January 12, 2010

Someone Wonderful: The Offhand Wisdom of Jerry Pournelle

jerry.pournelle.jpgYou can never go wrong by spending some time each week browsing Jerry Pournelle's The View From Chaos Manor, an effort he describes as, "Think of VIEW as my column on the installment plan, but there are major differences; here you see what happens as it happened."

Pournelle is an eminence gris of computers (They continue after all these years to vex him.), science fiction and history. He's got a keen sense of the novel and the classical. This morning is no exception. View 604 January 4 - 10, 2010

Western intellectuals used to share far more common education -- novels, familiarity with myth and legend, Iliad and Odyssey and Aeschylus and Sophocles and -- ah, well. There is a great deal of more modern stuff that we must know now, and perhaps a neglect of the classics was an inevitable result of all our modern scientific discoveries. Jacques Barzun told a story of the days in the 19th Century when Harvard instituted the Bachelor of Science degree; something new at the time. It did not guarantee that its recipient knew any science, but it certainly guaranteed that he would know neither Greek nor Latin... Today's graduate can add history and philosophy to those guarantees; all of which makes communication more difficult. If I say David and Goliath most readers will understand the reference and the image of the underdog winning; but the days when there were thousands of such colorful images for a writer to draw on in the sure knowledge that the reader would understand are long gone. Alas. I am not sure we are the better for it.
A smart man and a fine American. Recommended. (And don't miss his "Daily Mail" feature to see what his fine collection of correspondents is highlighting.)

Posted by Vanderleun at January 12, 2010 11:16 AM
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"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

Do not by any means assume that "most" people will understand the reference to David and Goliath. Trust me, I know. The odds are far better than even that most people will not get it.

Few people read the Bible any more, even church people. They might read stuff that other people wrote about something in the Bible.

And since the vast majority of Americans almost never attend church, guess what that means for the average Joe getting references such as David & Goliath?

Posted by: Donald Sensing at January 12, 2010 11:53 AM

One of those uncommon folks whose site doesn't have an RSS link- and where I regret the lack of same...

Posted by: WWWebb at January 12, 2010 12:19 PM

Jerry is a Man for All Seasons in all things.

Posted by: Austin at January 12, 2010 1:52 PM

Actually, Pournelle's site does have an atom feed: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/atom.xml

Posted by: Corrector at January 12, 2010 2:17 PM

Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out" makes up an embarrassingly large part of my world-view (well, that and Starship Troopers, but let's not get into that right now). Reading A Step Farther Out in the midst of the early 80's gloom and doom was a breath of fresh for this Western Canadian lad. All around me, the media was saying that we'd die because that durn cowboy in the White House was going to blow us up or we'd die because of overpopulation or we'd die because of acid rain, and here was this science fiction author telling me in this silly little book that not only would the human race survive, but we'd survive with STYLE.

Hope wasn't in great abundance back in 1981, but it was in that book, and to this day I still treasure the words that I read back then.

Posted by: ExurbanKevin at January 12, 2010 2:39 PM

Mr Pournelle is very much worth reading daily.

I'd love to have a tenth of his intelligence, education and wisdom.

Posted by: pdwalker at January 12, 2010 5:40 PM

I agree with your high opinion of Jerry Pournelle.

Posted by: pst314 at January 12, 2010 7:32 PM

I've had the privilege of knowing Jerry and his sweet wife Roberta for over 25 years (my wife and I visited them at their home just last summer). Jerry is brilliant and incredibly well-read. He has an amazing memory and a broad-yet-detailed grasp of history on the order of Victor Davis Hanson. His politics are a bit more complex and harder to pigeon-hole than is apparent to those try to dismiss him as a right-wing curmudgeon. And while I don't always agree with Jerry, I'd think three times before taking him on in a debate -- he'd mop the floor with me.

Thanks for the shout out to him; he deserves to be more widely read. ..bruce..


Posted by: bfwebster at January 13, 2010 6:48 AM

Does Jerry still carry a sword cane?

Posted by: Don Rodrigo at January 13, 2010 2:13 PM

@Corrector: Thank you. I am in your debt.

Posted by: WWWebb at January 14, 2010 9:26 PM