A naturalist looks at his journal

 Richard Mabey suggested that Gilbert White thought of his journal as his “intellectual ledger, where he took stock of his understanding of the physical world.”

In his journal, White, 1720-1793, wasn’t really writing — it was more thinking. Mabey lists some of the usual things that writers do that White omitted: literary illusions, self-examination, searches for meaning.

The writing came later. White turned the journal entries into a series of letters, published as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in 1789. Mabey edited the Penguin Classics edition.

I’m interested in Mabey’s remark because I’m interested in journals and people who keep them. I sometimes think this concatenation of notes online is a kind of journal. Like White — or Mabey’s perceptive view of White — I think of it as thinking more than writing.

• Source: Ronald Blythe’s essay “Richard Mabey at Selborne” was collected in Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007, pp. 264-8. The quotation is on p. 266.

Conformity

 Researchers using new modeling tools have some interesting things to say about how political attitudes shape our identity.

The researchers’ first claim is obvious: If you know a person’s opinion about one political issue, you can often guess that person’s opinions on other issues. If you know whether your neighbor supports restrictions on gun control, you could probably guess whether he supports restrictions or abortion.

Those networks of opinions are what we are talking about when we use the terms “liberal” and “conservative.”

The researchers’ second claim is that conformity within identity groups based on political attitudes can be measured. Democrats have higher levels of conformity than Republicans.

Individual Republicans are more likely to disagree with the party line on gay marriage and abortion. Democrats are more likely to conform. They also tend toward more extreme positions.

“Extreme” is a loaded term, so let’s proceed carefully. Here, “extreme” is a statistical, not a moral, term. An extreme position is simply one that relatively few people support.

You can frame questions about the rights of transgender people in many ways, but if you ask whether it’s fair to allow volleyball players who were born male to compete against female players, most Americans say no.

I think defending the rights of transgender people is a moral responsibility — it’s nonnegotiable. But I don’t think it’s fair for players who were born male to compete against women who were born female. I don’t think they have a right to compete for spots on women’s teams and to compete for athletic scholarships.

I see a tension between those views about the rights of transgender people — not a contradiction.

The researchers’ paper is provocative. I was reminded of the internal tension within any democracy.

By definition, a democracy is a government of the people, and it must take seriously the rights of individual people, no matter how small the minority. We have a moral obligation to defend those rights.

A democracy, by definition, is also the rule of the majority. No matter how high your ideals might be, those ideals become law only if you can persuade your neighbors.

I lived most of my life in Texas. I don’t know what it’s like to be in the majority politically. As one with some experience of being in the minority, I’d suggest two things:

• Dissent is important.

• The way we dissent is equally important. We should not cut off contact with people we disagree with.

As a rule, I’d say we dissenters could do with a less conformity and a less puritanism. We could tone down our sense of rightness and righteousness, which sometimes strikes our neighbors as self-righteousness.

• Source and notes: Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle, “Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts”; British Journal of Social Psychology, 11 July 2023. I found it here:

https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjso.12665

I found the article because David Brooks mentioned it in a column about the decline of the novel (“When Novels Mattered”; The New York Times, July 10, 2025).

'The presence of a noble nature'

 To my mind, no philosopher was clearer than Wittgenstein on why a science of ethics is impossible — why talking of ethics as if it were a feature of the natural world is nonsense.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

 

A science of ethics, a calculus of ethics, a logical system of ethics is nonsense, and Wittgenstein said not a word. However, our experience of ethical behavior is not nonsense at all. Those experiences might be the most serious things we humans encounter, and Wittgenstein said a lot about that.

If you’ve read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it might surprise you that Wittgenstein gave copies of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations to friends. He urged his students to read Tolstoy’s Twenty-Three Tales and questioned them to see if they’d grasped the stories.

The praised Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He loved to talk about the character Father Zosima. Such people really exist in the world, Wittgenstein said. He hailed Dostoevsky as a master for capturing this natural — but almost miraculous — personality.

To me, George Eliot was even clearer in Middlemarch:

 

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us; we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

 

And this:

 

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us.

 

Such people do walk the earth.

• Sources: The first quotation is the last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The quotations from George Eliot’s Middlemarch are from Chapters LXXVI and LXXVII.

What we plant on public land

 I found a lovely seedpod, about the size of a rabbit’s foot. It was tan, made of three leaf-like panels. Inside were green seeds that looked like small marbles.

The pods are from Koelreuteria paniculata, a goldenrain tree. It’s a lovely tree. It’s one of the trees the ancient Chinese planted beside the graves of scholars. In spring, the goldenrain tree will be covered with little yellow flowers on long panicles. To some poetic soul, the sight looked like sheets of golden rainwater running off dark foliage.

Gardeners can’t resist goldenrain trees. They brought them from China to Japan in the Middle Ages and to Europe before 1750. They brought them to the colonies before the American revolution.

Some gardener planted the tree I was looking at on public land — in the landscaped area of a park. Before long, the seeds will go from the landscaped area into the natural forest within the park’s boundaries.

I think it’s hopeless to try to prevent private citizens from planting non-native species. I don’t think the country is in the mood for garden police. But when I saw that beautiful seedpod I wondered whether we could hope to change the policy about what we plant on public lands.

Finding your interests

 I think it must be a natural law that every family of educators must have someone like me: a person who has a talent for dropping out.

I know nothing about education, but I think this is true: We do well when we try to help children — and those who inquire like children — find their own interests. We do less well when we think it’s our duty to help them find a “career,” meaning a way to sort out questions about money.

A.S. Neill, who was an educational reformer when I was a child, had a similar idea:

 

I hold that the aim of life is to find happiness, which means to find interest. Education should be a preparation for life.

 

I think that helping children find their interests is a good thing to do — but I also think that old people can seek like children and that those who do are happier.

When people who are considering retirement query me about it, I ask: “Is there anything you are interested in — anything you want to learn?”

• Source: A.S. Neill, Sumerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing; New York, Hart Publishing, 1960, pp. 24. The Internet Archive has it here:

https://archive.org/details/Summerhill-English-A.S.Neill/mode/2up

In search of something small

 Mary Russell Mitford, the English writer, liked to walk through natural places. She knew when violets bloomed and where to find them. When the time came, she had to get outdoors. 

What a renewal of heart and mind! To inhabit such a scene of peace and sweetness is again to be fearless, gay, and gentle as a child. Then it is that thought becomes poetry, and feeling religion.

 

• Source: Mary Russell Mitford’s essay “Violeting” is in Our Village; London: The Macmillan Company, 1893. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2496/2496-h/2496-h.htm

Two brothers argue about place

 Julian Tennyson, at 23, walked and cycled around Suffolk.

It was 1938, and the great-grandson of the famous poet was hoping to write a guidebook about rural county that was not overrun by tourists. He had a strong sense of place and looked at all aspects of it: the natural history, of course, but also the towns, farms, churches, language and fairs.

His Suffolk Scenes was published in 1939, the year the war broke out, breaking off his literary career.

Capt. Tennyson eventually was shipped to the Far East, where he had a wonderful argument with his younger brother Hallam. Here’s Ronald Blythe’s account:

 

When he (Julian) was stationed in India he was urged by his brother Hallam to try and drop is English attitudes and ‘to read Kalidasa, to study the Vedanta, and to do anything that might help him to understand the soul of the country he was in,” but, says Hallam, ‘He replied very briefly … saying that he was fully taken up with thinking and reading about the things he loved at home, that he had no interest whatever in the East and did not want to go any further East than East Anglia in the future.

 

One brother wanted to understand the world and the other wanted to understand the shire.

They seem to me to be kindred spirits. Both were concerned with a sense of place. They differed on whether the broad view or the deep view of place is best.

Both are essential, so I don’t think one view could be best. Whichever you choose, it would be deficient in a way.

But over a long life, I have wanted to see the world and have wanted to know the county. I’d have loved to have heard that argument.

• Ronald Blythe’s essay “Julian Tennyson and Suffolk Scene” was collected in Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007, pp. 140-3. The quotation is on p. 141.