The Meaning of Christmas

No matter how conscientious one is at trying to stay out of line of fire and wait for the attack to be over, it seems impossible to avoid entirely the almost literally non-stop bombardment of "holiday" ads --- in print, on television, on billboards, on the radio, before movies, on virtually every site in the virtual world of the internet. It can be done, of course, but it would require a true retreat from the world, not merely a vague attempt to ignore, and I'm not willing to do that, so I continue to be hit, as it were. I wish that they were, as so many old movies and TV shows put it, only flesh wounds, but I know better: each one is a blow to the soul.

This has been going on for so long that most of us take it for granted, although I think that it goes beyond that. My intuition is that some critical mass of us now positively affirms the contemporary nature of "the holidays" with all its pressure to buy exactly the right thing for all those people who are going to be disappointed and critical if you don't; to entertain friends, neighbors, and family, and to do it in a way that will not allow for criticism from them; and to be "joyful" through it all. "The Holidays" as social and emotional obligation: One can almost see the old cartoon portrayals of the fat, cigar-smoking capitalists chuckling with satisfaction at how cleverly they have co-opted the events and manipulated us.

This is, of course, not just cognitive dissonance but the imposition --- and now the embracing --- of obligations that are impossible to meet. Through the influence of the most talented and effective industrial psychologists in the world, we have become our own crazy-making torturers.

(From 1958, here is Stan Freberg's "Green Christmas" wherein he satirizes the commercialization of Christmas. He was right then, but the current reality has gone way beyond what he was seeing. For one, we have successfully commodified all the traditions of Christmas. Even the most faithful or the most sentimental stories are vaguely accepted as just part of the great blob of "holiday tradition.")

I suggest that, to the extent each of us finds it possible, to step outside this dance circle and think about and act on either of two actually meaningful ways of looking at these end-of-year celebrations. (There are other traditional and meaningful celebrations at this time of year, none of which I know enough about to include here.)

The first is the orthodox Christian understanding of Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation, the coming into the world of the Messiah, God Himself choosing to live not only among His creatures but as one of them; to live a fully human life with all its joys and sorrows; and ultimately to suffer and die, just as we do. The story as it used to be told was this: After Adam and Eve had committed the Original Sin, one of the effects was that Heaven was closed to humans, and it would take a sacrifice to overcome the effects of that sin and to re-open the gates of Heaven, and that is why the Son of God came to live among us and to die for us.

Whatever your theological position on this story, it is undeniably, as Fulton Oursler put it, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

So Christmas --- the Mass of the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah --- is the remembrance, the celebration of what believing Christians see as the most auspicious event in the history of the world. (It is no accident the world of Christendom saw history as separated into the time before the coming of the Christ and the time after the coming of the Christ.)

In this way of thinking about Christmas, the giving of gifts to one another is a small, symbolic representation of the great gift of Salvation given by God to His creatures. And it is supposed to be a reminder that, to put it crudely, we are all in this together, that God came to be with all of us so that we all could be redeemed, that we are all eternally loved creatures of an eternally and infinitely loving God. So gathering in some kind of communion is also a way to symbolize the great truths of our existence and of history.

I think it's obvious that the emphasis on material and emotional vanities has very little to do with Christmas as understood in this orthodox way. On this understanding, Christmas is a formalized opportunity for us to remember and to affirm the greatest truth of our existence.

The second is a pagan understanding. Our reptilian hind brain is still at work and one of the things it registers is that the sun, immediately after the summer solstice, begins to head south with no guarantee that it will ever come back. Try to imagine our most ancient ancestors, aware enough of natural changes to pay attention to the shortening days and lengthening nights and dropping temperatures, but not sophisticated enough to be sure that the process would reverse itself and that the sun would come back north, the days would get longer, and the temperatures would rise.

So historically there are pre-Christian and non-Christian celebrations that come only days after the winter solstice, as the sun starts to come back and the days get a little longer, because once again we have been spared the catastrophe that the sun's dropping off to the south and disappearing from our lives would bring.

What is common to both understandings is that we have been saved, and what is called for is humble and celebratory gratitude. Whether in the sacramental tradition of Christianity or the feasting tradition of paganism, what is appropriate is celebratory thanksgiving.

"The Holidays" are not meant to be a time that we celebrate getting together but a time when we get together to celebrate our salvation, however we define that.

If you want to fight back against the "corporate fat cats," re-claiming the end-of-year celebrations as meaningful rather than materialistic would be great way to do it.

The Gift of Music

And the young man said, "Speak to us of the Great American Songbook."

"To know the Songbook is a life's work, albeit an enjoyable and rewarding one," the Prophet said, "and, as with many things, we can start with the excellent article in Wikipedia.

"But the best way to learn is to listen:

     Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook, Volume I

     Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook, Volume II

     Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook

     Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Gershwin Songbook

     Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook

     Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook

     Ella Fitzgerald, The Intimate Ella

     Ella Fitzgerald, Like Someone In Love

     Frank Sinatra, The Voice

     Frank Sinatra, Songs for Swingin' Lovers

     Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours

     Frank Sinatra, A Swingin' Affair

     Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely

     Carly Simon, My Romance

     Carly Simon, Moonlight Serenade

     Linda Rondstadt, What's New?

     Linda Rondstadt, 'Round Midnight

     Diana Krall, From This Moment On

     Diana Krall, The Look of Love

     Various artists, American Popular Song

"Go, my son, go and listen, and learn, and grow in spirit. As a wise old professor once said, 'The duty of the poet is to bolster the nation's courage.' Living with these wonderful melodies and great lyrics, the best work of the poets of our own time, will bolster yours."

Devolution

We are well into Advent and the great feast of Christmas will soon be here so the question of presents looms large, especially what presents are appropriate for whom. For several people on my list, I will give, in one form or another, the gift of music. Pondering the possibilities inevitably led me into my favorite pastime, abstracting things beyond all recognizability; in this case, considering the state of contemporary popular music and what it says about us.

I was reminded of a scene from "10" where the Dudley Moore character has followed the Bo Derek character and her new husband to a posh Mexican resort where they will be spending their honeymoon. On his first night there, the Dudley Moore character goes to a lovely poolside bar where the bartender is played by Brian Dennehy. There is a very nice arrangement of "Laura" in the background, played on a piano.

The two men engage in the following conversation:

Moore: "They don't make music like that anymore. At least, not much anymore, anyway."

Dennehy: "Is that good or bad?"

M:  "What do you think?"

D:  "Actually, I'm opposed to bartenders making value judgments while on duty."

M: "How old are you?"

D:  "37, but I look 40."

M:  "No, you look 33."

D: "That's because I'm really 25."

M:  "Well, each of us is the product of an era. That music is my era. Beautiful melody, great lyric.

"If you were 19 and 20 years from now you were dancing with your wife or girlfriend you knew in high school and you said to her, 'Darling, they're playing our song,' do you know what they would be playing?

D:  "Uh-uh."

M:  "'Why Don't We Do It in the Road'. What kind of f...ing era is that?!"

D:  "To each his own."

M:  "Now that's a good song."

(You can see the whole scene here.)

I was going to update the gag by referring to some particularly hideous example of contemporary popular music from 2012 but the research process was overwhelming. There is so much that is so awful --- aesthetically and morally --- that I had to withdraw, so you fill in the blank.

Recently I read a wonderful review in The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz of a new book by Ted Gioia, Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire. Gioia's book sounds terrific, offering "a guide to more than 250 key jazz compositions --- the 'building blocks of the jazz art form'," and I plan to give it this year to my jazz-playing barber.

But Schwarz's thesis, and this is the title of the review, is that we have come to "The End of Jazz" because the Great American Songbook is gone. John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet is quoted as saying,

          Jazz developed while the great popular music was being turned out. It was a
          golden age for songs. They had a classic quality in length and shape and form
          and flexibility of harmony. The jazz musicians were drawn to this music as a
         source of material.

Schwarz's conclusion is that

          The Songbook, a product of a fleeting set of cultural circumstances when popular,
          sophisticated music was aimed at musically knowledgeable adults, was the
          crucial wellspring of jazz....and there is no reason to believe that jazz can be
          a living, evolving art form decades after its major source --- and the source
          that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment --- has
          dried up.

There is a long story --- not a joke but a story with a moral --- the conclusion of which is that the ultimate wisdom is "This, too, shall pass." Undoubtedly true. But when thinking about the current state of things musical, it's very difficult not to see a pretty steep downward curve from 19th Century lieder and Stephen Foster, to the greats of the Songbook --- Berlin, Kern, Porter, the Gershwins, et al, to the breakthroughs in rock'n'roll in the '50's, to whatever it is we have now.

The music business, like real estate, is one of the great examples of capitalism: people will pay for what they want. No one is forcing contemporary music down our throats; we are being given what we ask for and will pay for.

Christmas remains a profoundly important time, despite the tidal-wave of time and energy devoted to commercializing it, and one of the most important elements of it is a kind of defiant act of faith in ourselves and our future. Just days after the shortest day of the year, deep in "the bleak midwinter," we celebrate life and the hope that is symbolized by the Incarnation.

So I will not give in to despair about our music but will keep the faith, in whatever ways I can, but especially by listening to music with "a classic quality in length and shape and form and flexibility of harmony." A gift indeed.

Bonus: An audience participation question. If you wanted to update the conversation from "10," and assuming that "Laura" would still stand as representative of the Songbook, what contemporary song would you use to replace "Why Don't We Do It In The Road"?

Questioning Authority

The '60's --- that is, November 22, 1963, to August 8, 1974 --- gave us many things. One of those things was the advent of what one wag referred to as "bumper sticker philosophy," the posting on automobile bumpers of pithy statements of (allegedly) deep meaning: "One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day" or "War is unhealthy for children and other living things" or "I"ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands," to cite a few of the more memorable.

One of the most common of these was the one that demanded, "Question Authority." And apparently it was not just a popular bumper sticker. I've seen it described as a fundamental tenet, a kind of rallying cry, for only a fairly large but very influential group of young people, most of them undergraduates at our most prestigious colleges and universities.

In context, given the high level of moral condemnation of the Vietnam War and, by extension, the moral condemnation of the government that was waging it; and the behavior of local and state governments in response to various activities of the civil rights movement; and the Watergate scandal that seemed to demonstrate that all previous skepticism about the federal government in particular and authority in general was not only justified but understated, such an attitude is understandable, maybe even inevitable.

There are dangers involved in giving in to that level of distrust but that's another topic for another day. What I want to poke at today is the elimination of the notion of authority from the ways that we understand, think about, and talk about all manner of personal and institutional relationships.

In the academic and intellectual conversations that I have in which the concepts of "power" and "authority" are pertinent, I have seen two epistemic and psychological phenomena come up over and over. The first is the conflation of the two terms. I know very smart and highly educated people who believe that the two terms are synonymous; that "power" and "authority" mean exactly the same thing.

The second is that even the possibility of authority is seen by some people as leading inevitably to patriarchal oppression of women and racial submission of blacks and stigmatizing of homosexuals and so on. To these people, even allowing the notion of authority is to put in danger all the social, cultural, and political gains we have made over the last century.

So, one at a time.

There are serious problems that arise from conflating "power" and "authority." "Power" resides in the ability of one person (or group) to force another person (or group) to do what the one with the power wants even if they don't want to. A crude example is when Ralph has the gun and I don't. Ralph can insist that I do something that I don't want to do because if I don't he will kill me. But any time an individual or an institution or a bureaucracy creates a situation in which someone has to do things he doesn't want to do or suffer, it is a function of power.

There is no question that power is necessary in the world. Power is, as I see it, morally neutral. The question of importance is how power is used, for good or ill.

"Authority," on the other hand, is something else entirely. Where I can take power if I get the gun away from Ralph, I can't take authority; it has to be granted to me because I have earned it. Authority is granted because of expertise, good character, or a particular kind of revered status --- the Pope or the Dalai Lama, for example.

We grant authority of various kinds to the doctors who diagnose and treat us; to the lawyers who represent us; to some teachers and professors; to some clergy; to tennis coaches; and so on. The important point is that we grant it and we can take it away. Authority is conferred upon those others who deserve it, or who have convinced us that they deserve it.

The notion of "authority" has always been at least a little tenuous in the United States. The concepts of royalty and aristocracy, based on heredity, never took root here and, as time passed, even the watered down versions of those concepts lost their influence in the way that people thought about themselves and their relationships to others. When Quakers refused to doff their hats when passing "the better sort" on the sidewalk it was a harbinger of a process that would move faster and get bigger and more influential.

Democracy, at least as it has been practiced here, always skates perilously close to egalitarianism and sometimes a crude egalitarianism (if that isn't redundant) is incapable of separating the notion of equal rights from the notion of deserved authority. It seems apparent to me that we are living in a moment where a kind of simplistic belief that "I'm just as good as anybody else" has moved over into something like "no one is any better than I am and so no one deserves to be treated as an authority."

It is probably true that "this, too, shall pass." But in the meantime, having removed a properly understood "authority" from our understanding, our thinking, and our talking, we are left with only "power," and that is highly dangerous. If we frame everything in terms of power, we are driven into selfishness, self-protectiveness, and ultimately into what Hobbes called "a war of all against all."

The problem with the bumper sticker, or perhaps with the way that the bumper sticker was interpreted, was that it established a false dichotomy: either one "questioned" authority or one was a mindless (even cowardly) conformist.

"Authority" was something to be wary of, even to fear. Now we see this being played out in the attitude of children toward their parents; students toward their teachers and professors; patients toward their doctors; employees toward their employers; congregants toward their pastors.

There are those who don't see this as problematic; who see it, in fact, as a great step forward. Maybe they're right, but I don't think so. I think we need --- and I use the word advisedly --- to let go of this mass vanity and re-establish "authority."

Which gets us to the second phenomenon, the fear that allowing any version of "authority" into the conversation will lead inevitably into the submission of anyone who is not a rich white man. It seems obvious to me that this is a false dichotomy: That we can have either freedom for all or submission to authority. Democracy allows for, even requires, a variety of personal and institutional relationships, some of which can be egalitarian, some meritocratic, and some based on a voluntary and contingent submission to authority.

We live in a time where many people who we need to be worthy of being granted authority are not worthy of it, especially in the worlds of politics and organized religion. And it is also true that we --- all of us --- have turned into our idols a bunch of people who are most certainly not worthy of being granted authority.

There are two things necessary to get out of this. The first and more necessary is that we --- all of us --- demand the behavior and character that are worthy of being granted authority. The second and just as important is that people who take positions which by nature involve the possibility of authority manifest those behaviors and characteristics that deserve to be granted authority.

But the very first step is probably bringing back into the conversation, bringing back out of intellectual exile, the concept of authority.

Vulnerability

L'affaire Petreaus has been much in the news. Although I haven't seen everything printed or posted about this, what I have seen has been surprisingly mild. With a few exceptions, I have seen little crowing either from the point of view of moral superiority or from the point of view of political schadenfreude. One can only hope that this is not an anomaly but a small sign of a trend.

The whole sad situation has reminded me of two lines that are both apposite and helpful to reflect on. The first is the old and well-known, "There but for the grace of God go I." This is meant to be not just a statement of gratitude, and certainly not just a way to express relief, but an acknowledgement of the disagreeable truth that we are all susceptible to temptation, that at one time or another we all fail, we all fall. Reminders of this are important because our natural tendency is to avoid such thoughts. While that great philosopher Johnny Mercer was right, we should "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," it is also true that temptation is sneaky and seldom if ever ugly and obnoxious. It's helpful to be reminded of our inherent vulnerability.

But it was another line that struck me as even more appropriate, a line from the Eagles' song "A New York Minute":

               If you find somebody in this world to love
               You better hang on tooth and nail
               The wolf is always at the door

The Long Campaign

My elder son, in whom I am well-pleased, is a smart, thoughtful, aware man who follows current affairs and cares deeply about them. He also believes I am politically somewhat dim, so he sends me things to read, sometimes things which he has written and sometimes things from (mostly) respectable journals which publish on-line.

Yesterday, he sent a piece by David Frum, who writes for Newsweek and The Daily Beast but who also has some conservative credentials. Whatever your take on the election and the consequent post-mortem, I think it's worth reading.

There are a couple of points in the Frum piece itself that I want to poke at a bit, but mostly I want to meditate on what I see as the long campaign of which the election of 2012 was only the most recent event.

First, Frum commits a logical error which is shocking coming from someone with his credentials. He contends that Bill O'Reilly is the spokesman for conservatism, quotes O'Reilly's latest silliness, and then criticizes --- condemns? --- that point of view: O'Reilly represents conservatism; O'Reilly is an idiot; therefore conservatism is, at least, suspect. In the world of logical fallacies, we call this a "straw man." It is like ridiculing the concept of monarchy because Joseph DeMaistre supported it (which is actually a pretty good line if you're hip to this particular bit of esoterica). If you're interested in thoughtful and measured post-election reflections by conservatives, I suggest this by Charles Krauthammer and this by George Will.

Second, Frum repeats a trope common over the last 30 years or so, that the political battle is over the center, that advantage shifts from center-left to center-right and back again. I'm not enough of a political scientist to know the extent to which this oft-repeated claim is true, but I am hesitant to accept it, just as I am  hesitant to accept any form of conventional wisdom. There is something about it which just seems too easy.

But the real point of this post is that the election of 2012 is really not very important or interesting as a discrete event (although it will be very interesting to see if the socially libertarian and egalitarian decisions on marijuana and gay marriage turn out to be the wave of the future or something that will not last).

There is, I'm afraid, a certain amount of pedantic exposition necessary here. The election of 2012 is just the latest event in an ideological and practical conflict that goes back to the end of the 19th Century. The North's victory in the Civil War eliminated the split between half a country devoted to modern political and economic principles and other half devoted to pre-modern political and economic principles.

The Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's, helped propel the United States headlong into industrial capitalism, so that a country which in 1850 had been a non-factor in the world's industrial economy would become by 1920 the great industrial power.

This process had many effects, the most important of which were social, cultural, and political. The democratic capitalism envisioned by Jackson and Lincoln became the corporate capitalism of Rockefeller and Carnegie. The factory system drew larger and larger portions of the population into cities, a process increased further by the second great wave of immigration, this one made up almost entirely of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, almost entirely Catholics and Jews.

As it always has, industrial capitalism led to an improved standard of living, more personal freedom, and more social mobility; but the dynamism which allowed for these improvements also created great and painful disruptions.

The move to the cities had created a situation in which people found themselves living within a mass, rather than in a society, as they had in the small towns from which most of them came. The impersonality, the unpredictability, and the very energy of this new situation were frightening to many, and that fright played itself out in different ways within different populations.

Workers tried to unionize and there were riots. Farmers whose understanding of basic economic principles was drastically upset by the effects of now-global markets demonstrated, organized into political groups, and pushed for currency reform. And corporations pushed harder and harder for more and more control over larger and larger sections of the economy.

Amidst all this unrest, compounded by the mass immigration of people whose cultural assumptions and practices were so different, the middle class felt abandoned. Political and economic forces were at play that seemed to threaten their preeminence in American life. Organized labor, organized farmers, conspiring corporations, and the background "noise" of the profound social changes created by just the presence of the immigrants --- all undermined the confidence and sense of cultural importance of the middle class.

There was a certain sense of fear for survival, but mostly it was a feeling that there were forces at play of which they had little understanding and against which they had no defense. This was a different kind of politics, a politics of competing interests, and the middle class had no organized political representation.

One of the reasons that this had happened was that the federal government, with some notable exceptions, had stayed out of the economic life of the country during the 19th Century. Not laissez-faire, strictly speaking, but certainly something approaching a hands-off policy.

But by the end of the Century, it was clear that the government was going to have to get back in. While it was true that a big part of the reason the government had to get back in was for government to be a counter-balance to the ever-growing power and influence of big business, it was also true that thoughtful people realized that a politics of competing interest groups demanded a disinterested, centralized authority to maintain an orderly and civil political process.

The result was the Progressives, the political group that gave us Robert LaFollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, and that gave us the referendum, the recall, and the ability of the people to put potential legislation on the ballot through propositions.

At some level of decision-making, it was determined that the political culture of the middle class should be enshrined as the defining elements of the new politics, the politics of the new reality, the politics of the industrial and multicultural city.

But it was never quite that simple because the question always was, and still is, to what extent should the government become involved? This is not only an extremely complex question on its face, the specifics are always changing because of the very dynamism of industrial capitalism. No one in 1912 could possibly have predicted the technology that we take for granted in 2012 (see "21st Century Skills") and every one of those technological advances has political, economic, social, and cultural consequences. So even if someone had figured out the exactly right formula for how much, and in what ways, the government should be involved in 1912 (and many tried), that formula would have been outdated by 1922 and completely inappropriate by 1932. And the process of globalization, interrupted by the great European civil war of 1914-1989 but now back in full swing, increases the complexity by factors.

The dynamism of the process which is at the heart of how we live is the very reason that we can't figure out exactly what the right formula is.

If this is what David Frum means by the contest being over the middle, sometimes moving to the center-right and sometimes to the center-left, then okay. I prefer to think of it as an on-going tension within American society in which the body politic pushes in one direction and then the next depending on an almost literally unbelievable --- and ever-increasing --- set of factors.

It takes a real democrat to trust the people in such a process.

Leadership

I have recently been reminded of the profound truth of two statements that border on the cliche but which are true nonetheless. The first, and more general, is that in any organization, the character, personality, and temperament of the personnel is the single most important factor in the health and success of the organization; the second, and somewhat more specific, is that the character, personality, and temperament of the head of the organization is the most important factor of all.

For whatever reasons, it is easier for me to imagine situations in which bad forms of character, personality, and temperament lead to toxicity and dysfunction. I hope that rather than a mere self-indulgent screed, that such a description will make the necessity of the right forms more obvious.

First, a word about the descriptions of organizations undermined by bad forms of character, personality, and temperament. We are prone to describe such situations as "dysfunctional," but that, while not inaccurate, is misleading. It is obviously true that organizations do perform functions, and performing those functions effectively and efficiently is essential to organizational success. But to focus on the functions themselves, and on the functionality of the organization's processes, is to emphasize the mechanical, the technical, and the outcomes. While it is true that organizations that suffer from bad forms of character, personality, and temperament do also suffer from reduced efficiency and efficacy, that is not the more important element.

The more important element is that such organizations are, to use the other current jargon, toxic; that is, they suffer from a systemic infection, not just reduced efficiency and efficacy.

Consider an extreme example, a kind of perfect storm of wrong character, personality, and temperament embodied in the leader of an organization. This hypothetical person is unscrupulous, arrogant, and --- at least relative to the demands of his position --- lacking in intelligence. This is a person who is absolutely sure of his own rightness; is not smart enough to see the larger picture or to question his assumptions and desires; and who feels not only free to impose his will on those he employs but who feels a kind of righteous self-assurance about imposing that will.

Such a person sees organizational leadership solely in terms of power: he must establish it and maintain it. The obvious way to accomplish this is to create fear and the most obvious way to do that is to punish enough people so that the rest become subservient. More often than not, that punishment takes the form of driving people out; simply dismissing them; or demoting them in humiliating ways. It doesn't take very many such events for the rest of the people in the organization to realize that they are dealing with power and nothing else, and that their alternatives are to conform, whatever new and different forms that takes from time to time, or to suffer.

Such a person, if sufficiently clever, knows that the stick is not enough; there must also be the carrot. In many cases, this amounts to the rewarding of two kinds of people: those who are truly and most obviously loyal and those who espouse some essentially harmless and unthreatening cause or program but whose support can be sold as courageous and principled when it is seldom anything of the kind.

This process is not about function, although functions are certainly affected; they are about the resultant infection to the institutional body. Fear is a great motivator but it motivates toward self-protection, toward reading the signs and symbols in order to say and do the safe thing, toward competition instead of cooperation and collaboration, toward survival as the only vital goal.

Which gets us back to the importance of personnel generally. In organizations run by those like our hypothetical example, the vicious, undermining, poisonous, gossiping, and back-stabbing are not only tolerated but actively encouraged. The inmates become their own jailers.

There's nothing new or shocking about this, especially after the huge institutional versions of it that dominated the 20th Century. The difference between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the hypothetical situation I described above is one of degree, not of kind. We've seen it all before.

It is one of many, many examples of how tempting power is and how corrupting it is.

Real leadership takes not only a principled vision and managerial expertise. It also takes the personal and professional courage to define the institutional culture, to face down the bullies, and to insist on everyone's commitment to the principles that inform the organization.

A difficult challenge, perhaps more difficult in our time than ever before because of the universal sense of entitlement and self-importance, but anything less is inhumane.

We should be aware of and grateful for the examples of right leadership that there are about us. And in those situations where people suffer from rule-by-fear, we should strive for reform or maybe even revolution.

A Post-Election Day Meditation

Now that the results are in, there already are, and no doubt will continue to be, pleas for bipartisan cooperation; for reaching across the aisle; for putting aside partisan preferences in favor of working toward the common good.

On the face of it, this seems unlikely. As several of the talking heads pointed out last night, campaigning in 2012 cost something like 6 billion dollars and resulted in nothing more than the maintenance of the status quo ante. Despite Mr. Obama's election night contention that there is not a real split in the American people, the election results themselves seem to deny that.

One can hope that it does not turn out that our elected representatives continue to act as they have in the recent past.  Predicting the future on the basis of the present is almost always wrong, so maybe everyone involved will come to see things in a different way. It is devoutly to be wished.

I am skeptical, not because of the election result numbers but because I think that they reflect something very deep and very real. I don't know how to label it; I suspect that many will try to do so in the next few years. But I think that there has been a profound shift in the zeitgeist, a re-defining of the dominant cultural paradigm and that this election, even more than the election of 2008, manifested this. This election was contested on many different levels of political, economic, social, and cultural consideration, but I think that the single most significant element was that Mr. Obama --- and, by extension, his organization and those who ran in other races who reflected his point of view --- not only embraced but embodied the characteristics of that new paradigm.

To vote for Mr. Obama was, as his favorite slogan had it, to be "Forward" thinking, feeling, and acting; to vote against him was akin to trying to hold back the tide.

This is intuitive, of course, but my sense is that what it comes down to for many people is a choice between being progressive or reactionary; to be in favor of moving forward or in favor of trying to prevent moving forward.

(This raises the question of what form a genuinely conservative [as opposed to reactionary] response --- or alternative --- could be to these new social and cultural realities. After 1945, when the Republican party had become a political afterthought, a conservative intellectual movement articulated a coherent and attractive position that eventuated in the Reagan presidency. That coherent set of ideas, and the authentic coalition that grew around it, are gone. Mr. Romney and his campaign were obviously not the people to develop, articulate, sell, and govern by a conservative vision appropriate to our time and circumstances. Will there be such a person and what will be that vision? But these questions are for another time.)

The point here is that the chances of there being a bi-partisan approach are, as the old line has it, slim and none. Of the many reasons that I think this is true, to me the most significant is that this is not just a political or economic divide; it is not just an ideological divide; it is a philosophical divide. To the people actively involved in electoral politics, the stakes seem ever and ever higher, and each side sees itself on the side of right.

(I am reminded of the Bob Dylan song "With God On Our Side." Maybe we ought to lock them all in a room and force them to listen to that over and over until they come to their senses.)

Last night someone suggested that the President call for a kind of summit meeting of the major players and that it should be away somewhere; Camp David, for example. Maybe away from the "noise" of the Capital, they could concentrate on addressing the issues.

I would suggest, rather, a Humility workshop. As long as all the players are absolutely --- even arrogantly --- convinced of their own rightness and see the opposition as mindlessly refusing to go along with what is obviously right, there will be no bi-partisanship and we will continue to beat on one another. We will, as the post-modernist/multi-cultural folks like to say, "other" one another.

As Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see."

This means you.

An Election Day Meditation

You may not be aware that the readership of this blog is well up into the single digits. One of those readers responded to the "seek after peace and pursue it" post by sending a paraphrase of the Serenity Prayer:

     God, grant me the serenity
     To accept the things I cannot control,
     Courage to control the things  I can,
     and wisdom to know the difference. 

Something about this struck me as not entirely apposite to the point I was making, but it was not immediately clear why. So in the spirit of writing to find out what one knows, as opposed to writing in order to tell what he knows, I offer this meditation.

It seems to me that there are two levels of reason for humbly accepting that one cannot control everything. The first is a psychological reason (or perhaps a psychological and social reason): a person is much more at peace, with himself and with others, when he does not try to control everything. This is a very good reason because internal peace and contentment may be the single happiest state we can achieve.

The second is a theological reason, the belief that there is a personal and infinitely loving God whose "eye is on the sparrow;" that is, a God who is actively involved in the world He created and moves in it in loving ways. If such a thing is true, then we can truly "Let Go; Let God." I believe that this is an even better reason.

Both reasons seem to proceed from the assumption that it is not a good thing to be in control of much of anything.

But doesn't this fly in the face of the practicalities of our lives? We have our physical selves to maintain and protect; we have our relatives and friends to support and defend; we have our professional and creative activities to practice. In all these ways, we hope to succeed and even to prosper. Are not these good things? Do we not have an obligation to love ourselves the way that He loves us? And to love one another as we love ourselves? And not to hide our light under the proverbial bushel basket but to shine in the world?

In life, we see examples of responses to these apparently contradictory requirements that span a wide spectrum. The hermit, the monk, the religious who lives in community, the resident of the kibbutz --- these occupy one end of the spectrum. The person who is acquisitive, selfish, and materialistic but involved in all kinds of social, political, and economic activities is at the other end.

The Greeks (and the Romans after them, imitating them as in most things) preached balance in our lives. One

 formulaic version of this is the saying "moderation in all things" which always reminds me of the Jesuit who said to us, "Moderation in all things, including moderation." As with most clever lines from Jesuits, there's a lot to that.

Emerson said, "Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." Moderation as a mindless habit doesn't seem like what the Ancients were advising.

So how are we to be humble enough to let go of the temptation to control others; loving enough to trust ourselves and to trust others, even when we are afraid to do so; and wise and courageous enough to do the right thing in the world?

These are the questions that have bedeviled thoughtful men and women from time immemorial. The licentious don't care about these questions; they get to do whatever they want. And the conformist don't care; they simply follow the rules of whatever institution they've turned themselves over to. And the supremely confident in their own rightness find such questions befuddling.

The free man takes on the burden of grappling with these questions and courageously living with the existential doubt that inevitably accompanies them.

That existential doubt is inevitable because "now we see through a glass, darkly." That is our lot and we can either take on that burden or shun it.

None of us will ever get it exactly right. No matter how hard we try, we are all imperfect. We should keep that in mind when we find ourselves thinking that we know what other people should do and be.

Not a bad meditation for Election Day, I think.

"Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your plan."

There are many things to recommend "Homeland" which I find to be the best thing on television since "The Wire."

But the element which intrigues and impresses me the most is the realistic portrayal of how complex each of us is; how motivated by a variety of things that matter for a variety of reasons; how inconsistent and unpredictable. And how unpredictable and inconsistent acts affect the other players, and their responses affect yet other players, and so on, until the original scheme is no longer relevant and the new schemes continue to change.

Among other things, this is a reminder of how unlikely conspiracies are. The explanation of confounding events by reference to a conspiracy theory is comforting, in situations where comfort is desperately needed; I am as temptable by this as anyone else.

But when we face the realities of human behavior --- the complexity, the inconsistency, the unpredictability --- it becomes extremely difficult to find any conspiracy theory credible.

One person can have a plan. Two people may be able to form a conspiracy; maybe even three; although even then the odds against efficiency, effectiveness, and secrecy are very high. And more than three is no longer a conspiracy; it's a convention.

So what can be learned from this dramatic portrayal? Several things occur, but to me the most important one is that control is a fantasy, a self-serving and comforting delusion. There are many about us whose lives are governed by this fantasy. We take humor from references to "control freaks" or "Type A personalities." But their lives are not happy, much less humorous, for the pursuit of control is never-ending and always frustrating because it is always out of reach. Such people are frantic and anxious and miserable and the people who orbit their lives aren't much better off.

So if control is impossible, what is the alternative? Chaos? That is certainly one logical possibility. And for people who are seeking control it is not just a logical possibility. Psychologically, it feels like an inevitability. This is terrorism but not the kind created by suicide-bomber fanatics. It's a terrorism that we visit on ourselves.

I must be in control or chaos will ensue. But I can't be control. But I must be in control. A truly awful state of being.

I don't believe that control and chaos are the only alternatives. The third way, and I think the best way, is to do the best one can and then to have faith that things will happen the way they are supposed to happen.

Sometimes it feels that the loving thing to do is to control others for their own good. This is almost never true. Or, to put it another way, it is only in the most extreme circumstances where it is true. Otherwise, the loving thing is to trust.

The characters in "Homeland" are like real people. Despite all the attempts to conspire and control, the individuals involved keep doing the inconsistent and unpredictable thing.

The philosopher Alisdair Macintyre once wrote of our time that it is "a new dark age" and that what we need is "another, doubtless very different, St. Benedict." In the Rule, Benedict emphasizes the line from Psalm 34, Verse 14: "Seek after peace and pursue it."

None of us has to be the new and different Benedict in order to practice one of the most efficacious ways of seeking after peace --- we can give up trying to control.

Resiliency

On the eve of the eve of Election 2012, when lots of people on both sides of the spectrum fear that the results could bring on something like the Apocalypse, I am moved to count the dreadful things we have lived through, coped with, and overcome. We are a remarkably resilient people both because of what the academics call "cultural capital" and because of democracy itself.

I have not included the obvious just because they are obvious: the World Wars, the Depression, the Cold War, natural disasters, etc. (Most of my family members would want to include the Presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush, but this is my blog so too bad.)

I have also tried not to include the merely idiosyncratically annoying and the explicitly political. I have aimed instead at things which are certainly annoying of and unto themselves but which also have larger cultural implications.

So, in no particular order

     the designated hitter rule

     artificial turf

     domed stadiums

     bicycle helmets

     the back-up beeper on commercial vehicles

     "sharing"

     verbing --- the turning nouns into verbs; "impact," e.g.

     the use of "ironic" for "coincidental"

     the use of "cynical" for "skeptical"

     the misuse of "fair"

     "non-sexist" language

     turning the university into a training institution

     removing any serious connection to the founding religion from religious colleges and universities

     air travel

     post-modernism in all its forms

     "reality" television shows

     "greed is good"

     focus groups

     the soft totalitarianism of giving us just enough to keep us fed and entertained

     ESPN

     chest-thumping athletes

     the disappearance of modesty as an ideal and as a practice

     The Sexual Revolution

     video review

      internet "research"

     the anonymity of on-line comments and responses

     turning the altar around

     the claim of being "offended" without reference to commonly held standards

      egalitarianism over democracy

     loss of any real connection to the past

     self-admiration

     The Rise of the Bureaucrats

     social media

     the ubiquity of meaningless phrases: almost, a little bit, a quick question, just, not necessarily
            (used incorrectly), actually, etc.

     "I just kind of feel....."

     sequels

     steroids

     the ubiquity of cell phones/cameras/video recorders

     "hopefully"

     euphemisms

     "Yeah, I mean......"

     awesome

     "almost like"

     redundancies

     "holiday" songs, celebrations, parties, gifts, etc.

     advertisements promoting Christmas shopping on October 1st

     "tragedy"

     moral relativism

     cultural relativism

     student learning outcomes

     the use of sit-com catch phrases as a substitute for humor

     "That was then; this is now"

     the confusion of "skills" and "knowledge"


I invite your contributions to this list.

And I pray for a grass-roots reform effort so that we can not just survive these cultural devolutions but can move toward and embrace something much more like what we need.

The Pleasure of Power

We live in a time where we are deeply conflicted about the concept of power. On the one hand, we encourage the empowering of people; on the other hand, we are suspicious of people who have power (especially the so-called 1 %). On the one hand, we are thrilled when watching those who exercise power, who impose their will on others --- athletes, movie heroes and anti-heroes, even movie thugs and gangsters; on the other, we cringe when someone in real life steps up and acts in a powerful way because that's not "nice."

Where this conceptual conflict is being played out most dramatically is in schools. For 4 decades or more, we have worked at empowering students, at treating them like clients rather than like traditional students, at figuring out how to win them over and "engage" them so that they will behave reasonably well and learn a reasonable amount. Reading the State-published guidelines for public school teachers, it is obvious that it is up to the teacher to figure out ways to entice students to behave well and to study. There is almost literally nothing about the responsibility of the student to learn and not much more about the responsibility of the student to choose to behave well.

I don't have the data to support drawing a cause-and-effect line between this approach and the reality that there is now so much "bullying" going on in schools that the concern has proceeded from faculty meeting topics to district-wide policy-setting to articles in a wide variety of periodicals to beautifully produced "public service announcements" featuring famous and beautiful people coming out against "bullying." It's an epidemic and it's obvious that we don't really know how to approach it and I suspect that there is a causal relationship.

In teacher preparation classes, I would sometimes raise the question of what a teacher should do when she saw one student teasing or ridiculing or physically intimidating another student. The response I got was universally that the proper strategy for the teacher to adopt was to "model" the behavior she wanted to see in the classroom. When I asked my students whether they could imagine being more pro-active and pointing out that the hurtful behavior was wrong and telling them why and telling them that it therefore must be stopped and never happen again, they were befuddled; such a thing had never occurred to them nor had anyone ever suggested it to them.

There are a number of pedagogical, epistemological, psychological, political, and ethical assumptions at work here. The ones that I want to pursue have to do with our understanding of what power is and what it's for.

Michel Foucault famously contended that "everything is politics and all politics is power." If one understands "politics" in this context to mean the entirety of interactions and negotiations of individuals and groups with other individuals and groups, then we have to take Foucault to mean that the nature of the world is nothing except a series of power transactions in which dominance and submission are established and any further policy or practice flows inevitably from that result.

This is not an esoteric academic theory held and understood and acted on only by a small intellectual elite. It is an attitude that informs the behavior of a great many people, even some people who have managed to achieve a veneer of civilization. One of the obvious manifestations of this attitude is in imaginative products --- novels, movies, music. Characters articulate their belief that the world is completely made up of what Hobbes called "the war of all against all" and that everyone is in it for his own gain and cares nothing for anyone else and that anyone who claims otherwise is either profoundly naive or running a scam (as his version of getting from others). Such people see those who preach ethical standards as either deluded or duplicitous and highly hypocritical. The criminal version of this character often claims a kind of superiority because he's honest about what he's doing where the bourgeois version hides behind a screen of lies.

(We can see a mild version of this in the Woody Guthrie song where he contrasts those who "rob with a six gun" with those who "rob with a fountain pen." Guthrie clearly preferred those who robbed with a six gun, although I have a hard time imagining that he would have gone as far as Foucault.)

It isn't just the influence of an otherwise minor French intellectual. I don't think that we give nearly enough credit to the epistemological and psychological effects of the 20th Century generally and of World War II in particular. The horrors of World War II went far beyond the usual horrors of war, the almost unimaginable loss of life and the resultant effects on the survivors. There was a level of barbaric behavior, made even more effective by advances in technology, that brought into question the worth of the entire Western project: rationality (and especially science), Christianity, liberal politics, the rule of law, and tolerance of diversity.

There was a whole generation of academics and professionals --- the group within Western society that we could loosely call the intellectuals --- for whom those barbaric acts indicated that the Western project had been a delusion and must be left behind (which led to a wide variety of suggested alternatives). The camps, the Bomb, Dresden and Tokyo, the medical experiments, the torture, the apparently easy step into seeing the other as less than human --- all these and many more had convinced these observers that we in the West had been kidding ourselves, that it had all been an illusion. Reason was an illusion, so attempts at objectivity and disinterest were pointless at best, just another way to control others at worst. For many, the Nazis had been associated with Christianity just enough to discredit the founding religion of the West.

As with so many things, what had affected the intellectual class made its way into the general population in more and more popular forms, until now we see what people from before our own time would quickly recognize as nihilism but we take as normal and everyday forms of entertainment.

A little more than 20 years ago, I was working in a very good independent secondary school and was teaching a group of seniors. Other than the fact that they all came from wealthy families, they were a pretty diverse group: boys and girls, 5 or 6 different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, different levels of intelligence, and vastly different interests and avocations.

I wrote the following terms on the board: atheistic, materialistic, nihilistic, and cynical. Then I asked them how they would feel if I called them a bunch of atheistic, materialistic, nihilistic cynics. To their credit, they answered the question: Oh, we wouldn't like that; that would be mean.

Okay, I said, and then defined each term, without prejudice. Once they heard the definitions of the terms, they all said, "Oh, yeah, that's us." And they said it simply and authentically. To them it was matter of fact.

The thing that we don't want to face up to when discussing "bullying" is that exercising power over someone else is pleasurable and that we don't have anything to say to a pre-teen or early adolescent whose attitude is that it gives me pleasure so leave me alone.

In the late 19th Century, Lord Acton famously said that "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." As with many other things, we have "empowered" without the understanding that the exercise of power must be principled. Without guiding principles, power becomes naked, something to use for its own sake and then we have "bullying."

"Bullying" in schools it not a discrete phenomenon. It is a manifestation of deep, complex, and long-term effects on the way we think about things. "Empowering" students without an equally powerful emphasis on the necessity of principled behavior is an effect of that process.

Teaching students that principle comes before pleasure (in this case, the exercise of power over others) is the only way to change this barbaric behavior, but we're a long way from choosing to do that.

How Does That Happen?

The title of Joseph Heller's other novel is Something Happened. I am among the many millions who did not read the novel but for whom the title --- if you'll pardon the current cliche --- resonated. There are times when many of us realize in a deep, inchoate way that some basic shift has happened. Three examples come to mind. Starting with the largest, most abstract, and most difficult to explain, and moving toward the more specific, the first is the shift from the medieval world to the modern world; the second is the shift from a pre-1960's world to a post-1960's world; and the third --- the most contemporary and most easily noticed --- is the shift from a precise and correct use of language to an imprecise and incorrect use of language.

I find myself more and more suspicious of the necessarily backward looking imposition of descriptions and explanations for large cultural shifts such as these. In retrospect, the qualities of the change are visible to careful historical research. It is not incorrect to say that the qualities of medieval Europe were thus and so and the qualities of modern Europe were this and that. Historians and social scientists are able to describe and, in many cases, to quantify the phenomena that substantiate these descriptions.

But historians, no matter how erudite in their respective fields, do not do a very good job of explaining how and why the change came about. Descriptions of the realities of life --- personal, social, and institutional --- before the shift and after the shift are detailed and based on evidence. It is clear, describable, and understandable that a serious change took place. History texts, even of the most narrow and detailed kind, are very good at such descriptions. History students, for the most part, are taken up with the recording of data that show the ante reality and the post reality. But no one is very good at explaining the how and the why.

Some historians (and other cultural commentators) attempt to explain by imposing a theoretical construct and fitting the data into that construct. Historians with a Marxist bent will provide one explanatory thesis; historians with a feminist bent another. Perhaps they are right (although they can't all be right); perhaps there is a single correct historical lens through which all the phenomena of change can be observed and explained. For what it's worth, I doubt it. Such thinking is comforting, allowing us to think that we understand it and --- by extension --- can control it. But I don't think we can really do either.

As a semi-pro (or maybe semi-pro-minus) historian, I have held such explanatory beliefs about large shifts in the zeitgeist. But the older and, I think, more honest I become, the less I trust these theories, despite my long love affair with them. Rather, I have come to think that such cultural shifts are the product of (literally) countless events of individual thought, of encountering and responding to stimuli, of conversations participated in or overheard, of the reading of books or articles or fiction or flyers or posters, of listening to speeches or watching theater, of sitting in church and listening to sermons, of seeing magazine covers, of watching televised interviews, of contemplation, and probably a host of other such experiences.

There is what I have long thought of as "the great democratic conversation" in which an unimaginable variety of people in an unimaginable variety of situations encounter one another and exchange ideas, feelings, prejudices, hopes, and so on, sometimes in a rational and logical way, sometimes in purely visceral and incoherent ways, but always in ways in which each is affected by each of the others.

There is an explanatory theory about how this happens which has always made sense to me, perhaps because I have always been, in one way or another, an academic, but I don't buy it anymore. The theory goes that someone in a rarefied position in the academy creates a new theory to explain the essential phenomena of his discipline; preaches that theory to his students, some of whom go on themselves to hold important positions in the academy; and so on, so that there is a kind of geometric progression of the spread of the influence of the theory.

At some point, the theory is presented at conferences and in prestigious journals thereby affecting hundreds or thousands of others; within a generation or so, the ideas have made it out of the prestigious journals and into the popular venues, including but not limited to newspapers, and thus into the popular conversation.

Hence Darwinian biology moved from being part of an intramural battle within a narrow band of the scientific world, to being an influential and widely-read book, to being an idea that challenged the religious beliefs of a whole generation, and finally to being an informative metaphor for understanding all of reality for a large percentage of the contemporary population.

One could put together the same sort of description for the Marxist critique or Freud's theory of the unconscious, or, in our own time, the post-modern challenging of reason and logic and any kind of disinterest  in favor of nothing but self-interest. What was once an esoteric discussion among a small group of intellectuals has become a set of unexamined first premises for a huge number of people.

But again this is much more descriptive than explanatory.  Correct as far as it goes but not much help is explaining how and why it happened.

My belief --- and I will make no more authoritative claim for it than that --- is that these changes happen out of the "great democratic conversation." Somehow we decide to change things.

If true there are two obvious implications. The first is that attempting to explain the phenomena of cultural shifts by imposing some theory in order to feel that we are somehow in control is a fool's errand.

The second is that we really are in control; that these big changes happen because we choose for them to happen. What that means is that we are responsible for them. If they are for the good, we get the credit; if they are for the ill, we get the blame.

Freedom is a burden and if we are going to be free in practice we have to learn to think carefully about how we want things to be, and why.

Preach What You Practice

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray describes the United States as more and more separating into two distinct and disconnected halves. One group is committed to long-term traditional marriage; devoted to caring for and supporting their children, both emotionally and financially; well educated; employed at professional or other high status jobs; concerned about health and fitness; and belong to civic and religious organizations that both help them sustain their lives and contribute to the social welfare of the areas in which they live. As a shorthand, Murray describes these people as living in Belmont.

People in the other group are usually unmarried, or cohabiting, or divorced; often have children outside of marriage; are either employed in menial, short-term jobs or unemployed and living on some form of the dole; use drugs and alcohol for recreation and seldom see medical professionals for preventive care; have low levels of schooling; and do not belong to civic or religious organizations. These people Murray describes as living in Fishtown.

Murray provides an impressive amount of data, covering, more or less, the last 50 years, and all of it based on lives led by whites. He also demonstrates that the trend lines are toward a greater and greater separation. He argues that this presents a very real danger to both our basic political principles: liberty and equality.

I'm not a social scientist by training so I'm not in a position to make a judgment about his use of data or about the conclusions he makes based on the interpretation of those data. But there was one point he made that really got my attention. After describing the lives of the people of Belmont at great length, and supporting his description with a very large set of data, he points out that despite their leading very traditional lives, they are resolutely committed to avoiding judgments about the lives that other people lead. In other words, they practice the virtues but feel morally constrained from preaching the virtues.

As I said, I don't have the kind of data at hand that Murray does, nor would I know what to do with it if I did; my evidence to support this is anecdotal. For several years, I taught people who were in graduate programs to obtain teaching credentials. Every semester, some 20-25% of those students were "returning," more-or-less middle-aged people, most of them women, who had come back to school to earn their credentials and teach.

They were, almost without exception, very good students and a pleasure to have in the classroom because they were thoughtful, interested, inquiring, and willing to grapple with sometimes difficult conceptual and practical questions. On these questions, they were willing to disagree, both in classroom discussion and on paper.

But on one point they were unanimous. They had all led very traditional lives to that point. Although some were recently divorced, most were still married; had put untold time and energy into rearing their children, some of those children with very demanding conditions; were church-goers and involved in local politics; were willing to argue vociferously for better diet and more exercise. But they were also committed without question to the premise that they should not judge, criticize, stigmatize, or condemn the behavior of others.

They were, in other words, moral relativists, without acting like it. My experience is that Murray is right: that the residents of Belmont practice the virtues but are morally resistant to preaching them.

I think of this now because there has been so much talk about the lack of "civility" in public and political discourse. There is no need to provide evidence for this concern; watching the talking-heads yell at one another or following any Comments section on-line would be sufficient to lead one to think that all civility (not to mention logic, precise and correct language, or a dependence on evidence) had long since gone away.

I have come to think of this as a conflict between the lives that the residents of Belmont lead and the public faces that our public institutions, especially our political institutions, put forward. We are all temptable toward acting selfishly, irrationally, and cruelly; and we all need reasons not to give in those temptations. In the past, there were such widely-held standards of decency, such powerful social stigma, and such widely heard preachments from the pulpit and elsewhere, that those reasons not to give in to temptation were all around us. It helped.

Somehow, over the last 50 years certainly and probably over a longer period than that, those standards, stigmas, and preachments became fewer and less influential. And there has been a high price paid.

It is not just that our influential public institutions act badly, speak ill, and provide harmful examples; it is that ordinary people, good people, are worn down and become, if not bad, then apathetic. It feels like its just too much.

I could be wrong, I hope I am, but it seems unlikely that those institutions will decide to act better and provide better examples. But the residents of Belmont are already practicing the virtues, despite the influence of those institutions. Maybe this is weak-minded Romanticism, but perhaps it would help if those virtuous citizens came to realize that practicing the virtues is not enough; that, in fact, it is selfish and tribal. They have an obligation to the republic, an obligation as citizens, to preach what they practice.

The Interior Life

Having just read the latest James Lee Burke, and having recently had lunch with a recovering alcoholic who is celebrating 25 years sober, I was reminded of this:

the demon arrives uninvited
without an offer of tea and cookies
without an expectation of jolly conversation
without consideration of previous engagements

the demon arrives
in his own time
for his own purposes
accepting no excuses

     TRM          2001

Personality and Power

As I write, it is a little more than two hours before the first presidential debate of the 2012 campaign. Consistent with my recent commitment to avoid the world as much as possible, I will spend the evening rooting for the Yankees to hang on to win the Eastern Division.

But the presence of the debate has reminded me of what has always seemed to me to be the key event of the 2008 campaign. It occurred during the fight for the Democratic nomination, during a debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I forget the setup exactly; there was some version of this campaign's discussion of likability.  Mrs.  Clinton was saying something mildly defensive and Mr. Obama slipped in "You're likable enough, Hillary." It was a knife in the ribs; the campaign for the nomination was essentially over and, because the presidential campaign was never really at issue, the presidency had been decided.

Now this is speculation based on intuition, so take it for whatever it's worth; but I still believe that it was at that moment that the electorate really started to take Mr. Obama seriously.

It was a mean line, a line that one could imagine being spoken by Sarah Michelle Gellar in "Cruel Intentions" or by Rachel McAdams in "Mean Girls." There is a whole social reality implied: an outsider tries to gain acceptance by the cool girls. She is unsure of herself and desperately hoping that they will embrace her as one of the in-group. "You're likable enough" is cutting because it is patronizing and condescending. There is no argument, no contest, no possibility of winning against the odds. One has been dismissed, not worthy of consideration.

By now it's obvious that I found Mr. Obama's remark both ugly and ignoble (as did many New Hampshire primary voters who sent him to a loss in that state). But at the same time, I was impressed. This was someone who knew how to win and did not hesitate to do what it took to win.

How such contradictory responses? The reptilian hind brain is still alive and well. When looking for someone to lead us --- which necessarily includes protecting us --- we look for qualities that are not always and not entirely civilized.

Mr. Obama was not just cool; he was someone who knew he was cool and was cool about that. That level of self-confidence, of self-assuredness matters to us  on levels of analysis and evaluation that may be unconscious but are no less powerful for that.

A psychologist I knew in the mid-'60's once opined that we want to elect someone who we will trust to have his finger on the button so that we can go to sleep at night. That was only 3 or 4 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War was as hot as it was going to get, and we were just beginning to sense that Vietnam was a mysterious undertaking that could lead almost anywhere. So maybe "finger on the button" is no longer the apt metaphor that it was. In 2008, Mrs. Clinton asked the question, "Who is best prepared to respond to the phone call at 3:00 o'clock in the morning?" I would contend it's the same basic idea.

Who has the confidence and the courage to take on the responsibility? Who can we trust?

Three-and-a-half years after Mr. Obama's inauguration, many have come to think that his self-confidence and self-assurance are really a reckless arrogance. In this sense, I think the election really will be a referendum on Mr. Obama; not on the basis of the leading economic indicators but on the basis of whether we trust him as much as we did in 2008.

And where is Mr. Romney in this? A fine question and one to which I have no answer. Possibly tonight's debate --- or the ones to follow --- will reveal an answer. If so, someone please let me know.

In the meantime, I'm edging closer and closer to P.J. O'Rourke's attitude: "Don't Vote: It Only Encourages the Bastards."

"I wouldn't put up with that for one second."

One of the great songs from the Great American Songbook is "My Funny Valentine" by Rodgers and Hart. Every time I hear it, I think of the woman whose response to hearing the song or to someone's making a reference to it or something was that she "wouldn't put up with that for one second."

For those of you who don't know, the lyrics --- like so much of Rodgers and Hart --- are a gently ironic but wholeheartedly sentimental expression of love; love not because the subject of it is handsome or brilliant but because he is loved. In the words of the song, "Every day is Valentine's Day."

But for some, maybe for many, and especially these days, the way the song gets there is unacceptable, not a way that self-sufficient, no-one-pushes-me-around, in-charge types can tolerate:

      "Your looks are laughable,
     Unphotographable.
   
     Is your figure less than Greek?
     Is your mouth a little weak?
     When you open it to speak
     Are you smart?"

The irony is that the woman in my story is a heart-breakingly pretty, reasonably smart, highly competent person with a compelling personality, a born leader, whose fortunate combination of characteristics has helped make her a great success in the world.

Which gets us to the point. As is true in so much of Rodgers and Hart, we are reminded that no one is perfect and that love is not earned but given.

No one is perfect, not even the smartest or the prettiest or the wisest or the most athletic or the most talented: No one gets everything.We all have strengths and weaknesses. We all have flaws, no matter how wonderful we are. We all possess wondrous characteristics no matter how flawed we are.

I don't know if it's true that making a list of desirable characteristics is an activity that is more common among women than among men. It's certainly true that in movies, it is much more often portrayed as an activity of women. But whoever is doing it is making a mistake. Desirable characteristics may logically lead us to make practically beneficial decisions, including advantageous or pleasurable marriages, but they have nothing to do with how and why we give our hearts.

Which gets us back to the song. The singer says, "Your looks are laughable, unphotographable. But you're my favorite work of art." After asking her rhetorical questions, the singer says, "But don't change a hair for me, not if you care for me, stay little valentine, stay! Each day is Valentine's Day."

We are not loved because we have earned it but because love has been given. Despite our desire to control our lives, there is precious little we can do to ensure that someone else will love us. And despite our desire to control the lives of other people, it is absolutely wrong to work at making other people become what we think is lovable.

What an amazing blessing that anyone would think of any of us this way, as "my favorite work of art." To know us in all our pain and foolishness and selfishness and still say "don't change a hair for me, not if you care for me."

That would be, you know, like awesome.

And devoutly to be wished.








,

Neomastadonianism

Which can be read as a call to a radical new political philosophy or as a bunch of aphorisms:

Knowledge matters and some knowledge is more important than other knowledge.

Mullets, goatees, scruffiness, and other hirsute affectations are pronouncements of self-importance and should be avoided

It is wiser, healthier, and happier to believe in something far more powerful and far better than oneself.

We are all flawed and suffering and deserve compassion; and we are all obliged to live up to the highest moral principles and deserve the consequences when we do not

All institutions --- political, religious, and academic --- exist for the betterment of people, not to achieve, maintain, and increase their own power.

Having a rich mental library which allows one to make and to understand a variety of appropriate cultural allusions is much better than not having one

Precise vocabulary, correct grammar, syntactical clarity, and logical thinking are personal and social goods, not arbitrary impositions

Freedom is neither license nor conformity; it is a burden and must be chosen

Much in the natural world is beautiful and can be inspiring; but much is cold, implacable, uncaring, and violently hierarchical, which we should not emulate

Marriage is a social contract, not an individual choice, with obligations to the community, especially to one's children, that take precedence over personal preference

We owe kindness, generosity, and patience to one another; and we have the right to defend ourselves against physical, psychological, and emotional abuse

Not all that is wrong is illegal

It is possible and preferable to have a principled aesthetic; Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are superior to Chuck Berry and the Beatles, and the reasons can be known and articulated; we are not limited to liking and not liking

The deepest wisdom about the human condition is expressed within the great traditions from around the world and we ignore them at our peril

Trustworthiness is a far more effective social bond than the law

Technology is always and everywhere a means, not an end; a neutral; a tool the uses of which must be chosen

Judgments of other should be based on competence and character, neither of which is predetermined by race, ethnicity, or cultural background

Loyalty to the right thing is a virtue; courage in the service of the right thing is a virtue

Any speech or action which is meant to call attention to oneself or to claim superiority to others should be avoided

Content and Character

I teach a class for undergraduates who are on their way to teach in public elementary schools. Last week, the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for LAUSD came to talk to the class about the new Core Content Standards, an attempt to create --- against all odds --- a set of national standards. She gave an excellent presentation which was well-received by the students. It was, obviously, all about the content --- the what --- of teaching.

This week, I spent the first half of class going over the 10 most important points that I took from her presentation: backward-design, text-based interpretation of literature (rather than reader response), evidence-based writing with a purpose (rather than merely responding to prompts), teaching clusters of standards within a subject and clusters of standards across subjects, and so on.

In other words, my students had experienced a full class-and-a-half of presentation and discussion about the importance of content, how to think about it, how to plan for the presentation of it, and how to help students learn how to grapple with ideas rather than just taking in information.

After the break, we turned to a discussion of the reading which led, in a not entirely linear way, to my asking them about the teacher(s) that they really remembered. Several volunteered stories about those teachers they remembered, all of them with a kind of enthusiastic fondness. Then I asked them what characteristics seemed to be common in all these stories; the answers came quickly; about this they didn't have to think: warm, caring, happy, enthusiastic, energetic. In other words, all strictly personal characteristics.

Not a word about mastery of subject or skill in the techniques of delivery; nothing about either content or method.

What they cared about had nothing to do with content and everything to do with character.

Those who do not live in the world of public schools and who don't pay much attention to public schooling as a political issue will not be aware that ever since the publication of the federal pamphlet "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, the several states and later the federal government have devoted tremendous amounts of time, money, and human capital to the process of defining what the content should be. First the individual states defined their own academic content standards and now, with the new Core Content Standards, there is something very close to a set of national academic content standards.

How to reconcile this very focused emphasis by all those responsible for creating legislation regarding public schooling with the very real life-experience of my students?

How to reconcile my own stated and oft-argued position that not only content but a very specific version of content is necessary for the development of good individuals and good citizens with my students' implicit position that what matters is the person of the teacher?

Mostly I'm going to leave this as a question, but I will say this. I think my students may be in tune with a deep truth: that elementary schools teach reading, writing, and computing, at various levels for various students; and that secondary schools provide a place for individual development by providing reasonable safety, by providing opportunities for participation in academic and other activities, and by otherwise staying out of the way. Outside of that we may have far less control than we like to think we do.

Just in case someone wants to take this as a rejection of the importance of the academic and the intellectual, I will make clear that it is not. By temperament and training, my interest is in helping students to think for themselves which requires real knowledge, not just information but deep understanding. I'd like to see much more of this than there is currently.

But imagining that we can define curriculum and then get certain predictable results --- a la the industrial model --- is, I have come to think, foolish.

But being the kind of person who touches the hearts and minds of young people, touches them with warmth and kindness and caring and enthusiastic participation in their lives at school, is not only wise but priceless.