The Switchel Philosopher

I recently purchased, and am reading, the book Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.

I will refer to this book from time to time on the blog. In this post, I discuss some background about the book.

Alexis de Tocqueville was a Frenchman who, as a young man, toured the United States, as a young country. He had studied history and law. He wanted to learn how democracy worked in America, so that he could take lessons back to France.

Tocqueville spent nine months touring the United States in 1831-1832. He visited 17 of the then 24 states. He visited with many people, both famous and not, including President Andrew Jackson, his predecessor John Quincy Adams, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence—Charles Carroll of Maryland, and Sam Houston of Texas (not yet a state). Tocqueville was 25 years old when he left for America. He traveled with a friend, Gustave de Beaumont, who was 29.

You can learn more about the tour that Tocqueville and Beaumont took in the United States from the Alexis de Tocqueville Tour, a series of programs produced by C-SPAN in 1997-1998 that followed the path they took. Links: Wikipedia, C-SPAN.

After returning to France in 1832, Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, published in French in two volumes—one in 1835 and one 1840. English translations were published at the same time. Today the two volumes are usually published as one book. I purchased the translation by the husband and wife team of Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop of Harvard University, first published in 2000. I have the paperback edition published in 2002. The first sentence in the Editors’ Introduction is:

Democracy in America is at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.

Clearly there is continuing interest in what Tocqueville had to say, as evidenced by the 1997-1998 C-SPAN series, the 2000 translation by Mansfield and Winthrop, and three other new translations since then per Wikipedia. Democracy in America is often quoted even today by people from across the political spectrum.

I won’t pretend that I am reading the book straight through. It is massive at about 800 pages, which includes both original volumes plus 75 pages or so of introduction and notes by Mansfield and Winthrop. But the book is well organized, and I am guided in my study by a set of lectures from The Great Courses Company: Tocqueville and the American Experiment, which I have listened to several times since purchasing it in 2006.

The course guide for Tocqueville and the American Experiment lists the following major themes in the book:

Democracy is the way of the future.

Because of changes taking place in the world, there is a need for a new political science. Democracy in America is meant to be a part of this new political science. America has a unique history and geography, and its form and practice of democracy cannot be imitated.

The essence of democracy is equality.*

Democracy depends on broad participation of citizens in public life at the local level. [This resonates with me now that I am on the town selectboard!]

Equality* leads people to withdraw into themselves.

The success of democracy hinges on vibrant local political and social institutions that will limit the centralization of administrative power and encourage people to be active in politics.

*By “equality,” Tocqueville does not mean equality of outcomes. He means something closer to equality of opportunity, but it is not exactly that, either. He certainly means to include equality before the law, but it is more than that. Included in his meaning is a lack of aristocracy (he was himself a French aristocrat). He also had many negative things to say about slavery. Tocqueville calls what he means “equality of conditions.”

Recently I was in the awkward position of explaining to a woman the concept of mansplaining.

What is mansplaining? This clip from the television series Silicon Valley explains:

Ouch.

What can we men do to improve our communication skills?

This short article contains good advice. Please follow the link. It won’t take you long to read, and there are five excellent tips in that column that everyone can use to improve the art of conversation.

Many thanks to a family member and a friend, neither of my generation, for the links.

I maintain that my awkward situation in the first sentence was not an instance of mansplaining because she didn’t already know (see the last line in the video) and she asked for an explanation (see tip #3 in the article). That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Update 7/03/17: This post was rewritten to improve clarity.

The image to the left is a birthday card. Inside the card it says:

Don’t worry… It will make more sense after you start drinking.

I am reminded of something Richard Feynman said. Richard Feynman (1918-1988) won a Nobel prize in physics in 1965 for work in quantum electrodynamics.

In 1961-63 Feynman created and taught a completely revamped two-year introductory physics course at Caltech, known as The Feynman Lectures on Physics. These famous lectures were published and are now available online for free at the link in the preceding sentence.

The third lecture was titled “The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences” and Feynman ended the lecture as follows:

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

Quantum physics is strange. Feynman once said: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” (source – the quote comes from lecture #6)

A few years ago I read a fascinating book titled Quantum Reality. Click here for an overview of the ideas in the book. Interesting stuff.