Splendid Uselessness

Thanks to Max; my everyday life is filled with splendid uselessness and rich in reality. 

There is no way on earth, I would have seen the world as I do now without him.

Joseph M. Keegin's beautiful essay:

John Alec Baker was not an ornithologist by profession. He had a regular English schoolboy’s grammar-school education, then won his bread at odd jobs and minor clerical positions in the Essex county town where he was born and raised (and where he would, at the age of 61, die). Despite having worked for some time at the Automobile Association, he never learned to drive a car, so when he travelled the quiet roads into the English countryside around Chelmsford to watch the birds, he walked or – despite his poor eyesight and increasingly debilitating rheumatoid arthritis – rode his bicycle.

In his free time, Baker watched and documented the habits of birds, with particular attention to one raptor that had, by the middle of the 20th century, become seriously endangered: the peregrine falcon. Afternoons in the woods, and evenings recording his observations in a diary – a decade of such labour bore Baker his small, luminous masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), now recognised as some of the greatest nature writing ever set to paper:

For 10 years, I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For 10 years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air.

Not money, nor fame, nor even the improvement in man’s estate that motivates the knowledge-gathering activity of the modern scientist: Baker’s effort was for the sake of something else entirely. He sought something splendid and beautiful, to be sure, but – in worldly terms – completely and utterly useless.

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Baker’s story is relayed in beautiful detail in the philosopher Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (2020); the story of the Minutemen comes from Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (2001). 

Both are indispensable documents, in very different ways, of how the pursuit of creative and intellectual activities for their own sake results in an abundance of unpredictable, often unexpected rewards. Great art and thought have always been motivated by something other than mere moneymaking, even if moneymaking happened somewhere along the way. But our culture of instrumentality has settled like a thick fog over the idea that some activities are worth pursuing simply because they share in the beautiful, the good, or the true. 

No amount of birdwatching will win a person the presidency or a Beverly Hills mansion; making music with friends will not cure cancer or establish a colony on Mars. But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.

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Of course, not all useless activity is actually good. Binge-watching television, being hooked on drugs, or spending one’s day doing nothing but eating are useless activities, to be sure. But truly splendid uselessness nourishes and elevates us spiritually, rather than simply providing a rush of mental or bodily pleasure. The output is always more than the input: the contemplation of nature, the joy of music-making, and even the study of mathematics can be rich and ennobling activities that, while also being pleasurable, reward the intellect and the soul. And the more we engage in these kinds of activities, the more we hone our sensibility and capacity for receptivity – and these qualities allow us to pay attention to, learn from and, ultimately, act in the world.

But this kind of useless activity is not solipsistic. While rewarding each of us internally, splendid uselessness enriches the world beyond us. Like the fertile soil of a well-kept garden, a life of splendid uselessness provides abundance far beyond one’s immediate aims.  

One thing I don't agree with this essay is - we understand neither animal vocal nor non-vocal communication leave alone our capacity to understand non-human animal versions of "splendid uselessness". 

People compare humans to non-human animals just to pride how humans have the capacity to do this and that but yet they have zero understanding of the animal world. This needs to stop. It's boring and annoying.

I know with high confidence that Max had a more splendid uselessness than I will ever do. His life was far richer than mine.