Some Leisurely Meandering

The title of this essay is “The Discipline of Leisure” for a reason. Leisure requires discipline precisely because it involves personal liberty, and undisciplined liberty is not freedom but indecision and dissipation. We are free most free with some constraints, because by accepting them we create and preserve a clean, well-lighted territory (see Marc Herman How the Scots Made the Modern World for a good discussion of how property and territory contribute to identity) wherein we can act decisively and meaningfully, banishing uncertainty to the hinterlands, the dark edges of the world. “Here be Dragons” we print on maps of globe and psyche alike.

Leisure is freedom within constraint, the chaos within a determinate system. Anarchy, like entropy, is the dark without, the disorder of boundlessness. (Boulding, Von Bertalanffy, and other early figures in systems theory recognize the need for boundary). Leisure is iterative simple construction that results self-similar structures of high complexity; anarchy is self-similar only in that it levels all to an equally low state.

This essay is a work of leisure. As such, it will build a complex structure out of many simpler ones. I can’t do otherwise. I am no mathematician, and am only social scientist and philosopher in the broadest senses of those terms. Further, when the scope of the work covers the breadth of human endeavor, I couldn’t possibly master every discipline, or even the handful I use most heavily. This forces me to use simple, basic principles. In turn, this keeps the theory simple. Nothing about leisure is difficult to understand – it’s just difficult to see through the fog of convention.

It also means that some of my insights are speculative: I can make synthetic connections, but lack the expertise to rigorously establish them: I can see how some high-powered math could be used to model these ideas, I can’t do those kinds of math. I can call attention to the need or opportunity for mathematical investigation, and can argue by analogy from known principles, but no more. In other words, I lack depth – and not just in mathematics, but in most every field I venture into. Instead, mine is the sideways depth of breadth. This always courts the charge of being dilettante, but this allegation is like half of an argument between a far-sighted man and a near-sighted one about who has the better vision. Johann Huzinga put my position best:

The reader of these pages should not look for detailed documentation of every word. In treating of the general problems of culture one is constantly obliged to undertake predatory incursions into provinces not sufficiently explored by the raider himself. To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.

To quote Vonnegut, “So it goes.” To paraphrase my favorite economist and virtual mentor Joan Robinson, I could either think or do math. And I prefer to think. By circumstance and habit I do so alone. As Keynes noted in the preface to his General Theory, this has its risks. It has costs too, one of which is the inefficiency of wheel-reinvention. As an undergraduate I “invented” the concept of evolutionary progress through the dialectic process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (if memory serves my terms were premise-contradiction-reconciliation and I argued a latent misunderstanding of this explained the harmful concept of original sin). Some months later I learned that Hegel beat me to the punch by a century or so. This took some wind from my sails for a bit (and a good thing too, for I was insufferable, I’m sure) but it also gave me great confidence. If I could reason from first principles and arrive at the same conclusions as a historical figure, I had to have something on the ball. Since then, I’ve not been shy about thinking on my own.

I gladly bear the cost of duplicating the efforts of others independently for two reasons. First, doing so lets me bring my own vocabulary and grammar to an issue. This isn’t to celebrate ignorance, but to admit the power of both fresh perspective and vested interest: bridges, gaps, and barriers obscured by the shade of professional edifices simply aren’t noticed except by lone wanderer at ground level.

Second, when I run across a thinker who has anticipated me, it’s like running into an old friend – or sometimes first-sight infatuation. When I discover a predecessor-in-thought after the fact, I don’t it see so much as missed opportunity for labor savings as confirmation that I’m on the right track. For this lone thinker, such validation is nearly priceless. After all, when reconsidering staples of conventional understanding in isolation, a fellow wonders just how sane or silly his effort may be. In such an environment, even diametric opposition is valuable so long as it reputable, for it provides a logical connection to society at large. The more boundaries you break, the stronger this applies. Also, anything which has been profitably discussed once is likely to bear opposition well – Hegel would know.