Pen Portraits-Thomas R. Malthus

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834)

If impact of any one is based on influence one had over shaping the thoughts of number of people (who are movers and shakers in their own time,) Malthus deserves a pre-eminent position as the shaper of modern world. Where would be  VI Lenin if there was no Karl Marx to begin with? Karl Marx certainly owes much to this unassuming English cleric. So do Charles Darwin and Arthur Russell Wallace.

Malthus became widely known for his theories about change in population. His An Essay on the Principle of Population observed that sooner or later population would be checked by famine and disease. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. Naturally he had no use for Rousseau’s woolly ideas of noble savage. Nature was a battle- front where life forms marshaled their energies to get an edge over others in the ever dwindling resources. There was nothing noble but hard-nosed reality of survival.

Malthus wrote:

That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,

That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and,

That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.

Malthus was interested in everything about populations. He accumulated figures on births, deaths, age of marriage and childbearing, and economic factors contributing to longevity. His main contribution was to highlight the relationship between food supply and population. Humans do not overpopulate to the point of starvation, he contended, only because people change their behavior in the face of economic incentives.

Noting that while food production tends to increase arithmetically, population tends to increase naturally at a (faster) geometric rate, Malthus argued that it is no surprise that people thus choose to reduce (or “check”) population growth. People can increase food production, Malthus thought, only by slow, difficult methods such as reclaiming unused land or intensive farming; but they can check population growth more effectively by marrying late, using contraceptives, emigrating and so on.

It could be argued that war is also part of Nature’s game plan*.

Trivia: Thomas Carlyle in 1849 coined economics as “dismal science.” It was to demean John Stuart Mill, and often erroneously thought to refer to Malthus’s contributions to the economics of population growth.

 

*Tailspin:

 Hitler’s lebensraum  was one way of cutting the ground off from under the feet of National Socialism. Is it not nature’s way of getting rid of evil geniuses? Nature works with chains of events that are most likely to be beneficial to maintain open societies where new technologies shall be put to use for creating health and all around well-being of  global population. Consequently ethnic cleansing of minorities, gypsies, Jews adopted by Nazi Germany as a state policy was counterproductive. Stalin would cause some 22 millions to perish under his personality cult. Where did that leave Soviet bloc? Did it not go out of business by its own immoral governance? Nature has a role if we were to follow Malthusian thought  further into the fall of empire-states. (Ack: wikipedia, Lauren F. Landsburg)

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Pen Portraits- Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) never left his place of birth except for a brief stint as a lecturer in a nearby village. He lived and died in Kaliningrad (now Konigsburg), Russia. While tutoring, he published science papers, including “General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens” in 1755. He spent the next 15 years as a metaphysics lecturer. In 1781, he published the first part of Critique of Pure Reason. He published more critiques in the years  to come preceding his death, on February 12, 1804, in Kaliningrad.He was barely five feet tall and extremely thin, and his health was fragile. Toward the end of his life he became increasingly antisocial and bitter over the growing loss of his memory and capacity for work. Kant became totally blind (Ack- http://www.notablebiographies.com)

At the age of 22 he wrote:”I have always fixed upon the line which I am resolved to keep… Nothing shall prevent me from keeping it.” Everything else he relegated to it. He thought of marriage but by the time he decided the lady in question married one who meanwhile proposed. He remained a bachelor. He presevered despite ill health and obscurity. Never did a book so startle and upset the philosophic world as his.

Critique for a title does not indicate Kant is criticizing Reason but it just means a critical analysis of pure reason from ‘impure’ reason. Pure in the sense knowledge does not come through our senses but is independent of all shared experience. For example Knowledge in mathematics is true no matter what our future experience be. Two plus two is four whether the moon in furthering distance from the earth or not. Such a change in the future will lengthen days and nights necessitating a change in our internal clocks as well. Experience of ‘gut feeling’ as to passing of time or needing sleep as our biological clocks may change. Kantian pure reason is truth inviolable. Mind of man is not passive wax upon which sensation and experience writes its will.

In order to have a casual understanding of his importance as a philosopher and his work Critique it  shall suffice to say the entire 19th century philosophic thought revolved around his speculations and in our age  it influenced Jean Paul Sartre greatly. His magnum opus runs to more than 800 pages and in discarding examples and analogies he made it very daunting for the beginners to understand him directly. It is often safer to approach him from expositions of lesser mortals. It is like understanding Jehovah at the Mount Sinai through his prophet Moses.

Immanuel Kant didn’t explain his thought by examples lest he should add more pages needlessly. As a parting thought let me add: analogies are like fishes of the sea and it could include from anchovies to the whales. These are merely incidental to the quintessence of the sea under the influence of the wind or without. Philosophy of man accommodates analogies from nature but are not really called for.

benny

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Pen Portrait -’silent’ Cal,

“Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind.”

The above quote is revealing as to something profoundly refreshing about the US President. It encapsulates a certain perspective on life and politics,- terse as it is direct a quality that is rare among politicians.

Calvin Coolidge was born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, on July 4, 1872. Coolidge slated for law gravitated into politics. In 1896 Coolidge campaigned locally for Republican presidential candidate William McKinley he was elected in 1906, as a Progressive Republican to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Elected U.S. vice president in 1920, he became president following the death of Warren G. Harding in 1923. Coolidge, also known as “Silent Cal,” chose not to seek a second term. He died in Northampton, Massachusetts, on January 5, 1933.
And Coolidge, of course, was always a source of great stories. Everyone has his favorites. Once a man, riding with Coolidge through Vermont, commented, “See how closely they have shaved those sheep?” “At least on this side,” said the President.
At another point, a rude, combative man came up to Coolidge and said, “I didn’t vote for you.” The President immediately replied: “Someone did.”

In 1905, Coolidge married Grace Anna Goodhue, a teacher at a school for the deaf. The two were nearly opposites: While Grace was talkative and social, Calvin was stoic and serious. The marriage would prove to be very happy and successful over the coming decades.
One Sunday morning Mrs. Coolidge was indisposed so Calvin went to church alone. On his return Mrs. Coolidge asked her husband, ”Calvin, what did the minister preach about?”
“Sin,” said ‘silent’ Cal.
“What did he say about sin?” prodded his wife.
“He was against it.”
For anecdotes check my earlier post on him.(ack: http://www.biography.com)
benny

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Pen Portraits- John Locke

John Locke (1632-1704) Philosopher
Any examination of philosophy leading to Kantian critique of reason will need to know this philosopher. Enlightenment is the age of Voltaire where the irrepressible skeptic tilted his barbed lance at the Church. The Church was running personal lives of men as though it held a monopoly on their religious faith. Faith in reason gave encyclopaedia which in France was to give the Age of Reason an elbow room for man to think for himself without fear of damnation. It fortified men to resist from being muzzled by superstitious fears. Prior to this Spinoza in Holland had created an universe by geometry and logic ( his works are still on the proscribed list of the Church). But Spinoza could survive with no such fears of hell and damnation. Later David Hume during the Enlightenment would launch an assault against superstitious belief saying,’when reason is against man,’he would turn against reason itself. If the age old belief,- faith and hope which had made society into some semblance of working order, were to come down what will replace them made many thinking men dread. Their chief cause for complaint was in the nature of reason. ‘Reason, what stuff is that?’
How would man respond to such confusion and perplexity? John Locke’s work is an important milestone in the advancement of human thought. He took up Franis Bacon’s inductive methods to give it a psychological basis. For the first time here was a philosopher trying to make sense of the instrument itself that stood for reason. How does knowledge arise? He compared the mind as a clean slate tabula rasa on which sense-experience writes in a thousand ways till sensation begets memory and it can play with ideas. Think of it as music is made in the manner scale ladder is used creating infinite combinations. It led to a controversy since he stated that sensations owe to material warp and woof of universe, it was all materialism since according to his argument we may know nothing but matter.
His greatest work is Essay on Human Understanding(1689).
benny

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Pen Portraits- Marquess of Salisbury

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil(1830-1903) was a descendent of Sir Robert Cecil of the Elizabethan fame. He was three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, from 1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892 and 1895 and 1902 and also served four times as Foreign Secretary. His time as Prime Minister coincided with a great expansion of the British Empire. Lord Salisbury is also remembered as an adherent of the policy of “splendid isolation”, the desire to keep Great Britain out of European affairs and alliances. He was also the last British Prime Minister to serve from the Lords.
He was notoriously myopic and mistook people in his own cabinet and also his son. He once looked at the photograph of Edward VII and mistook him for Sir.Redvers Buller. Intemperate in speech( of Disraeli-’the grain of dirt that clogged the political machine’) he was not above granting one of his nephews an out of turn favor. In 1887 he made Arthur Balfour from obscurity to front-line post of Chief Secretary for Ireland, a vital post that gave rise to the expression,’Bob’s your uncle.’ Subject to nervous storms, pessimistic, shambling he on a ceremonial occasion induced near apoplexy on his sovereign by appearing in a mixture of two uniforms.
A representative of the landed aristocracy, he held the reactionary credo, “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” Instead of seeing his party’s victory in 1886 as a harbinger of a new and more popular Conservatism, he longed to return to the stability of the past, when his party’s main function was to restrain demagogic liberalism and democratic excess.
(ack: wikipedia, eminent Edwardians/Piers Brendon-Penguin-1979)

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Pen Portraits- Georges Clemenceau

GEORGE CLEMENCEAU (French) (1841 – 1929)
Statesman.

Clemenceau stood for the principles of the French Revolution – authoritarian, democratic, patriotic; he was a 20th Century Jacobin.
The French politician who had the most nicknames (Le Tombeur des Ministères, Le Tigre, Père la Victoire) and fought the most duels, he began his career as a radical deputy and outspoken journalist in continous conflict with catholics, royalists, moderates and Socialists. His greatest moment came in 1917 when P.M. for the second time, elderly and deaf, he still became the symbol and inspiration of the French determination to win the war. In the peace negotiations he tried to get security for France against Germany. Yet was attacked for not being more successful; he was defeated in the Presidential elections of 1920 and retired. He was an independent character:(In 1919 en route for same ceremony, he met Balfour in the lift. Balfour was wearing a top hat and Clemenceau, his battered deer stalker. A puzzled Balfour:”But they told me that I have to wear a silk hat”. Clemenceau replied:”They told me that too”). And a sardonic wit. (Si, seulement je pouvais passer comme Lloyd George parle).

benny

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Pen Portraits-Frederick, the great

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Pen Portraits-Duke of Wellington

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Pen Portraits- Peter the Great

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Life of Theseus from post of Sept.21,’10

Outline:Aegeus is tricked by Pitheus to have sex with his daughter-Theseus is reared by his mother and when time comes he goes in search of his father. Medea wants to kill the youth but his father recognizes him by his sword. He is acknowledged as his legitimate heir. Sons of Pallas and his fifty sons wage war against him and are routed. Exploits of Theseus, Theseus and Ariadne-Theseus kills the minotaur and return to Athens. Credited as making Athens adopt democratic way of government.
As in maps of antiquity areas were sometimes marked with legends that showed ignorance of the cartographer than explained the true case. A lion country may upon close examination would have yielded dandelions than the king of the beasts. But such legends make us reexamine antiquity not for exactness of geography but for understanding the lack of it. I, Plutarch is aiming for an effect and not for explaining facts I do not have. The effect is entertaining my reader, of course.
Theseus is considered as the founder of Athens as Romulus, the founder of Rome. There are several points of resemblance to one another. Both were unacknowledged illegitimate children, and were reputed to descend from the Gods. Both were wise as well as powerful. The one founded Rome, while the other was the joint founder of Athens; and these are two of the most famous of cities. Both carried off women by violence, and neither of them escaped domestic misfortune and retribution, but towards the end of their lives both were at variance with their countrymen from what we have on this from writers of antiquity.(selected)
benny

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