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Nothing shifts my perspective quite like travel. I’m writing this on my phone from downtown Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, where among other wonders (dedicated bicycle lanes, poutine, friend and colleague Adam Haigler) I am surrounded by lilacs and tulips. More about the flowers in a moment.
In Satire VI, the Roman poet Juvenal (the same writer who gave us, “Who watches the watchmen?”) describes a woman worthy of marriage as rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno: “a rare bird in the world, very similar to the black swan.”
Juvenal was cracking wise. In his world the black swan was a metaphor for something that didn’t exist. All swans were known to be white — until about sixteen hundred years later, when Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh encountered black swans in Australia.
Since then, black swans have symbolized the limitations of human observation and belief. Nicholas Taleb put it this way in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, “When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”
Recognizing things for what they really are becomes more difficult when we believe that our previous experience of reality has already told us the whole story.
David Muskrath, one of my favorite teaching colleagues who grew a garden outside his portable classroom long before that sort of thing was popular, once told me in frustrated detail how he visited a farm in Baja California, picked oranges off a tree, and squeezed fresh juice for his daughters, only to watch them make faces and complain: “Ew, this isn’t orange juice — it doesn’t taste like Sunny D!”
About ten years ago my wife and I were hiking on California’s central coast when we saw an animal on the next ridge over. It was too big to be a dog, too thick to be a deer… and it moved in a way we couldn’t quite place. After a few minutes it finally dawned on us that we were looking at a bear. Then we laughed at ourselves, as it also dawned on us that the nearest town was Los Osos (“The Bears”).
It is even harder to see reality as it truly exists when others around us suggest that what we see isn’t there.
In the 1950s, Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments that demonstrated we will actually ignore what they see with our own eyes when the people around us contradict our observations. Nearly 75% of participants in Asch’s studies gave incorrect answers when they were influenced by confederates of the experimenters who intentionally misled them. Asch wrote, “That intelligent, well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.”
Why does this matter in today’s culture? Taleb again: “It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”
When our own sensory experience is reduced to a belief system in which our faith can so easily be rattled, what becomes of our shared experience in external reality?
We have invented intricate tools to investigate the very large, small, and complex aspects of our universe. Next week I’ll dig into the Gaia telescope, the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, and technologies that have advanced brain research.
We don’t need machinery to learn our way though relationships and interactions. Our local social universe reveals itself more easily, even when people group together and get excited about ideas that are untrue. Consider the economics of flowers.
About 60 years before de Vlamingh found a black swan, his country went wild for tulips. The Dutch Republic, which at the time was a leading economic power with the highest per capita income in the world, drove prices of tulips up astronomically and created the first speculative bubble in economic history.
Would you pay hundreds of dollars for a tulip? I wouldn’t. Tulips are nice. But not that nice. Then again, in this moment you and I are not surrounded by respected friends and neighbors who are racing around excitedly grabbing all the tulips to get rich.
Sometimes this sort of behavior isn’t speculative. People believe that something is valuable because it’s scarce and/or unique (like the highly prized Densuke watermelons, which routinely sell for thousands of dollars each at auction, or waterfront real estate). Sometimes people drive up the price of something ordinary out of perceived need or even fear (like toilet paper in a pandemic or the current presidential administration).
Here in Victoria, the Fairmont Empress hotel serves a fancy, expensive high tea. Servers have hosted the Queen of England and generations of royalty and celebrities. The front garden looks out over the harbor and features… tulips. Tulips are expensive, especially with Mother’s Day coming up.
But worth isn’t necessarily defined by market forces or fashion.
Lilacs are my wife’s favorite flower. Two days ago she got a text from her Dad telling her to go to a florist, his treat. We walked across the street to Brown’s The Florist. I later learned that Mary Brown opened the shop in 1870. Her motto was “doing more than just meeting the customer’s needs.”
My wife stepped up to the counter and asked for lilacs. Karina the florist laughed. “I don’t have any lilacs for sale,” she said, “but come back tomorrow morning and I’ll bring some for you.”
Yesterday we went back to the florist. Karina had beautiful lilacs. She made a bouquet, tied it with a ribbon, and presented it to my wife. I asked what we owed her. Karina laughed again. “Nothing!” she said. “They grow everywhere. I picked these at the end of my driveway.”
A kind, knowledgeable person went the extra mile and kept her promise with a smile. Now that’s worth something.
What’s worth more than money or other people’s opinions to you? Drop me a line – I’m curious!
Open-Source Learning is yours. Free. Get the white paper here. Use what works and customize whatever you need, however you want. I’m here to help.
Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
When I’m at home that’s where I eat. But when I travel, I like adventure and I love authentic. Yesterday after a meeting I found both in an abandoned subterranean mall in Vancouver. I walked down steps from the street into… what WAS that place? I was literally the only person in two stories of empty, unkempt space. A hidden loudspeaker broadcast a woman’s voice. In Chinese. The scene was Twilight Zone meets The Last of Us.
On the second floor was a counter under a sign that said Nine Dumplings. Behind the counter was a middle-aged woman who looked at me and said, “Steamed or spicy?” Spicy. She said, “fifteen minutes.”
About sixteen minutes later I ate the best nine dumplings of my life.
One thing I love about Vancouver Island is the number of independent bookstores here. I never walk out empty-handed. At Russell Books (next to Brown’s The Florist) I found a $5 (Canadian) copy of a cookbook that made a perfect gift, and today I’m headed back to Munro’s to buy Robert Sapolsky’s Determined and maybe Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (I was holding both yesterday just before closing when I had to walk out to take a call).
Not only does this place have great bookstores, they also have a terrific library — wherever you live or travel, I hope you can find and enjoy these community gardens of imagination.
We’re just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
– Stephen Hawking
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David Preston
Educator & Author
Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE
Header image: Flowers via David Preston
I was impressed by the global perspective presented.