Eight Little Piggies by Stephen Jay Gould

Author:Stephen Jay Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Published: 1993-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Towered cities please us then

And the busy hum of men.

Several years ago I visited India on a trip sponsored by Harvard’s Natural History Museum. My colleagues delighted in arising at 4:00 A.M., piling into a bus, driving to a nature reserve, and trying to spot the dot of a tiger at some absurd distance, rendered only slightly more interesting by binoculars. I yearned to be let off the bus alone in the middle of any bazaar in any town.)

Natural diversity exists at several levels. Variety permeates any nonclonal population from within. Even our tightest genealogical groups contain fat people and thin people, tall and short. The primal folk wisdom of the ages proclaims enormous differences in temperament among siblings of a single family. But the greatest dollop of natural diversity arises from our geographical divisions—the differences from place to place as we adapt to varying environments and accumulate our distinctiveness by limited contact with other regions. If all species, like rats and pigeons, lived all over the world, our planet would contain but a tiny fraction of its actual diversity.

I therefore tend to revel most in the distinctive diversity of geographical regions when I contemplate the aesthetic pleasure of differences. Since I am most drawn to human works, I find my greatest joy in learning to recognize local accents, regional customs of greeting and dining, styles of architecture linked to distinctive times and places. I also, at least in my head if not often enough in overt action, think of myself as a watchdog for the preservation of this fragile variety and an implacable foe of standardization and homogenization.

I recognize, of course, that official programs of urban layout and road building must produce more elements of commonality than a strict aesthetic of maximal diversity might welcome. After all, criteria of design have a universality that becomes more and more pressing at upper limits of size and speed. If you have to move a certain number of cars through a given region at a stated speed, the road can’t meander along the riverbanks or run through the main streets of old market towns. Public buildings and city street grids beg for an optimal efficiency that imposes some acceptable degree of uniformity.

But the sacred task of regionalism must be to fill in the spaces between with a riotous diversity of distinctive local traditions—preferably of productive work, not only of leisure. With this model of a potentially standardized framework for roads and public spaces filled in, softened, and humanized by local products made by local people for local purposes—authenticity of object, place, and use—I think that I can finally articulate why I love the Sears counter and the cable cars in the early morning. They embody all the authenticities, but they also welcome the respectful stranger. (Again, nature and human life jibe in obedience to basic principles of structural organization. Ecological rules and principles—flow of energy across trophic levels, webs of interaction that define the “balance of nature”—have a generality corresponding to permissible uniformity in the framework of public space.

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