said unemployed ; surely the employed are freer than the unemployed; but where is the stigma in leisure? As for the criminal, his freedom is illusory. He who deprives others of their freedom cannot be free.

Having edited Tolstoy I will move on to G. K. Chesterton, on the danger of ideas: “Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.”

The American revolutionaries were men of ideas; the British king was not. Consequently, the ideas of Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson confounded the king and liberated them. But what of Lenin? Was he not a man of ideas?

Margaret Fuller (“Papers on Literature and Art,” 1846) is quoted on “Being True to Oneself”:

“No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance, without becoming original, for there is in every creature a fountain of life which, if not choked back by stones and other dead rubbish, will create a fresh atmosphere, and bring to life fresh beauty. And it is the same with the nation as with the individual man.”

Ms. Fuller seems to have been expanding on the ancient precept: “Know thyself.” (I am puzzled that, as an outspoken feminist she should have used the generic “man . . . himself” rather than “person . . . himself or herself.”)

Dwight D. Eisenhower is quoted on freedom: “The winning of freedom is not to be compared to the winning of a game--with the victory recorded forever in history. Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed--else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.”

That is a fairly poetic piece of prose, coming from a man whose syntax was usually as graceful as a man running a 100-yard dash with a broken leg.

As a man who occasionally makes an error (but no more than two a year) I take comfort in a quotation from Goethe: “The most fruitful lesson is the conquest of one’s own error. Whoever refuses to admit error may be a great scholar, but he is not a great learner. Whoever is ashamed of error will struggle against recognizing and admitting it, which means that he struggles against his greatest inward gain.”

Marcus Aurelius might have been speaking about our own age of technology, with our dependence on data bases: “Facts stand wholly outside our gates; they are what they are, and no more; they know nothing about themselves, and they pass no judgment upon themselves. What is it, then, that pronounces the judgment? Our own guide and ruler, Reason.”

On the basis of these quotations I have set my course for 1989: I will try to know myself, to learn from my errors, to cherish and protect my freedom, to examine facts with reason, and not to fear ideas.