Adam, Eve, and Unconditional Love

Posted on October 22, 2011 by hessd

I am beginning today a set of thought experiments bearing on the notion of “unconditional” or “non-contingent” love.  I am beginning with the position that it is a bad idea.  It asks more discernment of us than we can reliably muster.  It misdirects our attention from effects to motives.  It renders unavailable questions that are really useful, most of the time.  It sometimes draws on a theological tradition (Christian, in this case) that I think gives uncertain support to it.

I’m not writing this post because I am looking for new friends, you will note.  I just hope I can keep most of the friends I already have.

Let’s start with the fall of “man.”[1]  God put Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden where they could be happy ever after if they chose.  There were two conditions.  The first is that they were mortal.  I infer that from the existence of a “tree of life” the effect of which would be that Adam and Eve would live forever.  The second is that the range of their responses to God would be a) obeying and b) disobeying.  I infer this from the existence of the much better known “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” or as I sometimes call it, “the tree of moral autonomy.”  Adam and Eve violated the second condition—they ate “the apple”—and were escorted hastily from the garden lest they violate the first condition.[2]

The serpent’s pitch to Eve was that God was worried about His creation becoming equal with the Creator and that is why He forbade the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  If you eat from the tree, said the serpent, you will be as gods, knowing good from evil.  That must have sounded pretty attractive to Eve.  She was going to sit at the big table with the grown-ups.

There were a few things the serpent didn’t mention, however.  Isn’t that how it goes?  God can get away with “knowing good from evil” because He is…well…God.  God is omniscient, which is nice if you are going to create a world and run it competently, and God is completely and reliably benign, according to the mainstream beliefs of both Jewish and Christian theologians.  God, in other words, loves completely and competently.  It is safe to have Him at the big table with the grown-ups.  It is, after all, His table.

Is it safe to have Adam and Eve there?  Not really.  They overestimated their abilities when they took on the burden of moral autonomy.  They could manage obedience.  Mostly.  And, as I read the story, they could manage occasional disobedience as well, because there was a way to be reconciled.  But moral autonomy is a whole new basis for deciding what is good and what is evil.  It is an intramural basis.  It doesn’t reach outside the walls, where God is.  It says, “We can make that decision perfectly well on our own, thank you very much for your concern.”

Unfortunately, you have to be completely loving and really really smart to be trusted with moral autonomy.  God meets those criteria quite well, but Adam and Eve do not.  They really don’t have the stuff to manage that level of understanding and caring and acting.  Nor do they, do “we,” have the stuff for unconditional love.  To be trusted with a mandate like that, we would have to be “like gods.”  Does that requirement sound at all familiar?  We would have to more perceptive and more caring and more strategic than we are really capable of being.

If the hubris that lead us into the Fall and the hubris that leads us to accept “unconditional love” as a standard for our behavior sound similar to you and if that similarity makes you a little uneasy, then this post has reached the place where in marathons, you stop for a drink.

 

[1] I learned recently from an old lecture by Raymond E. Brown, the Catholic biblical scholar, that in the early tradition “Adam” was not the name of the man and “Eve” the name of the woman.  “Adam” represented “mankind.”  The idea that mankind came in separate gendered flavors was a later idea.

[2]Genesis 1—3 covers all the narrative.  The notion of “moral autonomy” I ran across first in the writings of the late Gordon Kaufman, a Mennonite theologian at Harvard.  What are the chances of that?

Posted in Biblical Studies, Political Psychology | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Being a Patient and a Citizen

Posted on October 10, 2011 by hessd

I’ve been thinking for a couple of days now about the recommendations by the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force that we stop testing for the prostate-specific antigen (PSA).  The difficulty they point to is not that the PSA doesn’t identify prostate cancers—the fact is that it does sometimes and doesn’t sometimes—but that identifying prostate cancers doesn’t save lives.

This finding, and its twin two years ago, on mammograms, points to many difficulties.  Some are medical; some technical; some political.  I want to attend in this post to the social difficulties, but let’s start with the political ones.  If PSA screening doesn’t save lives, there really isn’t any reason why Medicare should pay for it.  Apart, that is, from the demand by Congress that they pay for it.

Here’s the difficulty.  Let’s say I am a healthy old man with an enlarged prostate.  I need to determine whether I should have tests to determine whether I have prostate cancer.  If it didn’t cost anyone anything to perform these tests and to read, evaluate, and disseminate the results[1] and if the tests themselves didn’t pose threats to my health, I would probably say, “Why not?”  If I knew I had to pay for the tests, I might say, “Why (should I get the test)?”  That is the dilemma faced by the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force, the Obama administration, and anyone else who understands that we cannot continue to spend money on healthcare at the rate we have been spending it.

The Task Force has a really useful view of these matters.  The evidence is very compelling at the aggregate level. Here is an account of it from the New York Times.  The short way of putting it is that PSA tests, given routinely to men without any symptoms, don’t save lives.  And they cost a lot of money.  An elevated PSA can lead to a lot of other tests, some painful and some lethal.

The question this article poses is just what we actually get from the routine testing of healthy men.  The case is pretty clear at the aggregate level: we don’t get anything—no savings of life—at all.  At the individual level, it looks different.  Individual patients are a lot more likely to be guided by stories that are passed around at the coffee shop than they are by large-scale longitudinal studies.  At the coffee shop, you will hear about the guy whose routine PSA—or digital rectal exam or ultrasound—turned up the existence of a previously unsuspected cancer and that early treatment was successful.  You will probably not hear about the 182,000 men in the European test or the 76,000 men in the U. S. test who showed that receiving a PSA test had no beneficial effect at all in saving lives.  After that experience, you go to see your internist or your urologist and the question comes up of whether we ought to just “take a peek” at your prostate just to “make sure everything is OK.”

The answer I am exploring today is, “No, let’s don’t just take a peek.  If there is a reason to suspect an aggressive cancer, let’s check it out.  If there is no reason or if the cancer is the ordinary slow-growing kind, let’s not.”  That is the right answer; it is the answer indicated by the recommendations of the task force on the basis of the studies.  On what grounds would it be my answer?

How about “citizenship?”  Let’s say I love my life and I want to do everything within reason to protect it.  Getting routine prostate tests don’t do that.  They do something, though.[2]  They reassure me that I don’t have prostate cancer.  Or they reassure me that the cancer I have—most old men have prostate cancer—is the ordinary slow-growing kind and that “watchful waiting” is the best course of “treatment.”  But since I can get all of that—again, absent any symptoms—without any kind of testing at all, another way to say it would be to say that they give me nothing at all.  And they cost a lot.  I’ve noted some cost statistics below.

Now we get the citizenship part.  Is it possible to think of “choosing not to get tested  as a way of holding down medical costs” as an act of citizenship?  I think so.  It isn’t easy, though.  Let’s take the analogous case of water usage during a drought.  I do all kinds of things at my house to be a “responsible” citizen and to help my city get through this difficult time.  That makes a lot of water available in other parts of town where driveway car washings and lawn waterings go up because there is now water available.  That just makes you feel stupid and it doesn’t save any water, region-wide, or any money at all.

What you really want to do is to define in this new area—routine prostate testing—what the implications of citizenship are.   If the implications are only that expensive and unreasonable medical practices shift from prostate testing to something else, it won’t help.  You get the virtuous glow of “doing the right thing” and the aggregate spending on procedures we shouldn’t spend money on continue unabated.  It’s virtuous, but it doesn’t do anyone any good.

I’ve been thinking about the analogy of military patrols in Afghanistan.  If we knew that routine patrols of an area didn’t increase the security of the area, would we send troops out just to “take a peek,” just “to be sure” that there were no terrorists there?  Would it be an act of citizenship for the local commander of U. S. forces there to refuse to send troops out on patrol for no reason?  What do we do about the possibility that the area would be secure if we did not patrol it, but patrols would attract insurgents and the security situation would get worse?

This is not an idle comparison, according to the Times article.

From 1986 through 2005, one million men received surgery, radiation therapy or both who would not have been treated without a P.S.A. test, according to the task force. Among them, at least 5,000 died soon after surgery and 10,000 to 70,000 suffered serious complications. Half had persistent blood in their semen, and 200,000 to 300,000 suffered impotence, incontinence or both.

So here’s the final form of the question.  Is it reasonable to put the citizen-patient who foregoes routine prostate testing to help make our healthcare spending sustainable in the same category as the citizen-commander who refuses routine patrols to make our military presence sustainable?  The citizen-patient will have to live with “not knowing for sure” or with “watchful waiting.”  The citizen-commander will have to live with the suspicions of his superiors that he isn’t “sticking it to the _______________ [insert the hate-name of current enemy].”

I admit that the military example is risky because there is a chain of command and decisions about how aggressively to patrol are sometimes—sometimes—made higher up the chain.  But I like the similarities.  Is it really an act of citizenship to forego what seems like a personal benefit (peace of mind, promotion) in order to follow the larger logic, the benefit being more manageable costs in the healthcare instance and fewer needless casualties in the military instance?

Today, I think it is but I’m just starting to think about what “medical citizenship” might be and I could use some help.

[1] I thought really hard about whether I wanted to use the word “disseminate” there and decided I could get away with it.  Did I?

[2] I’m not considering here what they do for surgeons who perform prostatectomies or companies who build ultrasound machines.  I am not considering the groups of prostate cancer survivors who will go ballistic about these recommendations because it directly attacks the salience of their mission and the basis of their contact with their members.  Nor am I considering the boon this will be to Republican candidates who will want to call this approach “rationing healthcare.”

Posted in Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

moneyball

Posted on October 3, 2011 by hessd

It is hard to give up the old ways.  I am not going to do it casually.  You will have to give me a really good reason to change my ways and then I probably still won’t do it.  I might think about it.  But if the way in question is the principal scaffolding of my sense of who I am, I’d have to say your chances aren’t really very good.

I’m going to give you a scene from Moneyball momentarily—the book, not the movie—but I want to stop and reflect on the Greek word metanoia.  I know it from its religious context, where it is usually translated “repent,” but it is a surprisingly cognitive word.  It means “change your mind” or even, “change the way you are thinking.”  That is precisely what  Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane is asking the baseball scouts to do in this scene.

Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, plays this scene for laughs.  It is funny, but I think it is funny because we see it the way Billy sees it.  I want to go around to the other side of the table to see it the way the scouts see it.  Billy and Paul Dipodesta, his computer ace, are trying to line up the players to draft in the coming year.  The opposition is a bunch scouts who have been doing this for a long time and know how it should be done. 

A player, in the scout’s view, should be drafted on the basis of his potential.  Billy and Paul think he should be drafted on the basis of his performance.  Where a player’s performance confirms his potential, Billy and the Scouts will be on the same page.  But so will everyone else in the major leagues, and that unanimity will make that player very expensive to sign if he is available at all.  If he has “potential,” but not performance, he will be affordable and the scouts will love him.  If he has “performance,” but not “potential,” he will be affordable and Billy and Paul will love him.  That’s where this conflict will be fought out, but it isn’t really what the conflict is about.  So what is it about?

For the scouts, it’s about the value of their lives; the value of themselves.  Here’s what scouts bring to the table, the table that has Billy’s computer on it.

In the scouts’ view, you found a big league ballplayer by driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of two hundred when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen—at least no one who knew the meaning of it.

A scout like this is someone who can see what no one else has seen; can bring undiscovered talent to the team who has put its confidence in him; can use the discernment that he developed as a player and that he honed to a fine edge in all those hours in the bleachers.  The scout says, “The way I learned the game matters.”  The scout says, “My judgment matters.”  He says, “My life matters; I matter.”  That’s what is at stake.

We’re going to look at Billy Beane next, but let’s go back and remember what metanoia means.  It means “Change the way you think.”  The scouts bring to the table not just a way of thinking, but a way of being.  They stand  for “the old values;” for “the way the game ought to be played.”  This way of contributing to their sport is what they  have to bring to the table.  If it is valuable.  Billy is saying it isn’t valuable.  He’s not just asking them to change their minds; he is asking them to change who they are.

Billy Beane cares about what a new player can do for the team.  Assessing the players’ strengths by ransacking the computer databases is not how Billy grew up.  He grew up the same way the scouts did.  He has repented.  Now he is calling on them to repent.  Let’s look at the decision to draft Jeremy Brown

“Jeremy Brown is a bad body catcher,” says the most vocal of the old scouts.

“A bad body who owns the Alabama record books,” says Pitter [Oakland A’s scout Chris Pettaro, who is working Billy’s side of the table. “He’s the only player in the history of the SEC with three hundred hits and two hundred walks,” says Paul, looking up from his computer.

It’s soft body,” says the most vocal old scout. “A fleshy kind of a body.  A body like that can be low energy.”

The old scout is talking about what he has seen.  Brown has “a bad body.”  But for that to really mean anything, it has to mean what the scout thinks it means.  If it doesn’t mean that, the scout wasted all those hours playing ball and then sitting in the stands.  Pitter says Brown’s performance is very good.

 “Yeah,” says the scout. “Well, in this case low energy is because when he walks, his thighs stick together.

“I repeat: we’re not selling jeans here,” says Billy.

“That’s good,” says the scout. “Because if you put him in corduroys, he’d start a fire.”

 “He’s leading the country in walks,” says Paul.

“He better walk because he can’t run,” says one of the scouts.

“That body, Billy,” says the most vocal old scout. “It’s not natural.” He’s pleading now.

“He’s got big thighs,” says the fat scout, thoughtfully munching another jumbo-sized chocolate chip cookie. “A big butt. He’s huge in the ass.”

“Every year that body has just gotten worse and worse and worse,” says a third.

“Can he hit, though?” asks Billy Beane.

Here are the three scouts, eagerly seconding one another’s “insights.”  His thighs stick together.  He can’t wear corduroys.  He can’t run.  He has a big butt.  Michael Lewis characterizes the scouts this way.

The old scouts aren’t built to argue; they are built to agree. They are part of a tightly woven class of former baseball players.

 Nobody can answer Billy’s question, “Can he hit?”  Yes.  He can hit.  And in 390 at bats, he walked 98 times.  For Billy, singles and walks are just alternative ways of getting to first base.  For the scouts, singles are “the right way to get to first” and walks are “the wrong way.”  For all practical purposes, singles show good character; walks show bad character.  Billy says a player who “earns” that many walks is a player who knows how to “control the plate.”

 Billy is right, of course.  Judging players on their performance is better than judging them on the scout’s instincts, which are really just another form of nostalgia.  And judging them on what they can do for your team—your team particularly—allows Billy to draft players he can actually afford instead of the ones everyone else wants too.  If everyone else wants them, Billy won’t be able to afford them.  There is no way, in fact, to argue that the Oakland A’s should use the judgment of the scouts rather than the judgment of Paul Dipodesta’s computer.  Billy is right and the scouts are wrong.

 But just think what Billy is asking of the scouts.  Think what metanoia means in a case like this.  It cuts deep.   It hurts a lot.  And if the scouts pay this price, their “reward” is that the Oakland A’s win a lot of games.  The outcome of my sacrifice, of my “changing my way of thinking” is that somebody else gets to look really good.

 I know the scouts are wrong.  But, probably more often than not, I have done what they are doing so I don’t take much pleasure in condemning them.

 

 

Posted in Books, Movies, Theology, ways of knowing | 5 Comments

Kimiko Says Thank You

Posted on October 2, 2011 by hessd

People who formulate, legitimate, or enforce public policy for a living have a good idea what makes a policy work.  It has to be effective, i.e., meet the goals the policy establishes.  It has to be affordable, i.e., not cost more than succeeding legislatures are willing to pay for it.  And it has to be acceptable, i.e., those affected by it need to comply without too much opposition.  You can tell when there is “too much” opposition because people grumble; they invent shortcuts that are probably illegal but which make enforcement uncertain; and sometimes they violate the policy flagrantly because they have no emotional attachment to it and want to make their opposition plain to the authorities.

There are other reasons policies fail, but those three take care of most cases.  When there are difficulties with a policy, the first wave of responses considers ways to alter the goals, increase the revenues, and rev up enforcement.  I’d like to consider another approach.

I was coming home from a run on the Wildwood Trail this week when I had to stop for a school bus.  I have taught at a lot of schools so I have a kind of respect for school buses.  For me, the STOP sign attached to the arm that swings out when the bus stops and the flashing lights and the little gate that extends from the front bumper are just reminders.  On the other hand, when you are on a road with school buses, you are going to be stopping a lot.  It was an ordinary compliance situation.  I was ready to comply, but I wasn’t happy.

One little girl got off the bus.  She looked like she might be Japanese, so I called her Kimiko, just to myself.  She was wearing a pink jacket and carrying a backpack.  And she looked at me as she crossed the road and waved her thanks.  It looked like it meant something to her that I had stopped.   She wanted me to know that she appreciated it.

I played with that appreciation the rest of the way home.  It occurred to me that maybe the best way to sell a policy is to have the beneficiaries say thank you.  Kimiko wasn’t thanking me as a way to drum up support for the schools’ traffic laws.  She really didn’t gain anything by it.  But she was small and cute and looked happy and the idea of stopping for her seemed a lot more appealing than stopping for the bus ever seemed.

This isn’t a “technique,” really.  It isn’t going to make palatable policies that cost too much or that are fundamentally contested.  On the other hand, people who oppose policies spend a lot of money dramatizing how their rights are being violated or their estates compromised.  It probably would not hurt a lot if some of the beneficiaries of the policy took a minute to say thank you.  I think maybe Kimiko is onto something.

Posted in Saturday Evening Post | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Obama’s Policy on Israel and Palestine

Posted on September 23, 2011 by hessd

How shall we approach the decades-long standoff between Israel and Palestine?  In our rush to establish one position or another, we blow right by the general questions which the positions purportedly address.  Any set of comparable positions lines up on an axis of some kind.  Is I see it, there are three axes available.  The first is conquest.  Everyone has a claim on the Promised Land.  It has been notoriously over-promised.  Some combination of Middle Eastern states may very overwhelm Israel and put the land back in pre-1947 conditions, minus, of course, the British.  Israel may decisively preempt attack and decisively defeat their enemies.  They have done it before.  Yet the war goes on.

The second is international settlement.  There will have to be a deciding party and an enforcing party. The deciding party will be the United Nations.  It’s hard to envision who will take part in the enforcing.  A “New World Order” style of temporary coalition wouldn’t be stable enough.  The U. S. would have to form the core of it and we wouldn’t unless the alternative were decisively worse for Israel and that view was taken by a substantial majority of the important pro-Israel groups in the United States.  The basis would be the 1967 lines with land swaps and some arrangement for sharing Jerusalem.

The third is bilateral agreement.  Israel and the Palestinian Authority work it out.  That seems the least likely.  No conceivable Israeli government could engineer such an agreement and no conceivable government of all the Palestinians—the West Bank and Gaza—could enforce the peace such an agreement would require.  The fatal flaw in the “land for peace” deal is that Israel does not have the political will to give up the land and Palestine does not have the security forces to legitimately offer peace.

That is the set President Obama is working with.  I don’t see any winners there.  My gripe about the president’s speech to the U. N. is that he is denying any attention to what I think is the only hope.  I call it, below, a “hybrid option” and will spend the rest of this post considering it.

The only hope I see is that the United Nations grants that the current set of options is unworkable and come with a hybrid.  Palestine becomes a member of the United Nations.  The plundering of the West Bank is recognized as the invasion of the territory of a UN member.  Economic and military sanctions are threatened, as they would be if there were a similar invasion of Italy or any other member state.  The same set of sanctions turns against the Palestinians if they are unable to control their militants and end military retaliation.

It is possible, under those circumstances, that the Israeli parties could decisively renounce their aspirations to Greater Israel and make the only deal there is to make.  And it is possible that Palestine (UN member nation Palestine) could decisively deal with the array of their allies—most notably Iran– who consent annually to the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, provided that their own war against Israel continues.  It is possible.  The look on the face of Mahmoud Abbas is not encouraging.

To do that—to devise this hybrid—it is necessary to abandon the line President Obama drew in his September 21 speech to the United Nations.  There is “judgment from the top” he said, and then there is “agreement by the two parties.”  There is no hybrid there, please note.  There is, instead, a resolute ignoring of the possibility of a hybrid and where necessary, the denial that it is possible.  That is awkward, presuming that nothing else will work.

The bulk of the President’s speech was devoted to clarifying that line, so that the top down—the international mandate—solution could be decisively rejected.  “This is how it is supposed to work,” said the President, “nations standing together for the sake of peace and security and individuals claiming their rights.  He cited South Sudan and Côte D’Ivoire and Tunisia and Egypt and Libya.  All those—successes or successes-in-progress all—show “the way it is supposed to be.”  We can argue about whether any of those is an example comparable to the Palestine/Israel conflict, which is the use the president wants to make of it. 

My interest here is the way each example reinforces the line of division the President wants to maintain.  “We must choose,” he says over and over, “between ineffective top-down decisions” and “letting the two parties work it out.”  Given only those two, the President is hoping that the U. N. members will deny Palestine’s bid for recognition.  But to do that, you have to say that those two are really the only options.

Since I am pushing a hybrid—enhanced negotiations resulting from U. N. membership for Palestine—I am not happy to see my option obscured.  When the President claims that there are only two options (and of the two, the one he likes looks preferable), it is important to argue that there are not just two and that we need not choose between them.

Controlling which options are seen as available is one of the first rules of power.  Whatever choice is finally made, that will have been the first step.  But to do that for the benefit of all, you have to get the options right and I don’t think President Obama did that at the U. N.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Djokovic Plays Erikson, Round 7

Posted on September 19, 2011 by hessd

I hate to abandon Roger Federer after so long, but since he lost to Novak Djokovic in the semifinals, I will have to examine Erikson’s Stage 8 with Djokovic in mind.  He is the one who actually made it to Stage 8.  In the integration I have been pursuing—the seven rounds of the U. S. Open tournament against the eight stages of Erik Erikson’s developmental ladder—if you get to the finals, you are facing the challenges Erikson described as the eighth and final stage.

Here’s what that looks like.

Maladaptive Syntonic Dystonic Malignant
Presumption Integrity Despair Disdain

WISDOM

 Before I go into this for the last time, however, I want to remember how we started.  I began by saying that there is a physical tournament and a spiritual tournament.  We lose the physical tournament.  We are, briefly, “mortal.”  You can dodge car accidents and strokes and cancer and crazed former spouses but eventually, something does the job.  I’m fine with that.  I have no idea what it would be like not to see myself at some point on a trajectory headed toward death.

We’ve been following the “inner” or “spiritual” tournament.  You can win that one.  That means that in Stage 6, you overcome isolation and achieve an intimacy marked by the struggle.  In Stage 7, you overcome stagnation and achieve a generativity marked by the struggle.  In this stage, you overcome despair and achieve an integrity—a sense of wholeness, of rightness—marked by the struggle.  The syntonic value does not careen, unmodified, into the excesses of presumption.  The dystonic value does not plummet into the malignant excesses of disdain.[1]

At this end of the analysis, the weaknesses of the tournament metaphor are clear.  Professional tennis players—professional anything players—deal with the recently completed tournament by learning what they can and moving on.  It stretches the metaphor to imagine the winner of the final game struggling to push despair away and in the process, opening himself to WISDOM.  Maybe if it were the last match of his career.  Or maybe these questions come up as you end your career in tennis and look back at how you have spent your life since you were 14 years old.  Now you are old, in tennis terms, in your early 30s and you might wonder if your “career” in tennis actually meant anything to anyone—or even whether it meant anything to you.  You hear about athletes who are more or less whole persons so long as their pro careers sustain them and go onto the street, sometimes pausing at a series of failed business attempts, on the way to the gutter.  We can see, in those cases, that integrity has lost out to despair.

The final entanglement in thinking about Stage 8 is that as part of the process of asking whether your life meant anything, you must ask whether “life” can “mean” anything.  Considered at any level below cocktail party chatter, that one rocks you back on your heels.  You really do have to decide what it would mean to “mean something.”  And then you would have to establish “a life” as a unit that could be assessed in that way.  And then you would have to measure your own life according to whatever metric you decided had merit.

I like all those questions and I’d like to spend some time with each of them, but this brief post-tournament reflection is not the right time.  Let me just use the last few paragraphs to point in a somewhat different direction than Erikson does.  I think I would put TRUST in the final place, where Erikson puts WISDOM.  There is no reason to think that the two are opposed in any fundamental way, but trust is fundamentally personal.  It isn’t just a metaphor drawn from interpersonal relationships; it is personal.  We trust “persons.”  We don’t trust “fate” or “destiny” or “the cycle of life.”

At this very last question, I bump up against the limits of my self-imposed decision to operate at a secular level.  I do think you can successfully deal with questions like “industry”—that’s like “industriousness,” remember—and identity and intimacy and even generativity, in a secular way.  When you come to asking “did my life mean anything,” even I, with my secular intentions, run out of the available scaffolding.

So thank you Erik and Joan Erikson.  Thank you Helen Kivnick.  Thank you Novak Djokovic.  It was a superb tournament and I will do my best, as a Roger Federer fan, to assert the integrity of the tournament and to fend off my own despair.

[1] I don’t like either of those terms, but they are good enough for now.  I’ll be working a good deal more with Stage 8, since that’s where I am headed (as are you) and I’ll poke around more with them then.  Presumption, for instance, is not “too much integrity.”  Maybe “entitlement” is more what he is looking for there.  And I am not at all sure that disdain is worse than despair—I’m not sure it is not simply a form of despair.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Love and Savvy

Posted on September 17, 2011 by hessd

I haven’t actually read the book Women Who Love Too Much, but when I saw it on the shelf, I knew I didn’t want to.  The person who made up that title—I understand that it might not have been the author—has a notion of what “love” is that I want to stay away from.  How can anyone love too much?

You can, in your attraction to or your care for another person, make bad choices.  You can put his or her values at the center of your life where your values ought to be.  You can concede the point in conflicts where sustaining your own commitment is necessary to your integrity.  You can be boundlessly tolerant when only clear rules and consistent behavior will make the world clear enough to live in.  Certainly you can do all those things.  You cannot love too much.

The combination I am looking for is love and savvy[1].  Love and street smarts.  Or if you like the Greek notion, love and metis—practical craftsmanship.  It isn’t too much love that drives us to pursue our goals in ways that guarantee their failure.  Craftsmanship without love isn’t very attractive either, of course.

In a relationship like marriage, metis is what enables you to know how the other person sees things, what she cares about, what expectations he has.  If I set out to love my wife and offer her the things that mean most to me (not that mean most to her), I do not have a shortage of love.  I have failed in savvy.  If I know what would mean the most to her and don’t care enough to offer it to her, I have failed in love.  You can’t love too much and, in the service of love, you can’t know too much.

There are situations that must be managed, just as there are relationships that lay their claim to our attention.  You have to know, sometimes, “what will work.”  It might not be what you like most to do, but if it needs to come out right and if you know what it will take, that is what you need to do.

I have an illustration in mind.  It is a story Jesus told.  Mostly, we call it “The Prodigal Son.”  I call it, “The Hothead, the Tight-ass, and Their Father.”  It is the father who shows the combination of love and savvy that I find so attractive.  In a lifetime of churchgoing, I have heard this story told dozens of times and even preached on many times.  Usually, the emphasis falls on how much the father loved his itinerant son.  He didn’t wait for him; he ran to the gate of the city.  He didn’t bargain with him; he restored him to the family.  He didn’t chastise him; he rejoiced to have him back.

Yes, he did.  He was a loving father.  But why did this old man, the patriarch of his family, hoist his robes up around his knees and run out into public view?  Let’s start there.

Ken Bailey is the author of Poet and Peasant, one of the best books on the parables of Jesus I have ever read.  Here is a comment by John Nordin on how Bailey works.  I found it on the Amazon.com page under comments.

 Bailey’s unique contribution is that he sat down with a number of trusted Palestinian nomads and listened carefully to their take on the cultural issues behind various parables. He contends, with some justice, that this group of people have something in contact with the original culture that these parables arose in, and thus can help us understand the unstated assumptions and cultural implications of the texts. He invested many years in this and did it with care and precision. On top of that, he has explored the early translations of the New Testament into Syriac and related languages. The result is nothing short of stunning. His analysis of the puzzling parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-13) is worth the price of admission alone, and even on the well-trod parable of the Good Samaritan, he has much valuable insight to share.

The whole parable is worth attending to with the tools Bailey makes available, but I want to talk about how savvy the father was.  Everyone knows he was loving and I don’t want to diminish that in any way, but if he hadn’t been street smart—or, in this case, “gate smart”—it wouldn’t have mattered much.

Why did he run to the entrance to the village?  I once wrote an extended celebration of Bailey’s account of the story.  You can read the whole thing here, if you like.  The answer to the question goes like this.  The villagers would be really hostile to this former member of their village.

The younger son comes back to town, broke and hungry. The prodigal returns, Bailey says, “to face … the slander of a whole town and certainly the gathering of a mob. As soon as the prodigal reaches the edge of the village and is identified, a crowd will begin to gather, He will be subject to taunt songs and many other types of verbal and perhaps even physical abuse.”

So one reason for hitching up his robe and dashing for the village border was to get to the son before the villagers did. Something like a gauntlet would be in the process of forming, remember, as village children alerted their elders to what was dragging itself into town. A second reason is that the father needed to make a spectacle of himself to assure a good‑sized audience for his next several actions.

So the son’s safety, first.  Second, the son’s status.  The father kisses the son because he knows what he wants to say and how to say it.  The son knows neither.  The son wouldn’t know whether to kiss his father’s hand or his feet or some…well…other place.

The father, by kissing his son on the cheek, indicates his forgiveness and his wish for reconciliation. The son would not have dared to kiss his father on the cheek, but the father preempts the son’s self‑abasement by his own quick mercy. And by doing so, he sets in motion a quite different sequence of events.

Next, he directs the servants to put his own robe on the son.  Here’s Bailey again: “the best robe”…would be the father’s robe; the feast day robe. It would be the finest robe the villagers had ever seen.  The father does not put this robe on the son.  That would not teach the servants what the father wants to teach them.  “You put it on him,” he tells them.  “He is my son, just as he was before.”

And he tells the servants to put shoes on his feet.  The shoes are a sign of being a free man in the house, not a servant. Telling the servants to put shoes on his feet was telling them that he was returning to his status of their master.

And he tells them to put a ring on his finger.  This isn’t quite as clear.  A Lucan scholar named Derrett speculates that the ring they were to put on his finger was a signet ring. It means he is to carry the authority of the master in his actions. He does not carry the economic resources, remember.  He received his share of the inheritance and spent it making whoopie.  He is, as a practical matter, a pauper and will be a pauper the rest of his life.  His brother will no doubt remind him of that fact many times a day for many years.   But there will be a limit to what the older brother can do, because both brothers wear the ring.

This old man, so often portrayed as foolish, admirable only in the exuberance of his love for his son, is seen here as quite deft.  The “restoration to status” is clear to the servants (serve him) and to the villagers (lay off him) and extends to the older brother (he wears the same ring you do; back off a little).  Whatever arrangements the father makes will have to continue to function after his death.  This is a supreme exercise in “generativity” for those of you who have been following the Erikson posts.

Are the villagers going to go along with all this?  Maybe.  The chances are not hurt at all by the huge party the father is throwing to which they will all be invited. 

Finally, the father orders the killing of the fatted calf. Bailey says this is an occasion for the whole village; that to kill a calf and not invite the village ‘would be an insult to the village. And, having already seen so many of the father’s actions as strategic, it is tempting to add this one to the list.  At the party, under the influence of a celebrative gathering, good meat, and free‑flowing drink many villagers will have an opportunity to accustom themselves to the presence of the younger son, who will be the guest of honor.

If there were a book called Fathers Who Love Too Much, this father would not be in it.  He’s too savvy for that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] From Spanish, possibly: sabe (usted) = you know.  Or from the French savez (-vous) = do you know?  Many years of wasted scholarship have gone into deciding if Tonto really knew the Sabe in “Kemo Sabe” meant.  Some scholars have suggested that it meant “the one who thinks he knows.” It is, in any case, a West Indian pidgin borrowing and Fran Striker, who wrote the Lone Ranger books and invented Kemo Sabe never made it west of the Mississippi.

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Federer Plays Erikson, Round 6

Posted on September 17, 2011 by hessd

It has taken me a little while to recover from the semifinals.  Even if you don’t follow tennis, you probably know now that Novak Djokovic won the U. S. Open and since you know how tournaments work, you know that he also won his semifinal match.  I am not in mourning because Djokovic beat my man Roger Federer in the semifinals.  I am in mourning because Federer had him at match point on his own serve with two chances to end Djokovic’s run and didn’t do it.  Ah well.  You have to give it to the people who run the tournament.  The semifinal matches featured the first seed (Djokovic) against the third seed (Federer) and the second seed (Nadal) against the fourth seed (Murray).  You can’t run a tournament any better than that.

For the purpose of tracking the Erikson developmental stages, Federer’s loss serves as well as a win would have.  Round 6 of the tournament matches up to Stage 7 or Erikson’s scheme.  In that stage, each of us encounters the good tendency (syntonic) and the bad tendency (dystonic) of that stage.  As always, the best outcome is for the good tendency to prevail, but, as always, only after having to cope with the resistance put up by the bad tendency.  Here’s what that looks like for Stage 7.

Maladaptive Syntonic value Dystonic value Malignant
Overextension Generativity Stagnation Rejectivity

CARE

 So what do those mean?  We have come a long way to reach generativity.  This emphasis takes for granted a lifetime of hard work and intimate relations.  It is the achievements in those areas that need now to be cared for.  I have been a teacher and a father since I was 22 years old.  I have students and grandstudents and great-grandstudents and more.  I have children and grandchildren.  The grandchildren are great, but they are not great-grandchildren.  The work of my productive life has been accomplished.  I need now to care for it and for them.  That is the work of generativity.  Notice how outgoing it is.  Think of the watershed pictured here.

Stagnation is not outgoing.  As a modifying effect on generativity, it has the effect of keeping the schedule manageable, of keeping time to nurture the self and the marriage and the close friends.  Those are all good.  As a value of its own, it represents only withdrawal from the work of one’s life.[1]  There are other things to call it, of course.  The later phases of this stage have been called “the golden years,” meaning that at last you can indulge the level of self-absorption your working life prevented.  You can do everything you have always loved to do.  And when you are tired of it, you get to do more because that is really all there is.  That is the point where you discover that self-oriented “leisure activities” were seasonings, like salt.  They had a wonderful effect on the activities and commitments you seasoned with such activities.  This is the time you realize that a diet of salt or dill or oregano really isn’t that satisfying.[2]

The extremes are, as always, distasteful.  An unrelieved generativity slides into overextension.  We all know people who, in their retirement, volunteer at a place that leaves them distraught and exhausted.  Not enough “stagnation,” to use Erikson’s term.  Not enough attention to the quality of generativity, I would say, rather than to the raw quantity of it.  And unrelieved stagnation is not inert.  It is an active rejection of the involvements that would give meaning and structure to your life.  Hollywood has made a great deal of money over the years, telling the story of an old codger who withdrew from all meaningful work and all meaningful relationships, rejecting the attempts of even the most diehard friends to re-engage them, until finally a Q falls into their lives.  Q is a puppy or a grandchild or a long alienated son or daughter or a once-important cause that calls one back to action.  Lots of kinds of Q.  It’s all the same story.  But when Q fails, the Eriksonian rejectivity is the ruling force.

The name Erikson gives to the appropriate outcome of the necessary conflict between generativity and stagnation is CARE.  “Caring,” he means, I think.  This caring overcomes the rejection of one’s own progeny, whether biological or pedagogical.  Being a teacher, I see my “progeny” as both my children (and their children) and my students (and their students).  Or, as I say it when I have only myself to please: “my progeny, both genetic and memetic.”[3]

Beginning, in your retirement, to exercise some care for the watershed where you live is a good idea, but it isn’t generativity.  Generativity is continuing to care.  It took a long time to build the coalition—I’m not presuming you are the one who built it, only that you were involved in it—and to set in place the expectation that the watershed deserves deliberate care, and more time to engage the relevant regulatory majorities at city, county, and state levels, and even more time to establish the budget line.  NOW my care for the watershed is generative.

It took a long time to establish close trusting adult relationships with my children—or, depending on whose life is being described, my grandchildren or my stepchildren or whatever—but that is now accomplished.  Now I oversee their lives with satisfaction, but from a distance.  I answer the questions they still want to ask me as well as I can, but there is great satisfaction that those questions reaffirm the relationship.  I ask more questions than I am asked, because I am a known quantity and questions that might be jarring from someone who was not trusted are not jarring from me.  Generativity is continuing to serve as I am able, but much more to celebrate the work of others, whose lives were once under my active care.

It took a long time for my students who became teachers to confront the dilemmas I confronted with them.  But when they did confront them, some of them came to think that I might be able to help and we became colleagues.  I know that examples that have been a part of my teaching for years—how do you understand a classroom for 100 students which has only 20 chairs?—have been told and told and told as generations a students have gone to school and graduated.  That is not, as some say, “a form of immortality,” but it actually is my present care that the example be well used.  It is a part of my generativity.

The one thing that remains to be said yet is that all three of these examples—who are not me, but they are flavored by my recollections—reject stagnation.  Stagnation is refusing to care any longer.  It is daytime soaps or endless golf or fanatical sports attachments or whatever you default to when you give up caring urgently for the life that goes on outside your domain and that will keep right on going when you die.

Actually, we come to the dying next.  The last of the Erikson stages looks right down the barrel of that event and we will see, in the next post, what he sees.

 

[1] We will see in Stage 8 that the dystonic value is “despair.”  Of course it is.  That follows directly from the withdrawal of the meaning of one’s life that is represented by “stagnation” in Stage 7.

[2] It confuses, my brother Karl taught me to say, the aliment and the condiment.  Everyone knows what condiments are; aliments are what you put them on.

[3] Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” as the cultural counterpart of “gene.”  It is based on the Greek mīnēma, “something imitated.”  My students who are teaching the things I taught them or teaching in the way I modeled for them are my memetic “children,” and I owe them my generativity as well.  They are the children of my mind and my heart as my biological children are the children of my body (and my mind and my heart).

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Federer Plays Erikson, Round 5

Posted on September 10, 2011 by hessd

In the musical, 1776, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania objects to the wording of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which was before the Second Continental Congress for debate.  Jefferson had referred to King George as a “tyrant.”  King George, Mr. Dickinson specified, is “not a tyrant…in Pennsylvania.”  I know the feeling.  In looking forward toward the Federer v. Tsonga match, I referred to Tsonga as “a monster.”  But he was not a monster this year.  Federer took him out 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.

This brings my man Roger to the end of the matches in which he is the higher seeded player.  The two players standing between him and the 2011 U. S. Open title are #1 Novak Djokovic and #2 Rafael Nadal.  Good luck, Roger.

The point of all the attention to the U. S. Open, however, was to follow Federer through the several stages of Erik Erikson’s developmental stages.  I had to start Roger on Stage 2 (Round 1 of the tournament = Stage 2 of the developmental sequence) so his Round 5 match with Tsonga is our springboard for a consideration of Stage 6 in Erikson’s scheme and here is where my tournament metaphor comes seriously apart.  Stage 6 is about the triumph of intimacy over isolation, with LOVE considered as the effect that the struggle with isolation has on the capacity for intimacy.

Nothing in the Federer v Tsonga match bears on it, so I will go back to the fundamental rationale for the tournament metaphor and leave the intimacy questions to be worked out between Roger and his wife, Mirka.  Should he win the match with Djokovic, we will be in a good position to go on to look at generativity, because Roger and Mirka have identical twin daughters, Myla Rose and Charlene Riva.[1]

It is tempting, in the context of tennis, to move directly from Stage 5, in which you have established a central identity and have found a way to be faithful to that identity in an array of circumstances, to Stage 7, in which you achieve what that identity has prepared you to achieve.  But most of us don’t live our lives that way.  We aspire to a deep mutuality with another person and that has very little to do with the kinds of achievements we have been considering.

The treatment given this stage in Vital Involvement in Old Age focuses on the syntonic value, intimacy.  The name they give to the maladaptive form is promiscuity.  I have been calling the maladaptive tendency the “too much” version of the syntonic value, but it is hard for me to see promiscuity as too much intimacy.  It almost seems to me that it is too little.  It’s not hard for me to think of a man who has sex with a lot of women because he has no interest in, or possibly no capacity for, real intimacy with any of them.  I don’t actually know anything about Tiger Woods as a person, but he is a prominent celebrity who seems to have moved away from intimacy toward promiscuity.

The dystonic value, the central antagonist to intimacy is isolation.  I don’t know if anyone reads Kahlil Gibran at wedding ceremonies anymore, but a line of his I used to hear  at weddings a lot belongs here.  The line is, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.”  I think those spaces are the value they are pointing to with the word isolation.  If that’s what they have in mind, I agree wholeheartedly.  If you really can’t manage to be alone, it is hard to know just what you are trying to achieve in relationship.  You can, certainly, hide from yourself—that would be a Stage 5 failure—in an intimate relationship.  When you are OK with your aloneness, it is clearer what you are trying to achieve in an intimate relationship.

The word they use for the “too much” level of the dystonic tendency is exclusivity.  I think they must mean a stance of actively excluding others, i.e., not just withdrawing from then, as in isolation, but preventing such relationships.  I hope that’s what they mean.  When I talk about exclusivity, I think of it as the basis of intimacy.  It is the exclusion of others, in what would otherwise be promiscuous, that allows intimacy with one partner.  So…they mean something else.

The master value of this stage is LOVE.  Love, in this sense, is the mastery of intimacy in its struggle with isolation.  Isolation—the aloneness I mentioned earlier—has its proper place in an intimate relationship, but it is not the first place.

Roger has Novak Djokovic next.  That’s the semifinals—Round 6—of the U. S. Open tennis tournament and it corresponds to Stage 7 of Erikson’s scheme.  I hope he does well.  He played Djokovic straight up in the French Open this year and took him out.  On the other hand, Roger is 30 and the commentators seem to think that his best matches are behind him.  Even if that’s true, it wouldn’t allow a prediction of tomorrow’s match.  What it does do is to put that match in a good place to consider Roger in the context of generativity, the syntonic value of Stage 7.

[1] Full disclosure.  I have identical twin granddaughters, but I liked Federer’s tennis long before either of us considered what life in the doubles court would be like.

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Reading Year (RY) 2012

Posted on September 9, 2011 by hessd

You can have conflicting short-term and long-term goals, right?  I want to lose weight over the longer term, but I want that milkshake RIGHT NOW!  With that in mind, the sentiment I want to begin with today might not be so bad.  I like to read books I really don’t want to read.

How does that work?  Well, five friends and I started meeting as a book group in 1983.  There aren’t many long-lived book groups.  Most book groups are women’s book groups.[1]  In the fall of 2013, we will begin our 30th year.  One of the friends was my employer at the time, an Oregon state legislator.  One was an education lobbyist in the 1983 legislative session.  They and their wives and I and my wife were the six people.  The next year, each couple chose to invite another person or another couple and very soon we were a group of 12, which is our current number.  Four of the original six are still members.  Here is the most recent picture of us, missing only three.  That’s the Pacific Ocean behind us.  The Sylvia Beach Hotel, famous for its author-themed rooms, is stage right.

We choose books for what I have recently been calling “the reading year.”  There are many different fiscal years; there are calendar years; there are liturgical years. Why not a reading year; an RY?  Following the practice of the federal fiscal year, I propose we date the year by the ending date, so we are just entering RY 2012.  We choose books from October to September.  That’s the RY.  At the September meeting, we will discuss the last book of RY 2011—it is Daniel Schorr’s Staying Tuned—and complete our balloting for RY 2012.[2]

Let me start with the truly shocking news.  Not everyone in the group shared my taste in books.  You heard it here first.  People nominate books I have never heard of and some of which I find really unattractive.  We have read books of poetry by poets I didn’t like.  We have agonized over the impoverished or otherwise distorted childhoods of people who grew up to write nostalgic or angry reflections on that time.  We have read children’s stories.  One month, long ago, we read supermarket tabloids.

In the process of reading books someone else thought were important and interesting, I have become interested in books I would never have read.  Further, some of the books I have read and never did become interested in have nevertheless benefitted me.  I look back on “having read them” with a pleasure entirely incommensurate with the pain of actually reading them—or with the prospect of reading another such book.  So I like reading books I didn’t want to read and nearly every year, the books that have real merit form a larger fraction of the total list.

Tell you what.  Don’t take my word for it.  Here is the list of books from which we must choose nine for RY 2012.  Pretty cool, huh?

[1] I just spent a little time trying to verify those assertions, but I can’t do it in the time I have.  The way I remember it, women’s groups are most numerous, followed by couple’s groups and, distantly, by men’s groups.

[2] I say “complete our balloting” because there will have been at least one round of electronic balloting by the time we meet on September 24.  We need nine books and if we have chosen fewer than nine in the electronic balloting, which has been the case every time so far, the remainder of the books will be chosen by old-fashioned put your paper ballot in the jar politics.  And by old-fashioned politicking as well.

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