The Dilettante's Dilemma

What Will We Do After Work?

Posted on June 15, 2013 by hessd

And I don’t mean “after work” like 5:00 and I get to go home. I mean “after work” like there isn’t enough work to do to sustain us as a country. That kind of “after work.”

I am not an economist, like Paul Krugman. I know enough economics to be a fan of his columns in the New York Times. This column was about how we are going to cope with the relentless loss of jobs. And on this issue, I am ahead of him. I am still behind Karl Marx—aren’t we all?—who scrambled to find a kind of society that would continue to function when “jobs” had become superfluous, but I am ahead of Krugman.

Today’s column ended like this

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too…

I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?”

Yup. That’s where I’ve been for several months now. We use employment as the way we distribute income. We have to distribute a lot of income because our economy is based on consumer demand. Consumer demand requires the levels of income that good jobs used to provide.

On the other hand, we are also committed to reducing labor costs. Keeping costs low keeps prices low (lower than they would otherwise be) and profits high. We have reduced labor costs for many decades now, by using machines that do away with human workers. We also export jobs to places in the world where we can pay workers less money, of course, but even these workers can’t match the productivity of the new machines—which, among other things, don’t take coffee breaks.

The old solution was to keep the brainy jobs here and leave the manual jobs for foreigners abroad and the lower classes here at home. This two-part solution has two challenges to face. The first is that as the machines get brainier (have you seen any GE or IBM ads on television lately?) more and more of the brainy jobs can be done by workers powered by battery packs. There have been, for instance, some truly amazing experiments recently using robot counselers.[1] And, of course, the other challenge is that you can’t pay low income workers enough to enable them to sustain a consumer economy.

Those two projected paths are so clear that I am willing to call them, for the purposes of this post, “facts.”

Is there a liberal response to these facts? Yes, there is. In the short run. It is that we follow the socialist democracies of Europe with substantially higher taxes and substantially higher services. That will work for a while. But unless we find some way to keep ourselves from turning most productive labor—including “creative labor”—over to smart machines, it won’t work for very long. I don’t see us passing laws requiring that some given percentage of all “labor” must be performed by human beings.

Conservatives don’t have a response even in the short run. The percent of national income now controlled by the top 1% is now about where it was on the eve of the Great Depression.[2] We can argue for upward mobility until we are blue in the face, but upward mobility doesn’t create enough good jobs to sustain an economy based on consumer spending. It changes who gets to do the spending, but now how many people are able to spend.

So the liberals win this one. Let’s move on to the next one. What will people need to be like in a society where most people’s time is not structured by “doing jobs,” and where people are free to “be” whoever they want to be? I’ll tell you. They will need to be like the people the conservatives have been arguing for—not, I hasten to point out, supporting—lo these many years. They will need to be—WE will need to be—people of character. Neighbors, friends, communities. Dilettantes.

If you thought the U. S. government was up against a huge challenge in redefining “work” so that we can afford it, how do you like this challenge? Here, the U. S. government is going to have to make citizens who can be trusted with these levels of resources and freedom.

I said that the worst way I could think of. “The U. S. is going to have to make citizens…” Except in the very most technical sense, no government “makes” citizens. And no government makes citizens virtuous. The very best would could do as a government is to make family settings rich enough in resources that parents—who may not have had a fighting chance themselves—could give their children a fighting chance to become virtuous citizens. And ordinarily, that doesn’t work. We would need to find a way to enrich the communities that actually could, if they chose to and if they had the resources, provide nourishing contexts for the families that make up those communities.

We will need, in short, the kinds of communities conservatives have been kvetching about for decades now and liberals have been telling them to shut up. That brings us back to Krugman’s very good question, “What…would they propose, instead?”

Except that now it is a short term question only, given that “they” refers to conservatives. The long term question is the same, but it is asked by conservatives about liberals. Looking at our great need for the traditional virtues—given the “fact” of a machine-dominated economy and a human dominated world of leisure—conservatives will ask “What…would they propose, instead?”

I’m a liberal and I feel the bite of that second question. I know what kind of society I would like, but when conservatives ask about “proposing something,” they are not asking about preferred outcomes. They are asking about how to get there.

I have no idea. No way of getting there seems very likely to me.

[1] It’s a lot worse than it sounds. See Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together for a much larger dinner of bad news. And here is the entre to that dinner. We are redefining our needs so that they can be met better by computers than by humans. We are redefining our needs. Redefining. We are doing that.

[2] Robert Reich has a very readable account of this in his book, Aftershock, but no one disputes that it is true.

Posted in Politics, Sustainability | Tagged character, consumer spending, Krugman, welfare, work | Leave a comment

The Exception Proves the Rule

Posted on June 14, 2013 by hessd

This is a really cheap post. I labor over some of my posts. I use punctuation and everything. For this one, I am going to point you to the website (The Phrase Finder) that deserves the credit for this and then just say a few things that I feel like saying.

“The exception proves the rule.” I have never understood this saying. Why does an exception prove anything? To the best of my recollection, I have never used it. Ordinarily, I am the guy who is pointing to the regularities; to the rule. It is the other guy who is saying that the rule doesn’t apply at the moment. And since it didn’t really mean anything, it couldn’t be refuted. It was just an annoyance.

The Phrase Finder cites this situation—my situation—first. “To the untutored ear it might appear to mean “if there’s a rule and I can find a counter-example to it, then the rule must be true.” This is clearly nonsense; for example, if our rule were ‘all birds can fly’, the existence of a flightless bird like the penguin hardly proves that rule to be correct. In fact, it proves just the opposite.” So here, my opponent would be arguing that that the existence of a flightless bird proves that all birds can fly. It is, as the Phrase Finder notes, “clearly nonsense.”

I came to this topic yesterday because Dr. Andrew Novella, whose lectures I have been listening to, (see: Can You Be Too Skeptical?) pointed out that “the exception that proves the rule” has been widely misunderstood. The reason it has, he says, is that we don’t understand that “prove,” in that formulation, means “test.” The exception tests the rule.

Of course it does. I have had a particular affection for the word anomaly ever since I learned that it is formed of an-, a negative prefix, and homalos, “even.” An anomaly is an unevenness: a bump in an otherwise flat plane. It is an anomaly. It is an exception. Does this exception “test” the rule? Do we want to call this plane “flat,” even though there is this exception?

I liked that a lot better. But if you go to the Phrase Finder hyperlink, you will find this response to that explanation. “Unfortunately, when we go back to the legal origin of the phrase, we see that it doesn’t mean that at all.”

The origin is the maxim, “Exceptio probat regulam in sasibus non exceptis” and is interpreted to mean “exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted.” The exception points out, in other words, what the rule is: it does this in the process of removing one instance from the rule. Phrase Finder’s example is: “If we have a statement like ‘entry is free of charge on Sundays,’ we can reasonably assume that as a general rule, entry is charged for. So, from that statement, here’s our rule—you usually have to pay to get in.”

Think about the realities—the rules—pointed to by such phrases as: except when accompanied by children; or, without proof of membership; or, unless you are a Democrat. Every one of those points to a situation that is to be taken for granted—it is a rule—and makes a small exception to that rule. It is the exception that testifies to the existence of the rule.

Isn’t that satisfying? Unless, of course, you are a casuist and therefore an exception.

Posted in Words | Tagged exceptions, rules taken for granted | Leave a comment

Can You Be Too Skeptical?

Posted on June 11, 2013 by hessd

Yes. You can.

I want to refer, down the page a little, to a controversy between medical doctors. Dr. Andrew Newberg, whom I know only from his recorded lectures, called “The Spiritual Brain” is one; the other is Dr. Steven Novella, whom I know only from his recorded lectures called “Your Deceptive Mind.” So far as I know, they don’t know each other and if they did, they might not know that they are arguing with each other. But I know.

Phyrro, the father of the school of thought called Skepticism, is with us still. At least, he is with the inventor of “truthiness.”

To illustrate this point—not to prove it, only to illustrate it—allow me to contrast a word that managed to survive in English with one that did not. The word that did survive is sepsis, “a poisoned state caused by the absorption of pathogenic microorganisms and their products into the bloodstream.” No one would ask if I had “too much sepsis.” Any sepsis is too much. The word that did not survive is skepsis.[1] The OED defines it as “inquiry, hesitation, doubt.” Their one quotation comes from 1876: “Among their products were the system of Locke, the scepsis of Hume, the critical philosophy of Kant.”

This glimpse of the two words is enough to show that they represent different ways of pointing to gains and losses and that is what I want to think about today. An appropriate treatment of skepticism requires a balance. There is too much, too little, and just right. An appropriate treatment of sepsis requires only simple condemnation. There is no just right; the absence of septicism (sepsis) is really the only good.[2] The further you can get away from sepsis, the better.

Here is Dr. Newberg’s contribution to this dilemma. He cites a study in which “believers” and “non-believers were asked to find objects embedded in a complex picture. For the purposes of this study, “believers” are religious, spiritually engaged people and “non-believers” are athiests, agnostics, and people disengaged generally from religion. I know those ways of assigning people to categories are crude, but they are good enough for this study.

He gave these volunteers a very complicated picture to study. Embedded in the picture are some real images and some lines that “suggest” an image, but are really not images. Here’s what he found. Believers found a lot more of the embedded objects than nonbelievers. They also found more “pseudo-objects,” partial patterns that were supposed to “suggest” an image, but not really to “be” an image. So believers got more right answers and more wrong answers. It will not surprise you that non-believers found fewer objects in the picture and very seldom mistook a pseudo-object for a real one.

This is a particular kind of finding. It shows that believers are readier to say yes. They give more right answers because they are sensitive to the “is this really an object” cues. They give more wrong answers for the same reason. A reasonable person could argue that this is a pretty good deal. You gain this and you lose that—not bad over all. Or one person could say that she was really more the “make fewer errors” sort of person and preferred the style used by non-believers. Another could say he was really the “make more good identifications” sort of person and preferred the style that was more common among the believers in the study. Most of us would call those stylistic choices.

Sepsis isn’t like that. And, for Dr. Novella, skepsis isn’t either. I haven’t finished all of Dr. Novella’s lectures yet, although I plan to because I am really enjoying them. Still, I have listened to three or four hours so far and I have yet to find a study, illustration, or personal anecdote in which skepticism is not the good that is to be sought. The good guys Novella has in mind are crouching down at the far end of the scale, as far from “over-willingness to believe” as they can get. Novella doesn’t have anything bad to say about religion but, oddly enough, religious people are the bad guys in all of the examples. Sometimes they are the butt of the joke; sometimes real villains.

For Newberg, skepticism is something to be engaged in in moderation. Too much is bad; too little is bad. For Novella, the more skepticism you can manage, the better, provided that it doesn’t drive you to be skeptical of everything as a matter of principle. To tell you the truth, I believe that if you sat Drs. Newberg and Novella down in a room and asked them to devise a criterion for skepticism, they could do it with no trouble. They would produce a joint statement with both signatures and call it an easy morning’s work.

Then they would go back to their studios to continue recording their lectures. Dr. Newberg would talk about belief and believers. The statistics show that their lives are better in every way we know how to measure.[3] Sure you make more mistakes, but look how much better your lives are. Dr. Novella would talk about the credulous and simpleminded (both victims and villains) who don’t recognize the power of coincidence and of probability and who, therefore, attribute agency to the oddest situations. He regularly cites people who believe in Bigfoot, people who believe they have been abducted by aliens (as we see here), and people who assign religious answers to problems for which there are perfectly good scientific answers.

Their work, that is to say, would be entirely unaffected by the paper they had just devised and signed. Why is that? It is because Newberg is working in a world of too much, too little, and just right. All the studies he reports fit that model. And Novella is working in a world where credulity is a kind of sepsis and the better you can defend yourself against it, the better off you are.

My guess is that neither of them knows the truth of what I just wrote about them. But if you look at the title of this post and at the first line, you know where I stand.

[1] Don’t worry too much about the spelling. Our linguistic cousins, the British, spell this family of words sceptic, scepticism, sceptical. We spell them skeptic, skepticism, skeptical. I had to go back and change all the sc- words to sk- words. My spellchecker didn’t just disapprove of the British spelling; it attacked it and Americanized it on the spot.

[2] I’m going to keep fussing with these forms. English has borrowed an adjective from one word and a noun from the other. The complete pattern, which English does not have—did not have until today—would offer skepsis, skepticism and sepsis, septicism. We don’t do that.

[3] In fact, he comes perilously close to proposing that people ought to be religious because it has X, Y, and Z benefits for their health. That pisses me off more than anything Novella says. “Religion” that you adopt so that you will get the benefits isn’t religious enough to consider God as anything other than a tool. Just routine idolatry in the Judeo- Christian-Muslim way of looking at things.

Posted in Living My Life, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged gullible, religion, science, skeptical | 2 Comments

Surveillance and Its Discontents

Posted on June 9, 2013 by hessd

The federal government has recently been prodded and leaked into admitting that they have been snooping on an unprecedented number of American citizens. I don’t really think this is an issue that is going to matter much. It should, probably, but it won’t. Let me tell you why I think that.

This is an ends and means question but it isn’t a very good one. Here, by contrast, are two good ones. I need a widget and I have only an hour to find one I like. The first place I stop offers to sell me a widget at roughly twice what it is worth. I think about this unfair price and then about where I will have to go to get a fair one in the time I have and decide to pay it. The end I have in mind is keeping to my schedule; the means is paying too much for my widget.

In Robert Harmon’s movie, “Ike,” Gen. Eisenhower must describe to the King and Queen of England what Operation Overlord will be like. The King is nearly overwhelmed by the estimate of casualties. “…the expected losses—sheer carnage,” he says. Eisenhower responds that he, too, is grieved by the casualties, but “…if they do not offer the sacrifice of blood now, we will all pay dearly with added gallons later. So if some must die, it is in a worthy cause.”[1]

This question, like my widget question, is a matter of what end is to be achieved and what means will be necessary to achieve it. As different as these to settings are, they share some important features. The first is that the end is a current value. If I don’t have to shop elsewhere, I get to keep the time it would have cost me. If we sacrifice the lives of many of our soldiers, we defeat the German army and end the war.

What value do we achieve by the currently confessed levels of surveillance? No terrorist acts are committed against American locales or American citizens. In this formulation, what we “win” is that nothing happens. How would you like to run for re-election on that platform?

That is the current stance of the Obama administration and of majorities in both houses of Congress. Not too much pop, is there? Leaving aside the Obama administration (which, in the very unlikely event of a successful candidacy by Vice President Joe Biden, cannot be re-elected), we have all these Representatives and Senators claiming, as one reason why they should be re-elected, that something did not happen during their term of office.

So the goal statement is weak, politically.

The means statements are worse. President Obama can say that the Congress and the federal judiciary are “empowered” to oversee the intelligence agencies—to exercise surveillance over our surveillance programs. So to speak. In fact, the President said it yesterday.

But that’s also why we set up congressional oversight. These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress, and they’re being fully briefed on these programs. And if, in fact, there was — there were abuses taking place, presumably those members of Congress could raise those issues very aggressively. They’re empowered to do so.

We also have federal judges that we put in place who are not subject to political pressure. They’ve got lifetime tenure as federal judges, and they’re empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren’t being abused.

All this makes sense to a rational person if Congress is briefed regularly and specifically on what the covert programs are doing. They wouldn’t be covert very long under those circumstances. And Senators Wyden (D-OR) and Udall (D-CO) were not impressed. Here’s the New York Times for June 6.

“I do not take a back seat to any member of this body in terms of protecting the sources and methods of those in the intelligence community,” Mr. Wyden said. But he warned that those efforts “should never be a secret from the American people.”

Late Wednesday, the secret was exposed, bringing to light the scale of government collection of communication information in the name of national security that Mr. Wyden and another serious-minded Western Democrat — Mark Udall of Colorado — have been hinting at for years.

“The intelligence community can target individuals who have no connection to terrorist organizations,” Mr. Udall warned back in May 2011. “They can collect business records on law-abiding Americans.”

The case for serious resistance coming from the federal courts is more complicated, but I will say here that the courts have no independent basis for deciding whether the case the intelligence community made is asking for “data mining” was a good case.

So as an ends and means problem, it doesn’t look very good. The ends will have to be embraced by politician who want to be re-elected and “all kinds of bad things did not happen during my term” is weak. The means and supposed to be protected by vigorous debate among the policy branches of government but no one seems to know what means are necessary to deal with threats no one knows about.

But here’s the worst problem. In order to protect our privacy, we have to be willing to allow for the likelihood that some terrorist acts will succeed. Let me put that another way. The government will have to intentionally choose NOT to take actions and everyone will know that the result of this restraint will be that acts of terrorism will be more likely.

A lot of Americans are not very happy about unimaginably broad surveillance by their government, but they feel very strongly that he government should do whatever is necessary to protect us from getting blown up.

This is why I started with widgets and invasions. The debate on the value of the end and the cost of the means is right there in front of us. We can have a debate about it. In the case of the invasion, we did have a debate about it and it wasn’t as simple as that line attributed to General Eisenhower.

But we cannot have a debate about being willing to be less secure against terrorist attacks so that we can prevent unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution notwithstanding. We will not allow our elected representatives to engage in that debate. If they do, reprisal will be swift even if there is not a terrorist attack. If there is, and the odds favor it no matter what our spy agencies do, the reprisals will be vicious.

Here’s President Obama again:

But I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.

Honestly, I honor the man just for saying things like that in public. But “making choices as a society” is not how it gets done. It gets done by making choices as a polity and the way we do that is by means of elections which raise and examine policy questions.

We have never had that kind of elections and we do not now.

[1] Eisenhower tosses the word crusade into his account casually. In our world, a lot of people understand that what looks like a crusade from one side looks like jihad from the other. It isn’t a casual word anymore.

Posted in Politics | Tagged ends and means, politics as usual, surveillance, terrorism | 2 Comments

Saving Normal

Posted on May 30, 2013 by hessd

Being “normal” is a little bit of a challenge. There are several reasons why this is so. One is that knowing what is “normal” is not always easy. Then too, being “normal” is not always what one aspires to. Also, there is the moral part of “normal”—what I would call, any other time, the “normative” part of “normal.” You see why I didn’t do it here. If you are ready to object that normal simply means “most common,” please see abnormal and draw your own conclusions.

In the New York Times for May 27, David Brooks wrote a column called “Heroes of Uncertainty.” It was a very adroit column, in which Brooks shared his doubts about the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) on the one hand and lauded the psychiatrists who refuse to be bound by it and who, instead, jury-rig treatments for the patients they actually have. He also snarked, wittily, that if the creators of DSM-5 are so hot for “new diseases,” they should have included “physics envy,” because the crucial failing of the psychological sciences is their aspiration to me more like the physical sciences.

But for me, the most important part of the column is his reference to Dr. Allen Frances and to his book, Saving Normal, which I have taken as the title for this post. Here is a clip from the book review at Amazon.com.

Anyone living a full, rich life experiences ups and downs, stresses, disappointments, sorrows, and setbacks. These challenges are a normal part of being human, and they should not be treated as psychiatric disease. However, today millions of people who are really no more than “worried well” are being diagnosed as having a mental disorder and are receiving unnecessary treatment.

This practice is bad in a number of ways. Here are four. It “leads to unnecessary, harmful medications, [to the] narrowing of horizons, [to the] misallocation of medical resources, and [to the] draining of the budgets of families and the nations.”

You’ll agree that those are serious. This one is worse. By doing this, we “shift responsibility for our mental well-being away from our own naturally resilient and self-healing brains…and into the hands of ‘Big Pharma,’ who are reaping multi-billion dollar profits.”

There are two points here that are worth our attention. The first is that we shift responsibility away from ourselves. We explain “what is going on” in our lives in ways that cause us not to look to our own resources, but to pseudo-scientific, cookie cutter, psychopharmacology. That one is going to have to wait for another post.

The second is that we shift responsibility to the pharmaceuticals industry (Big Pharma), apparently hoping that the right pill will save us. How does that work, exactly? Well,…“normal grief will become ‘Major Depressive Disorder;’ the forgetting seen in old age is ‘Mild Neurocognitive Disorder’, temper tantrums are ‘Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder’, gluttony is ‘Binge Eating Disorder’…” and so on.

I think Dr. Frances is right. I think these name changes will become common among therapists and, more alarmingly, among patients. In all these pairs, we see the option of defining them as moral or normal on the one side and as medical on the other side. Grief and forgetting are “normal.” They are not pathological. Temper tantrums and gluttony are moral failures. They are not pathological either.

Society is pretty much a moral enterprise. There are rules we are supposed to live by and failure to live by those rules ought to bring moral condemnation. Ideally, the person who violated the rules would condemn himself, apologize, affirm the general value of the rule, and promise not to do it again. Failing that, the society should condemn him for the violation and provide the array of incentives and disincentives that will not only change his behavior, but that will also bring him back to the moral standards.

Calling these behaviors medical rather than moral doesn’t do any of those things. The approach that treats these issues as moral issues and that counts on the wisdom of the violator or the community where the violator lives is better in every way. If it works. If it doesn’t work, it isn’t better.

What we have actually done for a long time now—most of my lifetime—is to define issues like this as normal (she forgets things sometimes) or moral (I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that) as long as we are able to define them that way. When the behaviors get really bad, we ask for professional assistance. I think that’s the way it ought to work.

Frances’s concern is that that order of events is going to get turned around. We are not going to give “our own naturally resilient and self-healing brains” a chance. We are not going to accept some kinds of failures as “normal” or some kinds of violations of social norms as “immoral.” We are going to go straight for the major leagues of therapy where normal grief becomes Major Depressive Disorder.

In this way of looking at it, the difficulty is that we choose professional interventions first. We don’t try, first to incorporate these events into the normal rhythm of our lives or try, first, to show that important norms have been violated and apologies are in order. We skip over both of those and go for the pill—whatever new solution the pharmaceutical companies have come up with.

There’s another way of looking at it, however, that is a little darker. Nobody makes any money when we decide that grandma will require a little more vigilance from all of us because she forgets things. Nobody makes any money when a school day is broken up by enough exercise and project work that children don’t have Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder “symptoms” any more. Nobody makes any money when normal grief is treated as something that should not be borne by anyone who has insurance. But if those conditions are called “disorders” and treated with drugs, quite a few people make money.

This is the place for vilifying doctors and hospitals and insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. I’ll leave that to people who are better at it than I am. What I want to point to is that under these conditions, everyone involved is rewarded for seeing a condition as a “Disorder.” No one is rewarded when it is not called a “Disorder.” Under those conditions, everyone slides slowly, not intending to, into the frame of mind where calling “Disorders” is the professional and the responsible thing to do. It is the compassionate thing as well, because it takes the “suffering” of the “patient” seriously.

I’m going to close with two stories. These don’t prove anything. They do give illustrations of just what we are up against as we try to understand these matters.

Story #1 Something happened to me in the summer of 2006. I didn’t know what it was then and I still don’t know what it was. I lay around at home for a while trying to get better, but I kept passing out. I couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t stay awake during the day. I went to my doctor, who said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you are going to have to have some sleep.” He said that when he found me asleep on the hallway floor outside his office. He gave me pills that knocked me completely out at night and he put me on six months of antidepressants. Because of those pills, I was able to start teaching at the beginning of the Fall term at Portland State. The first week, I taught as much of a class period as I could and then went home and went back to bed. By the third week, I was teaching whole two-hour periods and holding office hours. They never did find out what was wrong with me, but the pills either fixed it or gave my body enough time to fix it on its own. We don’t know.

Story #2 My wife, Marilyn, died in 2003. We had been married nearly 25 years. She was my best friend and losing her was really awful. I grieved the loss of this special friend for a long time. In the middle of this time, an old friend of mine pointed out that I was depressed and asked whether I had considered taking an antidepressant. I thought about it for awhile and told her, eventually, that I wasn’t any more depressed than I ought to be, having lost a wife like that. The way it ought to work, I said, was that I would be depressed for a while and then slowly start to get better. And, with a lot of help from friends who knew me and were willing to put themselves out on my behalf, that is just what happened. I did get better and ever since then, I have benefitted from what I learned as the process worked itself out through me.

You see the dilemma. Story #1 and Story #2 define the options. These are both good stories because I did what I needed to do in each one, but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine them reversed. In the first instance, I would refuse medication when in fact, my active life had been brought to a stop. In the second, I would refuse the experiences and the learning that working through my grief would give me and go straight for a pharmaceutical solution.

The authors I am considering today are worried that the #2 stories are going to fade away. People who are taught to define their grief as a “disorder” will not accept the lessons it has to teach. These authors also worry that #1 stories will be all that is left. These stories are built on the premise that we don’t know what is wrong with you, but if you’ll take two of these every day, they will fix you.

We will all be poorer if that happens, no matter who is making money on it.

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology | Tagged Big Pharma, depression, grief, normality, social norms | Leave a comment

A Retirement that Sparkles

Posted on May 23, 2013 by hessd

I want to admit, right away before someone reminds me of it, that it is my own retirement I am thinking of. I know that yours—the one you are currently experiencing or the one you are hoping to experience—will likely be very different. To me, that doesn’t mean you don’t want your retirement to sparkle; it means only that different things will make it sparkle.

This post is about what I think will make my own retirement sparkle. We’ll begin by recognizing that sparkle is what they call “a frequentative.” My dictionary says that it “expresses frequent and repeated action” and by sweet happenstance, it gives sparkle as the frequentative form of spark.

Now let’s reset the scene a little. I was sitting in the northwest corner of my favorite Starbucks—it’s where the Northwest Corner Caucus meets—and George Battistel, a member of the caucus asked me how the retirement was going. I had put in a solid month of it at that time and wasn’t really sure. I told George that I was pretty clear about some of the elements it needed to have. I wanted to be active and I needed a good deal of structure, but I wanted to be more relaxed than my work at Portland State had allowed, but I still wanted to be “productive,” whatever that meant. George said he thought that was pretty complicated and that I might want to give some thought to making it an acronym.

So I did that. I made SPAR—structured, productive, active, and relaxed. I was pretty happy about that. “I’m retired, but I want to keep SPARRING.” That sort of thing. It did sound a little nautical for me, however. Then I thought I might be better off to have something that sounded like a unit of measure; something like reps or volts or decibels or something. It wasn’t too hard to get to ARPS. That sounded like a unit of measure to me. “It’s a good retirement. I’m averaging over five ARPS a day.”

I have no idea what that means.

The next time I saw George at Starbucks, I was ready to tell him about my ARPS but he had been thinking about it too. His idea was that it would be a better acronym if it had a K in it. He liked the idea of SPARK. I liked it too and as I looked over my ARPS, I realized there wasn’t anything there that represented the persistent attraction to knowledge, which I was pretty sure would be part of any retirement I had. So I make the K into KNOWLEDGE and put it at the end of my old SPAR.

That gives me SPARK for my retirement goals and, with the frequentative form, SPARKLE. So what does all that mean? It’s hard to say in advance. Here is what I hope it will mean.

The S is there to remind me of structure. When you have a job, you have an imposed structure. When you don’t—and you still need some—you need to build it yourself. It helps me to have to be somewhere in particular at some time in particular. I fit the rest of my life in there somewhere and everything is good.

The P is there to remind me of productivity. For me, that’s just doing something I think is worthwhile. I enjoy some things just because they are enjoyable and I am very proud of that. The other things I do need to have an effect of some kind. That doesn’t mean that I am driven to achievement. It mostly means that I like to keep track of whether I am actually doing what I am trying to do. I still keep track of my mile times when I run on Wildwood Trail. I don’t strive to achieve them; I just note what they are. I like that.

The A is there to remind me that everything works better when I am physically active. Many hundreds of times, I have begun a run I did not want to do and have discovered somewhere in the first quarter of a mile that this whole running thing is pretty nice. Being active keeps my body feeling good, increases the number of calories I can safely consume in a day, and keeps me from being moody.

The R is there to remind me that I need to relax. It’s like running; I discover how much I enjoy it when I make myself start doing it. My niece, Kendy, calls it “unclenching.” Perfect metaphor! I could use a little Jamaican influence. Maybe I should go to Jamaica and study them. (Just kidding.)

The K is there to remind me that the production and consumption of knowledge has always been a major part of my life and, especially now when I have no classes to teach, I need to find ways to continue to emphasize it. My friend Dave Campbell and I are presenting a paper at the Public Administration Theory Network convention in a few weeks. Maybe I can count that as something like teaching a course.

So I hope to sparkle in my retirement. We’ll see how it goes.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged activity, relaxation, retirement | Leave a comment

Remembering Bonnie Zawacki, Part II

Posted on May 22, 2013 by hessd

In Part I, I passed along to you Bonnie Klein’s recollections of herself as a college student; Bonnie Zawacki, studying causal attribution with me at Westminster College. The two of us—Bonnie and I—talked about building a new lens, a lens that allowed us to see our own lives in a new way. Bonnie remembered the surprise she felt when she discovered the categories she had created in trying to give a structure to her experience. That was our common work in class.

I warned you that there was a dark side, too and I’d like to turn to that dark side today. In the previous post, we considered what it would mean to “lower the threshold of perception.” We looked at Albert’s day in school and why he says “Fine,” when his mother asks him how things went that day. For Albert to have some data, with which he could answer his mother’s question, he will have to lower the threshold of perception that prevents him from “noticing” the bullying, the dreary Spanish class, and the daunting lunchtime.[1]

Shifting now from Albert back to Bonnie Zawacki, we see that Bonnie takes the Political Behavior class, a part of which involves lowering the threshold of perception so that she sees a lot of things she has not seen and formulates these new data into categories. As categories, they seem much larger and more permanent. Because they are all made up of failures, they may seem more menacing as well. What is Bonnie supposed to do with those new structures?

Here’s the way Bonnie Zawacki put it:

If the purpose of [this] course is to make us aware that we can move our thresholds up and down, 1) is this reasonable[?] and 2) why don’t you aid us in raising them if you’re going to teach us to lower them? HUH?[2]

Then, later:

My threshold had indeed been lowered: I was sensitive to social manipulation, saw the alienating character of institutions, and understood that the methods and demands of those institutions were not always or necessarily in my best interest. But then the course was ending. I couldn’t go back to my ignorance (didn’t want to go back) but I didn’t know a way to protect myself from the hits my lowered threshold permitted and the “HUH?” at the end of that question makes me remember that I had been taking some hits, though I couldn’t possibly remember what they were. It appears I felt left on my own to deal with my sensitivities.

Bonnie discovered some questions in her notes that she apparently wrote there rather than asking them of me. Here’s one: “How much do you intend to lead our morals, or are you just trying to make us think?” The underlined words were underlined in her notebook.

Questions and comments like these point out the dark side of teaching a class like this in the way I had chosen to teach it. My goal was to open students’ eyes to a little of what they routinely ignored. I wanted to give them choices where before they had seen no occasion for choice. The picture to the left shows a lot of dialogue balloons and no dialogue. That happened a lot at the beginning of the term.

Remember that “nothing at all had happened” in Albert’s school day and that everything, therefore, was “fine.” I wanted to help them build, out of all the frictions they had been taught to explain away, stable prominent categories of persons or character traits or institutional practices or lapses of judgment or systemic characteristics that kept them from reaching the goals they were aware of pursuing. That leaves the questions Bonnie asked: “OK, I build these structures. Now what?”

There isn’t any adequate “now what” that I am aware of. There are two ways of resolving the dilemma this approach provides. Both resolutions are worse than the dilemma, it seems to me. The first way is that I provide the answers to the question, “Now what?” There were ten other students in Political Behavior the year Bonnie took it. They represent a substantial segment of the bright, highly motivates, highly individualistic students that a good liberal arts college will collect. So to Becky, I would say, “I see that you have devised some interesting and troubling problems as a result of your journal work. Here is what you should do to resolve them.” And to Amy, “Well, Amy, that is really troubling. Clearly you are going to have to make some changes. Here’s how you should begin.”

Are you bothered yet? I am, and I didn’t even get down the page to Dave.

The second way is to forget what you learned about your own patterns of perception, categorization, and causal attribution. Honestly, I suppose that was the most popular approach the students actually adopted, but I can’t see recommending it. Let’s start with Becky again. I say, “I see that you have uncovered some shortcomings in the way you attend to yourself and your social environment. I thought that your discovery that you routinely attribute the flaws of your female friends to their oppressive environment and the flaws of your male friends to their inherent sexual nature explained quite a few of the journal entries you submitted. It is problematic, though; I can see that. So I recommend that you forget that this pattern of attributions is something you do and just go back to doing it in an unconscious way.”

My hope was always that the students would take whatever of the new reality they found to be attractive and useful and pursue it to the best of their abilities. They get all the benefits that way and become intimately acquainted with the mistakes they make and the consequences of those mistakes. If there is another way to make a liberal arts education work[3], I don’t know what it is.

[1] It costs Albert a lot of energy to keep “not noticing” these events, by the way. I don’t want to say he “represses” them because that gets me into a whole pattern of discourse I don’t want. Imagine that Albert is the CIA and that he has “locally embedded spies” who notice all these things going one. Albert needs to find a way to keep these spies from reporting their findings to headquarters. He needs, in other words, to keep threatening them about what will happen if they do or keep rewarding them for their silence. The cost of either of those will be high. That is why it costs Albert to keep “not noticing.”

[2] Bonnie Klein, reading after all this time what she had written, admitted that that “HUH?” expressed some anger and frustration she was willing to share with her notebook, but not with her professor.

[3] They call them “the liberal arts” because they are the arts that are necessary if people are to exercise their freedom. I think of them, myself, as “the liberating arts.”

Posted in Education, Political Psychology, ways of knowing | Tagged abandonment, agency, anxiety, authority, freedom | 2 Comments

Remembering Socrates

Posted on May 14, 2013 by hessd

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. I don’t think I would go quite that far, myself. I do think I would say that in most cases, the properly examined life is “better” than the alternatives.

This comes to mind because I am stuck between Part I and Part II of Bonnie Klein’s (the veteran high school English teacher) recollections of herself as Bonnie Zawacki (the late teenage college student). At the end of “Remembering Bonnie Zawacki—Part I,” I promised dark things in the next post, but the most interesting of those dark things is Bonnie Zawacki’s complaint that I taught them how to lower the threshold of perception (as that threshold controlled certain questions) but I didn’t tell them what to do with all that new data. In that, she was completely correct.

I have some things to say in my defense—in my defense against Bonnie Zawacki’s charge; remember that Bonnie Klein and I see this issue in precisely the same way by now—but before I say them, we are going to have to take on Socrates’ notion of what is worth living and what is not. Ludwig Wittgenstein has another idea entirely in mind, as you see, but he is going to have to wait his turn.

Let’s begin with the contrast Socrates draws between “examined” and “unexamined.” This is a light switch sort of contrast; either you “examine” your life or you don’t. I like the principle because it does away with “unexamined” as a value.[1] It does not, unfortunately, distinguish between “overexamined” and “underexamined.” It also does not distinguish between “well-examined” and “poorly examined.” We could call those, respectively, the amount of examination (too much/too little) and the quality of examination (high quality/low quality). When I asked for the “properly examined life” in the first paragraph, these dimensions are what I had in mind.

Socrates didn’t say that the maximally examined life was better than the optimally examined life. At least he didn’t say it in this quote. My wife, Bette, was introduced to my family in the summer of 2005. I was 67 years old at the time and I felt that introducing a brand new wife to a collection of people who have known you all their lives is potentially perilous. Bette won the hearts and minds of my family with one line, “Sometimes Dale…well…you know…he over-processes things.”

I deny it. I say that I am the kind of person who really needs to process things—how do I think, how do I feel, what causes what, who is responsible—more than most people do. More to the point of today’s story, however, is that I was also the kind of teacher who wanted people to process things more than they had, up until then. Maybe I thought that if it was good for me, it must be good for them. However it started, it was unquestionably sustained by the several generations of students who said, “This is the most valuable thing I ever learned,” or sometimes, “Wow! This is soooo cool.”

I don’t want to waste a paragraph on under-processing. In collectivist societies, the group does a lot of the processing and individuals don’t need to. In individualist societies, like ours, individuals need to do more of this “examining of their lives” for themselves; even so, some need it more than others. I’ll just say that if you can overdo it, you can underdo it. That takes care of the amount of examination.

The quality of examination is another question. No one will have any trouble accepting the idea that high quality examination is better than low quality examination. But what makes an examination of your own life, “high quality.” My idea is that it is worthwhile to start with what you are trying to do and why. Also, with what you are not trying to do and why.

Most of us live lives where we order off the menu. We don’t start with the universe of things we would like to eat and then judge the menu by the proportion of that universe it includes. We look at the menu and decide which, of the things on the menu, we would like to eat and order that. The menu us just a metaphor. I think nearly everyone lives a menu-driven life. The Goths that hang around our high schools, for instance, have a menu of ways of dramatizing their disdain for convention and they choose off of that menu what they will do on any given day. Even the Goths don’t start from scratch.

Focusing on the menu is a way of ignoring other things and, in some circumstances, “other things” really should not be ignored. Leading a well-examined life is a way of probing, from time to time, for things that we would like to have on the menu. Part of my work in Political Behavior, at Westminster College, was to ask off-the-menu questions. Let’s consider Albert.

Did you ever wonder what a high school student meant when he said, “Fine.” “Hi, Albert. It’s good to see you home so early. How was school today?” Albert thinks for a moment and then says, “Fine,” and leaves the room. He might mean just that he doesn’t want to talk about it. On the other hand, in that moment when he paused, he might have run through all the things that happened, looking for something unusual; something that could be singled out and given as an answer to the question.

So let me invent a school day for Albert. Some of the guys in his class pushed him around a little as he was going to his first period class. It was just recreational pushing; nothing serious. It’s what they do more often than not. Spanish class was awful. Most of the kids haven’t done the assignment and Ms. Gonzalez has to spend a lot of time complaining about it and then a lot more time doing their homework for them orally in class. That’s mostly what happens in Spanish. Lunch was routinely awful: greasy chicken and gravy and deep-fried tater tots. Albert sat at a table by himself and pretended he was reading a book; he had found it more likely that he would stay out of trouble if people thought he was reading.

That’s pretty much what happens when Albert goes to school. It is those things that he means when he says, “Fine,” meaning that nothing so unusual has happened that it ought to be singled out. The events of Albert’s day came right off the menu. He managed that day’s menu of events as well as he could and that’s the end of that.

That’s a good way for Albert to get through the day, but it isn’t a very good way for Albert to understand the day. To understand the day, Albert is going to have to allow himself to become aware of some things that aren’t on the menu. What would happen, for instance, if he was met at school by people who were glad to see him? How would it be if Spanish class were not so awful? What if there were good things to eat at lunch and pleasant interesting people to sit with for lunch?

Asking those questions moves the threshold of awareness down. It allows information and values and hopes and fears to come across the threshold and into your life and onto the pages of your journal. If you had a journal that was organized around what you were trying to do—that’s the kind of journal the causal attribution journal (CAJ) is—then you could get out of the menu. You could say what you wanted to happen and what you were trying to do as you entered school and in Spanish class and at lunch and you could see that those things you wanted were not happening.

That’s the kind of thing “the examined life” brings to you if you do these two things: a) organize the examination around what you are trying to do and b) expand the menu beyond “how it always is” to “how it could be.” If you are recording failed initiatives in your CAJ—and that’s what it’s for—you now have a series of entries that begin (negatively) with “Wanted to go into school without being pushed around” or (positively) with “Wanted to meet people as I come to school who are glad to see me.” Eventually this series gets a category name, either a negative one which will have “bullies” in the title or a positive one that will have “friends” in the title.

You now know a lot more than you did. That’s good. Unless, of course, it’s bad. How to you respond to knowing all those things? How does your mom respond to your knowing all those things? What if there’s nothing you can do about it? What if you respond by becoming persistently depressed or angry?

There are lots of possible outcomes and some of them are not good. And those are the “dark things” that Bonnie Zawacki had in mind. We’ll take a look at them next.

[1] Members of collective societies—not individualistic ones like ours and like Socrates’—might feel that it is “our life” not “my life” that needs to be examined and that there is some collective rationality that will do it. Maybe “the traditions of the elders” provide the kind of examination of our life that is needed.

Posted in Education, Political Psychology, ways of knowing | Tagged anger, CAJ, confusion, denial, self-examination | Leave a comment

Remembering Bonnie Zawacki

Posted on May 13, 2013 by hessd

Beyond any question, the most exciting project of my fifty years of teaching was helping students understand causal attribution. “Causal attribution” is just giving a reason why something happened—it is attributing a cause to an event. This has been on my mind recently because I have received an amazing account of one phase of my teaching from a former student, now a dear friend. It has helped me see what I have been doing by looking at it from her side.

Bonnie Zawacki was a student of mine for one class. It was called Political Behavior at Westminster College, where I was teaching at the time. The experience I am going to think about today has been relayed to me by Bonnie Zawacki Klein, who, after forty years of thinking about it, has shared with me how the course struck her as a young student at Westminster. Bonnie has amazing credentials for writing these notes, but I am going to hold off for just a little while in saying what they are.

So these are the notes taken by Bonnie Zawacki and recovered, forty years later, by Bonnie Klein. In the title of this piece, it is Bonnie Klein who is remembering Bonnie Zawacki. This is Bonnie Klein at our house in Portland just a few years ago.

About the course, Bonnie said, “It gave me a lens for looking at the world.” I liked that a good deal although there is an important sense in which it isn’t true. What I did was to offer Bonnie a reason to look at the world a little more reflectively and some help in constructing for herself a “lens” that would help her do that.

If there had been a tagline for the course, as there is for nearly everything today, it would have been “What’s stopping you?”

To help answer that question, I asked students to keep a causal attribution journal (CAJ). The first element of the journal asked, “What are you trying to do?” It’s an oddly revealing question. We all see the world in the light of what we are trying to do. The events we are drawn to and the categories we use most reveal what our interest is. In 1957, psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote a much-cited article about “category accessibility.” Here is a paraphrase of what he said: “If you are out looking for apples, anything that “might be an apple” comes readily to your attention and you check it out to see whether it really is an apple.”

It is this phenomenon that makes the CAJ so insidious.[1] College students have become masters of intentions they are supposed to have and they will readily tell you what they are. But a student who says she is out looking for apples but who readily notices fence posts (and ignores “might be apples”) is not, in fact, looking for apples. She is looking for fence posts or for something that might be mistaken for a fence post. That is why “might be a fence post” phenomena come to her attention.

So when Bonnie told me what she was trying to do, each of us had a way to look at that statement on the basis of what she recorded in the journal. It is in that sense that I helped her build a lens. I helped her look on the one hand, at what she said she was trying to do, and on the other, at what she was seeing and how she was explaining to herself why she was not successful.

And why was she not successful? Remember the tagline, “What’s stopping you?” That means that something was stopping her. It was the requirement that in every journal entry (I used the letter W to represent “wanted to”) there was also a (D), which represented “didn’t, or “was not able to.” So every line of the journal represented a failed intention. A number of the students pointed out to me that it got irksome after a while, but Bonnie was not one of those students.

The third necessary element of the journal was the explanation, which I represented as b₂, in which the b- stood for “because.”[2] It is the b₂ which gives the entry some pop because it says why you failed. This is the journal’s second claim to insidiousness because just as college students learn to say what they are intending, they learn to say what went wrong. Some students, to pick a very common example, explain a failure by saying the task was too hard; others by saying that they didn’t try hard enough.

I don’t care all that much about the truth of either assertion, but I care very greatly that the student have an opportunity to look at the collection of causal attributions she has given—that is the b₂ part of the journal entry—and notice how she explains things to herself. It is that reflection that builds the lens that Bonnie said I provided for her but which, in fact, she built for herself in my class using the CAJ.

“I felt something turn in me,” said Bonnie Klein, remembering the experience of Bonnie Zawacki. We had been reading Dorothy Bryant’s little novel, Ella Price’s Journal, and at one point, Ella imagined driving her car into a bridge abutment and “ending it all.” That image crystalized a lot of things in Bonnie’s mind simultaneously. Here’s how she put it:

To think that we actually had the power, consciously and abruptly, to end our lives…made life less of a fact, less a given. And if life is tenuous, then there are choices to be made about it. I doubt I articulated anything like this at the time. I just felt something turn in me. For a class whose scope included personal and social awareness and their interrelationship, this small image was a strong contributor to my understanding that “things aren’t necessarily what they seem.” And that’s one step closer to understanding what the possibilities are!

If Bonnie and I had had this conversation at the time she was a college student, I would have tried to talk her out of the notion that life is “tenuous.” I would have said that life is much less static than we take it to be; that it is much more malleable than it appears.

She would have agreed with that restatement, I am sure, because you simply cannot formulate the frustrations of your ordinary life into one pattern after another after another without realizing the extent to which you contribute to events that seem “external to you” when they happen. The experience of “building a new lens for herself” (that’s how I would put it) and seeing that life is “much less of a fact, less a given” are just two parts of the same experience.

I want to move to one more step in Bonnie’s experience before I finish this reflection. In the next post, I’d like to look at some of the darker parts of her experience. The step I want to take today involves the gathering together of journal entries into categories. The easy way to say it is that it involves categorization. Here’s Bonnie Klein again.

I can’t believe all I have found in my notes. Do you know that, before I wrote to you the first time[3] I looked at this notebook for information and directions for keeping the CAJ…Today I see, first, a couple pages of journal entries! Some are samples and some are my own. And I see what I think are my categories. And some suggested outcomes from the categorization. And what adds up to a theoretical explanation for keeping the journal in the first place. All that on the CAJ was there and I had lost the eyes to see it! (emphases in the original)

“I see what I think are my categories,” Bonnie says. Of course they were her categories. After she wrote the journal entries, her next job was to notice carefully which ones “belonged together.” Entries that belong together are the common elements of a category and right away, students feel the need to give a name to the category. I don’t remember which category names Bonnie invented, but I saw a lot of categories called: boyfriend/girlfriend troubles, boring classes, fraternity/sorority issues, dining hall, roommate, parents, and noisy library.

We all build categories just to get through the day. That means that not many new things happen to us Or, to say it another way, the same kinds of things happen to us and they happen over and over again. That is the effect of seeing an event as belong in a category with what we will call “similar events,” although we are the ones who first discovered the similarity.

Each journal entry is a record of something I tried to do and failed to do and a reason why I failed. That means that categories are entire collections of things I tried to do and failed to do—but the reason for failure now applies to the entire category. I have seen a student review her journal entries and find twenty or so entries in a month that had the attribution “because my roommate was inconsiderate.” I have seen that student look at the overwhelming evidence that she has compiled but never noticed and sit back in her chair and look at me in amazement and say, “That’s a really big problem. I didn’t know that.”

Attending to the small frictions of your life rather than ignoring them brings you information you did not have before. Categorizing those frictions into categories organizes those frictions into structures so prominent that they are hard to ignore. And the repetition of events within a category is a little like having the same toe stepped on over and over again.

[1] I mean this in the sense of the second meaning my dictionary app gives, “operating in a slow or not easily apparent manner,” not in the sense of the first meaning given, which is “characterized by treachery or slyness.” I was charged, every now and then, with being insidious in the first sense, even though I explained how the journal worked on the first day of class. Students mostly didn’t believe me.

[2] There was also a b₁, which was very useful is some contexts, but which need not detain us here. A complete single entry, like “Wanted to get to class on time because I hate to disturb the class by coming in late, but I didn’t because my mother called me as I was leaving for class” would be coded Wb₁(D)b₂.

[3] That first time was about 2005. She was starting to teach a new course and wanted to use some aspects of the journal method with her high school students. She called to ask if I would “talk her through” how the CAJ worked. We became friends that day and have been friends ever since.

Posted in Political Psychology | Tagged categories, explanations, intentions, self-advocacy | 1 Comment

Getting in Shape and Staying in Shape

Posted on May 9, 2013 by hessd

So here are a few dumb questions. Do you have enough fuel? Are you tall enough? Do you really think she cares that much about you?

I have no wish to pejorate—ordinarily, I would have said “minimize” or something, but I just learned pejorate and I want to get comfortable with it—the concerns underlying these questions. There is nothing wrong with the concerns; it is the question that are dumb.

If I were part of the conversations in which these questions were asked, I would want to know—and so would you: enough for what, enough for what, and “cares enough to do what, exactly?” Enough fuel to get home after the little fuel pump light comes on the dashboard. Sure, I’m only a mile from home. Enough height to be allowed to ride something at Disneyworld. Yup. I’m still a little over 6 feet tall, although not as much over as I used to be. Does she are enough about be to water my plants while I’m on vacation? Sure. She’s an old friend and she likes plants.

Once you add the missing information, everything works. What information is missing when we as whether we are “in shape?” “In shape for what?” seems like a good guess. We routinely aspire to “getting in shape” and to “being in shape.” We assure our friends that we are not really “out of shape,” although, we admit, we might look like it. Does everyone have the same thing in mind?

Let’s come at this from the back side. It was pretty puzzling on the front side. I need to walk a mile to get the bus stop. I need to sit through a mind-numbingly obtuse committee meeting for three hours. I need to stop by a local senior center and spend some time with a few friends who do not have the mental acuity they once had and who might or might not know who I am when I show up. I need to get to three appointments at different parts of town in the same day.

Am I “in shape?”

Here’s one way of looking at it. There are some things I must do or that I have chosen to do. If I can do them, I am “in shape.” I am in good enough shape, that is, to do the things I must do.[1] Let’s say that I am. I am able to walk the mile to the bus stop, although I need to allow a little longer than I once did. I am good enough physical shape to do that. I am in good enough emotional shape to endure the three-hour meeting, all the while playing the part I need to play and refusing to make the meeting less effective because I am there. I have enough loyalty and enough empathy to see my elderly friends at the senior center. I’m not all that big on loyalty and empathy, perhaps, but I know what it will take to do this particular act and I know I have at least that much. I can track when the appointments are and where they are and get to all three of them without debilitating anxiety and without undue levels of anxiety. We could call that “executive function,” which is what the lecturer at the Pre-Alzheimer’s Support Group called it.

So I actually am in shape. I have the cognitive, conative, affective, and behavioral abilities to do all those things.[2] To me, that way of saying that I am “in shape” makes a lot of sense. I am not under the illusion that it is going to become a common way to use this all too common phrase, but I like it anyway. This picture is one of the kinds of “being in shape” have in mind.

If I am not in shape, there are two kinds of things I can do. I can increase my capacities so that I can do things like these without exhausting myself or my friends. Conversely, I can reduce the demands to what I am currently in shape for. I’ve experienced both of these and you probably have too. In 2006, I suffered a periodic and mostly unexplained disorientation. This happened to me while I was in the middle of living an ordinary and not very demanding life, but I did have some obligations to meet. I would call the convener of the meeting and say that I would come if I were able and I would stay as long as I was able, then I would go home. On the other side, I have increased my cardiovascular fitness and learned some techniques of concentration and simplified my schedule so that I can manage them.

“Not being in shape” is like a wall. You can learn to get over the wall at the regular height of six feet. That’s probably the best idea, all other things being equal. Or you can move the height down to four and a half feet. Clearly, what we have been calling “in shape” is a ratio between your abilities and the challenges you will have to meet. My idea is that if you know it’s a ratio, you have two chances to be in shape and I like that. Do you?

[1] It will simplify quite a few sentences if I can just say that I am going to treat things I am obligated to do, things I would like to do, and things I am required to do as the same kind of “must.” That means that moral and legal obligations and internal and external sources will all get dumped in the same pile. Ordinarily, I don’t do that.

[2] All those are common except conative, which refers to the facility for intention. It is the past participle of the Latin verb conari, “to undertake, to attempt.” I cannot imagine how we let a word like that slip away.

Posted in Living My Life, ways of knowing | Tagged compassion, functional requirements, getting in shape | Leave a comment