I've been doing a bit more reading lately. Various forces have conspired to keep me away from books for most of this year, but the pressure to read finally reached a critical point last week. This nonreading/reading cycle is a common occurrence since we got ourselves a life including a house and kids. When I break my reading fast, I usually reach for something easy to read, which almost always means one of my library of science fiction or fantasy novels that I haven't read yet. This time, I surprised myself by picking out The Autobiography & Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin, a tidy little Bantam Classic paperback edited by Peter Shaw.
I was tired of Franklin just being the phantoms and shadows of memory from elementary school history lessons and Fourth of July pageants. I wanted to know more about that homely old dude who stares out at us from the $100 bill.
It turns out that he was freaking brilliant, talented, and lucky. The character that coalesces from the writings is witty, circumspect, practical, generous, and sometimes vindictive, mischievous, and conceited. Franklin admits at the close of the second part of his autobiography that "there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as Pride.… for, even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility."
It's fascinating to read his pre-Revolutionary works where he constantly refers to England as "home." For most of his life, he appears to have considered himself an Englishman, a rather unconventional, colonial Englishman, but English and a loyal subject of the Crown.
Generally, he was a good example of an Enlightenment thinker. He lived his life as if there were no aspect of existence that could not be improved through the application of reason. Whenever some misguided Bible thumper rails on about America's Christian heritage, I'm going to think of Franklin's cautious attitude towards organized religion and practical Deist faith.
I particularly appreciate his approach to solving the problem of keeping the streets of Philadelphia lit at night. Traditional streetlights were simple blown globes of glass with an oil lamp inside. With no venting, the lamp eventually scavenged all the oxygen from the globe and was reduced to a sickly, pallid glow. A single strike would cause the globe to explode into a shower of glass shards. This was not very practical in Franklin's eyes, so he effected the installation of four-paned lamps with plenty of space for air to get to the flame and smoke to vent out. A broken pane was much easier and cheaper to replace than an entire globe.
My biggest guffaw and forehead-slapping moment so far has been item #16 of his "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries" published in 1751: "Foreign luxuries and needless manufactures, imported and used in a nation, do… increase the nation of the people that furnishes them, and diminish the people of the nation that uses them."
I think about the huge containers stuffed with rubber chickens and various other dollar-store crap, and I can't help but feel that old Ben was right.
Pakeha