Category: Media

The failures of kindness

George Saunders, NYTThere is no time like college graduation — the propulsion of thousands of fresh-faced, exuberant 21 year-olds into the “real” world — to believe anew in the possibilities of mankind and the human spirit.

Great convocation speeches capture that energy and — to paraphrase Pico Iyer — help us become young fools once again. And George Saunders delivered a great one to Syracuse U’s Class of 2013.

Some excerpts:

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” – that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf

Full speech here.

There are two ways to succeed: do very good work, or cheat

G.K. ChestertonI loved this article by G.K. Chesterton, an English writer, poet, and man of letters.

More than 100 years ago — before motivational posters, TED talks, and Tony Robbins — Chesterton complained about the excess of self-help books.

On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.

For him, there were only 2 roads to success: do very good work, or cheat.

If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards.

He simplifies for entertainment’s sake, but his insight is valuable: for example, he believes we are obsessed with self-help because we mystify money and millionaires.

The writer of that passage did not really have the remotest notion of how Vanderbilt made his money, or of how anybody else is to make his. He does, indeed, conclude his remarks by advocating some scheme; but it has nothing in the world to do with Vanderbilt. He merely wished to prostrate himself before the mystery of a millionaire. For when we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity.

And his remarkable conclusion, that this obsession makes us snobby. It appeals to our baser, meaner values.

They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride?

Some food for thought as we enter 2014. Here’s a running list of what I’m reading, thanks to Postach.io.

Why everyone should read some Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton @ TEDLet’s face it, we’re a pretty hypocritical country: we watch porn in record amounts but shun abortion; we drive Toyota Priuses but keep our lights on when we leave the house; we spend billions on diet books and fitness fads then stop by Wendy’s on the way home. It can overwhelm, at times.

I believe it’s partially driven by religion, or the lack thereof. Religious folk struggle to maintain their values in our sex-soaked, technology-obsessed culture; nonreligious folk (call them what you like: atheists, agnostics, the “spiritual but not religious”) struggle to find a sense of purpose, a greater good. We’re conflicted, caught between who we are and who we want to be (and believe). And hypocrisy – Greek for “acting of a theatrical part” – is the result.

That’s why I love reading Alain de Botton, and why I recommend his work. He’s chicken soup for the modern soul.

de Botton believes we’ve secularized, but have done so badly. In our abrupt, aggressive departure from religion, we’ve run away from home but are still wandering the streets without safety or shelter.

Instead of shunning religion, we should learn from it. We should, in the greatest sense of the word, steal pieces of it — for example, a belief in giving back, or love for neighbor and stranger — and make those pieces a part of our lives.

And the best part? It’s not just for nonbelievers: Christians can learn from Hindus, Buddhists can learn from Muslims, and so on.

His solution makes immediate, visceral sense. If humankind aspires to a true global village, this is the culture it must create.

de Botton is better-known in Europe than the States. They’re more secular, for one. His provocative titles, like “Religion for Atheists” or “Atheism 2.0”, would be dismissed forthwith here. Europe is also more removed, if by a small margin, from some of his critiques of what polisci students would call “American soft power.” Even his name is hard to pronounce (try saying “Botton” five times without hearing “bottom”).

But he’s prolific, he’s persuasive, and he’s profound. Start with his Twitter feed, a stream of seemingly simple self-help soundbites. Yes, he might be the intellectual man’s Tony Robbins, but there’s more substance, and nuance.

The bottom line: Alain de Botton has changed how I see the world and what I’d like to accomplish before I die.

The other author I’ve frequently praised on this blog is Haruki Murakami. There’s no obvious overlap with de Botton, not in style, format, or demographic, but they both peel back the layers of humankind, to place the emotional and logical pieces of our species into a broader tableau. Murakami’s tableau is a sensory, magical one; de Botton’s is an orderly, harmonious one.

Below, I’ve compiled a selection of my notes from his work, a sort of buffet-style entry to his arguments:

On status anxiety

  • It’s a problem today because 1) we don’t approve of people who receive their status by birth and 2) we believe status can be earned/achieved and therefore it is limitless
  • There are 2 types of self-help books: 1) the Tony Robbins kind, “become a billionaire by Sunday” and 2) how to deal with low self-esteem; they’re connected because if you’re not a billionaire by Saturday, you have self-esteem problems
  • Tocqueville, on his trip around the world, noted that envy would be the #1 emotion that Americans would suffer (as with most democratic, egalitarian societies)
  • In a “just” society like ours, the rich deserve their success, but the poor also deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)
  • Hundreds of years ago, if you saw a rich person, you would assume he/she was born into it or did something bad to get it; and in ancient Rome, your good fortune was due to the Gods, when something good happened to you, you’d thank God and bless him and sacrifice to him

On why pessimism is healthy

  • Problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, mankind has taken such great strides that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day
  • The secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through things like Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research
  • Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers are instead meant to be tolerated (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”)

On atheism and religion:

  • There’s much to admire about organized religion – the music, architecture, texts, rules, communities
  • Education has two goals – to learn important/technical skills, and to make better human beings
  • We are immensely forgetful beings, which is why religions on average remind people of things five times per day (whereas secular education rarely if ever reviews important lessons)
  • Secular world has religious equivalents, like museums, but they lack power and purpose
  • In 2011, the Catholic Church made $97B. Why is it so successful? Because it’s involved directly in many aspects of peoples’ lives, whereas the academic/intellectual world is more distant, preferring instead to publish books and lecture from afar
  • Religions are like good hosts at a party – bring people together, facilitate intros, help people make things happen

Some videos:

Some tweets:

Some quotes from Religion for Atheists (see here for a longer list):

We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths.

In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself – the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes – has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.

Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit.

The one generalization we might venture to draw from the Judaeo-Christian approach to good behaviour is that we would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small-scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. Pride, a superficially unobtrusive attitude of mind, was deemed worthy of notice by Christianity, just as Judaism saw nothing frivolous in making recommendations about how often married couples should have sex.

Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers lectures, Christianity sermons. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.

The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

Thanks everyone. That was a long post but hope you found it useful. I’d love to hear what authors and thinkers inspire you. Also here is a much longer list of stuff I’m reading and highlighting if you’re into that sort of thing.

The Inverted-U: the research behind why there can indeed be too much of a good thing

The Inverted-U is a journal article by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz. It’s the pillar of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in David and Goliath, which is how I discovered it.

Reading academic papers is tougher than your regular blog posts and nonfiction books. It’s uncomfortable but I try to push through one or two each month. I can’t imagine how grad students (and law students) do it. I suppose as with all things that you get used to it.

Here are my notes. Reader beware – there’s a good chance some of the below is inaccurate, incomplete, or misrepresentative, since this is only one read-through in the eyes of a pure layman.

Adam Grant and Barry Shwartz are professors at UPenn Wharton and Swarthmore, respectively; I’ll refer to them below as GS.

The Inverted-U by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. – Aristotle

  • The academic term for too much of a good thing is “nonmonotonic inverted-U-shaped effects”
  • Psychology research has proven that certain behaviors increase happiness (eg, sending thank-you messages, spending money on others, making choices to increase autonomy), but GS believe there needs to be more discussion and research on the downsides of excess
  • Aristotle argued people need to find the mean, the “proportionate” response to things
  • Cited studies and examples include:
    • Learning (on the job) is good, but people too focused on learning can divert attention from performance, waste resources, distract from key priorities
    • Complex jobs provide satisfaction and fulfillment, but jobs that are too complex (I’m thinking anything in public office these days) can lead to stress, burnout, dissatisfaction
    • An NBA study showed that practice was helpful and improved performance, but excessive practice (and excessive experience, as measured in years) led to overconfidence, complacency, and lack of creativity
    • Detail-orientation is important to success, but when you are too detail-oriented – especially for simple, mechanical jobs, you can miss the bigger picture
    • Generosity is good, but too much consumes your time and energy. A study of volunteers showed that 100 to 800 hours per year is optimal
  • Other examples of the inverted-U include optimism (too much can lead to under preparation and under estimation of risks), self-esteem (can harm relationships and health), cheerfulness (can lead to engaging in risky behaviors), and life satisfaction (“moderately satisfied” people earned the most, “extremely satisfied” people earned less and had lower levels of education)
  • GS stress that most data are correlational, and thus causality is uncertain. We’re not sure if moderately satisfied people are driven to be more successful, or if more successful people, once they compare their BMW to their neighbor’s Porsche, are less satisfied
  • Why does this happen? I struggled through this part, but here’s my best shot:
    • One reason is “virtue conflicts”. In other words, life is zero-sum, and the more of one virtue you cultivate, the less time and energy you spend on other virtues (helping others is good, but so is investing in yourself)
    • The second reason is “good things satiate and bad things escalate”. So a good burrito is great on the first bite, but not so tasty near the end. And bad things – like substance addiction – can grow in magnitude
    • The third reason is the characteristics of some virtues, where one effect is harmful in excess (eg, motivation is a positive virtue, and increased focus is an effect, but too much focus can be bad for complex, big-picture tasks)
  • GS end by asking a few questions, including:
    • 1. How much of a specific trait is too much?
    • 2. Why does this happen?
    • 3. When – under what conditions, circumstances, contexts – does this inverted-U happen?
  • They believe that applying Aristotle’s concept of the mean and the inverted-U are helpful to understanding behavior and happiness. For example, researchers used to believe that the more choice we had, the better. It was only recently that the same researchers realized too much choice can make you less happy (the paradox of choice)
  • Are there any virtues where more is always better? What is known as an “unmitigated good”?

We believe that the search for the Aristotelian mean represents an opportunity for psychologists to answer fundamental questions about the limits of positive experiences. The inverted-U is a widespread phenomenon in psychology, and we believe it deserves more attention in psychology writ large and in positive psychology especially – Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Here’s the original article. Happy reading! I’d love to hear what you think and if you came across different insights than I did.

For more readings, check out my linkblog. There, you can see what I read and highlight. Thanks to Postach.io for building this tool, which integrates neatly with Evernote.