Lawn Mowing and Learning

I was riding in a car yesterday and saw a scene straight from Norman Rockwell. A father was seemingly mowing his lawn and right behind him was his around four-year-old son pushing a small, plastic toy lawnmower, head down and very earnest in his mowing. (I say ‘seemingly’ because I don’t think the father’s power mower was actually running.)

It was cute, of course, (that all-purpose sugar word), but it was also quite ancient and profound. Most of the things that we know—practical, intellectual, artistic, spiritual, moral—we have learned (as individuals and as cultures) by imitating someone else–someone older, more experienced, and wiser.

This foundational truth has been obscured in recent centuries by two developments in the West, both of them good in themselves but with some negative consequences. The first is the rise of science as the measure of truth, with its future orientation and subtle suggestion (not found so much among scientists themselves) that we are smarter than people used to be. The other is the Romantic revolution that, as a corrective to other excesses (including scientific rationalism), tended to emphasize living in the moment and the individual as the maker of his or her own truth.

I found when teaching young creative writers that few of them wanted to read and learn from established writers. They mostly wanted to spontaneously explore themselves (resulting in a lot of spontaneous punctuation among other things). And, to be fair, they sometimes ended up with something quite nice.

Learning by imitating someone wiser is the oldest and surest way of learning anything (in the animal world as in the human). It is the genius of virtue ethics, of the artistic tradition, of bridge building, and of making disciples to go into all the world.

I’m not arguing for the heavy hand of Tradition. I’m not arguing for anything actually. I’m simply saying that it gave me pleasure to see the young boy trying to imitate his father. That both helps the young boy and puts responsibility on his father to be someone worth imitating—in areas more important than lawn mowing.