Independence

It’s a story so coincidental, it’s almost unbelievable…

On July 4, 1826, at the age of 90, Adams lay on his deathbed while the country celebrated Independence Day. His last words were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” He was mistaken: Jefferson had died five hours earlier at Monticello at the age of 83.

Two former Presidents of the United States, “the last surviving members of the original American revolutionaries who had stood up to the British empire and forged a new political system in the former colonies“, die within hours of one another on the day representative of the cause to which they devoted their lives. (History.com)

I learned this while watching the excellent John Adams miniseries. 

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Forgiveness

As Seneca wrote, “Let’s be kind to one another. We’re just wicked people living among wicked people. Only one thing can give us peace, and that’s a pact of mutual leniency.” 

(Daily Stoic, We Need Forgiveness)

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Changing Norms

The ancient Romans filled their capital with more than 1,000 public baths. Those privies weren’t remotely private. They “generally had twenty seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus,” Bill Bryson writes in his history of the modern house, At Home.

This type of bath went out of style in Europe for almost a millennium after the fall of Rome, thanks in part to Dark Age scientists’ developing the very unscientific idea that bathing in water invites a host of awful diseases into the body’s pores. For most of the Middle Ages, “most [European] people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it,” Bryson writes. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, declared that “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” in a 1778 sermon, he was talking about our garments, not our armpits. (The Atlantic)

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Unlikely Agreement

(Phys.org)—Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made…

The researchers demonstrated the paradox in the case of a modern-day police line-up, in which witnesses try to identify the suspect out of a line-up of several people. The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.

(Phys.org, H/T David Perell – Monday Musing 10/21/19)

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Access and Ownership

New technology generally reorganizes our consumption away from ownership and towards access. 100 years ago, music came from a piano, then it came from the record store, and now it comes from Spotify. 100 years ago, food came from a farm, then it came for a grocery store, and now it comes from DoorDash. There’s no denying that this is forward progress for the consumer. You would not want to go backwards. But there’s a cost. The more you can access, the less it’s yours. (Alex Danco, Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours)

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A New American Journey

“This was the fabled South Pass that the fur trappers had used since the 1820s. The pass, the benign opening in the Rockies that made the trail west possible, marks the Continental Divide, separating the drainages of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The views west from South Pass are spectacular. Vast sagebrush lands, rimmed by the foothills along the western face of the Rockies, stretch toward the rendezvous country along the Green River. Narcissa and Eliza paused at the top to rest their horses and wait for the wagon and the pack train, staring off toward the capacious vistas of the Green. It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.”

— The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck