玉手箱

Designers generally do not think to design the "ordinary". If anything, they live in fear of people saying their designs are "nothing special". Of course, undeniably, people do have an unconscious everyday sense of "normal", but rather than try to blend in, the tendency for designers is to try to create "statement" or "stimulation". So "normal" has come to mean "unstimulating" or "boring" design.

A worrying condition worldwide is that civilization’s critical systems are rarely adequately resourced for long-term sustainment. The authors draw attention to the related concept of sustainability:

The best-known socio-ecological definition of sustainability (attributed to the “Brundtland Report”) is commonly paraphrased as “development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The distinction is that sustainability is merely a goal, whereas sustainment is a plan, a program, a set of actions. The one says, “Aspire”; the other says, “Here’s how to get it done.”

And keep it done. Unrelenting endurance is the commitment.

Charles C. Mann, a science journalist, expands on the distinction. He wrote me:

This is a story of three generations in the family of the eminent mathematician-physicist Freeman Dyson, who died in 2020. In 1913, his father, Sir George Dyson, was a music teacher at Marlborough College in England. A friend related this anecdote to Freeman:

Your father had just bought his first motorcycle. They wheeled it up to the top of the school playing fields behind the College, next to the open grassland of the Wiltshire Downs. Your father then proceeded to dismantle the machine entirely, laying out all the different parts neatly on the ground. Then he reassembled it again, putting it all back together correctly, so that when he filled the tank with petrol and turned on the motor, it started immediately. He mounted it, and drove off at speed.

When I heard this story from Freeman’s son, science historian George Dyson, I asked him, “Did your dad do that kind of thing? Do you?”

Sir George’s grandson George wrote back:

What is Life? One dissects a body but finds no life inside. What is Mind? One dissects a brain but finds no mind therein. Are life and mind so much more than the “sum of their parts” that it is useless to search for them? To answer that, consider this parody of a conversation between a Holist and an ordinary Citizen.

Holist: “I’ll prove no box can hold a mouse. A box is made by nailing six boards together. But it’s obvious that no box can hold a mouse unless it has some ‘mouse-tightness’ or ‘containment.’ Now, no single board contains any containment, since the mouse can just walk away from it. And if there is no containment in one board, there can’t be any in six boards. So the box can have no mouse tightness at all. Theoretically, then, the mouse can escape.”

Citizen: “Amazing. Then what does keep a mouse in a box?”