Padraic X. Scanlan tells the real history of the Irish Potato Famine The post The Root Cause appeared first on The American Scholar.

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I once spent most of a day in an upstate New York marsh with a neuroethologist, a biologist who studies how an animal’s nervous system determines its behavior. His specialty was the order Odonata – dragonflies and damselflies. Like any journalist who’s paying attention, I got a free education. These elusive, jewel-like insects rank (with hawks and ladybugs) among nature’s most viciously efficient hunters. His research showed their kill rate topped ninety-seven percent. Eighty percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision, and their field of vision is 360 degrees.  This is the time of year in Texas when we see the first seasonal return of various species, from dormancy during the winter cold or migration. The first monarch butterfly visited our front garden about two weeks ago. Every day I see anoles on the ground and among the leaves of various plants, mosquitoes and a male cardinal singing in a crepe myrtle, likely seeking a mate. Informally, out of admiration for their hunting prowess, I’ve collected a small anthology of dragonfly poems, including my favorite, “The Dragonfly” (1961) by Louise Bogan, and “The Dragon-Fly” (1833) by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Here is my latest discovery, “Lines to a Dragon Fly” (1806) by Walter Savage Landor:   “Life (priest and poet say) is but a dream; I wish no happier one than to be laid Beneath some cool syringa’s scented shade Or wavy willow, by the running stream, Brimful of Moral, where the Dragon Fly Wanders as careless and content as I.   “Thanks for this fancy, insect king, Of purple crest and filmy wing, Who with indifference givest up The water-lily’s golden cup, To come again and overlook What I am writing in my book. Believe me, most who read the line Will read with hornier eyes than thine; And yet their souls shall live for ever, And thine drop dead into the river! God pardon them, O insect king, Who fancy so unjust a thing!”   Less entomologically acute than Bogan’s poem, Landor’s is typically Romantic and not rigorously scientific. “Hornier” doesn’t mean what you think. The OED gives “callous or hardened so as to be horn-like in texture,” like a weapon.

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We are shokunin. Last week I was in Ojai, California, for True’s Founder Camp.[1] James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee was in conversation with Jeff Veen, and one of the attendees asked him: “How do you maintain such high quality?” Freeman answers, “‘Maintaining’ is a trigger word for me. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. There is no maintaining.” That struck me as he said it. It immediately reminded me of shokunin. Master woodworker and shokunin himself, Tashio Odate describes: Shokunin means not only having technical skill, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness... a social obligation to work his best for the general welfare of the people, [an] obligation both material and spiritual. The Art of Fine Tools If you’ve seen “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” Jiro Ono himself is a shokunin, and I think of his lifelong pursuit of making sushi better every day. Compare that to the rise of supermarket sushi, which can be passable and satiate an immediate need, but never reaches the levels and highs of what master sushi chefs can achieve during their tenure. Sachiko Matsuyama in a piece titled, “Shokunin and Devotion,” writes: When I take guests to visit shokunin at their studios, they often ask how long it takes to make one item. The shokunin, sometimes annoyed by the question, answers: ‘A lifetime’. Among shokunin that I often work with, there are some who are carrying on their family business, and others who have courageously jumped into the field of craftsmanship to become one simply through their own strong will. The independent web, where people are making homes on the internet, on their own domains — creating, building, and sharing with the world — stands in contrast to the walled-off prisons of social media networks. The curation and craftsmanship that individuals develop over time — iterating, tending, evolving, and continuously improving — results in a collection of work that embodies their creators’ intentions and aspirations for care. I’m okay with worse too. We learn from regression or dilution, and that can provide perspective to return to better. You need to know the lows to appreciate the highs. In this current moment with AI reaching a fever pitch in the industry, there’s a palpable tension between those of us who have been working on the Internet for decades, and the young upstarts embracing vibe coding and building with almost completely generative codebases. Many of us possess deep knowledge and experience, having journeyed through different outcomes and encountered those moments when things worsen or improve. We design and code for better, and we design and code because we’re practicing a craft for our lifetimes: Internet shokunin. Full disclosure: I work for True Ventures as a fractional creative director and product designer. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email