The Dilettante's Dilemma

Conflict in the Second Temple Period

Posted on August 23, 2015 by hessd

I’ve been listening to some lectures by Professor Isaiah Gafney [1] and I got to a place this morning that raises a broader question for me. Gafney offers a historical perspective on the early years of the Second Temple period of Israel (on which, more shortly) and this perspective permits him to comment on the relationship between the perspective we find in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the perspective found in the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

I’m going to ask the question that his lecture raised for me and then I’ll back up a little to lay in the context that makes it matter. The question is, “What kind of understanding of these texts is possible with the historical context?”

I should probably stop briefly to say that not everyone agrees that “understanding the Bible” is what Christians ought to be doing. Some say, for instance, that there are little fragments of text that, as you are reading along, suddenly seem powerful or relevant to you. The purpose of the reading is to expose yourself to such moments. That has never worked well for me and I have come, over the years, to think that “understanding” a passage means understanding what it means in its context.

When I say “in context,” I commonly think of both the historical and the theological contexts. I think both are worth knowing, but more and more, I have come to approach the theological meaning by means of the historical meaning. What if, for instance, the very pedestrian focus of Ezra and Nehemiah were a reaction to the most more expansive and messianic emphasis of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi? If the builders (Ezra and Nehemiah) are saying to the prophets (Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi), “Hold on! You are going too fast!” Or possibly, “Hold on! Your emphasis on God’s promise to Israel is going to bring Persians down here!”

That’s what Professor Gafney thinks, although I have simplified a much more detailed account in putting it that way. The contrast between these two commitments reminds me very much of Abraham Lincoln’s need to ward off the abolitionists so he could finish the war and restore the union. It also reminds me of the way Eleanor Roosevelt approached the difficult issues during World War II. She would seize on to an issue, frame it in moral terms, and then present it to her husband Franklin in language like “We HAVE to do something about this.”

In this way of looking at it Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Eleanor, and Horace (Greeley) are on one side of things. Ezra, Nehemiah, Abe, and Franklin are on the other side. The one is relatively simple and emotionally expansive; the other carries the kind of complexity that project management often does and has both weariness and wariness as characteristic emotions.

The historical period referred to as the Second Temple period, begins when Cyrus, the king of the Persian empire, adopts an entirely new way of managing religious minorities. For the Jews who had been deported to Babylon, it meant “going back home.” Of course, it was a “home” to only a few because the Jews had been living in Babylon for three generations. When the Jews got “home” they started rebuilding the temple, with had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BCE. The politics of the Second Temple period was difficult. Rebuilding the city walls and the temple took a lot of time and money. There was also a sense that the way of living in Jerusalem and its surroundings had become very “mixed” and Judaism is a religion that stresses separation and purity. More complexity.

The job of dealing with these very immediate issues fell to Ezra and Nehemiah. The vision of what it really meant, in the providence of God, for the Jews to have come back home fell to the prophets and they said some very expansive things. They spoke about the restoration of the royal line of David as if they had lost track of the fact that David was a king. Restoring religious freedom to Jewish outcasts in Babylon was what Cyrus had in mind. Supporting the resurgence of a hostile state on their southern border was NOT what Cyrus had in mind.

Similarly, the prophets spoke very confidently of God’s plans to restore to Israel the “lands of their fathers” which had been “stolen from them” by their enemies. It felt very religious to the prophets. And it was something that God would do, not something the rebuilders of the city would do. On the other hand, “reclaiming” the lands “stolen from us” sounds like a series of border wars to Cyrus. That is not what he had in mind by funding the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem.

If Professor Gaffney is right about all that, and I have no doubt at all that he is, then the language of the prophets should be read as the language of aspiration. Look what God is doing! And the language of the builders should be seen as the language of project management.

I am ready now to attempt an answer to the question with which I began: “What kind of understanding of these texts is possible with the historical context?” I can think of two kinds. I am going to fight my natural inclinations here and just not give them any names at all. I will just describe them. You can name them if you are so inclined.

The first is seeing how fully complementary the two emphases are. They don’t fit together very well, but “too much” and “not enough” have never fit together very well. The easiest thing to do is to identify with one group—with the prophets, let’s say—and condemn the builders for their lack of faith in God’s provision or for their giving priority to politics over prophetic certainties. You hear what the other group is saying as if it could be best understood within your own frame of reference. That’s easy, but it’s not smart.

The smart thing to do is to understand what the fundamental vision of the other group is and to understand what they say (the prophets) or what they do (the builders) within that context. Of course, opening yourself to “understanding” that other vision relativizes your own vision and who likes that? But if you are willing to grant that the two are complementary, that is what is required. Otherwise, it is like imagining what “walking” would be if you were a partisan of the left foot and resented the adjustments made by the right foot.

The second is to see oneself in a “time” of some sort. In the Bible, “time” often means “when the time is right” (kairos) rather than “the second Sabbath of a month (chronos).” That is hard because everyone agrees about the second Sabbath; very often, people argue with whoever says, “This is the time to strike” or “the time to disappear” or the time for diplomacy. If you are part of an organization for long enough, you get a sense for the tides of events. [2] You come to feel that we need to pull back now, to save ourselves the futile effort, to store up the resources we will need. Others will feel that now is the time to push harder, to make whatever effort is necessary, and to use the resources we have right now.

The value of this little snapshot of the Second Temple period for me is that I see these conflicts in a context. In two contexts, in fact. These stresses that are a part of my life—the us and not them stress and the now but not then stress—were crucial to the early parts of the Second Temple period and “understand” means both seeing those arguments in their setting and also knowing how to appreciate those same arguments in my own setting.

But most of all, it is a warning against cherry-picking, an insidious practice by which someone chooses “a verse” and says that it represents “God’s will” for us in our time. Someone needs to say, “Um…what about the other verses” and sometimes, that is me.

[1] The course is called The Beginnings of Judaism. It is one of many truly remarkable courses offered by The Teaching Company. The lecture that flipped my switch this morning is called “The End of Days—Messianic Eschatology.”
[2] Not everyone feels the tides the way you do, unfortunately. And the “time” that can be determined by the tide charts is (chronos) the other kind of time and “feeling the tide of events” is always the kairos kind. Oh well.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged Ezra and Malachi, Franklin and Eleanor, prophets and builders, Second Temple period | Leave a comment

Victim Blaming and Claire McCaskill

Posted on August 22, 2015 by hessd

This is going to look like a reflection about dress codes. It isn’t really. Or, on the other side, about sexual harassment. It isn’t that either. It is an extended plea for an understanding of communication as communication actually happens. It’s a denunciation of tag team flame-throwing.

In the account I found on politico-dot-com, Sen. Claire McCaskill “is not happy about reports that lawmakers in her state [Missouri] considered instituting a dress code for interns after a summer of sexual assault allegations.” I’m OK with that. Have a dress code; fine. But how does one argue that a dress code is a good idea or a bad idea—now THAT actually matters. The way the argument is shaped can be truly destructive of thoughtful discourse.

So let’s consider the role of how one dresses as it bears on sexual harassment. I have heard people say that women who dress as if they were eager to be approached sexually have only themselves to blame when things go wrong. The liberal crowd I hang out with finds that completely reprehensible. No one would mistake Sen. McCaskill for a liberal, certainly, but in this instance she says what liberals say. I’m going to separate her remarks into two parts because the two parts use different standards.

McCaskill, Part I

“Is your recommendation [the dress code] meant to suggest that the ability of adult men and women who have been elected to govern the state of Missouri to control themselves is contingent on the attire of the teenagers and young adults working in their offices?

The “ability…is contigent on…” language is rhetorical excess. In the context of a conversation that had even a basic understanding of how people work, it would be ridiculous. But this is an argument conducted with bullhorns, so subtlety isn’t really part of the mix. The picture Sen. McCaskill paints has two pieces to it. In the first, a female intern shows up to work in an outfit that shows, just guessing here, too much cleavage or too much leg. The picture suggests some ways of imaging the issue; they were not chosen from Missouri. I know there are other possibilities. The result of these wardrobe choices is that the male representatives lose the ability to control themselves and they sexually assault the intern. Those are the two pieces. The provocative intern and the incontinent legislator.[1] In the other picture, the intern is not provocative and therefore the legislator is…um…able to contain himself.

I don’t want to offend anyone unnecessarily by pointing out how ridiculous this is, but people don’t actually function like that. Rats do, not to disparage the sexual behavior of rats unnecessarily, but people don’t. The way one dresses is part of an immensely complicated tapestry of communications about who I think I am, what kind of an occasion I think this is, and what I hope or fear will happen in this setting. That complexity is a commonplace of culture. The two-valued parody that Senator McCaskill offers is not an attempt at analysis.

Then the Senator moves on to Part II:

“Is your recommendation meant to suggest that if an intern wears suggestive clothing, she or he will share partial responsibility for any potential sexual harassment or assault?”

More rhetorical extravagance. Sen. McCaskill wants to say that how the intern dresses cannot affect the way she is treated. I built a small model in the paragraph above that suggests that an intern might say everything about me, how I walk, what I wear, who I talk to and how I talk etc. is part of the normal everyday information by which people align their behavior with each other. Everyone bears partial responsibility for every part of the web of communication that allows societies, even legislatures, to function. To imply that each person does not bear such responsibility is to misconstrue how social communication works.

Everybody knows all this. Everyone who is discussing communication and considering the elements that make it work (to the extent it does work) and each person’s responsibility for getting it to work and for keeping the machinery of implication and inference in good working order, knows all this. But the charges we are considering today are not “discussions.” They are accusations. They are intended to score points. And in the service of scoring points, what is a little damage to the reality everyone knows about the communications process?

To give the sharpest point to this distortion, Sen. McCaskill calls the story that a dress code has been formulated, “blaming the victim.” The point of a word like “victim” is to absolve the legislative interns of any complicity if there is an episode of sexual harassment and to accuse anyone who wants to make the situation more complicated is “blaming” the interns. But really, who could blame interns like these?

My point so far has been that as analysis, the perspective Sen. McCaskill has adopted is the sheerest nonsense, but in fact, there is a reason she is so fired up. Let’s imagine that Sen. McCaskill is ordinarily careful with the way she uses language and shares the understanding of interpersonal communication that scholars have agreed upon. I don’t know whether any of that is actually true, but let’s posit it so that I can ask the next question. The next question is this: what could have so riled Sen. McCaskill that she blew right past all that she knows about how people communicate and went straight to stereotyped charges?

Well, here’s an idea.

“McCaskill, a Democrat, discusses being sexually harassed while she interned in the Missouri Legislature in her new book Plenty Ladylike.”

Oops. So Legislative Intern McCaskill was sexually harassed. And now Senator McCaskill—Democratic Senator McCaskill—hears that Republicans in her home state are sexually harassing interns and then passing a dress code, as if the lack of a dress code were the cause of the difficulty. If the question is, “What could have so riled Sen. McCaskill….?, here, I think, is the answer. She was mistreated as an intern herself and now this is happening to a new generation of interns and the same old “it’s their fault” accusations are being made. You can almost see the steam coming out of the microphone in this picture.

I get that. She’s upset. She is saying the kinds of things people say when they are upset. But she is saying them into a microphone. And she is being covered by the national press. And she is saying that what legislative interns wear to work is no part of the misbehavior of the legislators.

Now that makes me upset. Let me tell you why I hate her approach with such a passion. I hate it because it exposes people like me, (who say that communication is a complicated matter and that every part of the communicative world of each participant needs to be taken into account if fingers are to be pointed at anyone) to censure unfairly. To tell the truth, I don’t like being censured even when it is fair, but when it is unfair, it feels even worse.

If I were going to give advice to the legislators, I would say, “Behave toward the interns as if the Legislative Ethics committee were controlled by your worst political enemies and had the Kansas City Star on speed dial. You don’t make suggestive comments; you don’t have private meetings in private spaces; you don’t feature the sexual implications of male legislators and female interns. [3]

If I were going to give advice to the female interns, I would say, “Let the way you act and the way you dress indicate how you want to be treated.” Make sure that the way you see yourself is broadcast on all available channels.” That won’t solve all the problems, but it will solve all the problems that are caused by confused communications.

I think there ought to be people like me saying what I am saying in public. Sen. McCaskill makes people like me part of the “blaming the victim” crowd because it suits her political agenda to misconstrue what the process of interpersonal communication is like.

She makes me the victim of her intemperate outbursts and then blames me for objecting to it. Really, is that fair?

[]] I have such fun with words whose meaning has shrunk to some shred of the earlier range. George Washington uses the word “intercourse” to refer to our diplomatic and commercial interaction with other nations. Perfectly common 18th usage. My friend Bob Nightingale, with a firm grasp of an earlier meaning of the word “prophylactic” as “preventative” used to throw it into a discussion of how to “prevent” strikes by public employee unions. Continent is based on the Latin verb continere, “to contain.” At my age, the most common use of “incontinent” I hear has to do with the inability to contain urine. “Incontinent” and diaper are closely related terms. A continent like North America is said to “contain” a certain land mass as if the land would go out to sea if it were not contained. Sen. McCaskill has “containing” one’s sexual urges in mind.
[2] The failure of such signals to work is routinely played as comedy. In an episode of NCIS, Agent McGee is on the job at a bar frequented by men and women from the local military base. He is bringing drinks back for himself and his partner when an attractive young woman runs into him. He apologizes. She “apologizes” in an unnecessarily personal way. He still doesn’t get it. “I ran into you on purpose,” she says. He still doesn’t get it. Finally: “I’m flirting with you.”
As I say, they play these for comedy. The viewers are supposed to understand immediately what Agent McGee never catches at all until it is given to him is sentences which contain subjects and predicates.
[3] I know there are other kinds of potential scandals. Those are the ones in play in the Missouri legislature.

Posted in Politics, Words | Tagged blaming the victim, legislative interns, Sen. Claire McCaskill, sexual harassment | Leave a comment

Proud of Who I Am

Posted on August 18, 2015 by hessd

This could provoke a fevered search for “true identity,: I suppose. That’s not what I have in mind. I am thinking of being proud of “who I am—today” as opposed to “who I was—yesterday.”

To make this work right, we need two elements. We need a self of some sort. As everyone knows, there are legions of notions of how to say just what a “self” is. [1] All I will need to mean is “the person you have in mind when you say I.” And you need some kind of emotional palette which includes the emotion “pride.” [2]

That’s pretty much it.

The trick is not to identify I with a system of abilities you once had. It is common to refer to the self you used to be as “who I once was,” but I think it would be perfectly appropriate to refer to that previous version of the self as “him.” Or, of course, “her.” [3] This would enable a old man, struggling every day with the reduced capacities dementia has dealt him, to remember the self he was as CIO of a major company and say, “He really knew his stuff and he required competence from the whole staff.” Or, more briefly, he might say, “I am so proud of him,” referring to that CIO self, a role he had played himself. [3]

What do we gain from this little verbal shuffle? It saves I to refer to the person he is now. Being proud of this person is the task I would like to address. Referring to earlier versions as “he” or “she” will clarify just what the task is.

Is it really possible to be proud of keeping your sense of humor when you keep forgetting just where in the conversation you are or what your daughter’s name is, the one who is visiting you at the moment? Yes It is. Does that require that you never forget your daughter’s name? No. It doesn’t.
Is it really possible to be proud of going to some kind of physical exercise or physical therapy every day? Yes. It is. Does that require that you walk as far or stretch as expansively or swim as efficiently as you once did? No. It doesn’t.
Is it possible to be proud of an essay you have written when it represents the best thought and the most adroit expression you are capable of? [4] Yes. It is.
Is it possible to present yourself confidently—it’s the appearance of confidence I am referring to—to new people as if you thought it would be worth their while to get to know you? All the time you are doing that, you are aware that they might not find you as desirable as the image you are presenting, so there is a very real risk of being rejected. What you know about yourself is that you really hate to risk rejection, but that if you don’t run the risk from time to time, your world will get smaller and thinner. Is it possible to be proud of yourself for running that risk? Yes. It is. Does that require that you succeed all the time? No. It doesn’t.

Once you get over trying to be “that other person,” the person you once were, being the best possible version of the person you are today ought to seem less daunting. [5]

[1] My proposal for ending all the speculation by going to a Self Storage unit and looking inside has never been well received.
[2] The emotion is built on a self-assessment system that measures how nearly you have come to what you know to be “your A game.” It is understood that you are not going to be playing your A game all the time. Who of us does?
[3] This sets up a way of identifying persons which is common in drama. It is common to hear an actress, say Merle Streep, say about the character she plays, say Karen Silkwood, “Oh, she is deeply conflicted about the project.” Or a villain might say about the completely reprehensible character he plays, “He is really a good guy at heart.”
[3] It does sound odd, of course, but this is language that would be used with family and close friends, who know what he is doing and why.
[4] Someone is going to object that a person whose once good mind is failing is not going to be able to assess the writing in that way. I don’t think that’s true. I think that the assessment can be subjectively meaningful; I can know whether I settled for what seemed a clunky expression because I ran out of patience or whether I persevered through that frustration to find a cleaner and better expression. It may not be the quality that some earlier I could have produced and it will certainly not represent the ease of expression of that earlier I, but it is my best work as of today and I can know that and be proud of it.
[5] During my last several years as an adjunct professor at PSU, I suffered notable declines in my ability to remember my students’ names and would discover, in the middle of a lecture, that some very common expression, say “popular sovereignty,” would just disappear without a trace. I dealt with these difficulties in ways I am proud of. First, I told the classes it was going to happen from time to time and that I would appreciate their help in restoring the missing word or phrase so I could go on with the lecture. They did that with good humor. Second, I took pictures of everyone on the first day of class and reviewed the faces and names every class day just before going to class.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged failing mental abilities, failing physical abilities, old and proud, rising above decline | Leave a comment

Giving One To the Team

Posted on August 14, 2015 by hessd

I want to provide a rationale for paying some attention to how one looks to others. I will want to say there there are some contexts where looking “better” [to be defined soon] is a service people can provide to each other and that looking “worse” is a disservice in these circumstances.

Let me say up front that nearly everyone I know, who regularly reads this blog, is going to find it offensive. I wish they wouldn’t but I would like to make the case anyway and count more, in the long run, more on their forgiveness than on their agreement in the short term.

I’m picturing a group of people who live in the same senior center and who hang around together. Bette and I have not yet chosen our preferred senior center so I call it Paleo Acres. They go on trips together, often have dinner together, watch movies together, and so on. They are a group. Not a tight exclusive group, but more than a category like left-handed, bald former athletes.

Let me start somewhere easier and try to work my way up. Here’s a line from Dorothy Sayers marvelous mystery, Gaudy Night. I am pretty sure this is the seed that led to the several years of thought that led to this essay.

Harriet Vane and the Dean of Shrewsbury College are waiting in the Senior Common Room for Lord Peter Wimsey to show up. Then “…an elegant figure paraded towards them from the direction of the New Quadrangle.”

Miss Shaw’s got a new frock,” said Harriet

So she has, “said the Dean, “How posh of her.”

Then, a few lines later, as Wimsey is showing up.

“Looking at a bunch of students who happened to pass at the moment, Harriet wished she could have said the same of them [that they were appropriately attired] They were grubby and dishevelled and she felt unexpectedly obliged to Miss Shaw for having made an effort in the matter of dress.”

Why did Miss Vane feel obliged to Miss Shaw? Miss Shaw had honored the occasion by her dress. She gave the meeting a little class, we might say, and all the participants benefitted by her action. That was the new idea to me—or at least the seed of the idea.

Note a few things this is not. Miss Shaw is not, according to this description, calling attention to herself. She is not trying to win some undeclared competition with any of the other women by dressing more formally than they did. What she did makes a statement of some sort about the group and/or about the occasion. The statement would be something like, “We are a group of women academics who know how to present themselves appropriately to a famous visitor.” [1]

The expression “taking one for the team” is common now. It refers to a member of an group who has borne some burden that would otherwise have had to be borne by the group at large. In this essay, I’m thinking about something more like “giving one to the team.” [2] Miss Shaw took an action that reflected well on the whole group of women and on the nature of the meeting they were to have. That is what Miss Vane saw and liked. That is why she felt “obliged to Miss Shaw for having made an effort in the matter of dress.”

This is not really an odd idea. It makes perfect sense for anyone to arrive at a gathering of some sort and look around at the choices people have made about how to present themselves and to make a quick judgment about “what kind of an event this is.” A lobbyist who sits down at the witness table before a legislative committee automatically notices who is wearing what, who is putting in the effort to maintain the dignity of the hearing, and who is just killing time; whether the manner of interaction is correct and formal, friendly and informal, or cold and hostile. What you see, as you sit at the table, tells you how to present the argument you are there to make.

If you were a second term legislator (a sophomore, as they put it in Oregon) and were chairing your first committee, you might be eager to present to the public the appearance you had chosen for the committee, “what kind of committee we are,” you would say. Let’s say you had chosen “formal and businesslike” as the image you wanted to project. Wouldn’t you feel, as the chair, “obliged to Rep. Shaw in the matter of dress” if she showed up looking and acting in a businesslike manner? Of course you would.

I’m going to get to Paleo Acres very soon now. I have two small preemptive remarks to make and then a proposed master metaphor and then we’re there. The first remark is that this picture—Miss Shaw is “giving one to the team”—appears to deny that Miss Shaw has any notion of how she is presenting herself as a person. And that is, in fact, the use that Dorothy Sayers makes of this remark in Gaudy Night. But there is no reason why Miss Shaw cannot have in mind how good she is going to look and also have the intention of lifting the self-image of the group. The one exception to this would be if her showing up looking good were construed as making the other women look bad. That could (probably would) cost the group as much as Miss Shaw’s appearance benefitted it.

The second preemptive remark is that this little scene imagines that there is no difference of opinion between Miss Shaw’s judgments about “lookin’ good” and everyone else’s judgment. In another book, it might be that Miss Shaw was a white haired old lady of the “when I am old, I will wear purple” school. She would think, in this re-imagining of the scene, that it made her look daring; everyone else would think it made her look awful. Sayers bypasses all such considerations by focusing on Miss Shaw’s “effort,” as in “made an effort in the matter of dress,” and just assuming everything else.

The image I want to use now is group buoyancy. A group needs a certain amount of levity (I don’t mean humor, just “lightness”) if it is not going to sink. There is enough gravity (I don’t mean earth’s gravity, just “heaviness”) in any case, for reasons we will get to shortly. [3] So the group needs to remain at a certain level of buoyancy to be viable, i.e., to do for its members what the members need to have done for them. Let’s call that zero. [4] Certain things the members bring to the group—we are considering only their appearance in this piece—provide “levity” and lift the group above where it would otherwise be. They are uplifting, we might say. Miss Shaw did that for Dorothy Sayers’ Shrewsbury College group. Other things the members might bring provide “gravity;” they are onerous, burdensome.

Because this is a group, it needs a certain buoyancy to remain viable. That means a certain ratio of levity to gravity. But not everyone needs to take this into account all the time. The man who comes to be with the group having freshly showered and put on different clothes than he wore yesterday and the woman who comes to the group, having stopped at the mirror in her unit to be sure that her appearance will add a little uplift to the group, both help the group to stay buoyant. And given that they have done that, the group can manage the member who is having an off day and comes to the group wearing soiled clothes or messy hair or without his glasses or his hearing aids.

The two units of levity can handle the one unit of gravity. It’s easy to see that, especially with the illustration. But even this simple illustration requires that we attend to an unusual criterion of self-presentation. This “self-presentation” is not about me. It is about us. The appearance I bring to the group—and we are talking this time only of appearance, not of behavior—is my gift to the group; everyone benefits from it. Or, conversely, it’s a bad appearance day for me (for any one of a number of possible reasons, some beyond my ability to control; some not) but I come to sit with the group anyway, knowing that they can handle the stress of gravity my appearance imposes today.

TELEVISION PROGRAMMES… One Foot In The Grave; Richard Wilson pictured as Victor Meldrew.

So what is all this? It’s one way to think of one’s appearance in a setting where everyone is old. One way, that is, apart from the solution to the left. It’s not the only way. One’s appearance is not the most important thing a person could bring to the group. But I have spent this much of my time on it—and possibly even your time—because it is a new idea to me. I have thought of my appearance as my business. [5] And that’s all still true. But now I have the chance to think of my appearance as an additional stream of revenue for the group (levity) or as an additional tax on the group (gravity), and I am thinking that is a way of looking at the matter that is worth considering.

[1] The famous visitor is a man, visiting the faculty of a women’s college, but it is his status as an expert on crime, not his status as an available man, that is featured in this scene.
[2] It is TO the team and also FOR the team. It’s hard to choose one to the neglect of the other, but when you choose both, you really neglect both, so I’m staying with “to.”
[3] I see now that I am not actually going to get there. The reference is to psychologist Erik Erkison’s idea that “despair” is the trap that is always waiting to sabotage the older person. That is the gravity.
[4] I just barely fended off an urge to identify a sustainable social level with the letter C, indicating that A and B were submerged, while D and E were not. That would have led, in very short order to a “below C level” remark. I fended it off by promising myself I could always put it in a footnote.
[5]Well, Bette’s business too, since we often appear as a set and some responsibility for how I look will be attributed to her, whether she likes it or not.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged despair and its enemies, Erik Erikson, giving one to the team, individual and group notions of appearance, looking good, senior centers | Leave a comment

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks

Posted on August 13, 2015 by hessd

“We know the Republicans are evil! We’ve known it for years.”

That line was not a slip of the tongue, nor was it fortuitously overheard by a passing graduate student. It was a frequently-used assessment by one of the professors in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oregon when I was there in the early 1970s. It was more like a tag line. Anyone could quote it and count on everyone else knowing who had said it. [1]

An assessment very much like it has been published recently by two long time congressional scholars, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. The title of the book is It’s Even Worse Than It Looks and it carries the less catchy subtitle, “How the American Constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism.” You can’t actually click to look inside unless you go to the Amazon.com website. This essay is not about the book, although I will begin with the authors’ assessment.

Here it is.

“The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But wait. Our situation is even worse than that.

“…many in the traditional media…took issue with our criticism of their even-handed treatment of the decidedly uneven behavior of the two major parties.

Here Mann and Ornstein are claiming that what the media understand as a commitment to professionalism is a major part of the problem. The parties behave “unevenly” and professional journalism would be required to report that unevenness. They would be required to report, borrowing from the language of the condemnation earlier, that the Republican party is extreme and the Democratic party is not. They use the term—in their defense, I will say they use it sparingly—“asymmetric polarization” to describe this reality. The Democratic party, is not extreme, this means, but the Republican party is.”

The media problem Mann and Ornstein point to is that the media don’t regard that as compatible with their professional responsibilities. Our job, the media professionals say, is to report the news “evenly;” sometimes they say “fairly.” That means that they are required to say both parties are, or neither party is, at fault even when they know that one party is at fault and the other is not. It is not (watch carefully here and don’t lose track of which shell the pea is under) “professional” for them to tell what they all know to be true. [2]

I don’t want to lose track of those two aspects of the issue, but neither of them is what I want to think about today. I want to try to imagine a small group of people some of whom are Democrats and some Republicans who could seriously consider the argument this book makes and then come back together the next day as friends.

I’m having trouble imagining it. I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends who used to be Republicans, back when Republicans were a policy-oriented party. They mourn the demise of the old moderate Republican party, with its progressive and conservative wings. They say they would join that party in a minute if it still existed, but add, sadly, that it does not.
Those aren’t the people I’m talking about.

I’ve had a lot of arguments of the “you’re as bad as we are” sort. Saying “Your party is extremist and irresponsible and mine is not” is like saying your daughter is ugly and mine is not. It gets a very predictable response from the aggrieved parent. As a parent, I am angry that you said that; I deny that it is true; I retaliate as I am able. In my anger, I entirely pass by the question of whether it is true. [3] The easy thing is for me to say something bad about your daughter and it doesn’t much matter what I choose. You hit me (by your attack on my child) so I will hit you (in whatever way I think will hurt the most.

So “Democrats are extreme too!” is the common and easy out. Here’s an example of that tactic as it was expressed in an online response to the book ten months ago.

If you believe there is only extremism on one side, then you have already lost the battle.

But Mann and Ornstein argue that the parties are not symmetrically extreme. One is and one isn’t. I am taking their observations as completely accurate just for the purposes of this essay. I am accepting the Mann/Ornstein thesis so I can ask this question. What will make a conversation possible which includes Republicans who want to continue being Republicans, but who want the current political gridlock stopped and who think that the Republican party is the agent of gridlock?

I can think of one way. It isn’t much. It requires drawing a line and saying that crossing the line means you are out of bounds. The line gets drawn so that House Speaker John Boehner is inside it and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate President Mitch McConnell are outside it. Cantor and McConnell are out of bounds. “Out of bounds” means that as a Republican, I withdraw my support from them. Being a Republican means being willing to go as far as Speaker Boehner goes, but not as far as Cantor and McConnell go.

Let me pause here and deal with another objection. The objection is that Cantor and McConnell are just the tip of the iceberg. The metaphor makes the point, of course, so I propose a different metaphor. This is a missile guidance metaphor. Mission Control needs for the thrusters on the left side and the right side of the craft to fire. All the ones on the right side that will fire will be left in place; the ones that won’t will be replaced for the good of the mission. That’ s my metaphor. [4] There’s nothing wrong with having thrusters on the right side. We need thrusters on the right side. But they need to fire when necessary to save the mission.

The difficulty facing any such resolution of the problem is HUGE! At the bottom, we see conservative candidates who are worried about extremely conservative challengers in the primary elections and not worried about moderate Democrats in the general election. Elections are supposed to keep the candidates moderate, which is “where most of the voters are.” But that is not where the voters are in Republican primaries. Conservative members of Congress can lose the primary election if they can be shown to have colluded with the enemy in Congress. What they call “colluding with the enemy” used to be called “bipartisan cooperation” or “the politics of legislation is the politics of compromise: or “half a loaf is better than none.” Now, in local politics in conservative districts, it’s more like treason.

There are media outlets that reflect and enforce that view. There are extremist millionaires who demand that view as a condition for campaign contributions. There is a substantial part of the Republican membership in Congress, larger in the House than in the Senate, which is hospitable to this “politics of purity.” That includes Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Eric Cantor in the House. By this analysis, it does not include John Boehner, the Speaker.

The national media perpetuate this by their “each party is equally wrong” coverage of outrageous acts against the viability of an American government—any American government. So the “hotheads” in Congress are one part of the problem and the cool and balanced news media are the other part.

Now, I have gotten down to my own project of trying to imagine a conversation including Republican friends that will accept the Mann/Ornstein argument and still keep the conversation going. How will this conversation go? Maybe like this.

I say the Republican Party has to be stopped before it destroys us all.

You say the “game” needs to be kept within bounds, certainly, but we need both parties to make good policy. I agree.

I say that the McConnell—Cantor axis [5] is out of bounds and that if only the Republican party could be mobilized to support Boehner, we would be OK.

You say you thought I didn’t like Boehner.

I say that I don’t like his policy values, but in terms of procedure, he makes a deal and does everything he can to do his part to fulfill it. I like that. I say that the other side, the out of bounds side, the McConnell—Cantor Axis make commitments and then reneged on them. That’s really bad. No one can govern that way. Furthermore, I say that a Boehner-led Republican party would be open to compromises that would be well within the public’s acceptance and that would solve real problems, such as, for instance, maintaining the country’s credit rating.

You say that you want it to be possible for the two parties to agree at least on avoiding disaster, even if they cannot agree on how to make progress.

You say you would like a program that would systematically repair federal highways and bridges. I say that would cost a lot of money. You say it is clearly money that needs to be spent.

I say the Republican party needs to be much more aggressive in taking on “Tea Party” and “outlier” candidates, so that it can control its own program and its caucus.

You say you want that too because only the Republican program offers any real long term hope for America.

I say that my view is that real hope for American lies in the direction of reducing the inequality of incomes.

You say that is a bunch of socialist nonsense and we part friends, agreeing to meet again next week.

It is discussions like this one that give me hope. It is well short of the political discussions I think we should be having, but it does pave the way for large scale compromises at the federal level—compromises between parties that can deliver their membership when they promise to do so.

If we can do that, I think it will be better than it looks.

[1] To provide a small element of context, the professor who used that line was also the chair of the Lane County Democratic Party. He was known to play both roles in class.
[2] I am highlighting the media issue by framing the issue this way. I am not claiming it is true (although I think it is) because there is something else I want to talk about.
[3] I am not proposing that if it were true, that it should be said out loud or said in asides to others. I am looking only at the unlikelihood of examining the truth of the question when it is put that way.
[4] Someone will point out that politics is run by majority voting, where Mission Control is a rigidly elitist system. True. That’s why the missiles get to where they are going and the policies do not. But elitism isn’t any way to run a country.
[5] Probably meaningful only to old audiences and historians. The bad guys in World War II were referred to by the American media as “The Axis Powers” and the use of “axis” in joining McConnell and Cantor would be the hope that the bad taste that word acquired in World War II would carry over.

Posted in Politics, sociability | Tagged civil politics, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, media professionalism, Mitch McConnell, policy gridlock, political extremism | Leave a comment

A Parent is a Teacher, not a Concierge

Posted on August 9, 2015 by hessd

I am going to look at that bold title through the lives of Walter Possum and Frances the Badger. Or, rather, through their parents, whom I admire almost more than I can say. These wonderful parents come to us from the mind of Russell Hoban. He published Bedtime for Frances in 1960; Nothing to Do, the only Walter Possum book I know of, in 1964, and A Birthday for Frances in 1968. I became acquainted with these books in the late 1970s. I love these parents because they are warm-hearted and nurturant, for one thing; also they keep a consistent focus on what the child needs to learn and how they might help that happen.

On the other hand, parenting is a little more demanding these days and different norms define what “doing it right” looks like. I have begun to see the term “concierge parent” in use, and the intended analogy with a hotel concierge makes my blood run cold.[1] The concierge’s job is to please the guests; the parents job is to grow human beings. Surely the same set of tricks wouldn’t work for both. They wouldn’t, would they?

I want to explore just how Mother and Father Badger (and Mother and Father Possum) are so successful. The gender stereotypes are not current. It’s kind of a “Leave it to Badger” social setting. The tactics of parenting, especially of the fathers, do not fit the concierge model well at all, but in these stories, everything works. [2]

I’m going to start with a quick description of some events from the three books. I have chosen three of the “where the rubber meets the road” moments. These are the moments at which crucial decisions are made by the parents. Then we’ll back up and try to place these events in a sort of “theory of parenting” model. There might be a drawing of morals after that.

Episode 1: In Nothing to Do, Walter Possum wakes up one Friday morning and discovers that he has nothing to do. He rouses his father, who, unaccountably, is still sleep when it’s almost 6:00 already. Father doesn’t say a word. He goes outside and gets Walter a rake and a basket and tells him to rake leaves.

Then, when Father is leaving for work, Walter approaches him again.

“Raking leaves is not really something to do,” says Walter.

“Well,” says Father, “ I am sorry to hear that, but I have something to do. I have to go to the office, and so I cannot talk about it any more right now.” [3]

The next morning is dedicated to housecleaning, so everyone needs to be somewhere else. [4]

Walter objects. “I have nothing to do and Charlotte [little sister who speaks in bold font only] follows me all the time.”

“I know all about that, says Father, “but you are going to play outside anyhow.” And he went out to the tool shed and hoped for the best.” [5]

The plot goes on from there. It is, in my reading of it, quite sophisticated, but what the stone actually does is not relevant here. and we have two more episodes to consider. This story is based on Father’s gift to Walter of a “something to do” stone. It’s magic. You keep it in your pocket and when you have nothing to do, you rub it and look around and then the stone gives you [!] something to do. [6]

Episode 2: In A Birthday for Frances, [7]we find Frances’s nose seriously out of joint because it is her sister Gloria’s birthday and Frances wants it to be HER birthday. Again. Frances is hiding in the broom closet with her imaginary friend, Alice. What she really wants is for Gloria not to have a birthday celebration at all.

Preparation for the party goes on. That’s the important part to me. We do not break off preparations for negotiations with a disgruntled child.

Mother: Frances, wouldn’t you and Alice like to come out of the broom closet and help us make place cards for the party?

Gloria is drawing rainbows and happy trees on her cards.

Frances is drawing “three-legged cats/and caterpillars with ugly hats.”

Preparation for the party goes on.

Frances is outside sulking and looking through the window at Mother wrapping a present for Gloria.

She says, “I am not going to give Gloria any present.”

“That is all right,” said Mother, and Frances began to cry.

“What is the matter?” said Mother, “Why are you crying?”

“Everybody is giving Gloria a present but me,” said Frances

Frances manages to buy a present for Gloria and then, after a tough struggle, manages to give her the present, rather than eating it herself; then after an even tougher struggle, manages to genuinely wish Gloria a happy birthday.

Frances is on the outs with everyone all the way through the story until the end. Everyone (all the adults) are very solicitous of Frances’s feelings, but the preparations for the party go on all day. The result is that Frances is confronted with an event that is going to happen no matter what. The event is guaranteed by people who are relentlessly nice to her. She is invited at every step to join in.

But…finally, at the very end, there is still a party; still an event for her to join. If they had removed her from the scene, which I would have been tempted to do, that would not have happened. Had the party been postponed until Frances had made her peace with it, that would not have happened.

Episode 3: In Bedtime for Frances, the question is all about facing nighttime fears. Frances does everything she can to get out of bed and do something else.

She thinks that maybe she can see a tiger in the corner of her room, so she goes to find her parents. The parents determine that the “tiger” did not bite or scratch Frances; they decree that it must be a friendly tiger, and direct Frances back to her room.

Next she sees what might be a giant over by the chair. This gets her to the living room and it gets her a piece of cake, but the advice she gets is to ask the giant what he wants, at which point she determines that it is her bathrobe on the back of the chair.

After that, there is a scary looking crack in the ceiling. This gets her to the bathroom where Father is brushing his teeth and she gets to brush her teeth too. But she is sent back with the suggestion that she enlist help in watching the crack for awhile. Her Teddy Bear helps.

Then the curtains at her window are moving so she goes in search of adult consolation, but finally, she has reached the end of the road. She wakes her father up to tell him about the wind. Here is what happens.

[It is the wind’s job] to go around and blow all the curtains.

How can the wind have a job? said Frances.

Everybody has a job, said Father. I have to go to my office every morning at nine o’clock. That is my job. You have to go to sleep so you can be wide awake for school tomorrow. That is your job….

If the wind does not blow the curtains, he will be out of a job. If I do not go to the office, I will be out of a job. And if you do not go to sleep now, do you know what will happen to you?

I will be out of a job? said Frances.

No, said Father.

I will get a spanking? said Frances.

Right!, said Father.

Good night! said Frances and she went back to her room.

Reflections

So there are the three episodes. Let me draw together what I think of as the essential elements. Walter Possum has boredom to confront. The job his father gives him isn’t really “something to do,” so the next day, Father gives Walter a “something to do” stone and with the aid of that stone, Walter plays actively and socially all day. “Socially” comes to include his obnoxious sister, Charlotte, for whom Walter invents a “play right here” stick because he has come to understand how a “something to do” stone really works and makes the necessary adaptations.

Frances comes to grips with a birthday party she does not want, but for which preparations go on all day. She is invited to join at every point and says No at nearly every point, but preparations continue. Eventually, it gets to be Yes or No time for Frances and because her parents have not made themselves the issue, Frances has to decide to do the right thing just because it is the right thing.

Frances comes to grips with her night time fears because she is given a rationale—everybody has a job—and a credible threat which returns her to the real issue. The threat comes from extraordinarily indulgent parents, but eventually Frances is forced to face the fear. The wind is doing his job, she decides, and the moth at the window his job, so she lies down in her bed and does her job.

These are three episodes of parental success. Having been a father and a stepfather and a grandfather, I have to say that my admiration for these parents has no limits. You will notice that there are no “concierge parents” in this hall of heroes. In each case, they herded the child back to what the issue is. In each case, they did not allow escape from what the issue is. In each case, they did not, allow themselves to become the issue.

The “something to do stone” and the repeated invitations to join in the birthday celebrations and the threat of a spanking all do the same thing. They wouldn’t in every family, but they do in these families. They are not “loving too much,” an expression I have written about recently, or too little. It is love that takes the needs of the young person into account and also their need to address the issue that confronts them.

Throwing a fit doesn’t help them. Sulking all day doesn’t help them. Relentless access to the parents is not permitted. It’s you and the issue, kid. I wish you well and I’m on your side. Win or lose, come and tel me about it.

[1] Here are a few phrases Rob Lazabnik’s piece in the Wall Street Journal from July 24, 2015. He says, “You see, these children are members of the Most-Loved Generation: They’ve grown up with their lives stage-managed by us, their college-acceptance-obsessed parents.” and “All those years being your kid’s concierge and coach have created a monster.” The cartoon comes from that article.
[2] He forgot to end with, “O-k-a-a-a-y?” as is done now, even at the end of commands. I am amazed.
[3] I’m going to include what I think of as the off-Broadway run of the Frances books and introduce Walter Possum and his baby sister, Charlotte. They are from the same world, the same writer so I’m going to just add them in.
[4] Mother is going to do the housecleaning. This is 1964. Who else is going to help with the housecleaning is not a topic for this book.
[5] “He hoped for the best” is striking in this context. I don’t recall any other authorial comment on what an adult thought—as opposed to what an adult did—in the whole Frances/Walter corpus.
[6] Provided that you don’t aren’t too close to the house when you do it (no playing inside) or standing too close to the pocket where Father keeps his money (a costs money thing to do). You have to be at the right place. Then the stone works.
[7] I just now noticed that although this is “a birthday for Frances,” it is not her birthday. It is “a birthday” she needs to come to grips with.

Posted in Books, Living My Life | Tagged boredom, concierge parents, helping children succeed, nighttime fears, parents, sibling rivalry | Leave a comment

Trump: Not So Much a Candidate as a Tantrum

Posted on August 7, 2015 by hessd

I have ranted in one setting or another recently about the movie Inside Out, which nearly everyone has found to be delightful and which no one, myself excepted, has found to be dangerously subversive. Today, I would like to make another pitch that the premise of the movie subverts what we care about most in our fragile American democracy and I would like to look at the Donald Trump Phenomenon as the example.

We call our kind of government “representative democracy.” [1] By that, we mean that the people elect people to represent their interests and that these people operate the government with the interests of their constituents in mind. [2] This presupposes both a) that the constituents will know what their interests are and b) that they will choose representatives (now including both the Senate and the President) who will enact public policy with those interests in mind.

We are nowhere near that at the moment and I would like to point to the Pixar film, Inside Out, as an illustration. The movie is about how five emotions collectively construct the life of a little girl named Riley. These emotions do not have “interests,” of course, because they don’t have intentions. As a result, Riley does not have interests based on intentions. Riley’s behavior represents the dominant emotion at the time. Here, for instance, is Anger. A few paragraphs down, I will offer Trump himself. See if you can see the similarity.

OK, that brings us to tonight’s “debate” among the candidates for the Republican nomination and particularly to Donald Trump. Does the Donald represent Republican voters?

Well…yes and no. He represents the way they feel. He probably will not represent their hopes for public policy. He may not even represent the kind of party they want the Republican party to be. But in Inside Out, how you feel is the only thing that matters and if that holds for Republican voters, I think the best short answer is “Yes. The Donald represents Republicans better than anyone else.”

I got to thinking in this direction based on a piece Jonathan Chait wrote for New York Magazine. Here’s a piece. You can see the whole article here.

The current moment of enthusiasm for Donald Trump is instructive because it pulls the [ideological and emotional] strands apart. Trump’s appeal reflects, in nearly singular form, the nonideological component of Republican rage. He is the candidate of affect.

This is galling, Chait writes, for Republican officeholders who have acquiesced to every demand for “ideological purity” from the Republican base.

Republicans have dutifully complied with every policy demand. They have refused to increase taxes, even at the cost of programs they support, like infrastructure and defense. They quickly withdrew cooperation from all of President Obama’s legislative initiatives, opposed virtually all of his nominees, and joined self-destructive demonstrations of anger they knew would fail.

They have done all this, and now a candidate who has refused to do any of it has surged into the lead. The Republican primary electorate has demanded that candidates be good little boys and they have given their hearts to the baddest little boy around.

And here is Chait’s very best line. See what you think.

His affect supplies his appeal — he is strong, mad, and, above all, unapologetic in a world that demands he apologize. Trump is not the spokesman for an idea at all, but the representation of undifferentiated resentment.

“Undifferentiated resentment” is Howard Beal’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take

this any more,” from the movie Network. (You can find it and 99 other beauties on the American Film Institute’s 100 best movie quotes.) This is a newscaster urging people to open their windows and yell his line out into the dark. It’s great catharsis. It’s no way to choose a president.

It’s easy to say bad things about Donald Trump, but if he really represents us, then we are the ones about whom bad things should be said. Trump is betting that that will be enough. The horrible possibility is that he might be right.

[1] Another way to say that is “republican government.”
[2] Not to get picky, but the Framers had overlapping constituencies in mind. The House of Representatives would represent the people, the Senate would represent the states, and the President would represent the judgment of unrepresentative “wise” elites, who would choose him or her by means of an “Electoral College.”

Posted in Politics | Tagged Donald Trump, Fox News, representative democracy, Republican candidates | Leave a comment

Getting Over It

Posted on August 6, 2015 by hessd

Day 1

My version of the truth is that I came to “causal attribution” as a tool for doctoral study for perfectly good academic reasons. [1] Bette thinks I turned to that kind of research because I was a natural worrier anyway. What I would have liked to say to her in response is that she has not adequately distinguished “rumination from reflective processing,” as in “she is accusing me of the former when actually, I am utilizing the latter.”

I have not said that to her because it is a phrasing I just discovered yesterday. In 2005 [2] the journal Psychological Science published an article with a very catchy title. It is, “When Asking ‘Why’ Does Not Hurt” In fact, causal attribution is the study of asking why—usually we ask it of other people, but it is remarkably revealing to ask it of oneself.

The subtitle of this article is “Distinguishing Rumination from Reflective Processing on Negative Emotions.” I am eager to confront Bette with this article. I am pausing only to give myself a chance to read it first, just in case it doesn’t support the conclusions I am already committed to. I am a fan of science, of course, but satisfactory outcomes have their place as well. This is not a problem Vulcans worry about much.

Day 2

OK. I’ve read it now. There are two distinctions that will make it possible to look at these options the way Walter Mischel and his colleagues look at it.[3] It turns out that I will be able to deal only with the first one today. The second one distinguishes asking “what questions” about a past event from asking “why questions.” Maybe I can get to that soon.

In the first dichotomy, we need to distinguish “self-immersed” from “self-distanced.” The orientation they call “self-immersed” is part of “the hot system.” It is concrete, it causes a first-person reliving of the event, and it intensified the bad feelings you are having at the time. The other orientation, “self-distanced” is part of “the cool system.” It is abstract, rather than concrete; it supports a “third person” or “bystander” way of remembering of the event; it reduces the bad feelings that come from recalling it.

Since we seem to live in groups, it is always important to look at how my way of doing something looks to you and particularly what vocabulary is available to each of us to describe it. If you reflect on negative experiences in a “self-immersed” first person style, you will be all prepared to misunderstand people who use the other style.

If you use the style of remembering that goes with the hot system, you look at me handling my remembering in the cool system and you say, “That’s not remembering. That’s denying.” You mean, by saying that, that I am avoiding emotional contact with that memory. With the rise to prominence of psychological jargon, you would be able to say just that I am “avoiding.”

Or you might say that I am “intellectualizing.” For the direct wrestling with vivid images of the event, you say, I have substituted abstract names that fall into even more abstract categories. I am keeping the event at a distance by dealing with what actually was a very emotional event, as if it were merely a difference of opinion among friends.

As I consider the charges—you call them observations, but they feel like charges to me—I have to admit that you might be right. The real question is whether I am getting the job done or not. I want to deal with those awful past events in a way that reduces or eliminates the physical symptoms I once had when I remembered them and also in a way the reduces or eliminates the mental and emotional stress I once had. If what I am doing actually accomplishes that, then I should reject the charges.

On the other hand, you might be right. What if I am overusing the “cool system,” turning it into a “cold system?” If I am simply distracting myself from remembering those events by some other strategy—drug addiction, alcohol addiction, hypersexuality, workoholism—then the events are still “there” and I still have not learned to live with them. If I am avoiding those memories, I am not processing them and they are still there. If I am “over-intellectualizing” them, then I am not dealing with them and they are still there.

So when you import the bad words you have available, I need to pay attention to them. You may have come to them by a flawed method. You may have picked up the pejorative words simply because what I am doing is different from what has worked for you and you don’t understand. Regardless of how you came to your judgment, I need to consider it. And the heart of the consideration is this: is what I am doing, working?

Let’s think about “working,” for just a moment. I learned about this from Josh Lyman and Stanley Keyworth. The episode appears early in Season 2: it is called “Noël.” At the end of Season 1 of The West Wing, Josh Lyman, assistant to the Chief of Staff of the President of the United States, is shot. He tries to go back to work when his body has recovered sufficiently, but it turns out that his mind has not recovered sufficiently.

Early in the second season, Stanley Keyworth (Adam Arkin) is called in to help Josh get through those events and this is the distinction he makes. It is the first time I ever heard it.

Keyworth: What we need to be able to get you to do is to remember the shooting without reliving it. And you have been reliving it.

Working a dark and difficult memory successfully brings us out on the “remembering” side; not the “reliving” side. And what I need to do is to listen respectfully to the words you use to characterize my way of working with these memories and match them against the results. If I’m not getting the results, maybe the reason is, just as you said, that I am avoiding the memories or “intellectualizing: them. But if I have been successful in reducing their effect on me, in largely avoiding the tax they levy on my energy and my ability to focus, then I need to say, again respectfully, “I know the cool system I am using looks odd to you, but really I am not avoiding or intellectualizing. I am doing what works best for me.

I like it that there are words that point to misuse of the hot or cold system or overuse. They need to be used by people who know what system you are using and what actually works for you. “Works” means that you are actually engaging the emotions, not denying them or hiding from them. And “works” means that you are able to come into contact with the experience that carries these emotions without reactivating their toxic effects.

The authors that this analysis is based on are, for all these reasons, big fans of the cool system. You can read the experiments yourself if you like and see if they are persuasive. For me, what matters most is that a system that is working is respected even by people who have found relief in another system and that we apply pejorative words only to practices that don’t actually work.

[1] I needed a tool by which individuals (especially the students I hoped to work with) could explore their own “life-worlds” by means of a system of notation that could be found in the phenomenological tradition. A study of “causal attribution” using “causal attribution journals” turned out to be just right.
[2] Apparently this particular point has mattered a lot to me lately. I keep referring to John Gray’s Mars and Venus distinctions because he takes the trouble to talk about what men’s processing looks like to women and vice versa. It turns out that each has a supply of good affirming words for their own way of interacting and a supply of bad pejorative words for the other style. I applied that same distinction recently at it bears on aggregating interests and making a group choice. I invented followers of Thomas Hobbes (Hobbesians) and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseaueans) and found that each has a supply of good words for their own way of adding up preferences and a supply of bad words for “the other style.” Martin and Doka, in their book on gender and grief (Men Don’t Cry…Women Do) show the same division between those, like me, who grieve in “the instrumental style” and those who grieve in the intuitive style.
[3] Ethan Kross, Ozlem Ayduk, and Walter Mischel, “When Asking ‘Why’ Does Not Hurt: Distinguishing Rumination from Reflective Processing of Negative Emotions. Psychological Science, Vol 16, Num. 9, (2005), pp. 709—715

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology, ways of knowing | Tagged avoidance, cool systems, denial, depression, hot systems, intellectualizing, rumination, Walter Mischel | Leave a comment

Women Who Love Too Much

Posted on August 3, 2015 by hessd

In 1985, Robin Norwood wrote a book called Women Who Love Too Much. My immediate response was, “Oh dear. She’s redefining what love means.” I haven’t read the book, but I still dislike the title. Is it really possible to “love too much?”

I don’t think so.

To make a judgment like that, it would be very helpful if various actions could be assigned to love and love alone. Not, for instance, to combinations like love and cowardice or love and ignorance. But let’s talk about love as if it were a single unmixed motive.

My notion of love is organized around other dimensions. It doesn’t make any sense to me that anyone could “love too much.” You might, of course, do the wrong things. There is nothing about love as a motive that cleans up all the actions it drives. The actions may still be ineffective or even perverse in their effects. The outcome may be disastrous for all parties. That does’t reflect on love as a motive and particularly it does not argue that love might be successfully viewed as an amount, as if there were too little, too much, and just right.

Let’s look at a few settings where this notion might be usefully examined. Ms. Norwood seems to be thinking about—again, I haven’t read the book, I am working off the subtitle of the book, which is: when you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change. The man in the subtitle, a significant other of some sort, is not behaving the way you wish but you stay with him anyway. You say, it seems to me that you are doing that because “you love him too much.” If you loved him only as much as you should—the “amount notion” of love again—you would have dumped him long ago. Apologies to fans of the book if the argument makes is actually more subtle than that.

Let me offer a counter example. The word love doesn’t show up in this text at all but I do think that if there were a subtitle, it could well be: “when you keep wishing and hoping she’ll change.” This is a children’s book, one of my very favorite books of any kind, called A Bargain for Frances. [1] In the first scene, Frances announced to her mother [2] that she is going to play with Thelma. Mother’s response is, “Be careful.”

Frances wonders why she should be careful. Mother ticks off a few instances of Frances’s previous times with Thelma—we get the distinct impression that these are taken from a much larger list.

Remember the last time? said Mother

Which time was that? said Frances

That was the time you played catch with Thelma’s new boomerang, said Mother. Thelma did all the throwing and you came home with lumps on your head.

I remember that time now, said Frances.

And do you remember the other time last winter? said Mother

I remember that time too, said Frances.

That was the first time there was ice on the pond. Thelma wanted to go skating and she told me to try the ice first.

Who came home wet? said Mother, “You or Thelma.”

I came home wet, said Frances.

But even the two instances we see are enough to establish that over and over, Thelma acts as a predator, counting on Frances to be her prey. If Frances wants a friendship relationship with Thelma, she is going to have to offer it from a different place; a different status. Sheep do not make friends with wolves. It doesn’t work that way.

And there is nothing Frances can do to make Thelma want to be a sheep. She could choose to put up with Thelma’s abuse—apparently, that is what she has been doing—or she could decide that if she continues to be gentle and tolerant, that Thelma might be shamed into changing her behavior. That’s why I like the wolf and sheep analogy so much. Wolves are not ashamed of killing and eating sheep.

We can imagine Frances’s mother anguishing over the kinds of behavior Frances tolerates from Thelma. Mother might conclude that Frances “loves too much” and that “loving less” is the right thing to do. My argument is that loving smarter is the right thing to do.

Since there is nothing Frances can do to turn Thelma into a sheep, it might be the smart thing for Frances to become a wolf. And that is what she does. In this story, Thelma lies to Frances and cheats her out of her toy tea set. In response, Frances lies to Thelma and gets the tea set back. Thelma understands immediately that a shift in relationship has taken place and that it might not be good for her. “I can see,” says Thelma the wolf, “that I am going to have to be careful when I play with you.” To which Frances the wolf replies, “Do you want to be careful or do you want to be friends?”

As a wolf, Frances now occupies the same status as Thelma. Neither is now predator; neither is now prey. Wolves are a very social species. [3]There is nothing, now, stopping them from being friends.

This achievement of Frances’s love is surprising and encouraging. Nothing about it suggests either that “love considered as an amount” is a useful notion or that “love” requires acquiescing to abuse. I think it stretches the story beyond the author’s notion of it to say that Frances cheats Thelma for the purpose of establishing the basis for friendship. I think Russell Hoban’s notion is that Frances, confronted with Thelma’s new wariness, is moved by an instant generosity to offer Thelma friendship. But as an illustration that the love that works best is the love that is both smart and courageous, the first interpretation actually works better.

Based on the Frances analogy, a useful response to the subtitle of Robin Norwood’s book (when you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change) is that wishing and hoping are not going to get the job done. Deciding what you, yourself, are going to do is the form that love can take that shows the most promise. Just what that is will depend, of course, on the relationship. Hoping he will change, would apply equally to a husband who abuses the children, who spends all his time at work, or who treats his wife as if she were the maid.

What would a wife have to do to bring herself to the place where she could offer friendship? Certainly, she will have to be taken seriously. Whatever she has to say can’t be simply waved away at the time or violated without consequence later on. I would want to apply my notion of loving enough to ask, “Do you love him enough to do that?” To say what you want to say will require that your husband be married to an actual person. Loving him enough to establish yourself as a person is a preface to having the kind of marriage in which two persons can thrive and grow.

Applying my notion of “loving enough” to this situation requires that you say what you are willing to do to achieve it. That could be onerous. It could be scary. It absolutely must be generous and non-vindictive. Asking for a new relationship means making it a choice he will want to make. It means that the new actions he might contemplate that will support the relationship should be recognized and rewarded. Actions he might take that fall short of that or that exacerbate the situation need to be either ignored or opposed, depending on what works best for him.

It’s hard to know what to do. And knowing what it will take might establish that it takes too much. But neither of those brings the motive—loving enough to do the right thing—into question and neither of them imagines that “loving more” is going to do the trick.

So let’s have no more of “loving too much.” It’s not a useful notion. Let’s talk instead about doing what a knowledgeable and courageous love might require.

[1] I haven’t written anything about this book since the accession of Pope Francis and the question of who Francis’s friends will be, when the tumultuous politics of his first years in the Vatican are sorted out.
[2] If you don’t know the Frances books, you wouldn’t know that all the characters are badgers. It doesn’t really matter except to the illustrator, Lillian Hoban.

[3] A good general introduction to the question is Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce’s Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.

Posted in Love and Marriage, Words | Tagged Bargain for Frances, loving too much, personhood in marriage, the gift of friendship | Leave a comment

Inside Out (and Upside Down)

Posted on July 29, 2015 by hessd

“It’s a charming movie. It is also distinctly American.”

That’s the assessment of Tanya Luhrmann in the New York Times recently. (See her column here.) I like that way of putting it, because all the things I disliked about the movie, when Bette and I went to see it, were things I took to the theater with me.

I have, for example, a model of “how selves work.” Every model that has any aspirations to adequacy will need to deal with what we intend, what we think, how we feel, and what we do. You can subdivide those further if you like. The principal variations among the models of selfhood are formed by putting one or the other of those elements in first place or by rearranging the means by which they might be related to each other. [1]

For my own system, I put intention first. I am more interested, for instance, in the effects that our intentions have on our thinking than I am in how our thinking affects our intentions. Or, for a jargony summary, conation drives cognition more than cognition drives conation. [2]

So Bette and I go to a movie—it’s a well done and really cute movie—that eliminates three of our elements. It won’t spoil anything, I am sure, to tell you that the five principal characters are a pre-adolescent girl’s five emotions: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and joy. Although you would think it sometimes when you are seeing it, the movie is not about Riley, the young girl. It is about those five emotions. The girl herself is just an artifact, a product, of the interactions of those emotions.

If you go to the movie understanding that the movie is about the emotions—the personifications of the emotions—themselves and not about the humans, you will be OK. There is a lot of very acute, research-based understanding of our emotions built into the movie, thanks in part to the professional consultants. [3] You can see their New York Times article here.

So I’m not quibbling about the emotions part. But where is everything else? It would be fair, I suppose, (misleading, but fair) to say that Riley has no emotions. The emotions, rather, have her. Or they ARE her.

But Riley has no intentions—the part that is most important to me; the part that very largely defines what we think and feel and do. You could almost say she doesn’t “have” those other elements either, although the pictures they show you of Riley’s life do show her acting and thinking. But check the cast of characters: all of the emotions are “voiced,” as we say about animated characters. None of the other elements of selfhood are voiced.

Of course, you say. That’s because it’s a movie about emotions. But that means that it is not a movie about persons and it looks like a movie about persons. Riley and her parents, for instance, have the classic spat at the dinner table that ends with “Go to your room!” What was the father intending, you might ask, by saying such a thing to a daughter overwhelmed with sadness and then, momentarily, with anger. Ask it of another movie. The father doesn’t “intend” in this movie, no does any other person. The emotions do, of course. Anger was dominating the father’s console at the time. (Joy is controlling it in the picture of the console above.)

So there’s my own private struggle with the movie. “Charming,” as Luhrmann says, but “distinctly American.” This is the way Americans have come to view the self. According to Luhrmann, “…there is something deeply cultural about the way this mind is imagined,.” We think of minds this way, and that it has consequences for the way we experience thoughts and feelings. She gives examples from China and from southern India that show other people “imagining their minds” in different ways. But Europeans also “imagine the mind” in ways that are different from the way Americans do it. That’s one of the reasons that the Netherlands winds up year after year and one of the happiest nations in the world.

One result, Luhrmann thinks, is that Americans are notably anxious. A 2002 survey by the World Mental Health Survey found that “Americans were the most anxious people in the 14 countries studied, with more clinically significant levels of anxiety than people in Nigeria, Lebanon and Ukraine.” Nigeria? Lebanon? Ukraine? Don’t they read the newspapers? Surely they should be more anxious than we are! But, apparently they are not. At least, they weren’t in 2002. If you think things have gotten better since 2002, you haven’t been reading the same reports I have.

Luhrmann reports that “Americans are a pretty anxious people. Nearly one in five of us — 18 percent — has an anxiety disorder.We spend over $2 billion a year on anti-anxiety medications.” She thinks it has something to do with how we imagine the mind.

“Our high anxiety,” she concludes, “whatever the challenges we face, is probably one of the consequences” of this way of understanding ourselves.

Speaking only for myself, I want to say that I don’t like those consequences. If thinking of ourselves—how we actually operate as selves—in this “emotions-first” way helps to drive unprecedented numbers of us to antidepressants, then I think we should be looking around for another way to think about how we work.

I have one in mind, of course, but we are w-a-a-a-y too deep in this essay to start on it. I’ll just say this. If you make it a practice to pay attention to what you are trying to do and to pay particular attention (not exclusive attention) to the times you are unable to do it successfully, you will learn a great many useful things about yourself. If you are willing to think about just why, in each of those instances, you were unable to achieve what you were intending, you will learn even more about yourself. It’s amazing. Trust me on that. [4]

.[1] I suspect that what looks to me, at this stage, like a disagreement between Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) and Walter Mischel (The Marshmallow Test) is a disagreement how the various elements work as a system. So Haidt’s metaphor, the rider and the elephant, and Mischel’s “hot systems and cool systems” might be different ways of saying the same thing. So far, it looks to me like a disagreement.
[2] Conation, the faculty of willing to do something, is either an archaic word or a word that was in a brief eclipse when I was in grad school. That was when I really needed it and it took me a long time to find it. Maybe it will get popular again. It comes into English directly from the Latin conari, “to attempt.”
[3]Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul Ekman is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

[4] I just made a collection of my former students smile. They spent an entire term on that paragraph and when the recognize it here, they will turn to their current colleagues and say, “You’re not going to believe this.”

Posted in Movies, Political Psychology | Tagged emotions are everything, how selves work, Inside Out, why are we so depressed? | Leave a comment