Temple Grandin is the great apologist for “bottom-up thinking,” the practice of allowing the particulars on the ground to determine your thinking and guide your action. Another way of thinking about this concept is letting other people solve their own problems. This may sound passive, but in practice you may find great activity is required to restrain yourself from interfering in other people’s jurisdiction.
Armchair philosophers lack the perception to advise effective action in someone else’s life. This is not to suggest that we should not be receptive to sound advice in seeking to solve our own problems or that general principles and material aid should not be given to others. The difference is in the action itself.
One of the greatest satisfactions known to man, assuredly fleeting, is the gratification of a job well done. Or even just done. In order to feel this, the job must be completed by the person himself. It’s all well and good to give mothers classes on nutrition and provide resources to acquire food to cook. It becomes harmful when prepared food is doled out without regard to the person eating the food and the joy she might derive from preparing the food and serving it to her family.
You can sense the angry masses raising their hackles at this sexist, backward, unfeeling description just now. But it has feeling! The most feeling. As one philosophy professor memorably intoned at a lecture (more memorable than his personage, it appears): when we provide top-down government aid we rob women of the “joy of making pies.” Immediately, much of our culture will retort by rattling off a list of reason why this is “sexist,” and women who are physically unable to cook, and jobs that don’t allow time for cooking, and a deeply felt sense that someone they have never met cannot do something basic that meets a human need and relays immense satisfaction.
It seems odd that we can feel such certainty about what someone else “needs” when we can’t see the particulars in which he lives. Yes, every person needs to eat. In crisis and dire circumstances, that food can be anything edible distributed as quickly as possible. But most of life in civilization is blessedly not a crisis. In ordinary life, the items in the pantry, the recipes a person knows, and the individual demands of schedule and preference should play a role in who eats what and when.
The reality is that someone’s solution to his own problem will be more nuanced, interesting, and remarkable than anything you can come up with as a remote observer. There will be obstacles, but trying to remove every obstacle in someone else’s life does more harm than good. How do we know this? The alternative to letting people solve their own problems is running rampant in modern mothering, government, and charitable causes. We seek to infantilize our children and neighbors.
We’ve become so certain that this is the right approach that we seek to solve the problems of an entire continent with a bright idea. The other drawback of this backward focus is that not only do we waste our time fretting about problems that are not ours to solve but we also take our attention away from that with which we should be concerned.
For a particularly tragic and morbid illustration of the need of this principle, let us turn to an unlikely source: 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells. In her entry on the robin, Wells includes the story of John Woolman. In his Quaker Journal, Woolman describes the macabre scene in which he killed a mother robin. After stoning the mother bird, Woolman climbed to the nest and murdered the baby birds “supposing that better than to leave them to pine away and die miserably.” Alack, this violence which Woolman came to rue was not, in fact, necessary. Wells relays, “Although the event was important to the history of Quakerism, he need not have killed the nestlings. The male robin frequently takes over their feeding while the female leaves to start another brood.”
