Friday, November 30, 2012

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."

Thursday, November 29, 2012

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"?

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

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






Monday, November 12, 2012

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.






Saturday, November 10, 2012

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.


Wednesday, November 7, 2012

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.


Tuesday, November 6, 2012

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.

Monday, November 5, 2012

"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.




Sunday, November 4, 2012

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.