Author: bearcee

My degrees are in Journalism (M.A.,Andrews University) and Philosophy of Religion (M.A., Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University). I taught for 34 years at Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, MD—mostly religion, philosophy, communication and media studies, public relations and advertising. Then I was an adjunct professor in philosophy at Trinity Washington University (DC) and an adjunct in Business Communications at Stevenson University, MD. I love design, reading, writing, teaching, and learning. I'm married and have a son and a stepdaughter. I am a Christian with Taoist and Buddhist influences. I am now retired and writing full time. My first collection of essays, "Wandering, Not Lost," was published in November 2019 and is available from Wipf & Stock and Amazon.

Goldman Sachs and the Two Smiths

“If the moral sense is the result of nothing more significant than a cultural or historical throw of the dice, then it will occur to some people who by reason of temperament or circumstances are weakly attached to their own moral senses that they are free to do whatever they can get away with by practicing indulgent self-absorption or embracing an angry ideology.” — James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense

 This week, close on the Ides of March, saw Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs of London, resign in disgust at the moral degeneracy he saw up close for 12 years. In an articulate and scathing op-ed piece in The New York Times, Smith recounted how the culture that had sustained the trust of clients for 143 years has disappeared. “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for,” said Smith. “It astounds me,” he went on, “how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

Smith recounted how he had recruited and managed the 80 student interns who had survived the process that winnowed out thousands.  “I knew it was time to leave,” he says, “when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”

He signed off with a plea to the board of directors to “get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm—or the trust of its clients—for very much longer.” 

The next day Goldman Sachs stock dropped by $2.7 billion, a fact that some market analysts rushed to explain as just the daily vicissitudes of the market. 

Smith’s op-ed piece went viral, Goldman Sachs’ PR machine responded aggressively, and the thundering herd of pundits, Wall Street wonks, and competitors formed up for the ritual denunciations, analyses, and prognostications. Mayor Bloomberg even took time out of his busy schedule to go down to Goldman Sachs and offer his condolences on such a public drubbing. 

There were a variety of responses to Smith’s cri de coeur. Many, like Bloomberg, took it personally and saw it as a betrayal of corporate loyalty. Others, like The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan, couldn’t resist going for Smith’s jugular and heaping scorn on his shock. Zachary Karabell, also writing for The Beast, likewise took Smith to task for naiveté. “What profession did he think he was entering?” he asked, “Social work?” Karabell called for us all to lay off Goldman Sachs, to realize that people can be greedy anywhere, and that Wall Street should not be held to a higher standard than other professions. 

A common assumption running through much of the commentary is that this is the way things are and there’s nothing to be done about it. Everybody looks out for Number #1, everybody gets ahead by any means necessary, and everybody’s Greedometer is bending the needle. Much of the huffing and puffing over Greg Smith’s op-ed was of this defensive tone, evidence, it seems to me, of the elite closing ranks to justify their actions. 

This is an assumption that should be scrutinized. The implication is that this is how successful business is conducted; those who would win—or just break even—have to be willing to cut ethical corners and kill when necessary. This is turning an “is” into an “ought,” or at the very least turning ‘the way things are’ into de facto rules of the universe. It takes utilitarian ethics (the greatest good for the greatest number of people) and turns it into ‘the end justifies the means and we’ll get there by any means necessary.’

There are those who seem to actually believe this, and a few of them are now in jail—Jeffrey Skilling of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, and Bernie Madoff come to mind. But there are many more who accept this passively and live as if this were Reality. 

James Q. Wilson, whom I’ve quoted at the top of this essay, was probably the leading social scientist of his generation. In his book, The Moral Sense, he cautioned that we must resist the temptation to chalk up all the problems in our society to moral failure. Nevertheless, he makes the case that there is a moral sense in people which guides them in making decisions everyday. If it is not relativized away or simply ignored because ‘everyone else is doing it,’ this moral sense generally guides us to do the right thing. 

Like Wilson, “I am interested in why people act as they do, but I am more interested in why people judge actions as they do.” The outrage at Greg Smith’s dramatic exit from Goldman Sachs reveals a bedrock belief that free market capitalism is as cutthroat and duplicitous as it needs to be. But Wilson argues that a social order that shifts individual responsibility to expedient cultural norms will not question such unethical means because 1) they work in the short term, and 2) we lack the ability to speak and to reason of moral matters anyway. We have a moral sense, Wilson asserts, “but it is not always and in every aspect of life strong enough to withstand a pervasive and sustained attack.”

Greg Smith’s op-ed piece came at a time when people are fed up with the callousness of Wall Street and bankers in general, and are realizing that no amount of cajoling on the part of government or occupying of property will change the ingrained habits of a relatively few powerful and morally twisted people. I don’t believe—and neither does Smith apparently—that everyone who works at Goldman Sachs buys into the toxic culture he described. But enough of the leadership seems to practice it that many of the employees feel it’s in their best interest to comply. It’s that shrug of the shoulders, the non-verbal equivalent of our ubiquitous dismissal of things difficult to think through with the blasé ‘Whatever’, which reveals the herd mentality. 

Before Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, the Bible of free market capitalism, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work of social and ethical philosophy that is stunning in its psychological insights into our motives. 

He begins by describing sympathy and the natural human capacity to imagine the pain that others must feel as the result of injustice. For Smith, sympathy is the source of human moral sentiments, indeed, of ethics. A society made up of people with the capacity to put themselves in another person’s place will likely be more just than one where people don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. The one virtue that a society most certainly cannot live without is justice. “The violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of.” It was Adam Smith’s firm conviction that kindness and beneficence could not be coerced by force. If a society that is unjust is to change it could only happen if those whose actions hurt people receive widespread condemnation. The ‘invisible hand’ of public morality would drive people away from corrupt markets and would reward the honest ones. 

This may be the only thing that finally brings about change on Wall Street and in the banking industry. Since the language they understand is only that of profit and loss, investors and customers should learn to speak it fluently. Those with money to invest should look for the firms whose ethics are proven by their actions, not by their public relations statements.  There must be some out there who can do right by their clients and the country and still make a profit. Adam Smith believed that all people desire “not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” He thought that those who were condemned would eventually come to judge themselves and thus would undergo a transformation. Wilson, commenting on this, says “At first we judge others; we then begin to judge ourselves as we think others judge us; finally we judge ourselves as an impartial, disinterested third party might . . . . We can fool our friends, but not ourselves.” 

Well, there’s some hope. If losing profit results in some soul-searching among bankers and traders there may be a gradual detoxifying of their poisonous culture. And if Greg Smith’s brave act makes us question unfettered greed as the engine of capitalism, then we may have reached a tipping point.  

On a more personal note, this entry marks a year of weekly posting to Wretched Success. I’ve learned a lot in the process—and I’ve signed up for another round. I hope you’ll join me!

Pick the Habit

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. — William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology

I am a creature of habit. And so are you. And that’s a good thing, according to Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit (Random House, 2012), and reporter at The New York Times. 

Duhigg became interested in the research being done on habits while in Baghdad covering the war. It occurred to him that the U.S. military “is one of the biggest habit-formation experiments in history.” His interest led him to hundreds of experiments, thousands of articles and books, interviews with Paul O’Neill, Tony Dungy, Howard Schultz of Starbucks,  and many others, and into the labs of the foremost neuroscientists of our time. 

Research into habits isn’t new, of course. Aristotle based his ethics on practicing the virtues until they became habitual, second nature. William James devoted a chapter of his Principles of Psychology to it in 1890 and returned to it repeatedly throughout his career, calling us ‘mere bundles of habit,’ and remarking that ‘The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work (Talks to Teachers).’ John Dewey based his Human Nature and Conduct (1922), a social psychology, on the development of morals through the formation of powerful habits of conduct. 

That approach to growing up certainly was part of the upbringing of several generations of American and British children since the 1920s. We were taught to cultivate good habits and shun the bad ones, learning through cultural norms and precepts which could be trusted and which to stifle. 

What is new is the confirmation, through extensive research and experimentation, of many of these early conjectures and hypotheses. Duhigg’s approach is to focus first on how habits develop in our lives, then how companies and organizations instill habits in the lives of their employees and customers, and finally, to examine how movements within societies harness the power of habits to transform the culture and ethos. 

His central idea is that ‘habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.’ We build them consciously, as we gain more practice, layer upon layer, day to day, until they come to govern most of our actions. The key is understanding that what was put together can be taken apart and reassembled for different results. It’s no panacea for all our problems, but much of what we put off doing because it’s too hard could be accomplished through the conscious cultivation of habits. 

What scientists and psychologists have discovered is a basic three-part loop: cue, routine, and reward. In order to change a habit, says Duhigg, we first find the routine that meets some hidden need. Then we experiment with the rewards, built to satisfy our cravings. Third, we isolate the cue, what sets us off in playing through a habit, and finally, if we’re serious about change, we come up with a plan. 

On the idea that understanding is more than half the battle won, Duhigg gives us example after example of people discovering the loops, developing them, and changing their lives, however incrementally. 

Paul O’Neill took over Alcoa as CEO in 1987, and made it his mission to turn the company into the safest place to work in America. He had the idea that transforming the working habits that resulted in at least one accident a week at most of Alcoa’s plants might have a ripple effect throughout the organization. He was right. Changing the mentality of everyone at Alcoa—management to line workers—about safety not only resulted in the company’s worker injury rate dropping to one-twentieth of the average in America, but net income and market capitalization soared in the years O’Neill led the company. 

O’Neill believed that certain ‘keystone habits’ have the power to ripple through an organization, changing everything. Focusing on priorities rather than attempting to do everything exactly right, O’Neill found that workers now felt empowered to make suggestions and change routines that made their lives safer and their productivity skyrocket. 

Tony Dungy, coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, drilled his team on the basics, reducing the time it took to make decisions during a five-second play to automatic responses, thus freeing the players to react instantaneously to changes on the field. 

Mark Muraven, a psychologist at Case Western University, began studying willpower as a Ph.D. student. He wondered why willpower sometimes seemed to waver and then grow stronger, only to flounder again. Through a series of ingenious experiments, Muraven and his team discovered that willpower is more than a skill. “It’s a muscle,” he says, “like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.” If you want to change something, then you need to conserve your willpower and not waste it on tedious tasks. 

Muraven’s research was picked up by other researchers who extended it to other areas. What they discovered was that when willpower was built up and grew stronger, it touched everything else in a person’s life. Those who developed a habit of exercising regularly found it easier to eat more healthfully, work more efficiently, and have more satisfying personal relationships. 

But the flip side of habits is also explored. Duhigg examines the case of a woman whose gambling habit eventually took over her life, resulting in her losing a $1 million inheritance, her home, and her family. The power of habits is such that they can transform our lives for the better or ruin us. 

Once again, understanding how habits work is essential to harnessing all that power for the good. Duhigg cautions that there is no magic formula for speedily changing habits. Just as they build up over time, so it takes time to substitute routines, isolate the cues, and reap the rewards. Moreover, the infinite number of variables in any one person’s experience renders a formula useless. There isn’t one formula, says Duhigg. There are thousands. His aim throughout the book is to reveal the process of building habits and provide a guide to how to experiment with them. 

William James thought the development of habits so important that he urged teachers to ingrain the most useful ones into the lives of their students. “Education is for behavior,” he said in 1892, “and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.” 

Any of our routines can become habits, usually below the level of our awareness. But that needn’t be the case, and if we want to pilot our ship instead of being a stowaway, paying attention to our habits offers a direct route. 

The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. He could also have said, the unlived life is not worth examining. Either way it’s a fair bet that habits will be involved, habits that if put in place can free us up, both individuals and societies, for the more pressing problems we face. 

Andrew Breitbart, Your Bell is Tolling

“. . . . it has become an understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellowman.” — William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating”

Andrew Breitbart is dead at the age of 43. A warrior for conservative causes, he became a self-styled scourge of political and social liberals through his websites and videos. You might say, with Thomas Hobbes, that his public life was nasty, brutish, and short. 

Just last week he was in Washington, DC screaming obscenities at Occupy Washington and calling them freaks and animals. It’s hard not to think that he simply blew up, all that bile and red-hot anger just incinerating his heart. 

Upon his death many of the right-wing elite weighed in. Sarah Palin vowed to fight on in the endless battle against liberal corruption that Breitbart so valiantly waged. Even Romney released a generic condolence note, while Limbaugh called for “a thousand more Breitbart’s” in America. One of his fans, writing at the Fox Nation website, quoted at length from Ecclesiastes, comparing him to the wise man and reminding all readers that America was built by people like Breitbart. “This is not about politics—an aggressively corrupt vocation, at best—but rather the active living out of one’s faith in God and country; fully recognizing that this country was founded by men of faith. . . . on the principles of the Judao-Christian (sic) Gospel of Jesus Christ.” 

And so the lionization begins of a man who vilified Ted Kennedy after his death, calling him “a special pile of excrement,” among other things, and who assassinated the character of Shirley Sherrod, a United States Department of Agriculture official. Breitbart edited a videotape of Sherrod speaking at a conference so that it appears she made racist remarks about white farmers, when she was really describing how her attitudes had changed over the years. Breitbart lied, distorted evidence, and rejoiced when she was falsely accused and fired. Unrepentant to the last he vowed never to apologize to her. That was how he made his living—and apparently he loved his work. 

As David Frum, a conservative writer and columnist—and a man who knew Breitbart well—said recently, “Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war. Breitbart used those tools without qualm or regret, and he inspired a cohort of young conservative journalists to do likewise.”

That’s his legacy—giving a generation of conservative young journalists license to stab the body politic, trash-talk their way through column inches and video moments, and write the kind of drivel that not even a mother could love. 

I couldn’t stand the things he did, I didn’t think he was funny, and I found his values abhorrent. If he served as a catalyst for people’s hatred toward those he chose to crucify, then the world is fractionally better off now that he’s dead. Because he constantly thrust himself into the hot lights of arcade journalism, we only have his public persona to decipher. If there was a kinder, gentler Andrew behind his sneer he certainly kept it on a short chain.

Yet, he’s a fascinating case study for a political culture that has become both poisonous and ludicrous. No society with a majority of people like him could survive. But the very values he excoriated of tolerance, fairness, equality of justice, thinking before you speak and perceiving the world from multiple perspectives, allowed him the freedom to be himself. 

It’s possible that Breitbart might have moderated his style as he matured. With time, some personal pain and loss, and at least a hint of humility, he might have become a powerful and eloquent voice for conservative issues. But I doubt it. His consistency lay in his ability to disregard any viewpoint but his own. With the notoriety he gained and the money he was paid he had no incentive to stop and think before he flew into a rage. 

A lot of people admired him, no doubt for some of the same reasons we venerate Mafia bosses, thuggish musicians, and arrogant athletes: they do what they like and stand over against the crowd. 

I don’t hate the man because I don’t want to be seduced by the very weapons he used to hack his way through the world. If he were drowning I’d hope I’d have the presence of mind to do what I could to save him simply because he was in need. In that regard, he stands for all of us, one of the family of humanity in all its twisted, fallen, and forgivable potential. And his death reminds us that our freedoms, stretched at times to the breaking point when extended to people like him, must be preserved in the particular case in order that all of us may enjoy them.

The Law of Happiness

“. . . . happiness is affected more by one’s movement toward (or away from) success than by one’s position near (or far from) it. . . . So the law of happiness says happiness waxes and wanes in direct proportion to a sense of progress toward or away from a goal, a worthy cause, a creation, a companion to be loved.” — Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life

One of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Outliers, made the claim that successful people achieved their success more by working very hard than by native talent. In fact, their level of success could be predicted by the hours, days, weeks, and years that they kept at their craft. Those who worked hard and long did better than those who worked occasionally or half-heartedly. The “Duh factor” kicks in here, of course—you’d expect people who practiced the piano six hours every day to do much better than those who tickle the ivories once or twice a week. And while I may have forgotten the finer nuances of Gladwell’s argument, one thing I took away from the book is this: those who found enjoyment in the process of working to become the best were more likely to stick with it. And somewhere along the line other people noticed and counted them successful. 

This ability to find oneself in the practice runs against the common belief that our lives only begin in the end. “Wait until you’re older,” we say to those younger than ourselves. “You’ll find out what I mean when you get out into the real world,” we say to students, a warning to be graciously ignored since there is no reason to think that the life of a student is anything but real. “Work hard, think positively, and one day you’ll be on top,” the saying goes. As sayings go this one goes two-thirds of the way until it becomes mired in the mud of probabilities instead of certainties. 

Working hard is guaranteed only to make you adept and expert at what you do. Thinking positively begins as optimism and becomes faith in hope through adversity, never a bad thing. Inevitably reaching the top is not a foregone conclusion, no matter how hard you work. But it is a sure thing that if you don’t work hard your odds of success, much less rising to the top, will quickly diminish. Thus, behind most overnight sensations is a person who put in the time, usually a lot of time, to make it all look so easy.

I’ve been reading a biography of Bruce Springsteen, a man whose music inspires me and whose determination, even in his twenties, was formidable. Living lean, scratching out a living from day to day by playing in clubs, he worked on his music with a single-minded focus. He resisted all attempts to change his style, to use studio musicians instead of the guys he grew up with, and to practice being derivative of what was on the radio. He heard his songs in his head and he made them come out into the air in the way he wanted. 

Although his music is definitively his own he listened and learned from the rock ’n roll greats—Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, Bill Haley, and others—and he has distilled that legacy into the raw essentials of his own vision. 

Sting, another musician whose artistic range seems constantly to be expanding, has surrounded himself with people who, by his own reckoning, are better musicians than he is. Every collaboration offers him another chance to learn, to add to the collage of nuances and meanings he can draw from his own creative process. 

I am drawn to these people, not just because their music has defined and surrounded so many of the ways I experience the world, but also because of their open-hearted stance toward the dazzling, heartbreaking, searing, poignant prospect of becoming human. As artists they have pared away the distractions while remaining free to pick up what moves them from others. They have the humility to learn, the creativity to shape and produce art, and a work ethic that strives for the fullness of their imaginations. 

A. C. Grayling reminds us that “The first lesson of happiness is that the surest way to be unhappy is to think that happiness can be directly sought.” It can’t be, he says, because it is a by-product of other things. “And what it is a by-product of is those activities that are worthwhile in themselves, that bring satisfaction and achievement in the doing, that give one a sense of well-doing and well-being.”

Tonight, walking alone in the night with the wind gusting about me, heading for home and light and love and warmth, I could not help but smile, realizing by those measures, through the grace of God, family, and friends, I am a most blessed and happy man.

Whitney Houston: Respect for the Sufferer

“Compassion, therefore, is the one virtue that lets us open ourselves not just to all humanity but also to all living beings or, at the very least, to all suffering beings.” — André Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues

In the opening paragraphs of Philip K. Dick’s Valis, we meet Horselover Fat, a saintly but psychotic twin of Dick himself, who informs us that his psychiatrist told him that in order to get well he would need to give up dope and stop helping people. Fat was unable to do either. His compassion for others causes him immense suffering; his insanity prevents his compassion from having practical effect. He is all pity, but with little to show for it. 

In my mind there is a close connection between Horselover Fat’s predicament and the feelings generated by Whitney Houston’s death. Absent the dope and absent any way to actually help her or her family, we are left with pity and, as one philosopher has put it, ‘Pity doesn’t go far.’ 

To demonstrate the spectrum of experiences we call pity, I need only think about this past week in which Houston’s death led off, a friend’s aged dog was put down, many more civilians were slaughtered in Syria, and in Honduras a fire in a prison killed hundreds. In each case the common thread is that we can do absolutely nothing for the suffering beings directly. At a far distance we experience pity or compassion on a sliding scale: Whitney Houston’s sad demise in the foreground, a friend’s dog in the middle distance, and in the deep distance the suffering of prisoners and families alike in Honduras. 

Comte-Sponville, the author of the epigram above, examines compassion and pity closely in one of the chapters of his wonderful book on virtues. He notes that compassion means ‘to suffer with,’ and pity is almost always tinged with sadness. 

Pity has come in for its share of criticism throughout the ages, from the Stoics to Spinoza to Nietzsche to Hannah Arendt. “Pity is the sadness one feels in response to the sadness of another; it does not spare the other person his own sadness but rather tends to add to it.” Against this piling up of pain Spinoza counseled reason and justice. In his view, pity is evil and useless and unnecessary. Why not act toward the sufferer with the joy of love and generosity? Who needs pity?

Nietzsche regarded pity as more than useless, a weakness that was a fatal flaw in cultures. Those cultures based on Christianity he thought timid and effeminate because of their propensity toward compassion, following the example of Christ. The truly noble cultures would cultivate a visceral hardness, a kind of bitter joy in one’s own toughness and self-sufficiency. 

Which brings us back to Whitney Houston. It is a story we are all too familiar with: the celebrity blessed with talent to burn, beauty, and success, who squanders it, usually through drug and alcohol abuse, and ultimately dies alone under suspicious circumstances, long before their thread of life is fully spun out by the Muses. Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, Heath Ledger, River Phoenix, Amy Winehouse, Elvis—the list goes on and on. We mourn their passing, we miss their talent, we feel a shiver of relief that we are still here—and we go out in the morning and start the car and drive off to work or school or to shop. Of course we must go on; most of us would not be incapacitated by the deaths, however unfortunate, of those we don’t really know. 

I am trying to understand, nevertheless, why we feel this sadness, where it might fit in The Vast Scheme of Things. Understanding an emotion is not the same as defining and categorizing it according to function. Understanding develops almost organically, like a seed bursting open, thrusting shoots up toward the light, branching and twining, from strength to strength. To follow the analogy, it is training the vine instead of pinning the butterfly.  

Emotions simply are: we have them and are affected by them. That fact does not stop us from analyzing them in order to wring all the utility we can from them. We study them  so we can provoke them in others. We tamp them down, build them up, hold them in check, and give free rein to them. Plato called them wild horses, the ever-present danger to rationality. Yet without them we’d be less than human, and compassion, joined at the hip with sadness, practically stands in for love for humankind. “Humanity,” notes Comte-Sponville, “when we speak of it as a virtue, is nearly synonymous with compassion, a fact that says much about both.” 

Compassion, like sympathy, is linguistically bound to the idea and experience of suffering with others. It is a universal that transcends languages and cultures, opening us even to the suffering of animals and enemies. Yet, when a public figure says, ‘I feel your pain,’ or a character in a TV drama says stiffly, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ we bridle. This emotion, more than most, relies on honesty perceived. In other words, if we’re not really experiencing it, then silence in the presence of the sufferer might be better than empty eloquence. 

But an emotion is first experienced and then communicated. We see ourselves as sad, happy, angry, or confused. In fact, William James argued that we are sad because we cry, rather than crying because we are sad. The emotion wells up, we feel it, we awaken to it, and we express it. 

There don’t seem to be any selfless emotions. Even when we feel pity or compassion for another who is suffering we have not Photoshopped ourselves out of the picture. Aristotle said, “what we fear for ourselves excites our pity when it happens to others.” That may be, but does it negate the effect? I don’t think so. What is to be gained, in the long run, by hardening our hearts against the suffering around us, whether it be that of a dog or a diva? 

There is an important distinction to be made, I believe, between pity and compassion. Pity has about it something of contempt for an inferior, the poor schmuck who finally got his. If that’s what it is, nobody really wants our pity. But compassion, if based on love and kindness, sees oneself in the suffering of the other. Respect for the dignity of the sufferer calls not for pity shaded as contempt, but for the recognition of the universal in the particular, the tragic beauty of our common humanity.

So for Whitney Houston’s passing we could claim these lines of Rainier Rilke from his Sonnets to Orpheus:

“But you now, you whom I knew like a flower whose name
I don’t know, I will once more remember and show you
to them, you who were taken away,
beautiful playmate of the invincible cry.

Dancer first, who suddenly, with body full of lingering,
paused, as though her youngness were being cast in bronze;
mourning and listening—. Then, from the high achievers
music fell into her altered heart.

Sickness was near. Already overcome by the shadows,
her blood pulsed more darkly, yet, as if fleetingly
suspect, it thrust forth into its natural spring.

Again and again, interrupted by darkness and downfall,
it gleamed of the earth. Until after terrible throbbing
it entered the hopelessly open portal.”

They Shoot Laptops, Don’t They?

“A primary method for studying the effects of anything is simply to imagine ourselves as suddenly deprived of them.” — Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan

There are two ways that new technology is received:  we love it or we hate it. The shock of the new drives many to denounce it, mourn the passing of life as we know it, and predict a bad end for all of us. On the other hand, the beta testers and early adopters bubble with enthusiasm: the new (fill in the blank) will make life easier, more fun, more efficient, and . . . more fun. But once we traverse this familiar territory we find ourselves in rough country without maps and only a general sense of the terrain. 

That is where we are right now with Facebook, the social media phenomenon that recently announced it would go public in May, reportedly raising some $5 billion in the process. When Mark Zuckerberg began Facebook at Harvard in 2004, MySpace was already the place to be online. Rubert Murdoch and News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 and by 2007 MySpace was valued at $12 billion. But by 2008 Facebook overtook MySpace and quickly eclipsed it as the leading social network. In its recent SEC filing for the upcoming IPO Facebook reported over 800 million users world-wide. If you do a search on Amazon for “Facebook” you’ll get over 4, 600 results, and Facebook is now considered essential for corporations, start-ups, and public figures. If there aren’t any dissertations about Facebook yet, I’m sure there will be soon. 

But it’s the effect it has on families and friends that I find so intriguing. Although I am no Luddite I am perhaps slower than some to adopt new media. I can fully appreciate the power of Facebook to bring people together, but it’s how people use it to punish and harass one another that’s so disconcerting. 

Facebook has become Everyman’s bully pulpit, a megaphone to the world. We’ve all heard stories of employees getting fired, students expelled or otherwise disciplined, marriages breaking up, and people’s secrets being exposed on Facebook. It’s simply wrong to blame Facebook for this, but it’s naive to imagine that this medium does not have the power to ruin people. 

I recently saw a video on YouTube which brought all this into sharp focus. A teenage girl had used Facebook to rant about all the housework she had to do, how oppressive her parents were, and how her life generally sucked because of her family. Apparently, this was the second offense of this nature: the first time she had been grounded for months, and her laptop and cellphone were confiscated by her parents. But this time her father decided to carry through on his threat to do much worse if the girl broke the rules again. 

So he made a short video and placed it online so that his daughter and her friends and suffering parents everywhere could learn from her mistakes. We see a man in jeans and a cowboy hat, settling himself in a chair in the backyard, with a sheet of paper clutched in his hand. In a voice tight and high with rage he reads a letter addressed to his daughter in which he quotes at length from her Facebook rant of the previous day, complete with obscenities and the kind of whining and exaggeration which makes parents apoplectic. He recalled how he worked two jobs when he was her age, put himself through college while working full time, and how just the day before he had taken time off work to buy and install $130 of software on her laptop—the very laptop she had later used to complain to the world about her cruel lot in life.  “I’m going to post this to your Facebook account,” he said, “so all your friends and parents everywhere can learn from it.”

I thought it couldn’t get any worse—but then he walked toward the camera and moved offscreen as he directed our view to the ground near his feet. There lay the girl’s laptop and in his hand was a .45 pistol. “I told you last time that if you ever did this again there would be something much worse than grounding—and this is it!“ And with that he pumped six bullets into the offending machine. “These are hollow-point bullets,” he yelled over the echoing gunshots. “They cost a buck apiece and I’m going to charge you for them, and for the $130 I spent putting software on this thing yesterday. Oh, and by the way, for what you said about your mother, she said to save a bullet for her. So there’s the last one from your mother!” And with that he clumped back to his chair and signed off with a strangled, “Have a nice day.” Fade to black. 

Okay. . . let’s see where things stand, shall we? We have a grown man, a father and a husband, shooting a laptop in his backyard, while ranting at his daughter for ranting about her family on Facebook. I guess it didn’t register with him that his movie wouldn’t be seen by his daughter on Facebook since he’d just blown her laptop to bits. 

The video has received close to 4 million hits—it’s gone viral, in other words. There are thousands of comments, 95 percent of them in favor of the father’s disciplinary methods. If this had happened in the village square things could have gotten ugly. But that’s the thing: Facebook is the public square, as is YouTube. Together they make the world into a village—much as Marshall McLuhan predicted decades ago. Bratty teenagers and fed-up parents now fight out their problems on a global stage, and everyone is invited to watch, listen, and join the brawl. 

By responding we become changed, an irony not lost on me, by the way. When all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, it’s hard not to think of it as sound and fury, signifying nothing. But it is something and it does no good to blame Facebook or YouTube by shooting the messengers. 

But by the same token, some reflection on these channels, these media, remind us that McLuhan also famously said, “The medium is the message.” It’s not just what is being said, but where and how the saying is transmitted and received. 

Those words between father and daughter, spoken or even screamed inside the walls of a home, remain the private property of that family, to be dealt with in their own way and time. But putting them on Facebook/YouTube turns them into a spectator sport, like bear-baiting, dog-fighting, and witch-dunking. 

And the troubling thing is that many will not see this as a moral failure, a betrayal of the fundamental sanctity of the family. Indeed, many of the comments cheer the father on for his “honesty,” “for telling it straight,” for giving his daughter “tough love.” 

Technology built to bring people together can do precisely that. It is not neutral in the way we mistakenly think that a gun can be used for good purposes or bad, depending on the person wielding it. A gun is designed to stop, maim, injure, and kill no matter who is using it. Mass media is designed to communicate to the masses. If it’s done right, if it works, — like Facebook and YouTube unquestionably do — then what we say and do can be shared with millions. 

As a species we’re still evolving, and having tools this powerful can seem like a Faustian bargain. But I’m hopeful that we might even learn from the past. We survived the pen, the printing press, the telegraph and television. If we don’t kill each other first we may survive YouTube and Facebook too.

The Still Point at the Super Bowl

“The simplest pattern is the clearest. Content with an ordinary life,you can show all people the way back to their own true nature.” — Tao Te Ching, 65, Stephen Mitchell

This weekend the grandest spectacle in all of Mediaworld, the Super Bowl, will draw its millions—both spectators and dollars. I cannot think of another single annual event to which Americans pay such deeply religious homage. The arc of time, from pre-game to post-game, is sacred time, not to be violated by screaming infants, nagging housewives, or tinhorn dictators in Middle Eastern countries. Let Ahmadinejad threaten and bluster! He’ll have to wait his turn; The Game comes first. 

I’ve watched a few Super Bowls, even actually sat and watched the football game too, but those games fade into the blurry recesses of porous memory now. I think the last Super Bowl I watched was when Doug Williams was the quarterback for the Redskins. Then the next year he left for Florida and I left the Redskins. Back in those days the Washington Metro area’s water and sewage systems suffered regular shocks on Sundays as thousands of people flushed at the same time during commercial breaks. To remind myself of how long it’s been since I watched football is to call up an indelible image of John Riggins churning up the field, shaking off Don McNeal, for a 44-yard touchdown run and a Super Bowl record. That was XVII in Pasadena, in 1983. Commercial rates for a 30-second ad were $400,000; this year Volkswagen and other companies will ante up $3.5 million for 30 seconds. 

To put that into perspective, if you spent $1,000 per day of $3.5 million it would take you close to 9.5 years to blow that wad. Companies now can do that in 30 seconds, and with apparently little return on their investment. An article in Forbes notes that Volkswagen and Honda are topping the list of Super Bowl ads this year, having already released them on the Internet, but in purchasing language VW comes in at 13th. In other words, you have to wonder if spending the company’s money on a Super Bowl ad isn’t a vanity purchase, since on Monday or any other day after the game for that matter, the needle on the selling gauge isn’t going to tick more than a degree or two. 

But the Super Bowl, by current standards of entertainment value, is a blowout extravaganza, aiming for shock and awe from start to finish. The football game itself may rank second in reasons-to-watch after the commercials or perhaps even third after the half-time show. Those who mark the beginning of life each year with news from training camp will no doubt appreciate these diversions from the Holy Grail of their team’s heroic struggles, but they will not be denied the play-by-play and the endless angles from which to watch a fumble, a divine reception, and a slow-mo kick into the end-zone. 

There is a great divide between those of us who don’t watch and those to whom it would not occur to miss it under any circumstances. I don’t need to see it to appreciate its tawdry grandeur, its cued-up drama, and its celebration of youth, power, and raw egos. Down on the field, in the well of noise that must almost suck the air from one’s lungs, there is a domestic war being fought. To those who have struggled to get to this moment, life, the universe, and everything comes down to yards, minutes, and muscle twitches. Some, certainly not all, would play to an empty stadium, without cameras, satellites or commentators. The contest itself, shorn of the glitter and tumult of commerce, might be enough for some. 

For them the hours might hold a pure, numinous, power in which they see with absolute clarity the purpose, the means, and the goal. Emerson said, “We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.” 

Professional sports, political campaigns, and corporate strategy are the arenas of Mammon in our time. For those in the heat of the struggle, moments from victory, when the temptation and the means to crush others lies easily at hand, there might be a moment when their true face appears and they must decide whether they will wear it or sell all for a false one. That still point, a blade-edge of decision that maybe only comes with such simple grace once in a lifetime, must not be brushed aside. “It’s just a moment/This time will pass.”

That Was My Future

“Governments should strive to restore to men that taste for the future which religion and the state of society no longer inspire, and they should, without exactly saying as much, teach daily in practical terms that wealth, reputation, and power are the payment for work, that great success should come at the end of a lengthy period of waiting, and that nothing lasting is ever gained without difficulties.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

One of my favorite memories of childhood and early teen years is the image of the future as seen by Popular Mechanics in the late Fifties and early Sixties. As a recurring theme, the future was glorified for its clean cities, happy, healthy families, and the self-guided cars. 

Ah, the cars! They were blessed with automatic guidance systems so that Dad could take his hands off the wheel and turn around to the kids in the back seat who were playing a game together (nicely!), while Mom smiled approvingly. The family would arrive—on time—to their programmed destination, a gleaming skyscraper or, alternatively, a pleasant wooded valley for a picnic. These cars, as I recall, had only one flaw, but it was one that simply could not be overlooked. They were visual variations on what was later to become the AMC Gremlin, one of the most perverse cars of all time for many reasons. That mistake can be forgiven but how can the good people at Popular Mechanics have thought that our metropolitan highways would be anything but stupefyingly clogged?  I thought of this recently as I  inched through traffic on my way to the first class of a new semester. It took me as long to drive seven miles (45 minutes) into Washington, DC as it takes to drive almost forty miles to another campus just north of Baltimore. 

Understanding what this moment in the Great Timeline of History really means is beyond us. It’s beyond us in a curiously literal fashion in that the meaning of this moment, seen from a certain angle, is no-where, and it won’t be anywhere that makes sense for quite awhile. Of course, if you adopt another perspective on this, the present is not no-where but now-here, to be reveled in if not understood. These are not just word games; it makes all the difference in the world how we think about the present with regard to the future. For example, if the future is an eternal recurrence of the present, just more of the same, the appropriate response might be satire, as in Engel’s remark in a letter to Marx that Hegel seemed to be directing history from the grave, “once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce.” 

Stephen Colbert, the faux Republican comedian and favorite spokesperson for the political theatre of the absurd, understands this. He understands it so well that he’s willing to put thousands of dollars into a campaign for the presidency that parallels, but does not converge with—at least not yet—the “real” Republican primary campaign. Watching the current survivors of this fracas is instructive. As I write Rick Santorum has declared himself the winner of the Iowa caucus, Rick Perry has quit the race, Jon Huntsman bailed out the previous week, and Newt Gingrich continues to savage Mit Romney at the knees. The tragedy is that these are the kind of people who want to be president; the farce is what they are willing to do to get the job. 

I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times the other day, a shot taken backstage of one of the Republican debates, moments before the candidates took their places. In the rear of the photo can be seen three or four stony-faced onlookers, aides perhaps, while in the foreground Rick Perry joshes Rick Santorum, putting him in an elbow-grip and leaning in close with a tight smile like a preacher about to clamp the guilt-cuffs on a prodigal parishioner. To the right of the photo, bathed in a Rembrandt spotlight, the two alleged statesman of the event speak together. Mit Romney, his back straight, his fixed smile gleaming, his hands gesturing expansively, makes a point to Newt Gingrich who is positioned with his back to the camera. Gingrich is hunched over with concentration, perhaps trying to hear over Perry’s raucous laughter and Santorum’s sharp response. The tableau reminds us that candidates are actors in a traveling road show, fellow evangelists in a long-running gospel revival paid for, produced, and packaged by groups with unlimited funds and a few simple demands. 

After all the name-calling, the low blows, the viciousness, and the outright lying, one of them, probably Romney, will stand up, wipe off his sword, and march off to battle the incumbent. The ability to cut and thrust, grapple and disembowel—and then to emerge, winner and loser together, all smiles and a thousands points of light, makes one’s head spin. I grew up thinking that it mattered what one believed in and acted upon, that you shouldn’t be wielding the sword to dismember your opponent and then denounce him for not beating his sword into a plowshare. 

But such bald-faced hypocrisy is not the talent of the Republican tribe alone. Robert Hughes writes that  “Propaganda-talk, euphemism and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides.” Even so, naiveté has its benefits: we continue to believe that calculated sins were probably ignorant mistakes long after others have written off the whole political process as a bad joke. That naiveté grows into hope with time and conscience, and hope will not be fooled. The future we looked for in the past is here and it’s nothing like we imagined. It’s not as bad as some made it out to be and it’s certainly not as good as Popular Mechanics painted it. That future never really existed anyway. If you take a much longer view and if you realize that change is incremental and slow—until the fault line snaps and looses the tsunami—then what matters is that consistency and integrity will have their day, though you may not live to see it. Yet at some point we all look back and realize how much has changed, how much is still the same, and how much is still to come. 

More and more these days when I am tempted to regard the present order with horror, I appreciate Orwell’s comment that “Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.”

We should save the word “tragedy” for the genuine article: the suffering of those in earthquakes, tsunamis, and war. The political battles and campaigns that we are watching right now can be viewed as comedy when seen up close. But let’s not forget that the means often become the ends because through constant use they have come to define us.

Zero to Sixty . . . .

“The will is free, but who can account for his own acts and opinions without invoking influences and accidents?”— Jacques Barzun, “Toward a Fateful Serenity”


One of the benefits of an hour-long commute, really, the only benefit, is the time to think, to free associate, to sum up. In two weeks I will slip into that mysterious age of 60, an age which I have, until now, reserved exclusively for the old, perhaps the infirm, most certainly those far enough from shore that the next wave only lifts them gently in passing before cresting up ahead with a roar. We attach significance to these arbitrary numbers—12, 18, 21, 30, the BIG 50, 60, 65. What do they mean? 

The King James Bible (Psalms 90: 7) gives us one of the most memorable phrasings of our limits with its customary sturdy poeticism:  “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” 

The line begins modestly, ‘days of our years,’ adds the common limit with ‘threescore years and ten’, offers up the exception with ‘fourscore years’ but undercuts the implicit surprise with the burden of ‘labour and sorrow.” Finally, the brutal efficiency of ‘it is soon cut off,’ is turned in mid-air as we strain against the tethers that bind us to the earth, and ‘we fly away.’ There’s nothing of Dylan Thomas’ plea to his dying father, “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It turns out that we were always meant to leave this earth, but the image is almost one of indifference—‘we fly away’ without a backward glance. 

It is not to be thought that I am at this threshold as yet. I’ve been fending off AARP for years, and both my grandparents lived past 90 with a good measure of strength and plenty of cheerfulness. But, as I say, it marks a moment that we invest with meaning. We should not shrug off these moments, for they will not always announce themselves. 

In 2000 Jacques Barzun, one of this epoch’s greatest cultural historians, published his massive work, From Dawn to Decadence, a New York Times bestseller and the capstone to 75 years and over 30 books of a remarkable career. Two years later The Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works was published, and the first essay, “Toward a Fateful Serenity,” speaks autobiographically of the fault lines and accidents of history that shaped him early on. As a child of wealth, privilege, and genteel upbringing he lived through the chaos of the First World War in Paris, Grenoble, and the south of France. He remembers how temperament, tragedy, and trauma shaped him into the ‘cheerful pessimist’ who, in his eighties, could live serenely despite a culture that exalts selfishness. One of the things that history taught him was ‘the lost faculty of admiration.’ “The past,” he said, “is full of men and women (and children too) whose lives and deeds are worthy of honor, wonder, and gratitude, which I take to be the components of admiration.” 

And I, too, find myself surrounded by those I can admire, argue with, be inspired by, and learn from—from Aristotle to Zola, Annie Lenox to U2, A Bug’s Life to Unforgiven. Barzun recommends reciprocity, a reckoning of the debt we owe to those who have lighted our way. Thus, in gratitude to just some of those whose music has raised me up, here are lines that gave me words for the unwritten scripts I have lived out through the years.

“When you’re down and troubled, and you need a helping hand . . . .” — James Taylor
“Your time has come to shine/All your dreams are on their way . . . .” — Paul Simon
“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive . . . .” — Bruce Springsteen
“So let us not talk falsely now/The hour is getting late . . . .” — Bob Dylan
“Shower the people you love with love/Show them the way that you feel . . . .” — James Taylor
“In your eyes, the light the heat/In your eyes/I am complete . . . .” — Peter Gabriel
“You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one . . . . John Lennon
“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah/Pilgrim through this barren land . . . .” — William Williams
“You broke the bonds/And you loosed the chains/Carried the cross of my shame/Oh my shame/You know I believe it . . . .” — U2
“The river’s wide, we’ll swim across/We’re starting up a brand new day . . . .” — Sting
“Leave it behind/You got to leave it behind . . . .” — U2

and of course. . . .

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four?” — The Beatles


Whose Reality Show is This?

“This is the age of contrivance. The artificial has become so commonplace that the natural begins to seem contrived.” — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America


If the Republican candidates were students in a communications and public speaking course their midterm evaluations—based on their classroom performances—might look something like this . . . 

Sarah Palin — Charming and even flirtatious when she wants to be, but can turn vicious in a heartbeat. Late with her assignments, doesn’t seem to prepare, spurns advice. A dominant figure in any group, she tends to blame others for her mistakes. Still waiting for her to turn in her thesis statement. 

Rick Perry — Another student who waits till the last minute to prepare and then tries to impress by his bluff and bluster. That works for awhile but his lack of preparation quickly comes to light when questioned on his positions. Proud of being a doer rather than a thinker—obviously believes you can’t be both at the same time. 

Michele Bachman — Reacts rather than responds. Talks faster than she thinks. Relays second-hand information picked up from headlines. Sincere, upbeat, dazzling smile, too impatient to study. Does C work because she is constantly distracted. Would rather text than study. 

Herman Cain — Gregarious, ambitious, loves attention, overconfident. Used to getting what he wants, thus cannot handle even the slightest criticism. Comes up with clever phrasing but with little substance to ground it on. Should change his major to advertising or marketing. 

Ron Paul — One of the older students, keeps to himself, something of a loner. Firmly rooted in 19th century cultural values. In a group he sees himself as a spoiler rather than a tie-breaker. Uses every speech to advocate for American isolationism, the gold standard, or against taxes. Pre-med major; says he has no time for gen ed courses like Public Speaking.                                                                 

Newt Gingrich — Not afraid to speak a dissenting viewpoint, but was disastrous as a group leader. Seems to enjoy conflict for its own sake or as a way to gain an edge on someone else. Can be perceptive on certain issues but lets his need for power overrule his better judgment. Alienates the other students who think he’s arrogant. 

Rick Santorum — Knows how to articulate the free-floating fears of his contemporaries. Speaks with certainty on issues, but cannot understand people not like him. Sincere, has deep convictions, regards compromise on certain issues as moral betrayal. His inability to imagine other ways of perceiving the world hampers his ability to lead diverse groups. 

Jon Huntsman — Thoughtful, reflective, quiet, sits in the back of the classroom but pays attention. Often stays after class to discuss something or ask a question. In class discussions he often has the last word because he does not try to shout down the others. Will give his viewpoint if asked, but won’t compete with Gingrich or Santorum for air time. 

Mitt Romney — Class president, comfortable with money and power, looks “presidential.” Speeches are carefully outlined, delivery is standard, phrasing is predictable as are his positions. Ambitious, self-assured, but lacks depth. Out of his element when classroom discussions focus on issues of justice, poverty, or the increasing gap between the very rich and the poor. Envied but not particularly liked.

Of course, any person is more than what you see. But the hidden parts—you might call them ‘character’—are rarely seen in a public figure for two reasons: first, television transmits images, not ideals, and secondly, candidates play roles that they then try to live up to. 

It is not farfetched to imagine that if a candidate were to listen closely to a wide variety of Americans and then to honestly and clearly express his or her personal convictions in response, that such a candidate would be applauded in the media for a fine performance. It would not be at all clear that anyone had actually listened to what was said.