(cc) freeparking on flickrI had a creative writing professor who would search antique stores for old portraits, subjects long since separated from kith and kin. She would use the portraits to help generate character sketches, even if just as a jumping off point.

We don’t know much about Kate, the character Jane Jacobs uses to compile the two lists of “esteemed behavior” in Systems of Survival. Jacobs manages to sneak in a few details and traits about Kate—more than in your average Platonic dialogue—but we’re left with far fewer than for most characters in your contemporary novel.

Here’s the short list I provided earlier about Kate:

Kate:

• 30
• Academic - Biologist
• Enjoyed popular success with book on animal memory published by Armbruster, to dismay of peers
• Volunteers to go first; needs just over four weeks to research the systems behind morality

I also forgot that during the first meeting, while everyone else but Ben is drinking alcohol, she chooses coffee. Jacobs also applies the adjectives “tired” and “rumpled” to her appearance at this meeting.

Also, she’s not just your run-of-the-mill biologist. The academic denegration she’d received for the popular success of her book had landed her on a project involving rabbit neurobiology, edging out her research on squirrel behavior. In other words, she presents as both a generalist and a specialist: presenting her passion popularly while pursuing a very specific target in her academic discipline.

Within all this, Jacobs presents Kate as a keen observer of all manner of systems. In Kate’s words: “I like uncovering systems…” (p21) While her specialty is neurobiology, she proves that the same observation skills apply to systems of morality. Jacobs proved herself as a keen observer of urban systems in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (tags: organized complexity, processes).

That’s not to necessarily equate the real Jacobs and the fictional Kate, but I would imagine Jacobs’ methods to ferret out these systems of morality were similar to Kate’s. The latter, though fictional, has the advantage of age, position, and eagerness on the real Jacobs, yielding results in four weeks, compared to Jacobs’ 15 years.

Kate: First I immured myself in the library, opening to closing. Read, read, read, and took notes.

…Biographies; business histories; scandals; sociology, although that was less help than I expected, except for some of the Europeans. I dipped into general history and…skimmed some cultural anthropology. Nights at home I clipped newspapers.

I drew on three kinds of evidence. Whenever I ran across a behavior that was extolled as admirable, I cast it in the form of a precept….

I did the same with behavior that was laid out as expected or proper….

My third type of evidence was behavior that was deemed scandalous, disgraceful, or criminal….

…I kept running across much the same underlying moral principle in [other] contexts…I cast it as the more embracing precept…

Then I holed up at home and tried to make sense of my notes. First I sequestered off the universals….

…I noticed that specific precepts were repeatedly associated with specific others…. Aha! Precepts came in linked clusters! Each kind overlapped with other clusters. Combining the overlaps resolved the clusters into these two lists…

~”A pair of contradictions” Systems of Survival (p25-27)

The other characters bring different perspective and modes of thinking to the dialogue, but it’s comforting to see some of the habits Jacobs relies on in other works reflected in Kate.