People Don't Change: And They Have More Than One Reason

The professor and student seemed

to believe that the only people who

keep books are people who buy these.

One of the stranger conversations I had in my master's program was over people who collect books. The instructor presented some kind of quasi-Marxist argument that collecting books was simply the product of the desire to accumulate stuff. Books represented memories. Shouldn't people stick to  photographs than demonstrate their greediness with books? 

The die-hard Marxist in the course agreed with him. 

If it sounds strange for a professor who publishes to pour scorn on books...well, the tendency for humanities personnel to shoot themselves in the foot is kind of a given. 

I disagreed, of course, and to this day, I find the conversation odd. I keep books because they represent a gift or time in my life. I also keep books because I reread them. I keep books that were hard to find, and I don't want to go through the process of tracking them down again. I keep books for research and for teaching. I end up with books because I wanted to read the next volume in a series and the library didn't have it. I also end up with books because I don't want to run the risk of damaging the book (yes, I crease spine and dribble food on book pages). 

Sometimes, particularly with the last two categories, I end up "selling" the books to Bull Moose (for pennies, but the amounts do add up).  

The point here is that the assumption that I would have only one reason for buying/keeping a book is absurd. 

I often find that people who think this way tend to think in single causes and effects. I'm just about the only person I know who believes that AI is not going to continue on a single trajectory towards greatness or towards catastrophe. I think that other factors will creep in to change the equation. 

Take copyright laws. Samuel Richardson would have had good reason in the 1700s to believe that society would steal and reprint authors' novels to the end of time. His Pamela was followed by at the minimum 2 unauthorized sequels (in London). He didn't foresee copyright laws that span Great Britain and "the colonies." Arguably such copyright laws are still thwarted, but they are a far larger part of both the streaming universe and the publishing universe than existed in the early years of publishing. 

There is always a human element. And the human element doesn't work to a single theory or pattern. 

People do things for more than one reason.