On price, value, meaning, and the scourge of flame wars

One morning twenty-five years ago I found myself interviewing a prospective new arts marketing hire. “Why do you want to work here?” I inquired of the woman seated across the conference table.

“I love the arts,” she responded. “We all have the same information,” she continued. “We act on what we value.”

She got the job. As impressed as I was by her brevity and her clarity, her insights about human nature equipped her admirably for a career in marketing. Some people spend their entire lives and never learn that behavior is a consequence of what and how we value. They tell themselves that they are rational creatures, that they act in response to the dictates of logic and fact. While the rational self is certainly important, recent advances in brain science tell us that it is the emotional self that is the decision-maker within us.

This is not to say that reason doesn’t matter. Far from it. We use our rational skills to understand and navigate the world. We use them to make sense of ourselves and others. But, in a contest, the rational self will often find itself overmatched by the emotional self. So it is with facts and values, too. In many contests, facts find themselves overmatched by values.

The current political milieu exemplifies what I’m writing about here. Everyone has access to the same facts, yet liberals and conservatives resist creating solutions from any mutuality of purpose. Instead, each side demonizes the other. Conciliation and compromise are characterized as weakness or as “selling out.” These polemics are driven by extreme conflicts in values.

We can observe the same dynamics at play on a smaller scale within the pipe world when people argue about the relative merits of high-priced versus low priced pipes. The heat and anger that emerges during these discussions – especially the flame wars that ensue inside online pipe communities – is so extreme as to render the pipe smoker’s amiable and thoughtful persona a ridiculous fiction.

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If you think pipe prices are high now....

As I continue to do historical research for my pipe book, I’m amazed by how much I’m learning. One of the things I’m trying to do is understand the development of the world of pipes and tobacco in an historical context. Part of my work involves looking at economics and the marketplace. I have found and read a number of directories and price lists, one of which is this retail directory from 1932.

Today, when many of us want to try a pipe, but are looking for a more affordable version from a maker, we select a sandblast or rusticated finish. These days, sandblast and rusticated finish pipes are more economical than are smooth pipes from the same maker. Until recently, I assumed that smooths have always been dearer than their rougher cousins, but this is not the case.

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