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.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, October 5, 2012
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
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
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
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."
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."
Monday, October 1, 2012
"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.
,
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.
,
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)