"Your law may be perfect, your knowledge of human affairs may be such as to enable you to apply it with wisdom and skill, and yet without individual acquaintance with men, their haunts and habits, the pursuit of the profession becomes difficult, slow, and expensive"
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Perfection is a paper virtue, Dunbar implies, when it isn’t street-tested on actual people. The line reads like a warning to anyone seduced by the elegance of systems: even if your “law” is flawless and your grasp of “human affairs” is encyclopedic, you still can’t practice effectively without the messy, unglamorous knowledge that comes from knowing individuals - where they gather, what they want, how they behave when no one is watching.
Dunbar’s phrasing does something sly. He flatters the reader’s intellect (“perfect,” “wisdom and skill”) only to undercut it with a more practical standard of competence: acquaintance. The subtext is social as much as professional. “Men, their haunts and habits” points to networks, reputations, patronage, and the small economies of trust that governed late medieval life - especially in courts and cities where Dunbar moved. It’s also a quiet critique of abstract expertise: the idea that general principles can substitute for proximity.
Context sharpens the bite. As a court poet in Scotland’s orbit of power, Dunbar would have watched careers hinge on access, gossip, and the ability to read a room as accurately as a text. The sentence anticipates a modern insight: institutions run on informal knowledge. Ignore it, and the “profession” - any profession, really - becomes “difficult, slow, and expensive,” not because the rules failed, but because you misunderstood the human terrain the rules are supposed to navigate.
Dunbar’s phrasing does something sly. He flatters the reader’s intellect (“perfect,” “wisdom and skill”) only to undercut it with a more practical standard of competence: acquaintance. The subtext is social as much as professional. “Men, their haunts and habits” points to networks, reputations, patronage, and the small economies of trust that governed late medieval life - especially in courts and cities where Dunbar moved. It’s also a quiet critique of abstract expertise: the idea that general principles can substitute for proximity.
Context sharpens the bite. As a court poet in Scotland’s orbit of power, Dunbar would have watched careers hinge on access, gossip, and the ability to read a room as accurately as a text. The sentence anticipates a modern insight: institutions run on informal knowledge. Ignore it, and the “profession” - any profession, really - becomes “difficult, slow, and expensive,” not because the rules failed, but because you misunderstood the human terrain the rules are supposed to navigate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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