Knowledge and Relationships
I believe community comes together as spontaneously as you might infer this makeshift one in the photo did.
Community as a Natural Response to Learning
I want to explore the social aspect of knowledge this afternoon. How new knowledge affects relationships and instantiates them, the present post inspired by an encounter with a couple of fellow ice fishermen I met for the first time on Twin Lakes recently, and also by my ongoing fascination with individualism and community as inclusive of each other.
I spoke of that fascination in my recent post on individualism. I haven’t yet returned to the emails and essays from the other member of the Macmurray Fellowship I had corresponded with. Not only is my life too busy, I found that when I quelled the anxiety generated by my question in general—whether individualism and community are really at all compatible—the question answered itself.
No, I haven’t worked that question out in every intellectual detail to its answer. But satisfaction with it is something I don’t deny.
It also so happens that I’m going through a kind of personal transformation. I know dozens of guys who fish online. Guys associated with Mayhem Fishing. I went to the Christmas Dinner, when I met many for the first time. The impact reality had on me—rather than static online video, photo, and words—assured me that my bonding with them is fully worthwhile.
One of the group’s leaders, Joe Santiago, told a long-standing friend of mine, Brian Cronk, that they were trying to create a community. I learned of that intention months before I came upon John Macmurray for the first time, and I immediately joined the Fellowship, a philosophy and Fellowship essentially about community.
Online, Mayhem is a learning experience. People don’t divulge much about how and where to fish, as I do in my magazine articles and blog posts, but they post information, photos, and videos. Learning about New Jersey fishing through these Facebook posts prepares each of us who view and participate not only for more fishing of our own, but for the community as it exists in reality, rather than merely online.
It sprang forth for me, as if everything I’d done privately to inform others made who I was at that dinner possible. I recognized others the same way. People I had followed on Facebook for more than a couple of years.
The Urge to Share Knowledge
But why is it that learning leads into community? I know enough to say up front that I can’t answer that question in all its depth and complexity, and besides, it’s not my intention to try to do so in a blog post. But I’m addressing it.
Case in point. Oliver Round and I ice fishing on Twin Lakes as we watched others on the distant second lake. Eventually, they packed and headed back our way. Behind us, the kayak launch and entry way for Jet Sleds and other ice fishing carriers awaited them.
“How’s it going?” I said when they got into range.
“Hey, how’re you doing?”
“We’re catching small pickerel,” Oliver said.
“How deep is it here?” The man with a Jet Sled on sled runners had stopped walking.
“About eight feet,” Oliver said.
“It’s 30 feet deep back there. I got three bass. My buddy here got one four pounds.” His buddy was all smiles with nothing more to say
“Wow!” I said.
“We’re headed over to Iliff next,” he said.
I don’t remember exactly what we said beyond that, and those words I’ve related are only the best I can remember. Possibly because I got too excited, I can’t recall the rest as they were spoken, but I do remember the man spoke of a 6-pound, eight-ounce, and five-pound, 12-ounce largemouth he caught through the ice of another lake. He also mentioned a lake he believed might be inaccessible. And despite having sworn the secret to myself, I urgently told him about the entryway onto that lake, telling him about my adventure of finding it, too.
Did I chastise myself for divulging my secret as they said goodbye and walked off the lake? No. I felt grateful for those guys, because they helped wake me up to what’s completely natural to human beings—the sharing of knowledge.
It’s not quite as Ayn Rand might seem to imply is the case—the trading of value for value. Because my measuring the value of my learning of the lake where those big bass got caught, compared to my telling the others about the access to another lake, wasn’t exact and didn’t need to be.
At age nine, I read loads on zoology from books and magazines. I think of that year of my life as a miracle for its intellectual sweep and intensity. A year later, Lawrence Intermediate School happened to have a special teacher come in and teach us the subject. I corrected her at least two dozen times. It felt uncomfortable to tell her, repeatedly, but I felt it urgently important that the facts be correct. She did allow me to speak each time I had something to say, even though my words contradicted her.
It’s also important to this present blog post that while I was still a student at Ben Franklin Elementary School, I set up in my family’s garage and taught neighborhood kids zoology by use of a blackboard. Why? It wasn’t for money, personal admiration—nothing but the urge to share knowledge. I got to be the teacher, though. My memory of that is a great value.
So in a way, what Rand states is true. For example, you probably notice I’m not naming all the lakes. I’m not willing to attempt mention of them as any kind of trade off in this particular post. After all, a blog post isn’t the reality it refers to, and on my end, as I create this post, I’m not actually in touch with anyone who can teach me something and who has need to know of something I know. I can imagine readers having such need, which is why, if you’ll follow links, you might discover something. In effect, by my not naming the lakes in this post, I’ve felt moved to give you the opportunity to discover even more than merely their names, names which you can find, besides.
And regarding interaction between me as the website owner and my audience, some readers post comments I appreciate, too, not to mention that I write well so they can understand my work. I get the satisfaction of having done that.
I do my best to make each post an encounter in itself. I succeed at that, but everyone needs the outdoors.
And the likes of a dinner hall.
Knowledge is Necessary to Human Survival
Human beings survive by what they know. Individually. Those who refuse to think for themselves are dependent upon those who do. Again, I balk at something Rand insists on. She says those who depend on the thinking of others are parasites. In the first place, I don’t believe anyone exists who doesn’t think for himself. Some do more than others, but that’s not news to anyone. And everyone is interdependent on each other’s thinking, because each of us has important knowledge no one else has, not only for each of us alone, but for the human community.
Do people feel an urge to share knowledge—like we did in that Twin Lakes encounter—because we’re “compassionate” (as if that quality doesn’t bring up loads of possible discussion) or because doing so is a move in the direction of preserving the species?
If you’re strictly the kind of individualist who cares only for himself, it remains rational to behave in ways that preserve the human species, because you need others—at the bare minimum—as trade partners.
But natural human responses invalidate the kind of individualism limited to tit for tat.
I say so, because we live in a world of impossible grandeur. And yet, there it is. Outside for anyone who will rise to it. When human beings encounter that world alone, they return and help society rise towards it. You can say that’s in their self-interest, but what’s the point? It’s in everyone’s interest.