When inspiration strikes

 The Rev. Samuel Crossman, a parson who had a grim experience at a country church in the 1660s, wrote a poem called “My song is love unknown.” It’s a meditation on how people can turn on others.

The poem sat around for a couple of centuries until just after the Great War, when The English Hymnal was being compiled. The editor, Geoffrey Shaw, invited the composer John Ireland to lunch and said he needed a tune for a lovely poem. Ireland read the poem, read it again, grabbed a menu and started writing music on the back. Within minutes he said, “Here is your tune."

I’m astonished by people who compose quickly — artists, musicians, poets. The poet Norman MacCaig, asked how long it took to write a poem, said it took about as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette. One cigarette for a short poem — for a longer poem two.

I love stories about how inspiration strikes like lightning, perhaps because they seem barely believable to me.

• Source: I heard the story from Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 114-5.

Among the many recordings of the hymn is this one from King’s College, Cambridge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMart4wXsI0

The Dunning-Kruger effect

 The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that those who know the least about a specific skill are most likely to overestimate their competence.

Critics of the White House point to the president and his cabinet to illustrate the principle at work. But that’s a joke, rather than a scientific demonstration. The Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t applicable to general competence; the concept involves specific, sharply defined skills.

Academic controversies involving the concept are legion. Some are substantive. A mathematician has argued that the concept is simply wrong.

I’m interested in the basic idea. Self-assessments and measures of objective performance, such as standardized tests, are not the same. You’d expect different scores, and patterns in those scores are interesting.

All tests are imperfect, but problems should not undermine our commitment to testing. You don’t often hear that 90 percent of a surgeon’s patients die on the operating table because methods of assessment are used to weed out people who cannot master certain skills. The Navy’s methods for weeding out people who were not competent at specific skills were once draconian. Perhaps they still are.

I also think that those small competencies add up in some way that is obvious, although perhaps not not measurable. If you can’t  master the basic skills for handling classified information that the lowest ranks are expected to master, you probably shouldn’t be secretary of defense. If you read the Internet constantly and can’t tell science from science fiction, you probably shouldn’t be in charge of public health.

The daily note to mom

 The novelist Isabel Allende wrote daily letters to her mother. The habit influenced the way she lived. As she went about her day, Allende would look for things that were worth mentioning. She paid attention to things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. It’s something you do when you want to share a bit of your life with your mother.

For decades, my friend Melvyn made a journal entry in the form of a note to his grandson. Melvyn usually wrote late at night, just before bed. He’d look back over the day for at least one thing — and if one thing didn’t suggest itself, it made him wonder whether he was paying attention.

I’m fascinated by writing routines, but I have friends who avoid them, thinking that getting into a rut is not a good way to nurture creative impulses.

We talk about writing as if it were one thing. It’s not. Different people write in different ways because they are doing different things. Writing a report to inform someone is not the same as writing a novel to entertain someone.

When people tell me they are writing, I start asking questions. There’s no telling what they’re up to. I suppose that’s why I can’t resist reading interviews with writers.

• Source: Gilbert Cruz, “The Interview: Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society”; The New York Times, April 26, 2025.

Making soulful noises

 I’ve tried, several times, to say what this concatenation of notes is — to come up with a word or phrase for it.

My friend Christopher sent me a quotation from Alan Furst’s novel Night Soldiers.

 

Sascha Vonets was not meant to be a poet, that’s all one could say. It was just that his stubborn soul had, somehow, got into the habit of making soulful noises, and one had to do something or other about that, so his instinct had always been to chop up the thoughts so that they trickled down the page instead of marching, margin to margin, like a shock battalion.

 

Maybe I’m in “the habit of making soulful noises” even on days when I can’t half think.

• Source: Alan Furst, Night Soldiers; New York: Random House, 2002.

‘The Triumph of Stupidity’

 In 1933, Bertrand Russell wrote an essay deploring the politics of Germany.

Russell’s work in logic had been built on the foundations of Gottlob Frege. Russell said that individual Germans had done more for civilization in the past 150 years than individuals from any other country. But the Nazis were degrading civilization, Russell said. Give them a few years in power, and the Germans would be reduced to the level of the Goths. Here’s Russell’s summary:

 

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are in full doubt.

 

Russell said that what was happening in Germany could happen anywhere. He also said the bright spot in the gloomy picture was America.

The first sentence still rings true.

• Source: Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Triumph of Stupidity” is in Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell’s American Essays, 1931-1935, edited by Harry Ruja; Routledge, 1998, Vol. 2, pp. 27-8.

The goo that binds them together

 One of the epigraphs of Eric Hoffer’s True Believer is from the biblical story of Tower of Babel: 

And slime had they for mortar.

 

The slime that Hoffer wrote about in his analysis of mass movements is the stuff that oozes out of frustrated personalities — fear, ill will and suspicion. These things act as a “marvelous slime to cement the embittered and disaffected into one compact whole.”

People who are susceptible to mass movements are unhappy. They are not destitute but feel they should have more — usually more of what those people have. (Feel free to insert any of the movement’s scapegoats here.) 

People who are susceptible to mass movements are dissatisfied. They feel they are less than they should be. They feel keenly what’s wrong within themselves and so they are vigilant in looking for what’s wrong with everyone else.

Hoffer says the surprising thing is that this mistrust leads not to dissension but to conformity. In the current mass movement, it’s not good enough to just be a patriot; you must be a great patriot. You not only drink the leader’s Kool-Aid; you buy his merchandise.

 

Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.

 

Democracies and free societies are based on trust. For decades, we’ve had people whispering and then shouting that you can’t trust anything, especially experts. Not those in charge of public health. Not those in charge of national defense. So we have people in charge now who ignore the advice of physicians and who fire competent military officers who want to maintain a diverse force.

Suspicion might be a cohesive force, but it also makes that force weak. It’s not a recipe for being great. It’s a recipe for being easy prey.

• Sources: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 128. If you know the book by sections, the quotations are from §100. The biblical story is in Genesis, Chapter 11.

The difficulty with conversations

 The nation is struggling because four out of 10 citizens are submerged in a mass movement.

We Americans used to wonder how a great civilization could follow a carnival barker like Hitler to ruin. I’m interested less in the demagogue of the day than in the people who believe and follow him.

Like others who don’t think that the current mass movement is good for the country, I’ve been perplexed that I can’t talk to the believers. It’s like talking to a bot powered by artificial intelligence. If you ask a question, you’ll get an answer of a sort but you’ll see no evidence of thinking.

In his study on the nature of mass movements, Eric Hoffer says: 

 

… the chief preoccupation of an active mass movement is to instill in its followers a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, and that it achieves this facility by stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and no judgment of its own. The result is not only a compact and fearless following but also a homogenous plastic mass that can be needed at will.

 

I believe in conversation. But when I ask members of the movement a question, I do not get a thoughtful response. I get a slogan from one of the propaganda sites. It’s as if I were not talking with a person.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 87. If you know the book by sections, the quotation is from §60.