Limits of the Known: David Roberts

The cover of the book shows us a megalith sticking up into the sky with snow-covered peaks dimly visible far below. It looks almost fake; something out of Photoshop by way of Lord of the Rings.  It happens to be the Great Trango Tower, a peak in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. (I looked it up.) At first glance we might fail to notice the two tiny men standing on the narrow patch of flat rock on top. When we do, our attention is likely to be drawn immediately to the almost sheer walls dropping away on every side. How did those guys get up there? How are they going to get down? Call it a moment of minor frisson.

The book’s publicists have made an effort to characterize it as a tour de force of derring-do on the order of John Krakauer’s best-selling Into Thin Air. But in Limits of the Known journalist and self-styled “adventurer” David Roberts blends three or four elements into a robust if uneven whole.

In the early going Roberts shares stories of his youthful climbs in Alaska, which have become legendary, emphasizing how remote and daring they actually were. He more than occasionally compares these “light and fast” expeditions, during which he and a small group of friends were often out of communication with the outside world for weeks at a time, to more recent expeditions that are logistically complex and almost invariably rely on contact with support teams­­—and sometimes the world at large—on a daily basis.

“It is tempting to see the state of exploration today as a played-out endeavor,” he writes, “a stage on which latter-day imposters try to emulate the heroes of yesteryear by manufacturing artificial challenges that grab headlines but add little or nothing to terrestrial discovery.”

Roberts gnashes his teeth a little at the fact that later in his career he more than occasionally earned his living as a journalist providing copy for these transmissions.

Subsequent sections are devoted to the history and current state of different realms of exploration: mountain-climbing, river-running, caving, Arctic exploration. Roberts draws here on his years writing for Outside and other magazines, but he also spends considerable time detailing the early history of these “sports”: Shipton in the Karakorum, Mick and Dan Leahy in New Guinea, Nansen in the Arctic. For a reader like me, who reads a mountaineering yarn only occasionally, these straight-ahead historical overviews are among the best parts of the book.

In the midst of these overviews, Roberts punctuates his memoir with a blow-by-blow of his battle with throat cancer, describing each phase and issue in excruciating medical detail, almost as if the illness were an indominable mountain peak to be faced and somehow overcome. It’s not a pleasant picture.

Only in the last few pages of the book does Roberts say much about his domestic situation. It seems he and his wife led independent lives. At one point he writes:

“I think of myself—of my vocation—not chiefly as a writer, or a climber, or even a husband or a friend, but as an adventurer. This book represents my effort to get at the core of the elusive phenomenon we call adventure, both past and future, both in the lives of explorers and in the wayward paths along which my own wanderlust has propelled me.”

Though many parts of the book are engaging, it strikes me that in his attempt to get at the “core” Roberts has failed. In the book’s final pages he uses phrases like “vocation” and “ultimate things” in passing, but he shies away from probing what those concepts might mean. (Well, it isn't a theology text!) (Well, why not?) Nor does he give sufficient emphasis, in summing up his life and career, to the value of the pleasure he’s brought to the thousands of readers who, sharing his love of adventure, have relished his many popular articles and books.

What, in the end, is the value of adventuring? It can hardly be merely to bring back a report of a place no Westerner has visited before. It needs to be a good story, involving risk, and effort, and fear, and fortitude as well. This tussle of emotions is a critical element no less that a heart-expanding view from a lofty peak.

Though I haven’t read it, I suspect that Roberts’ first book, the now classic The Mountain of My Fear (1968), covers this ground admirably.

Does such adventuring bring us closer to the divine? Maybe so. But it’s usually a fleeting sensation, devilishly difficult to capture in words.

Those who can do so have reaffirmed the value of art.

No Kings

Yes, we went down to the “No Kings” event downtown yesterday, and it was awesome. Colorful, peaceful, joyous. The speakers were slightly rousing—with the exception of firebrand Keith Ellison, who was in a position to say “We’re suing the government and will meet them in court on November 5 —and the music was ho-hum. But the vibe was tremendous.

The space never got claustrophobic, yet there were so many people there that a half-hour after the actual march started, no one in our line of sight had moved, simply because they had started the marchers from the other end of the park.

I will be the first to admit that I was lukewarm about attending the event, out of laziness and the thought that “one person more or less won’t make a difference.” I know, I know. If everyone said that there wouldn’t have been a march.

Our plan was to park on the north side of the Mississippi in old St. Anthony and walk across the stone arch bridge to the gathering site. Hilary and I often park there during the film festival, but we drove down in the morning to double-check the parking signs on University Avenue and the side-streets nearby.

Back home, I went so far as to pay in advance for parking at the St. Anthony Ramp, just in case all the on-street parking was taken.

A friend of ours stopped at our house and rode down with us, and we met other friends at a coffeeshop two blocks from the park. By the time we reached the park, it was jammed with people as far as the eye could see. The weather was stunning. The signs were clever and also heartfelt. It was encouraging to see so many young people amid the crowd.

Marxists and terrorists?

Did our presence there make a difference? Did the march itself make a difference? Who’s to say? In his Substack column this morning economist Paul Krugman, my guru on all things political, had this to say:

“There is a solid body of research by political scientists like Erica Chenoweth about the effects of civil resistance -- nonviolent shows of opposition to those controlling or attempting to control the government. The clear answer from this research is that demonstrations like No Kings Day can make a big difference. They are a show of the depth and popularity of a movement, reassuring those who are opposed to a nation’s direction that many, many others share that opposition.

“Moreover, if a broad cross-section of society is represented in the demonstrations — and the crowds I saw consisted of a mix of seniors, middle-aged liberals, families with children, students and other unthreatening types — they can induce defections from the ruling regime, because the protestors can’t easily be ‘othered,’ portrayed as strange and alien. So protests with a wide base of support can ultimately pierce the regime’s bubble. In fact, in the aftermath of the massive scale and breadth of the demonstrations, the MAGA propaganda machine has gone remarkably quiet, although Mike Johnson has claimed that the demonstrators were all Marxists.”

You can read the entire column here.

 

The Nobel in Economics – Creative Destruction?

Reading over descriptions of the discoveries on which the newest Nobel awards were based, I was struck by two things. 1) The “discoveries” were pretty obvious. 2) The frequent use of the term “creative destruction” in describing those discoveries was a mistake.

As to the first point, let me hasten to add that economists often win awards for nailing down with mathematical precision the necessity and significance of things that are obvious. There’s nothing wrong with that. The publication being cited as critical to the current argument appeared in 1992. It's been around for a while, and has proven its worth..

But my dad, who spent almost his entire career as an analytical chemist at 3M, told me decades ago that 3M envisioned a three-year window of profitability for the new products it developed. From that point on, the Japanese or the Chinese would have figured out how to make the same thing cheaper. Hence the need for ceaseless innovation. In the business world, it falls under the category of "common knowledge."

On the other hand, the application of the term “creative destruction” to this process is simply a mistake. New products don’t “destroy” older products. They merely render them less popular, and sometimes obsolete. In many cases the older products retain a niche market among those who are nostalgic, or more interested in quality than in saving money.

The phrase “creative destruction” has a long history. Schumpeter popularized it in the field of economics almost a century ago. But the first time I can recall hearing it was in an episode of Northern Exposure (1992) during which Chris in the Morning hatches a plan to fling a cow. He later wimps out on the project and Maurice (the astronaut) gives him a dressing down for doing so. In the course of the discussion, Chris is reminded of Picasso’s oft-quoted remark: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

And that’s about the level of culture at which the phrase should remain, I think. It sounds bold, and the idea of destroying things appeals to many, especially those who aren’t very creative.

But what’s really going on when things develop isn't destruction but transformation.

It’s too bad Marx so badly misunderstood, sullied, and besmirched the concept of dialectic, because that’s the concept at work here. Maybe it's time we revived the associated concept, so dear to Hegel, of “aufheben.” Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Aufheben  or Aufhebung  is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", "cancel" or "suspend", or "to sublate." The term has also been defined as "abolish", "preserve", and "transcend". In philosophy, aufheben is used by Hegel in his exposition of dialectics, and in this sense is translated mainly as "sublate."

One analysis of the recent Nobel’s laureate’s work that I read goes like this:

 Economic growth in industrialised nations such as Britain and Sweden has been remarkably stable in recent centuries. However, below the surface, the reality is anything but stable. In the US, for example, over ten per cent of all companies go out of business every year, and just as many are started. Among the remaining businesses, a large number of jobs are created or disappear every year; even if these figures are not as high in other countries, the pattern is the same.

Aghion and Howitt realised that this transformative process of creative destruction, in which companies and jobs continually disappear and are replaced, is at the heart of the process that leads to sustained growth. A company that has an idea for a better product or a more efficient means of production can outcompete others to become the market leader. However, as soon as this happens, it creates an incentive for other companies to further improve the product or production method and so climb to the top of the ladder.

The process itself is easy enough to understand. The fallacy here is in imagining that things are being destroyed to make room for new things. Yes, people lose their jobs, companies go out of business. But the important thing—the expertise those workers possess—remains alive and active in the workers themselves, who make use of it when they get rehired at the start-ups that have been driving the less innovative firms out of business.

As Hegel envisioned it, this is a process of negating and rising above, while retaining and expanding on whatever remains useful of the older process or vision. Plenty of other phrases could be used, and would be more appropriate, than "creative destruction," to describe this process, though they would have quite the same journalistic zing. 

I suspect our newest Nobel laureates would agree.

Halcyon Fall Days

It’s become a struggle, almost, trying to make the most of the seemingly endless string of beautiful fall days we’ve been having. There have been excursions to the Landscape Arboretum, the river banks of downtown St. Paul and Mounds Park, Bud’s Landing at Spring Lake Regional Park, and even an overnight down in Forestville. The coup de grâce was a leisurely three-day trip under clear blue skies up to Itasca State Park.

We were in no great hurry to arrive at the park, and took a few secondary roads east of Rice to visit the Crane Meadows Wildlife Refuge. We spent a half-hour strolling along the Platte River through an oak savannah and were rewarded with a sighting of a bittern in the reeds on the opposite bank. They’re not exactly rare, but bitterns are hard to spot; I hadn’t seen one in five years. I also caught sight of a small bird moving through the underbrush and managed to get a good look with my binoculars. “I think that’s a Harris sparrow!” I all but exclaimed.

“You’re right,” Hilary replied. She’d pulled out her phone and identified the short, wheezy call on her Merlin app.

Our next stop, a half-hour up the highway, was Morey’s Fish House in Motley. We’re fond of their herring in horseradish sauce, and also picked up two nice walleye fillets for dinner, along with a pint of seaweed salad. “We eat quite a bit of that in California,” I told the woman behind the counter, by way of idle conversation.

“Do you harvest it yourself?” she replied, with a straight face.

That night we cooked up a fish dinner at our cabin rental, and later took a walk in the dark down to the Douglas Lodge parking lot in hopes of seeing a few shooting stars. Zilch. The Draconid meteor shower is almost invariably disappointing, and this year was no exception.

The next morning we hiked an unnamed two-rut road just west of the north entrance in cool fresh air and glancing sunlight, flushing a grouse and a pileated woodpecker, and noting the many young pines that had been capped with slips of white paper to protect them from browsing deer. 

On the Bohall Trail, where many of the pines are more than 200 years, the seedlings and saplings had also been capped. 

The dogwood shrubs had lost most of their leaves and the trails we took seemed pleasantly open. We came upon bittersweet, highbush cranberries, and even some grapes. In the six miles we walked we met up with only a single group of hikers.

Late in the afternoon, a sheet of gray clouds arrived, and we decided to take a short trip up to LaSalle Recreation Area, a few miles north of the park. We took the trail from the picnic area down through the woods to the dock and looked out on the deepest lake in Minnesota--225 feet, so they say. We circled down a few gravel roads on the return trip, passing prosperous cattle ranches and hardscrabble homesteads that looked like something out of a Knut Hamsun novel, startling a few magpies in the process. No corn in sight. Hurray!

I had brought up a fine selection of reading materials: Death by Black Hole (Neil deGrasse Tyson); The Works and Days (Hesiod); The Limits of the Known (David Roberts); Silk Dragon II (Chinese poems translated by Arthur Sze); and Last Night’s Fun (Ciaran Carson). A book for every mood.

Did I do any reading? Nothing to speak of.

We left the next morning, but not before hiking the Roberts Trail, where the air was crisp and the ground moss was frosty. Or simply dead. Not a loon in sight on the lake.