Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [53]
Had I been industrious? Well, I’m sure the manual will prove useful, but I have a sense that Franklin was hoping for something grander. After all, he was an inventor, a creator. He didn’t simply assemble the Franklin stove—he gave it life. His bifocals were not some lame conglomeration of earlier pairs of glasses. Franklin’s Industry was purposeful and directed and inventive.
Industry in the Franklinian sense has, I think, less to do with simply being busy and more to do with getting busy. As Chris said to me in his lead-up to the week, “It is not in the nose-to-the-grindstone busy-ness that we find truth. It is in the small gestures of understanding and compassion, the little distractions, that we shine.”
I think Franklin’s notion of being busy was tied up in his desire to do good works, to be a benefit to others. My little appeal manual might have been a start, but I could do better.
Of all the virtues, this is the one (so far) for which I have the most affinity. Indeed, Industry was what I was hoping for when I started this project. Or, more precisely, it was the absence of this from my life that drove me on. Guilt is a great motivator.
We’ve lost perspective. We, in the West, are simply so privileged that we no longer have a true sense of sacrifice and hardship. Now before some guy who lost his job at an assembly plant and had his home taken from him loads up his shotgun and tries to find my house on Google Maps, hear me out. Even in our most desperate times, a nostalgic look back at the good old days is fiction. Life might have been simpler before, but it was also exponentially more difficult. Beyond those in abject poverty, even the poor in modern North America have luxuries and conveniences of which our ancestors could not have dreamt.
What we have lost with this relative affluence is a sense of self-sufficiency. That is one of the motivations behind Benjamin Franklin’s admonition to be industrious—a drive to be self-reliant. The other is something Franklin displayed in abundance: selflessness. It is the paucity of these in my own life and the abundance of these in Franklin’s that make this the most personally appealing of the virtues. When I think of Industry, beyond my earlier reference to television, I think of my grandfather.
So, for the rest of this week, I decided this would be the week of . . .
Big Haze
My mother’s father, Hazen Wood Dickson (or Big Haze, as we call him at the annual golf tournament named in his honor), was not a man of means. Indeed, I would say for a good portion of his life he was poor. He always worked and worked hard, but he never earned much money. Despite this, he raised a happy and close-knit family and left a considerable legacy. He was also the most self-reliant man I have ever known. In fact, though he holds no patents, and no royalty checks from licensing schemes pad the coffers of his estate, he was much like Franklin: an inventor.
Tread on the concrete walkway from his driveway to his house and you’d never be encumbered by snow or ice. He created a self-cleaning walkway using steam generated from a woodstove. His pantry was accessible by a trapdoor that was raised or lowered by an electronic pulley system, which might not have been revolutionary, or an invention at all, but was very impressive to a ten-year-old boy. My grandmother told me he invented the world’s first self-loading pulpwood truck and that he would have been rich if he had thought to find a partner with business acumen. He had a backyard filled with ancient single-stroke engines and portable sawmills run by steam motors, and I never saw him turn to a mechanic, plumber, carpenter, or handyman for assistance. It was others who turned to him.
For me there was a little bit of Franklin in my grandfather, particularly his Industry. He was always busy, never idle, and he did it for the love of doing it, and perhaps to make the world a little better. There are lessons there