Fractured Attention

Posted on December 17, 2011 by hessd

From my standpoint, this looks like a cultural avalanche.  If there is something good about it, it is not yet visible to me. Today, I want to talk about technology and personal presence.  It seems to me that the more there is of the one, the less there is of the other.

Let’s start with the horror stories and work up.  This morning’s New York Times had an article with the headline: As Doctors Use More Devices, Potential for Distraction Grows.  The article included an account of a patient who is clearly a victim of what the writer calls “distracted doctoring.”

Scott J. Eldredge, a medical malpractice lawyer in Denver, recently represented a patient who was left partly paralyzed after surgery. The neurosurgeon was distracted during the operation, using a wireless headset to talk on his cellphone, Mr. Eldredge said.

 “He was making personal calls,” Mr. Eldredge said, at least 10 of them to family and business associates, according to phone records. His client’s case was settled before a lawsuit was filed so there are no court records, like the name of the patient, doctor or hospital involved. Mr. Eldredge, citing the agreement, declined to provide further details.

This is bad, certainly, but the question I want to consider is how the neurosurgeon came to be making calls on his phone during surgery. Or how a nurse came to be checking airfares.  Or how the technicians running bypass machines came to be texting during a procedure.

I have a theory.  It is that what people my age call “the normal mode of operating” has been fractured.  Let’s take a moment and look at some words here.  An integer is whole.  It has not been “fractured,” although we would probably say “fractioned.”[1]  You have to “break” an integer to get fractions.  You can do the same with integrity, of course (integer/integrity); you can break it and so become a person of pieces, of fragments.

It is not hard to picture a wholeness of attention.  It is a romantic myth that we once had a society that was characterized by this wholeness of attention, but I do think that the duty of “seeming to attend” to what was going on did cut down on the extremes of inattention I am talking about.  If you grew up in a society where attention was routinely fractured, you would never have experienced the fracturing at all.  Having never experienced the wholeness of attention, you would never have experienced seeing that wholeness broken down.  What you would experience, instead, is the persistent multiple claims for attention and the normal-ness, the “rightness” of that multiplicity.  Maybe even the “inevitability.”

If the range of things you know you are expected to be doing in this new consciousness is in the range of 4—7, you might look at someone who was doing only three and think of him as a slacker.  Someone who was doing only one—all of his attention was committed to doing or experiencing or thinking about just this one thing—might be thought of as pathetically simple.  Simpleminded, maybe.  Singleminded.

I’ve argued so far that “people” are like this.  If people are like this, then they go on being like this when they become professionals—unless, of course, they learn to set it aside.  So, in this instance, functioning as a doctor is going to have to be set aside from “normal” in some way.  “When I’m being a doctor,” one would say, “I set aside the normal complexity (I’m trying to think what this person might call it—“complexity” maybe) of normal life and restrict myself to just this patient or just this diagnosis or just this procedure.”  Being a doctor, then, means the temporary setting aside of the normal and everyday fracturing of attention.[2]  Same thing for being a nurse or an anesthesiologist.  If you don’t do that, you will be left with monitoring the procedure and believing that should something require your full attention, you will know it and attend to it in a hurry.

I’ve had pretty good doctors.  Also, I’m a demanding patient.  If I am not getting the focus I think the session requires, I ask for it explicitly.  I haven’t had as much luck with students though.  I’m a professor and I do see a lot of what I might call “distracted studenting,” just to have something parallel to “distracted doctoring.”

I get students who are, for all practical purposes, passing each other notes.  They are texting each other.  They are on Facebook.  The very best of the ones who are not paying attention to what I am trying to get done in class are online,  checking to see if there are more recent public opinion data than those I just cited.  I don’t think my students are any less disciplined than my generation of students was.  I do think that the tools for “being somewhere else” are much more available and much more distracting.  But, much more importantly, I think that there has been a substantial erosion in the idea that one should be “here,” rather than here and here and here and there.

I want to describe why this is particularly hard for the kind of teaching I like best and try hardest to practice, but before I do that, I want to establish a reference point.  It’s an over the top example, but with the absurdity comes some clarity and I think it is worth it.

Imagine that a young man and a young woman are getting married.  Picture a wedding card couple.  Except that each of them has ear buds and is busy texting as the ceremony is going on.  The minister, unused to what he will see as a fractured attention, stops and explains to them gently that they are GETTING MARRIED and this means something and they should pay attention to it.  They look knowingly at each other, (the minister is one of those old “full attention to the one matter before us” guys) then the bride-to-be explains that they actually are tracking the ceremony carefully.  They know where they are in it and what is next.  When the time comes for them to say something, they will be ready, so could we just get on with the ceremony please?

Before I get back to my own classroom, let me ask you to stop and try to say just what is wrong with this couple. 

How is it going?  Hard, isn’t it?

 The truth is, in order to say just what is wrong with it, you have to say what really has to go on RIGHT THEN that is not getting done because of the “distracted marrying.”  What could they really not have accomplished before the ceremony or after; what really had to be done right then?

My kind of teaching emphasizes “concept attainment.”  I teach politics, so there’s always going to be a lot of “who’s leading in the polls” and “will the cap and trade bill every get passed by both houses in the same year?”  But we will also have to deal with whether Americans are really permanently strung up between procedural and substantive notions of what “democracy” means.  What is the fundamental structure of the phony “pro-life v. pro-choice” argument?[3]  Is the internal distribution of power in the House of Representatives more or less important than the balance of power between the House and the Presidency?  That kind of stuff.

It’s hard.  It takes undivided attention for a period of time.  You have to find a way to disentangle the tendrils of old patterns of thought and to replant those tendrils carefully on new surfaces.  You have to see what changing this idea means for that idea.  You have to know whether you are really willing to live with the implications of this new notion.  It isn’t easy and there is a part of it that really has to be done right then.  The class session needs, by one means or another, to reach the temperature at which old ties are loosened (which is precisely what analyze means—the root verb luein means “to loosen”) and are free to be attached in new ways.

You do it then or, chances are, you won’t do it.  That task requires an integrity of attention.  The normal fractured (or multiple-investment) style of attention is not going to do the job.  And that means that if we are going to continue to produce “people” like this, we are going to have to get those people who are also students to set aside what they think of as “the normal natural complexity of being a person” for the purpose of learning something.  If we take as our norm the difficulty the doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologists have in setting this mode aside for the purpose of taking care of patients in surgery, we see that this is asking a lot of students.

In this coming term, I am going to keep this whole argument in mind and try, at the same time, to take a few small steps toward bring a focus to “what goes on within these four walls” during the time you are here.  I suspect it will involve “personalizing” a relationship that has been being “depersonalized” for decades now.  It will require redistributing the points awarded for performance so that the evaluation scheme of the class is not at war with my earnest entreaties to the students.

I don’t really know what these measures will look like, but I don’t think there is much time left to do it and I want to try.

 

[1] The verb here is frangere, “to break.”

[2] People of the old “focus on one thing at a time” mode—the fogies—might call it “inattention,” but we know it is just a new kind of attention: a lot of monitoring and attending as needed.

[3] Since no group thinks of their position as “anti-choice” or as “anti-life,” the structure of the dialogue is going to have to be torqued a little just to make discussion possible.

Posted in Education, Paying Attention, Political Psychology, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Probably Mitt

Posted on December 9, 2011 by hessd

So who are the Republicans going to pick as their presidential nominee?  If I were a betting man (I’m not) and if I put my money where my mouth is (I don’t), I’d say Mitt Romney.  The New York Times just published a survey of likely Republican voters in Iowa, the site of the first real test of R candidates.  To tell you the truth, no one likes Mitt Romney all that well.

Here’s the rundown.  These questions all had this form: “Regardless of how you intend to vote in 2012, which candidate do you think [the variable being asked about] and then a list of names.

[Who] understands the needs of people like you?  Gingrich 24%, Perry 16%, Romney, 13%.

[Who] has the best chance of defeating Barak Obama? Gingrich 31%, Romney 29%.

[Who] is best prepared for the job of president?  Newt Gingrich 43%, Mitt Romney 20%, Ron Paul 11%.

[Who] represents the values you try to live by?  Michelle Bachman 19%, Ron Paul 18%, Mitt Romney 16%, Newt Gingrich 11%.

[Who] will do the most to preserve conservative principles?  Michelle Bachman 21%, Ron Paul 20%, Newt Gingrich 18%, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, 10%.

[Who] can be trusted to handle an international crisis?  Newt Gingrich 44%, Mitt Romney 16%, Ron Paul 10%

[Who] is qualified to be Commander-in-Chief?  Newt Gingrich 40%, Mitt Romney 19%, Rick Perry 11%.

[Who] will deal with the economy and unemployment? Mitt Romney 22%, Newt Gingrich 21%, Ron Paul 15%

On first glance, that looks really good for Newt Gingrich.  He is at or near the top of nearly all the responses.  But there are a couple of things you really need to take into account about Newt.  One is that he really doesn’t have a campaign organization.  The one he had, quit—they left en masse—and he hasn’t entirely replaced them.  Another is that he hasn’t raised front-runner money.  There is still time to do that, but it needs to get done and he hasn’t shown much appetite for that part of the campaign yet. 

A third is that Gingrich is really smart and he knows he is.  That means that the discipline candidates have to show to keep “on message” is a good deal more onerous for him than for the others and consequently, he doesn’t do it as well.  If he knew for sure that he could be president if he could just control his tongue, I think he still couldn’t do it.  He really likes “being Newt” and my guess is that he would rather be Newt than President Gingrich.

That said, it can’t be denied that Gingrich is the flavor of the month.  He wins five of those questions outright.  Romney wins one—by 1%.  On the other hand, look where Romney falls on the questions he doesn’t win.  He is second on five of them.  He is third on three more.

Perry has a second and two thirds.  Ron Paul has two seconds and three thirds.  Michelle Bachman wins the values questions, but nothing else.  What does that sequence of lower placements mean for Romney?

My guess is that Romney’s position as the default candidate—the candidate who will be chosen at the convention unless someone does something really dramatic to replace him—will hold up.  Romney gets bad grades for “saying what he really means” rather than “saying what he thinks voters want to hear.”  As a successful governor of a liberal state, he did the things that success required.  Now he wants to be nominated by a much more conservative party and he is doing the things that success requires.  He can only hope that consistency isn’t one of them.

He’s the kind of team you don’t want hanging around late in the third quarter.  He’s not going to make many mistakes.  He’s run this race before and he learned a lot from it.  He’s going to have to be taken out by someone with a better offense than he has and I don’t see that happening.  Gingrich has a high-powered offense, but he turns the ball over a lot.  Nobody seems to like Mitt best, but everyone seems to think it would be OK if he won.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Matthew’s Story and Really Smart People

Posted on December 5, 2011 by hessd

Nobody ever said that the story of Jesus’s birth was about what you know.  The story is, like everything else in Christianity, about Who you know.[1]  I get that and I’m fine with it.  Mostly.  But the truth is that the less of any commodity there is, the more we are attracted to it and there aren’t very many really smart people in the birth narrative of the gospel of Matthew.

There are three for sure, though, counting all three magi as one.  In the order the story gives us, they are: the magi, King Herod, and Joseph.  The magi were what we would call astrologers today but that was before astronomy diverged from astrology.  The reason for studying the laws of the stars (the –onomy part) is that they would tell us things (the –ology part).  After all, you have to know a lot about stars to recognize a new one.

The new star told the magi that a new king was going to be born in Israel.  So what did they do: follow the star to Jerusalem?  Nope.  They consulted a really good political atlas and determined that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel and so, logically, where the new king would be. Then they packed up and headed for the capital of Israel to talk to the current king.

I like the magi for other things too, of course.  They promised a powerful king that they would return from their field studies to tell him what they had learned.  They had promised, from our perspective in history, to rat out Jesus.  But when they had a dream telling them not to go back to Herod at all, they obeyed.  A king as nearly paranoid as Herod very likely had agents all over the kingdom telling who was going where and why, so it wasn’t a risk-free choice to sneak back to wherever they were going—Iran, probably—against the wishes of the king, but they did it anyway.

In doing so, however, they set up the massacre of a bunch of little boys who had not reached their Terrible Two’s yet and who, now, never would.  It is hard to call Herod smart because he was also evil, but there is nothing irrational about Herod’s interest in learning the identity of the king who would supplant him and his own sons and doing what he could to safeguard his own political power.  Rome was going to judge Herod on how well he did at the one thing Rome cared about a good deal—keeping the peace.  Preventing a civil war over who was to be king in Israel would likely get messy and if it did, Herod could look forward to being booted out by the Romans even if he won the war.  So, like Pilate at the other end of Jesus’s life, Herod scoped out what his office required of him and did it promptly.

The third, in the order of the story, is Joseph.  Joseph had not done anything so far in Matthew’s story that I would call “smart.”  Lots of other good things: compassionate, obedient, thorough, prompt.  He hauled his family off to Egypt promptly when he had the dream in which the angel told him to go and if he had not, Jesus would have been among the not-yet-Terrible-Two’s who were massacred in Bethlehem.  But that wasn’t the smart part.  Joseph and his family stayed in Egypt until Herod died.  Then the angel told him it was time to go “home.”  But where to go?

In Matthew’s account, Joseph and Mary had never lived anywhere but in Bethlehem.  The onerous “journey to Bethlehem” is all Luke’s.  But whose political district would they be living in in Bethlehem.  The angel just said to go back to Israel.  It was Joseph’s job to figure out where in Israel Jesus would have the best chance of actually growing up. He picked Nazareth because Herod’s son Herod Antipas would be the ruler there and Joseph calculated that his family would be safer under Antipas than under his brother, Archaelus, who would be ruling over Judea.[2]  Why?  Did Antipas have fewer political ambitions than Archaelus, who would rule the territory that included Bethlehem?  Was he just less competent than his brother?  Had better National Security Advisors?

We don’t know, of course, but all those calculations are the kind that only a guy with substantial smarts would make and I have to say I really admire him for that.  As well, of course, for all the other things—such as postponing the period of Mary-making that would ordinarily have followed their marriage.  Good guy, that Joseph.  The patron saint of stepfathers everywhere.

[1] Many people will want to say that it is about Who knows you, but that leads into a very dark part of the woods.  Who does God not know?  See?  Now already we are into “knows-1,” one kind of knowing and “knows-2,” another kind.  I don’t think I want to spend my limited supply of bullets on the question of just how God knows whom.

[2] Raymond Brown in The Birth of the Messiah, cites the historian Josephus to the effect that Archaelus inaugurated his reign with the slaughter of 3000 people and continued until he was deposed by Rome at the request of his subjects.  Joseph’s judgment that Jesus would be safer under Antipas than under Archaelus was quite sound.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Francis Bacon Was Right

Posted on November 28, 2011 by hessd

Some years ago, Robert Reich wrote a telling and prescient book called The Work of Nations.  A little play, I noticed, on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.  In it, he argued that nearly anything that can be routinized can be mechanized.  He made explicit exceptions of making hotel beds and serving hamburgers.  He argued further that there are now many well-trained people in poor countries, so many jobs that can’t really be routinized can still be outsourced.  The question he left himself with was this: “What jobs pay good salaries and have to be done here in the U. S.?”

He named a few jobs, just to help people like me focus on the argument, but he really didn’t have “jobs” in mind.  He had “skills” in mind.  What do you have to be able to do to be well paid in a country that is dominated by mechanization and outsourcing?  His answer was profound and frightening; you have to be able to create works that are valued: new ideas, new plays, new products, new industries, new leisures.  You have to be curious and patient.  You have to think innovatively and write well.

He came closer to Sir Francis Bacon’s curriculum (“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man”) than anyone I have read recently.  Until this morning.  In this morning’s New York Times, Adam Davidson said most of what Reich had said in 331 pages in 1992 in about two pages.  Here’s what he said.

A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill — things, in other words, that can’t be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries.

And then he said:

One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence…A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.

Clearly, Davidson and Reich are saying the same thing.  I said as I introduced this idea that I found it “profound and frightening.”  You might have thought that was overdoing it a little.  It isn’t.  Let me tell you why.  In my off hours, since 1997 when I retired, I have been teaching political science at Portland State University.  Students take my classes, and those of the other professors in my division, because they want to “go into law” or “into politics” or, even worse, because they know the right answer and are looking for the political tools that will allow them to explain this answer to the rest of the country.

I try to tell them I can’t do any of those things for them.  I tell them I can teach them how to read and how to confer and how to write (Bacon’s curriculum).  I tell them I can invite them to unleash their curiosity and see where it leads them.  I tell some of them I can show them how to think thoughts that have never before been thought by any human being.[1]  I tell you candidly that my approach hasn’t worked very well.  I could count on my fingers and toes, if I could bend over far enough to get my shoes off, the students for whom the Hess version of the Bacon curriculum was attractive.  So I’m thinking that I’m going to try the Davidson approach.

Here’s what that would look like.  “OK boys and girls, who would like to have a good job that can’t be routinized or outsourced?  Good.  Good.  That’s promising.  How many of you would like to be architects?  Sorry, you can get access to really good Indian architects for about $10 an hour.  Oh, you were thinking of being paid more than that?  Let’s see, a lot of accounting is now being done by Xcel; a lot of conferencing by the internet; a lot of construction by dazzlingly efficient new machines.”

“Well then, boys and girls, how would you like to learn how to do things most other people will not be able to do as well as you can?  That means more than getting a bachelor’s degree because nearly a third of the population will have bachelor’s degrees.  You will need to have actually learned something.  Here are three examples of what you might want to learn. 

You might want to know how to find the crucial point in an argument more surely and in less time than most other people.  The document is 331 pages long and you have two hours to find the crux and see the implications.  You might want to learn to see the world in the way your colleagues or your rivals see the world and to use that vision to find common ground that they would never have thought of.  You might want to write lucid prose, expressing both the meaning and the sense of an idea in language tailored to engage the people you know will be reading your piece and looking for flaws.

“Does anyone hear ‘Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man’ in there anywhere?  I can help you with that.  Here’s how we would spend out class time together if those were our goals.    Let’s get started.  The last date to withdraw from the class without any loss of tuition refund is two weeks from today.”

There is a political contest of wills that is every bit as daring as this fantasy and that derives directly from the Reich/Davidson thesis, but that will have to happen on another day.  I feel like I’m just emerging from a Doonesburyesque Sorkh Razil fantasy and I’m exhausted.

 

 

[1] I know that sounds grandiose, but it’s really just slicing the process fine enough to guarantee uniqueness.  It’s the same way candidates are awarded doctoral degrees for “original research.”

Posted in Education, Politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

All Reasonable Men Will Agree

Posted on November 22, 2011 by hessd

Honestly, it doesn’t seem too much to ask.  I just want to say what I mean and have it taken the way I meant it.  How hard is that?

It turns out that it’s pretty hard, sometimes.  There is the matter of context, for one thing.  And then there is the little matter of interpersonal differences in communication.  Those two little items are today’s topic.

Let’s start with context.  How bad is it when your aide gives you a cue card that misspells potato(e) and you are caught on camera chiding a grade school child for spelling it without the final e-?  It’s really not that bad unless you have established a reputation for being really stupid.  Then it becomes what, in my family, we called a “nurn,” a word formed by corrupting the phrase “another one.”  It becomes, that is, yet another instance of a very familiar category.

I just googled “potatoe” to make sure.  Yup.  Dan Quayle and the “potatoe episode” come up on the first screen, even though the google prompts tried to add a final s- to it.  Dan Quayle cultivated an image of stupidity.  I don’t know why.  Maybe he thought it gave him “the common touch.”  Quayle’s father said his son majored is “sex and booze” in college and noted that it wasn’t every guy who could maintain a double major.

But what that means is that if Quayle is to be taken seriously, he has to confine himself to mistakes of another kind.  If people think of you as an education snob, the range of remarks you can make without being heard as though you were looking down on others gets small.  If you are thought of as a relentless appreciator of others, even an ambiguous remark will be interpreted in the best possible light.  If you are thought to be a racist, you really ought not to refer to a study you just read about the percentage of black coaches in the NFL.  It doesn’t really matter what you say, it will be treated as a “nurn” (another instance of an already formed category) and thus, further evidence of your racism.

Let’s look at this from the standpoint of the football fan in that last example and let’s say he is actually not a racist although he is thought to be a racist.  This fan pictures a scene like this.  Ten guys are lined up before an audience.  Each of them cites the same statistic about race and head coaching positions in the NFL.  Nine of they are judged by the audience to have conveyed some interesting fact.  You are judged to have made a racist remark.  IT’S NOT FAIR!

No.  It isn’t.  Now the question arises of just what to do about it.  I can’t really think of anything.  Get new friends?  Admit to having been a racist in the past so you can say you have turned over a new leaf?  Ask your present friends to aspire to attributional heroism—the willingness to consider each and every time  the possibility that what you said about race was NOT yet another instance of your racism?  That is a great deal of work and if you have friends who will do it, you have wonderful friends.

Probably the best thing is never to say anything about race every again.  What you say will not be “fairly” heard if by “fairly,” you mean it will be heard as if it were said by someone else.

The second case is easier in many ways. I counsel the quickest possible surrender.

This one comes from John Gray’s collection of insights in the Mars and Venus series.  This example still has quite a bit of pop for me because it was the occasion of what authors Snell and Gail Putney call a “yellow-eyed cat” experience.  That name comes from the great excitement their child exhibited upon seeing his first yellow-eyed cat.  Their own cats had blue eyes and those were the only cats the kid had ever seen.  The child was very excited when he saw the yellow-eyed cat because, according to his parents, he realized simultaneously a) that not all cats have blue eyes and b) that he had thought they did.

Here’s my yellow-eyed cat experience with life on Venus.   “On Mars,” says Gray, “When a man says he is sorry, he is saying he made a mistake.  The other man happily accepts his apology.  He feels, Okay, now that you admit you are wrong and I am right, we can be friends again.”  That didn’t just seem to me the way things are done, it seemed to me the only way things could be done.  The questions here have to do with promises made, with obligations, with good behavior and bad.

On Venus, says Gray, that’s not how it goes.  The questions do not have to do with promises made and who screwed up.  They have, instead, to do with whether the woman you have disappointed has a right to be angry with you.  In the field of that question, you tread at your peril.

On Mars, exculpation is possible.  Yes, I was late but I stopped to help deliver a baby in a car at the side of the road.  Yes, I was late, but I passed out as I was walking home and didn’t regain consciousness for several hours.  Yes, I was late but I got involved in my project and forgot I said I would be here at 5:00.

Some of those exculpations are pretty good.  The last one not so much.  But the point is that, on Mars, it is the quality of the exculpations that matters.  The good ones are accepted just as if no promises had been broken.  That bad ones are rejected, and apologies are necessary and sometimes even restitution.

On Venus, exculpations are not possible—at least, they are not possible right away.  The question is not, says Gray, whether you had a good reason for being late.  No.  The question is whether she is allowed to be upset that you were late.  It isn’t the validity of your excuses.  It is the validity of her feelings.  It isn’t about you.  It is about her.  It isn’t about whether you were at fault.  It is about whether you are willing to accept her expressions of blame, whether you were at fault or not.

I am the kind of person I introduced in the first paragraph.  I want to be judged on the basis of my work.  I want my good work to be praised and my bad work to be condemned.  I want really good excuses to be accepted and really bad ones to be rejected.  And then I realized, in the midst of all that, was that what I really really  wanted, in all those cases, was for the transaction to be about me.  That was my yellow-eyed cat experience and it carried a jolt with it.

I hadn’t ever noticed that before.  I knew that “the right question” was whether I was at fault.  I knew that “the right behavior” was to accept good excuses and to condemn bad ones.  Even after I learned “how things work on Venus,” I played the game the way you accept the frame of reference of an Alzheimer’s patient.  “Um…yes, here we are back at the farm where you grew up.  See the piggies?  See the horsies?  I’m so glad we came back to see where you were a little boy.”  I played that game and received all the benefits of it (domestic tranquility) for years before I realized that all I was being asked to do was to put her reality first instead of mine.

That doesn’t seem so bad.  It seems like something a caring friend might do.  It seems like something a caring husband might want to learn to do.  If there is a principled reason for saying that we will get around to what you care about just as soon as we have taken care of what I care about, I don’t know what that reason is.  I guess it would have to be that what I care about is more important than what you care about.

I know a lot of guys who would be willing to be more caring if they didn’t have to admit their guilt to do it.  My advice?  Do it.  Don’t call it guilt.  Call it “what you are caring about most right now.”  When you start to justify yourself, call it “what I am caring about most right now.”

Or, for you constitutional scholars, let me ask you to look at the preamble.  Hold “establish justice” in one hand and “promote domestic tranquility” in the other.  Look back and forth a couple of times.  Bear in mind that there are two systems of justice in play—forensic (Mars) and emotional (Venus), and only one system of domestic tranquility.

Make your choice and live with the results.

Posted in Love and Marriage, Political Psychology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Does God Love Unconditionally?

Posted on November 3, 2011 by hessd

The theological argument I have heard that Christians ought to be unconditionally loving is that God is unconditionally loving.  I’m not sure that’s true.  And if it is true, I think we wouldn’t be able to tell.

Today, I am concluding a thought experiment about unconditional love.  I have reflected over the last few essays my view that “unconditional love” is not a very useful notion.  It is theologically opaque.  It is spiritually misleading.  It is strategically unsustainable.  And, perhaps worst of all, it precludes a lot of other questions that would help us more.

 I’ve put the theological rationale off till last.  Let’s start with these two well-known passages.

The first is Leviticus 26: 3, 4; the second in just down the page at 14—17.

“If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, 4 I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their fruit. 5 Your threshing will continue until grape harvest and the grape harvest will continue until planting, and you will eat all the food you want and live in safety in your land.

“‘But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, 15 and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, 16 then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. 17 I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.

Those sound like conditions to me.

A Servant, committed as he is to doing loving things, would have to say that God is represented as loving in the first passage and not as loving in the second.  A Steward, committed as he is to “doing what love requires” would have to say that God, in these passages is doing what love requires, and so is “loving” in both passages.

Neither of those responses is very sensible, although sometimes it is just a good idea to give up being sensible when you are trying to explain God’s behavior.  The Servant’s response is, “That second one doesn’t look loving to me.”  The Steward’s response is, “I know they are both loving—this is God we are talking about, right?—but I couldn’t say just how they are loving.”

It isn’t hard to see what the dilemma is.  When I was a child, I thought my parents were loving sometimes and not sometimes.  When I was a parent, I did a lot of things that I thought love required that my kids did not think were loving at all.  So I see the dilemma.  If God is like a parent, we can grant that He might have to do things that the kids (that’s the human race) won’t understand fully.  But reasoning like that can’t establish that God is loving, much less that He is unconditionally loving.

And these if…then sequences don’t stop in the Old Testament like they ran into the Apocryphal Books and couldn’t get around them and into the New Testament.  There are too many to cite as evidence, so I will pick one from Matthew and one from Revelation.  How about Matthew 18:35?  “And that is how my heavenly Father will deal with you unless you each forgive your brother from your heart.”  The “that” in the sentence refers back to “the master handed him over to the torturers…”

Revelation 3:20 is a wonderful picture; Jesus knocking at the door and asking to come in, but this passage contains that conditional “if” as well.  “Look, I am standing at the door, knocking.  If one of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share a meal at that person’s side.”  Otherwise, not.

If we can judge God’s acts at all, we will have to say that some are loving are some are not; some are conditional and some are not. 

So maybe the better course is to say that we are not able to judge God’s actions, so mimicking them might not be a good idea either. 

We have still left the idea that God, whose judgments we cannot judge, has instructed us to be unconditionally loving.  And that idea can actually be sustained in some forms, but it can’t be sustained in the forms I have been working with here.

 In Matthew 18, Jesus gives a sequence of the right actions for a brother who has erred.  This sequence ends with “report it to the community” and “treat him like a gentile or a tax collector.”  I don’t think there is any way to say that is a loving act toward the brother, but you can say that your love for the community and all its members compelled you to do what you did with the erring brother.  We are often caught between what our love for this person requires and what our love for that person

I hear sometimes that God wants us to be channels of his love.  I don’t have any objection to that.  Like everyone else, I have trouble with the practice, but I don’t have trouble with the doctrine.  But I like much better the idea that God wants us to be stewards of his love.  We are to treasure it; not to hoard it.  We are to invest it; not to hide it.  We are to take risks with it.  But we are not to squander it.  That’s not what it’s for.  And it is not what we are for.  We are not to be squandered either. 

When you allow yourself to become so severely depleted as a steward of God’s resources, you invest those resources badly and you ignore what you once knew: you are a resource as well.

 

 

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How Man Looketh

Posted on November 3, 2011 by hessd

My text today is 1 Samuel 16:7a, which, for the purposes of today’s blog, I will render as, “A man looketh on the outward appearance.”  My sense is that men who look only on the outward appearance are probably jerks, but men who don’t look at all on the outward appearance are missing this picture of Liv Tyler.

I thought she did a really good job of Arwen Evenstar, in The Lord of the Rings, but I’d have to say she didn’t look this good as an elf princess.

 

 

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Do We Know Enough to Love?

Posted on October 31, 2011 by hessd

So…is unconditional love a good thing?  Is it possible?  It seems to me that the answers to both questions are going to have to be No, but the exploration of the context of this answer, these answers, will be meandering.  The next and last of these reflections will take Christian theology as its frame of reference.  This one does not.

I said when I began this set of thought experiments that the real cost of a question is the value of all the questions it precludes.  For unconditional love, the best of those questions is, “What conditions are you talking about?”  That seems to me an eminently reasonable question, but if there really ought not to be conditions under which love is not extended (or, having been extended, is withdrawn), then “what conditions” is not a question that can be asked.  If no conditions preclude “unconditional love,” then it is both foolish and wasteful to ask the question.

I think it is a question that will be asked and will be answered, no matter what.  If we forbid these words, the question will be asked in other words.  If we forbid all such words, the question will be asked without words.  But it will be asked and it will be answered.  In the meantime, we dodge and weave, trying not to get hit that hard.

I think there are two kinds of this dodging and weaving.  One is practiced by the people I called Servants; the other by people I called Stewards.[1]  Servants know what kinds of attitudes and actions are “loving.”  Generosity is good.  Forgiveness is good.  Empathy is good.  It is thought that these ought to be available on demand, like water in a well.  People who want some come to the well and help themselves.  No one restricts their drawing privileges and the well never runs out of water.  I wonder sometimes how they know things I don’t know.  Maybe it’s the earpiece.

I have described this as an inherently unsustainable situation, but people who favor it say it looks unsustainable to me only because I have misunderstood how the process works. I have heard three kinds of justifications from Servants.  Here is the first.  When I love someone, a Servant says, it increases the amount of love I have to give to others.  Love is not, as you are picturing it, like a well, where you can draw water until you overdraw and none is left; it is like a muscle that gets stronger the more it is used. 

Second, they say that when you love people in any of these ways, offering empathy, for instance, it changes them.  They now return resources to the relationship, so it is stronger than it was before.  And not only do they return this gift to you, but they also have more resources to give to others.  Empathy was the gift she needed, let’s say, and you provided it; now she is stronger and is able to give the next person the gift he needs, which, let’s say, is forgiveness.  So the supply of resources doesn’t run out and they take whatever shape is needed.  The original relationship is replenished and other relationships are enriched.  And it goes on and on.

The third element of the perspective is the response to what are called “failures.”  People like me are apt to look at an action that was lovingly intended and point out that both the giver and the receiver are now worse off than before.  Crucial resources—think, again, of how much water is in the well— have been drawn down and everyone is worse off than before.  That’s the criticism.  But that criticism requires that a judgment be made at a particular time about a particular cast of characters and this judgment requires, in addition, that an outside observer can tell which outcomes are good and which are bad.  None of these is actually true, say the Servants. 

If I say the outcomes are bad, they will say they have not yet become good and that time will tell.  If I say that these people are worse off, they will say that others—people I am not looking at—are better off and that I should take everyone into account.  If I say that I can tell which are good and which are bad, they will say that I really can’t.  Some that appear bad turn out to have been blessings in disguise and some that I would have called good, turn out to have been steps in the wrong direction.

And, if these people are of a secular cast of mind, they might tell me the story of the Zen master.[2]   The little boy breaks his leg and the villages say, “How awful.”  The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”  Then the army comes to recruit boys from the village away for a military campaign, but they can’t take the boy with the broken leg.  “How wonderful,” say the villagers.  “We’ll see,” says the Zen master.  You get the idea.  If people are of a Christian cast of mind, they might say that God has some good in mind that cannot be seen by us and that the right way to assess what is good and what is bad is from God’s perspective and on God’s timeline, not ours.

All those defenses are entirely reasonable, it seems to me.  I wouldn’t argue with a one of them on principle.  You will recall, however, that the Steward sees his business as reconciling the means that are available with the end he thinks is the best that can be achieved.  All the Servant’s points render the Steward’s way of coming at the world as fundamentally flawed.   Stewards tend not to like that.  These principles also work to justify the Servants in producing outcomes that Stewards think are regrettable and unnecessary.

The Stewards come at it a different way, of course.  If you really can tell what results are better, only timidity or cowardice—not transcendent faith— would prevent you from doing what needed to be done.  Or, of course, lack of love.  That one probably stings, if you are a Servant and have to listen to it.  There are certainly better ways to explain the Steward’s way of coming at the question of  unconditional love, but the Servant’s perspective sounded really good to me as I wrote it and I think I’ll feel better if I try just to dent it a little.

On the well analogy, a Steward—this particular Steward, in any case—will raise no objection at all.  If loving unconditionally (meaning by that what a Servant would mean) fills you with the resources needed to accomplish the job, go at it.  The Steward’s point is that very often, the Unconditional Love Project leaves the practitioners exhausted, frustrated, and alienated from their own support networks.  It is not a good time to use the unfailing well metaphor when the well is already dry.  And if the unconditional love image requires you to say that the well is never dry, then acknowledging that it is dry will be hard, hard, hard.  The Steward, but not the Servant, can say, “This is not sustainable.  We’re going to have to come at this a different way.” That is because the Servant is fixed on the means, while the Steward is fixed on the ends.  And, of course, the costs.

The second justification, which is that love given unconditionally returns to the giver and spreads through an unknown legion of others, is also something Stewards approve of.[3]  There are two ways this can go wrong.  In the first, you point out that what the Servant calls “loving” might be called irresponsible complicity by other people.[4]  It does “return to the source,” in a sense, and it is catastrophic.  And it does ripple through the bystanders, where it models and rewards bad behavior.

The second objecting is more fundamental.  You chose this behavior, the Steward reproves the Servant, because it was “the right thing to do.”  But look at the results.  They are consistently bad.  They exhaust you.  Everyone is worse off as a result.  At some point, you are going to have to look at whether the results are “loving” or not.  Does a person who loves the way you do really want to produce effects like that?

This brings us to the final and the most serious element of the Servant’s beliefs.  Let me put this disagreement into as sharp a focus as I can.  The Servant says you can’t really know ultimate outcomes and to pretend you can is simply arrogant.  The Steward says that it’s hard to argue about what outcomes are truly “ultimate,” but the results as far down the road as they can be seen are really bad and it is irresponsible to keep on doing whatever produces these outcomes.  So there you are; arrogance on the one side and irresponsibility on the other.  It’s not pretty at all, is it?

The Servant says that God has certain outcomes in mind—or that fate has intended certain outcomes—and we are not competent to judge them.  That means we are not free to adjust our behavior so that we are producing outcomes we judge to be good.  The Steward says we can know outcomes—not ultimate outcomes, of course—and “loving” requires that we do whatever needs to be done to produce them.  If that means withdrawing from exhausting and unsustainable relationships, withdraw from them.  All the others who want and need your love will benefit.  If it means doing things that are really going to piss off the beloved, do them anyway.  Sometimes saying “I will not help you do that” is the only loving thing to say.

That’s really the whole argument as I understand it.  As a Steward myself, I say the well will run dry if you abuse it and that will not be good.  I say that some loving acts do return to bless everyone, even yourself, but other loving acts impoverish the original relationship and deprive many others from the benefits you could otherwise provide them.  I say that we can know many of the immediate effects of our acts and even some of the long term effects.  Not “ultimate effect,” of course.  But if we are truly called to love, we are called to bring the benefits of our love to those who need them.

It almost seems, sometimes, that Servants judge whether an act is loving by how much it costs them to do it.  The measurement they are sensitive to is this: “Am I willing to pay the price or is my love so pallid I shrink from inconveniencing myself in the way I love?”  For the life of me, I cannot see that as a useful measure.  Being willing to love, even at substantial cost to myself?  I get that.  I have even, on occasion, done it.  But the cost is not a measure of the love.  It is truly lamentable to judge the “quality” of the love by how much it costs.  I say if you can produce the same benefit at negligible cost, do it. 

Sometimes costly love is all that will work.  But when it isn’t all that will work, it isn’t “costly;” it’s exhorbitant.

[1] The line is drawn between people who feel they are not and cannot be responsible for the outcome of events and who, therefore, fix on actions that are thought to be virtuous in themselves.  These are the Servants.  The other people think they can know what the outcome will be and are morally bound to adopt the means what will lead to the achievement of that outcome.  These are the Stewards.  Obviously, either approach can be abused.

[2] I heard this story in Charlie Wilson’s War, tellingly delivered by Philip Seymour Hoffman, but I think we were supposed to understand that it is a well-known story.

[3] Actually, it is hard to disapprove of it while you are watching Pay It Forward, the best “unknown beneficiaries” movie I know.

[4] I realize that the contemporary word for this behavior is “enabling,” but “making people more able” should more good than bad to me.  Besides, able is the Anglo-Saxon version of the Latin habilis, from which we get —making able again—and I don’t want to give up rehab, having needed it so often myself.  It all depends, of course, or just what behavior is being “enabled,” but neither word specifies that so I am going to keep both words.

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Why Bother Voting?

Posted on October 30, 2011 by hessd

I’ve been looking at the results of the most recent New York Times/CBS Poll.  It’s about a week old now; recent, as polls go.  It seems like a real shame that we have to go through all the fuss and bother of having an election because, clearly, no one can be trusted with a public office.  Any public office.

Let’s see what we have here.  The national economy is bad.  If you add the “fairly bad” and “very bad” scores, you get 80%  Looking back, we see that the percent of people who thought things were pretty good came down under 50% in 2007 and have been headed mostly down ever since.  And it’s getting worse.  If you add together the “about the same” and “getting worse” scores, you get 85%.   Have things gotten “pretty seriously off on the wrong track?”  Yes they have, say 74% of those polled.

Trust in government to help?  The question asks whether you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right: the options are “always/most of the time” and “some of the time/never.”  That second measure is chosen by 89% of the people in this poll.

How about Barack Obama’s handling of things?  Not so good.  Only 50% approve of his handling of foreign policy; only 38% his handling of the economy; only 35% his efforts at job creation.

Congress?  In single digits for the first time since polling was begun.  Who are the 9% who approve of “the way Congress is handling its job?”

So let’s see if I’ve got this.  Things are bad and they are getting worse.  The government can be trusted to do the right thing seldom or never.  The President is handling his job poorly.  The Congress is disastrously bad.

A little over 80% of those polled said they were registered to vote.  About 40% of that 80% are going to vote in a Democratic primary.  That’s a little less than a third of the eligible voters by my calculation.  Another 32% of the 80% plan to vote in a Republican primary.  That’s another 26% of the eligible voters. 

That’s a lot of people.  You have to wonder why they bother.

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Servants and Stewards and Unconditional Love

Posted on October 24, 2011 by hessd

We just don’t have the stuff for unconditional love.    The “we” I had in mind in that sentence is us humans and that’s the conclusion I came to at the end of Adam and Eve and Unconditional Love.  I’d like to pursue that dilemma a little further this time.  Let’s see what happens.

The point Genesis wants to make in telling the Adam and Eve story is that we are their children, in a sense, and share  with them the dilemma of their choices.  Here’s the way I see that dilemma.[1]  Our decision to be morally autonomous made us responsible for choices we are really not competent to make.  We are “thrown into history” (Heidegger’s phrase) and responsible to decide.  Deciding—linking immediate choices to ultimate outcomes—is fundamental to our nature and we aren’t smart enough to do it.  We aren’t loving enough either, but that’s a difficulty I will postpone briefly.

The names Kaufman gives to our condition are “alienation” and “anxiety.”  By “alienation,” he means that we are cut off from a relationship of trust and obedience, which is the context within which we were built to operate.  He means by “anxiety” what any of us would mean, but he thinks of it as operating at a fundamental level of our being.  The need to decide, hampered as we are by our alienation from God and our consequent anxiety, drives us absolutely nuts.  It drives us into the two kinds of sins we commit: idolatry (the ultimate worship of lesser values) and sloth (the withdrawal from the world of responsible choice).

This is a difficulty we all face.  It is a human difficulty and it hamstrings us without regard to race, color, creed, sexual preference, or any of the other variables on the ever-growing list of conditions protected by the 5th and 14th Amendments.  The two common approaches to this dilemma, as I see them, are commitments to live at the strategic or the tactical level.  The tacticians—I have been calling them Servants for some years now—think they can escape the trap by choosing their behavior from a list of approved actions.  The strategists—I have been calling them Stewards for some years now—think they know what actions will produce what outcomes and they are free to choose their actions accordingly.

A lot of times, the Servants look stupid.  That’s their liability.  They choose their actions from the approved list—“turning the other cheek” was a big one in my youth—without regard to what the effects of that choice are.  Indeed, Servants will tell you there is no way of knowing what the effects.  “Effects” are God’s job, they say, and people who think they do know are guilty of the sin of pride.  They got that right, at least.

A lot of times, the Stewards look arrogant.[2]   That’s their liability.  They commit themselves—and, if they are in positions of authority, they commit us as well—to praiseworthy ends and choose as means to achieve those ends, actions that fail.  And fail.  And fail.  Why do they fail?  Because the Stewards don’t know enough to choose the right means.  Remember the silent little codicil to the serpent’s pitch to Eve?  The serpent promised that she would be like a god in the sense of knowing good from evil; he didn’t say that not being smart enough to choose effective means to the chosen outcomes was going to turn out to be an ugly reality.  So the Stewards flail away, choosing now this means and now that one.[3]  They know how dumb it is to choose means apart from ends.  They don’t know they aren’t smart enough to choose the ends that will achieve the means they intend.  It isn’t pretty.

So instead of the few, the proud, the Marines, we get the many, the stupid and the arrogant.  It makes the Marines sound pretty good by comparison although I realize it isn’t quite fair to compare a marketing slogan with an existential reality.

We return now to the question of unconditional love.  It doesn’t look so promising any more, does it?  The Servants will identify certain acts as “loving,” regardless of the outcomes they produce.  The Stewards will claim unimpeachable goals and sort vainly through the grab-bag of available actions for means that will achieve those goals.  Let’s imagine a Servant who thinks that his ability to attend to others is unlimited and that all others have a legitimate claim on his attention.  He will be a very nice person as long as he lasts, but anyone outside that box can see the end approaching.  He will run out of attention even in the short term.[4]  He will begin to prioritize the claimants although the core commitment of “unconditional love”  requires unconditional love for all claimants.  This denial of “valid claims” will be painful, so he will begin to ignore (case by case) or withdraw from (a life choice) all those hard and painful choices.

When we love at all, we love conditionally.  We love these but not those; now but not then.  Really, it’s the best we can do.  And it’s better than not loving at all and it’s a lot better than not loving at all if you can find a way to get the “conditions” right.  Although…let’s face it…it’s hard to get the conditions right so long as you are laboring under the belief that there really shouldn’t be conditions at all.  I’ll come back to that in a post or two.

You would think that being a Steward is better and it is better in the limited sense that you don’t make the same mistakes that Servants make.  But Stewards don’t solve the problem either.  They are willing to adjust their workloads, so that the burden of “unconditional love” doesn’t exhaust them.  They might even affirm the duty of unconditional love, provided that they can define just what is “loving” in every circumstance.  Having trouble with a rebellious kid?  It’s time for “tough love.”  The means chosen might be undistinguishable from failure or indifference, but the Steward knows it is just another form of love.    Having trouble with a friend who is terrified of success and so sabotages his career at the crucial moment and calls you to lament his fate?  No problem.  You have only so much sympathy to offer—less at each successive iteration—but you can always help him come to grips with the reality of his self-sabotage.  Telling him a couple of times ought to do the trick.  Maybe this unconditional love thing isn’t as hard as people say.  Having trouble with a philandering husband—I notice I have made the Steward (ess?) a woman—and wonder what unconditional love means here?  Well, not loving him is out and so its establishing the conditions under which you will offer him anything he would recognize as love.  But withdrawing from him, physically and/or emotionally, is only husbanding (no pun intended) your resources in this difficult time so you will be able to be fully participatory in his recovery later on.

I hate to make Stewards sound that bad, partly because I am a Steward myself, but being a Steward and hanging onto the norm of unconditional love requires self-deception on a truly massive scale.  Nearly anything you want to do or feel you must do can be redefined as “the loving thing to do” even if the effect of each choice is to reduce the cost of the “loving act.”

Servants have to lie to themselves about the effects of their actions.  They don’t see the effects clearly, so choosing actions is all they have.  Stewards have to lie to themselves about the meaning of their actions.  They define whatever actions they decide on as “appropriate” to the goal, because the goal itself is all they have.

This seems to me a fundamental dilemma.  Just as we aspire to be “like the gods” but don’t have the equipment, so we aspire to love unconditionally, but don’t have the equipment.  Servants bury their talents and call the result “prudence.”  Stewards invest their talents haphazardly in the market and call whatever the outcome is “progress.”

I’m thinking that giving up the norm of unconditional love might be a step in the right direction.  For Christians, that’s a little dicey from a theological standpoint because the God we worship loves unconditionally.  Doesn’t He?  Or is he just so smart that the only conditions are the conditions necessary to His character and to our welfare.  And how would we know?

All this makes me wish that the serpent has been a little more candid.

[1] I will be borrowing, in this section, from Gordon Kaufman again.  Possibly I should remember to say that this is the 1968 Gordon Kaufman, the Kaufman of Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective.  The actual Gordon Kaufman went on thinking and came, later, to somewhat different conclusions.  I, myself, am still attracted to the old conclusions.

[2] Catchy word.  Stewards “arrogate” to themselves abilities they do not have and make a lot of trouble for us all.  The Latin is ad- plus rogare, “to ask.”  Arrogate is a verb; the related adjective is arrogant.

[3] This is the reality of our lives, not only at the individual level, but at every collective level as well.  It characterizes our politics, our economic relations, our social relations, our religious relations, our intellectual relations, and our aesthetic appreciations.

[4] We get attention from the Latin ad- + tendere = “to stretch,” so “to stretch toward.”  I move that over, just slightly, to “to strain toward” to catch more of the flavor of what “attention” costs.  The strain cannot be borne indefinitely.

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