Two kinds of “wonder”
I first came across the essay, “I, Pencil: My Family History as Told to Leonard E. Read,” via Thomas Thwaites’s Toaster Project website. It may be more accurate to describe the piece as a short story or a monologue. In it, a pencil tells us the story of how it is made — or, rather, it gestures at all of the moving parts that were required to be in place for it to be made. Indeed, it claims that it is so complex that “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.” Comparing itself to a human being, whose family history fades backwards into obscurity, the pencil attempts here to gesture at its own “innumerable antecedents,” which likewise signal an unfathomable complexity.
At just over 2000 words, “I, Pencil” could almost make for a fun children’s book or graphic novella. In the context of the The Given World project, I found the piece quite fascinating because of how it drew attention to the deep complexities underlying ordinary objects. Yet I also felt that it didn’t quite understand its own significance at times.
This misunderstanding came across even more clearly after I read Milton Friedman’s introductory essay (also available via the same website linked to above), where he claims:
I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith’s invisible hand—the possibility of cooperation without coercion—and Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that “will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.”
Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek!? My oh my.
Admittedly, the only other work by Milton Friedman that I have read is his famous (infamous?) New York Times article from 1970, “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” (I was not a fan!) In his introduction to “I, Pencil,” Friedman makes an explicit connection between the story and its author’s lifelong commitment to “the basic idea that human freedom required private property, free competition, and severely limited government.”
I have no doubt that Friedman is correct to make such an assessment. The author, Leonard Read, was a lifelong libertarian and the founder of one of the first free market think tanks in the US. As he has his pencil say in the story: “The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited.”
Every thing a mystery
It may be the case that this is the lesson the author, Leonard Read, wished the essay to leave us with; however, I think another lesson that it communicates is that there is in fact a mysteriousness to objects — whether they appear to be simple or complex. A computer is extremely complex and essentially cannot be understood. (Unless, as Robert Noyce is reported to have said, “After you become reconciled to the nanosecond, computer operations are conceptually fairly simple.” Of course, the joke when I read that is the idea of being reconciled to a nanosecond—a truly incomprehensible unit of time.) Yet, as Read’s story helps us to grasp, even something as simple as a pencil may ultimately be similarly opaque.
That Read may mean something different by mystery than me, though, is suggested in what he has his pencil say early in the piece:
I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning.
If anything, this suggests that Read (or at least his pencil, which after all is just a dumb pencil!) underestimates a tree or a sunset or a flash of lightning. In fact, his choice to compare the complexity of a pencil with the simplicity of a tree, put in mind for me the way Owen Barfield uses a tree as an image of an object that conceals depths. Read believes that the mystery lies in “the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being”; instead, the pencil’s complexities—and ultimately its mystery—lie in our alienation from these processes of production.
Read wishes to imply that the mystery of the pencil could be resolved if a will could be found and applied that was sufficiently broad enough to encompass it. (Because this will does not exist in any individual, Read indicates that the fact of the pencil’s existence therefore implies an Invisible Hand that makes it possible).
The inner life of sunsets
Another interpretation is possible, however. (And, had the pencil paused to linger at greater length over the mysteries of tree, sunset, and lightning, it may have realized this.) There is, of course, a complexity to lightning, sunset, and tree that goes deeper than just the admittedly convoluted and overlapping routes of the supply chain. The pencil assumes these are less complex because they involve fewer—or rather no—people. They have relatively simple scientific explanations (as far as I understand each of them: a tree emerges from the genetic information contained within the seed; the sunset is what appears due to the spinning of the earth; the bolt of lightning reflects the change in charge of electrons in the air. Yet their significance to us goes far beyond this. Indeed, it is their significance to us that gives them any perceivable significance at all.
And the same could be said for the pencil. On its own, it is a simple object, the origins of which can actually be described quite simply. Read’s essay makes it take on special significance, though, not through a revelation of the invisible will that he supposes drives it production. Rather than will, other authors—including Owen Barfield—have suggested that something more akin to love might undergird the mystery.
This kind of claim sounds a bit sappy, I realize, but maybe it can be reframed using the pencil’s own words—or rather its use of G.K. Chesterton’s words early in the essay: “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” Chesterton did not say this exactly, but what he did say was quite near it: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” He said this in a short essay included in his 1909 work, Tremendous Trifles. Interestingly, Chesterton himself might suggest that Read is undertaking an argument—not in the main part of his essay, but at the end of it (and moreso in Friedman’s interpretation of it)—that is precisely the opposite of what he himself intended when he said those words about wonder.
On the one hand, Chesterton observes, there is the theory (represented by his opponent) “that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere.” In other words, we can reclaim wonder through a radical freedom from the constraints of locale and place. On the other hand, there is the belief that wonder can be had via “a commonplace existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration.” As E.F. Schumacher put it, “small is beautiful.” Of these two theories of wonder, the first sounds a lot like what Read wants us to take from the story; however, as stories often do, “I, Pencil” seems to work against its author’s intentions and, in the overwhelming organic complexity of the family history the pencil narrates, we experience the kind of love for the reality of the world.
And maybe that is just another way of describing “wonder.”