I really like the Exupery quote, though for an entirely different reason than why you posted it. To borrow a little Kant, I think it captures the need to treat people as people, rather than as means to a certain end. The irony for me is that I generally operate under the former presumption. I dislike giving up control, and similarly, I don't delegate responsibility as well as I should. When I do delegate, it's for a specific task--I might explain what I want and what the goals are, but I'm basically asking for a mechanical task that serves a larger vision that only I have. I have people gather wood while I give orders. It's hard for me to imagine getting things done by inspiring those I lead to adopt my goals and setting them loose, rather than using them like chess pieces.

The quote could be a jumping off point for an essay on how to achieve things without using people. Just a thought :).

-- RonMazor - 19 Feb 2010

I think another interesting aspect of the Exupery quote is the implicit point that to persuade others to support an idea one needs a positive vision, not only a critique. Exupery's exemplary orator is not criticizing a landlocked life - he is offering an inspiring vision of an alternative. I think you can see this in Martin Luther King Jr.'s decision to structure his famous speech around a dream of racial unity, as a positive goal to strive for. This also relates to the "know what you want" part of Thurgood Marshall's advice about effecting change. One has to know more than what one doesn't want. Putting the two in dialogue, Exupery's advice about inspiring people with a positive vision may be part of the answer to Marshall's requirement that you know "exactly how to get it."

This is something I have given some thought to because the cause I work on most is environmentalism, and there is often a public perception that the environmental movement is mainly against things, not for things.

-- DevinMcDougall - 21 Feb 2010

Okay, so first I moved this conversation to the NonaFarahnikFirstPaperTalk topic, because you're just chatting, not helping Nona write the paper she's trying to write. Your talk may be relevant to what she's doing, but you're writing to do whatever it is you're trying to do, which isn't what she asked. Soon the page will be covered with chat, and she'll be responsible for turning it into a coherent draft of what she thought. Because it's got her name on it, she'll do that, but she shouldn't have to. Use Talk pages when you want to talk, please. And do understand that I consider collaboration to be commitment, and talk to be valuable only to the extent that it's creative and well-written. It takes no effort to write too long stuff that rehashes a familiar idea.

Now, on the substance. First, let's get an illiteracy out of the way. Referring to Antione de Saint Exupéry as "Exupery" is like calling Baltasar Garzón Real, "Real." Saint-Exupéry is a place, from which the family derived a surname based on a title of nobility, however minor, entitling them to call themselves "of" the place in which they were the owners or masters. He himself came from Lyon. Those who have not read the fable apparently for children called Le Petit Prince and always available in an English translation with his own watercolor illustrations have missed a masterpiece. His style in all his writing is elegant, as simple as Hemingway's, but lyrical and, as in the example here, profound as Zen is profound. I suppose he can be read as Devin reads him here—after all, the stated inference is correct, so logically the idea is there—but I think the reading is forced (the positive program, the building of the ship, is a given, and could not be accomplished by criticism, not matter how skillful—making the idea, to me, tautological), and is at any rate contrary to the themes de Saint Exupéry recurrently expresses. Ron too is offering an idea that is logically implied by the text, and using it (I ask myself, have I been here before?) as a bridge to talking about himself. His observations about himself are accurate, indicative of principled self-examination, and may be of interest to other risk-averse control freaks (as I have pointed out before, the target population of the admissions system and therefore overrepresented in every Columbia Law School entering class). But they have nothing to do with what Antoine de Saint Exupéry is actually about.

From Vol de Nuit to Le Petit Prince he writes always about the explorer's urge, the otherworldy empty places: over the immensity of the Sahara under starlight, between planets. Devin thinks he's talking about making people desire a common goal, and Ron apparently thinks he's talking about learning how to delegate. Nona understands already the importance of what he says to what he means, which neither of the alternate readings does: if you want a practical outcome, a ship, inspire in human beings a deep restless longing for the immensity, for the endless vastness, of the sea. Then they will devise and build with all the energy of their restless longing the engines of their exploration.

Nona has also grasped that this is what I do, in my practice: that I am the inventor of legal and rhetorical arrangements to harness this force in order to inspire the making of technologies that can ensure the future of human freedom. She gets that this class is my attempt to contribute practically towards making a curriculum that teaches other people how to make positive things happen in society by learning to inspire and harness the human restless hunger for the immensity of possibility. She's figured out all that and now she's asking the apparently obvious question: how should she build a boat? The least that someone could do who was trying to help her would be to help explain how to build a boat. The best that someone could do to help her would be to show her how to ask the right question.