How Selfish and Selfless Overlap

Let us say that you were a complete hedonist. You only did what made you feel good.

Wouldn't you still do things for other people? Given how we are wired, doesn't it make a person about as happy to make someone else happy as anything one can do? For instance, have you ever seen anyone making a baby laugh who looked like they were having a miserable time?

"Bring me a wave separate from the ocean and I will show you a person separate from the universe."
- Alan Watts

Out of the Multitude

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

- Walt Whitman

Everyone is a multitude. When you address them, talk to their best self. See if you can get that self's attention first. They'll be better to deal with and that is the self you want a relationship with. At any given moment you might wake up their low self-esteem self, their angry at the injustice of it all self, their benevolent self, their irritated at you self ... To raise the odds of missing these sorts of characters, directly address their best self.

Of course sometimes that's like trying to get the attention of someone at a loud party.

A Quick Self Inventory - Using Covey's Four Elements of Being Human to Identify What's Missing

Sometimes you're just off. You're not even sure why.

Stephen Covey argued that we are made up of four large parts: physical, social / emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. And if you divide our humanity into a different list or add to this one to make it work better for you, great. The point is, you can use this list - or some variant on it - to assess how you are doing, to inventory what is missing. Sometimes you feel like something is missing .Other times you just feel like there could be more. In any case, here's a place to start.

The drive for, and realization of, these needs does so much to define us and our happiness.

Physical - you are a biological creature. You might be feeling spiritual or mindful but there comes a time when all that matters is finding a toilet or tree to hide behind.

Eating poorly? Short of cash? Craving food, sex, alcohol ... This physical piece can be the most obvious of the missing pieces. And, of course, it can also be a diversion from what is really bothering us - people looking for food rather than esteem, sex rather than affection, ... well, you can fill in the rest.

Social / Emotional - this is complex. Social is our relationship to others and emotional is our relationship to ourselves. Do we have friends or family who give us a safe place to be ourselves? People who support us and who we, in turn, support? People who cheer us and people who coach us, those who support and those who challenge?
Emotional needs are also complex but they might be defined by our self-talk as much as anything else. What is our internal narrator telling us? Is it nurturing or toxic? Is it reality based on dependent on denial and delusion?

Intellectual - this has to do with keeping our big brains occupied. What are we thinking about? What is structuring our consciousness? Are we focused only on things that are offered to us by media and tradition or are we able to create our way into unique thoughts and new learning?

Spiritual - this is the big one. What, finally, gives our life meaning? It could be traditional religion and its hopes and consolation. It could be a life of our own invention that we're creating in response to what we see as possible, exciting, or important. It is what gives us a sense of purpose, connects us to something bigger than our own life.

There is a great deal you can do with these four. For one thing, it might help you to understand what is missing is not what you've been focused on. Perhaps what you need isn't another intellectual challenge but instead a physical comfort - or vice versa. You might think that you're bored when you're actually lonely, hungry when you're bored, or think that your problems is that you're unable to make sense of what you're doing when in fact it is that you're unable to see how it matters, a failure that makes it nearly impossible for you to be engaged in it. Nothing is more frustrating, or fruitless, than trying to cure what ails you spiritually with physical needs or intellectual needs with the social. When you are feeling restless because your mind needs a new challenge, it's a bad idea to go visit familiar friends. When you are hungry, it's a bad idea to console yourself by reading new recipes. If you're lonely, don't try curing that by meditating. Identify what is missing and try to meet that need rather than distract yourselves from it. You can't always solve what's wrong with Ramen noodles or Netflix.

Covey suggested that you could use this checklist of four elements of being human to assess a job, for instance.

Physical: does your job pay you enough to live the life in the physical comfort that you want or need? Even if it does, you might still be unhappy if you don't like what it does to you socially or emotionally.

Social / Emotional: Do you feel good about the people you work with? Do you feel good about what you do? Even if you do, you might still be unhappy if you don't like what it does for you - or more likely fails to do for you - intellectually.

Intellectual: Are you learning enough to stay up with your field? Do you feel mentally challenged by your job? Is it engaging enough that you lose track of time or self as you do it? Finally, even if all three of these needs are met, your job may still not do it for you if it feels meaningless.

Spiritual: Imagine that you were paid enough, enjoyed your coworkers and were continually learning but every project you completed was looked at by your boss who then, with a smile, said "We can't use this," and simply threw your work away. After awhile, your work would seem meaningless and you'd lose heart.

Of course your job might not address all of these. Most of us for at least some part of our career find ways to address at least one of these needs outside of work. Sustaining happiness means finding some way to address these four needs.

This little framework doesn't solve problems but it can help you to focus on the right ones. And I find it is not a bad place to start when scratching my head about what to do next. An important step in problem solving is defining the problem. If one or more of these is missing, that's a problem. And if you could read this far and make sense of this, you can begin to make progress at addressing what is missing. And that might highlight the final important piece: faith that you and the ones around you are able to address these needs.

Finding the Energy to be You (or, Stop Wasting Energy Trying Not to be You)

I wonder how much energy people waste trying not to be who they are? It is true that everyone has some things about themselves that it would be best for everyone if they did not. Everyone has a tendency towards something like sloth or being just a little too curt or too flirtatious or … well the myriad ways of being that we don’t like in others or ourselves.

The sad thing about this is that the energy we spend trying to rid ourselves of the bad is diverted from trying to build on the good. The charismatic or creative self gets distracted, if not repressed, by our project to squelch the undisciplined or reckless self. There is only so much energy and if we waste it on not being us we have so little energy left with which to actually be us.

Peter Drucker once wrote that most problems cannot be solved and most problems are rendered irrelevant by success. Picasso made a mess of relationships but what if he’d worked successfully at getting relationships right but didn’t leave us his incredible body of work? Would the world really have been a better place if that had happened?

I wonder how much energy we’d have to do great things if we accepted that we, ourselves, were not that great but nonetheless accepted ourselves and then tried to find our way in the world with what it was about ourselves we wanted more of?

That might be one way to end a personal energy crisis, to find the energy for life that might otherwise be missing. You're only alive once - you may as well be fully alive.

After writing the above, I read an excerpt that Thomas gave from from Franzen's "Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts." Franzen seems concerned with something similar.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

...

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

....

I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

Not So Much Unreasonable As Its Own Reason

It might be that you’ve found your personal reason if it seems unreasonable to everyone else.

Some things you do might do for money. That’s a reason everyone gets.

Other things we do for no extrinsic reason but just because of their nature. That, too, is a reason that everyone gets. We revel in a hug or great music, savor food or beautiful art simply because that’s part of the human experience.

Finally, there are things that you do simply because that is who you are. How can you explain why you’re compelled to write poems, play the ukulele, make fun of jokes, walk the high wire, juggle, or collect found art that others would categorize as junk? If there is no reason outside of the thing itself, it might just be your own “raison d'etre,” or reason for existence. (Or at least one of the reasons.)

If, by contrast, you have a reason for doing the thing other than that thing itself, it might just be that you’re still at least one level removed from your true passion.

To others your passion might seem unreasonable but perhaps it is simply the case that the thing is not so much unreasonable as something that is its own reason. 

Heaven or Hell?

What if eternity is a place where you live among people who may be a different gender, of different skill sets and abilities, different races and styles, but who, in terms of how they fundamentally live their lives,

• have no more (or less) compassion than you
• are no more (or less) loving than you
• are no more (or less) mean or thoughtless than you
• do no more (or less) than you to realize their own potential
• put no more (or less) effort into life than you
• are no more (or less) brave than you
• are no more (or less) selfish than you
• do no more (or less) to make themselves or the world better than you

What if, in short, you lived for eternity in a world where no one was any different than you in terms of the emotions they evoked or nurtured? What if you were the only one who had the power to define whether it was heaven or hell and you only had that power now? 

The really important question is whether that possibility comforts or frightens you. What you might wish were different in that life could be something you ought to think about changing in this one.

The Least Confessed - Most Often Pursued - Resolution

“The purpose of life is to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

-          Kurt Vonnegut

I like the idea of new year's resolutions. I love the idea of using any excuse for a fresh start, for renewing or creating a new goal or way of being. I'm not a cynic about goals or resolutions, but I do find it curious that what appears to be most valued is least mentioned.

Left to our own devices, we will play. We will stare at monitors, out windows, and at wallpaper. We will engage ourselves in such meaningless tasks that should someone ask us, "What'd you do?" the only honest response would be, "Haven't a clue."

And yet no one says, "This year, I resolve to give myself, guilt free, hours each week to dabble, putz, and fool around," in spite of the fact that our actions would seem to suggest that this is something we value.

If it is guilt that keeps you from admitting to your love for idle time, it seems to me that there are at least a couple of socially redeeming justifications for such behavior - justifications beyond the simple enough justification of "it makes me happy."

Idling gives you more energy to sprint when you need to. I find that the more time I spend trying to be productive, the less productive I can be. If you are trying to be productive 26.2 miles a day, you'll go at a much slower pace than if you are trying to be productive for 100 yards. Some tasks are more performance than productive; you have to be "on" for 15 minutes or an hour. If idling into that surge of adrenalin and engagement makes you more powerful in that moment, idling might be the smartest thing you can do.

Plus, this is a complicated and confusing world which requires us to learn and change, something that play makes easier. Covey used to make the distinction between efficient ("he was fast up that ladder") and effective ("oops - his ladder was leaning against the wrong wall!"). The person who has his head down the whole time, working to be productive, has less opportunity to explore other possibilities, to contemplate other ways to be. Children play all the time and no adult learns as much or changes as much as a child. Play - or fiddling about - gives a child a safe space to experiment with other personalities, goals, and roles. Play is personal experimentation and facilitates development.

Perhaps this is the year to stop pretending that you don't like to pretend, to play, to daydream, and to fart around. Perhaps this year it is worth leaving your self some elbow room to develop, muse, and unfold in unexpected directions.

At Last! A Nobel Prize Winner I Can Recommend

When I was 18, I read a novel about an 18 year old who fell in love with his aunt while working at a radio station with a wonderfully eccentric creative force, a writer of radio soap operas. For years after, it was on my list of favorite novels. (Until, I think, my daughter dismissed it as overly hormonal, or some such.) I thought it was brilliantly creative and this week, the Nobel Prize committee awarded its author, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize for Literature. I feel somewhat vindicated.
To me, the novel had any number of good reasons to hold my attention. The 18 year was in love with a 32 year old (as it turns out, this was based on Vargas' own life experience). As it turns out, hormonally speaking, an 18 year old male and 32 year old female are probably pretty well matched. That relationship alone - amplifying all that is awkward in any love story with its added prohibition of defying social norms - was enough to justify a story. The love story seems hopeless which, of course, is the definition of a love story: the triumph of love over probability and good sense. Love is for risk takers.
But the real juice in the story came from the alternating chapters that were excerpts from the daily radio soap operas written by the tiny little genius who'd come to Peru from a foreign country. Not only are these chapters wonderfully absurd, imaginative, and engaging, they record how the breakdown of self coincides with the breakdown of narrative.
We tell stories to make sense of our own lives. We explain ourselves to people. We explain government or work or pop culture through stories. Scientists are calling into question the hypothesis that we have any real choice about how we live our lives, as the evidence mounts that choices are made before we are conscious of our inclinations. We may not control what we do but we can generate wonderfully good reasons for it. To lose control of the narrative of our own lives is to lose control over our own lives. Even a victim has, at least, his own story about injustice. Vargas delivers a lecture on the power of narrative in such an entertaining way that we don't even realize that it is a lecture (and I pause to use such a term because "lecture" seems such a crass description of what he does).
And then the story ends sadly when the narrative of love fails to cohere. But sadly, too, is perhaps the wrong word. (It might just be this repeated choice of the wrong word that signals one difference between novelist and blogger.) The end of love is poignant because this we hate to see the story end between our narrator and "Aunt Julia," but is nonetheless hopeful simply because we trust that once this love story is over, our narrator will be able to write another. Narrative is key and this young man has learned how to be a narrator. For such a  character, there is hope. He could one day be president or love again or even win a Nobel Prize.

Discovering a Life

Tonight my teacher wife said something profound. A person can't learn their strengths without doing their best. It's a curious thought, that: we realize our potential to discover who we are. I like this thought.

Curious

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
-Walt Whitman

Resolution stops the creative process so it is probably a good thing that we are forced to play referee over the contradictions that we are.

We're a curious amalgam of bowels and brains, soul and scrotum, a spiritual being continually reminded that we're really just animals and vice versa. (Hm. It just occurs to me that the vice might actually be vice and the versa might be scripture. More creative tension.)

Humor seems the only resolution to living our life managing the war between such odd and contradictory roommates as we house within us.

"No!"

Anything you are not free to say "no" to, you are unable to say "yes" to.

You can't really choose what you are not free to reject.

This is worth remembering if you really are intent on moving away from parental and managerial or even educational models that don't depend on some form of tyranny.

Is it any wonder that one of the first phrases that toddlers learn is "No!"? This is the beginning of taking control over defining self rather than capitulating to others who would gladly define you.

Arrogance

Arrogance is just nature's way of telling you that you have stalled in the quest to realize your potential. If you've mastered something, it's time to integrate it into some larger goal. If you're not humbled by what you're trying to do, you're not stretching yourself very far.

Transcending Parenting

Of course the thing that no one admits is that the life of the child transcends our feeble attempts at parenting. Fortunately, the child is not any more limited by our parenting than is our brain by our understanding of it.

We have this conceit that we have to get parenting right or the child will turn out poorly. I don't intend to be glib about the danger of scarring a child, but I do know that the life of any person is more complex, more nuanced, more able than the parenting effort that went into it.

And whether you're a parent or a child, you can take comfort in this thought.

Abstract Notion of the Day - Let Systems Compete and People Cooperate

Competition and cooperation play together in nature. Some like to emphasize the competition that pits the gazelles against each other, the loser becoming lion lunch. Others like to emphasize the cooperation that enables the lions to bring down the gazelle or that prompts the mother to raise the child.


So which should we bring into our social and economic life? Should we emphasize competition or cooperation?


I'd like to offer this suggestion: competition between systems and cooperation between people.


Let companies go bankrupt, political parties, ideologies, and administrations lose power, and educational approaches go out of favor. Let systems compete to win or lose based on how well they do. Meanwhile, ensure cooperation between people, doing what we can to ensure that everyone thrives.


To reverse this - to have no competition between religious or political or educational systems (essentially some kind of a monopoly) while forcing competition between people is to create a system that arrests progress and makes even the winners miserable, worried as they are that they might lose their place.


One of the problems with this goal, though, is that people become the system they are a part of. It is hard to become intimate enough with a system to use it and yet not become defined by it. "I am a Stanford grad ... a mechanical engineer ... a Pentecostal ... a Republican ... a Jungian ..." we say and these systems we've adopted become less our tools than our selves. With such a belief, it is hard to casually accept the failure of systems and not see it as, somehow, a threat to ourselves.

The religious martyr may be the most extreme example of someone who no longer holds the system loosely in hand but, instead, is held tightly by the system. For them, Islam or Christianity or the cult has become more important than life itself and they will die for it.


This might be the biggest challenge we have in our education system: raising children to learn how to use systems without becoming defined by those systems. I'm convinced that we're not going to make much progress with our current definitions of liberal or conservative, for instance, and as long as major swaths of the polity or politicians define themselves this way, progress will be slow. And yet people need some orientation, even if it is one they'll abandon as goals or processes change. As long as people define themselves rigidly by these systems, competition between systems will equal competition between people.

Flow as the Compass for Social Invention

We’ve now reached a curious and potentially powerful point in history in which our social reality will be less defined by any one dominant institution or certain traditions than the act of intentionally engaging in social invention. It will, however, be social invention to a particular end.

A lot of our practices are about imitating. This is the opposite of inventing. We don’t call it imitating. We say that we’re studying principles of organizations and looking to apply what is proven or successful. But we’re imitating.
The problem with this and the practice of it is perhaps seen most readily in our approach to work within organizations.

In his book, Good Business, Csikszentmihalyi quotes Robert Shapiro, former CEO of Monsanto. He makes a critical point about how individuals are fit into organizations.

“The notion of job implies that there’s been some supreme architect who designed this system so that a lot of parts fit together and produce whatever the desired input is. No one in a job can see the whole. When we ask you to join us, we are saying, ‘Do you have the skills and the willingness to shape yourself in this way so that you will fit into this big machine? Because somebody did this job before you, somebody who was different from you. Someone will do it after you. Those parts of you that aren’t relevant to that job, please just forget about. Those shortcomings that you have that really don’t enable you to fill this job, please at least try to fake, so that we can all have the impression that you’re doing this job.’”

“It’s a Procrustean concept, and it studiously and systematically avoids using the most valuable part of you, the part of you that makes you different from other people, that makes you uniquely you. If we want to be a great institution, that’s where we ought to be looking. We ought to be saying, “What can you bring to this that’s going to help?” Not, ‘Here’s the job, just do it.’”

What does Shapiro mean by “a Procrustean concept?” Procrustes was a figure in Greek mythology who forced travelers to fit into his bed by stretching their bodies when they were too short or cutting off their legs when they were too long. It is probably true that the vast majority of employees are both stretched to the limits of their capacity in some aspects of their job and literally cut off from real and crucial parts of their self in others. In either case, fitting into a job in such a way does little to realize their own potential or, by extension, the potential of the organization.

In fact, such programming of one’s actions is antithetical to what any society would hope to see emerge: genius. “One admires genius because one has the imagination to see that there is no mechanism in him or his work, nothing that can be analyzed and rationalized, ” Barzun writes. Again, imitation is the opposite of creativity, a way to suppress genius.

And yet tailoring even a job to the individual is something we rarely do. We prod students, congregants in church, employees, and citizens into a particular way of being. We are focused on what is “best” without regard for what is unique.
But what if the purpose of social inventions like church, school, and business was to provide a forum for the individual to realize his potential and not simply realize the vision of some leader?

In this world, the guide to progress will be rooted in the psychology of engagement, in what makes us most happy.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has spent decades studying what makes people most engaged. He has called the state of engagement “Flow” and has found that it is in this state that people are most happy, most creative and from which people are most likely to emerge more able and developed. In short, the path of flow – found in challenges that stretch us beyond those in which we feel in control (much less bored) and less than those that make us feel anxious (much less overwhelmed) – is the path to self development. It is by following the path of flow that we find our own unique path and realize our potential.

If you can imagine a world in which learning and work follow the path of flow for the individual, you can begin to imagine a world in which social invention is necessary – where work and learning are as dynamic as a video game that raises the challenge as the gamer gets more skilled. This world is not chaotic, but it certainly is not static or generic.

And such a world is congruent with the basic theme of progress since about 1300: increased autonomy. We have increasingly given the individual more options and more freedom on how to construct his own life.

Accomplishing this will require massive amounts of information that is custom to the individual. That is, this kind of world could only sit atop an information age. There are a great number of obstacles to creating such a world but the major obstacle at this point in history is simply awareness: very few people are aware it is possible or even that is desirable. It’s time we ended this. Pass the word along. It’s time we stopped settling for somebody else’s life and created the context for our own.

Bernard & Maddie on Love as a Gale of Creative Destruction

It had been a long time since I'd seen Maddie. She looked bright eyed and greeted me with a wet kiss on the cheek. She had to be closer to 80 than 60, but her eyes shone in a way that made me smile.

"I have been thinking about love," her older brother Bernard announced in his inimitable way.

Maddie giggled. "Maybe if you hadn't thought so much about love you'd have done better with your three marriages."

"Well, there is nothing like being alone after three marriages to make a man think about love. Sometimes failure teaches you things that success can't," Bernard said a little testily.

"What have you learned," I asked curiously.

"Well, I don't know that I've actually learned anything. But in doing some economics reading, I found a phrase that sounded more like love than capitalism: gales of creative destruction. Schumpeter - an economist - wrote about how capitalism creates new industries like cars that destroy old industries like horse and buggies. Capitalism creates by destroying," he said. Bernard paused dramatically. "And I think that love does as well."

"You think that love destroys a person?" I said.

"The old you. Yes. You go into a relationship and the old you gets destroyed. In its place is a new you that works with this new person."

"That makes love sound exhausting," I said. "I think love is a very different thing."

"What?"

"I think we underestimate the power of getting to be yourself in love. I think that love is finding a person who gives you a place to be you. Love is comfort as much as it is excitement."

"I don't remember love feeling all that comfortable. It wasn't really a place where I could let down," Bernard protested.

"Well no wonder your marriages didn't last," I said. "That kind of love sounds exhausting."

Maddie laughed. "If you do it right," she said, "there is no conflict."

"Conflict between what?"

"The two kinds of love you're talking about," she said. "Love as a creative destruction and love as a place where you could be you."

"How does that work?" Bernard said with what I would have sworn was a pout.

"Nothing's more transformative than getting to be you. Getting to really be you," her eyes shone. "If you suddenly find yourself with a person who lets you be you, it does destroy the old you - the you that berates yourself, that spends more energy scolding yourself than enabling yourself. You think it isn't, finally, transformative to find someone who is the place where you can be you?" Maddie laughed at us. "You think that you are two are talking about different things?"

"Ron," she looked at me, "it is not that you are comfortable getting to be you. You make it sound like something comfortable, Ron, like as if it isn't a lot of work to be the real you. Or, I guess, you aren't left comfortable with the old you. Aren't left feeling comfortable unchanged. Love has about as much regard for convenience as gravity has for grace. You'll be happier. You'll be more alive. You may or may not feel all that comfortable."

"So you agree with me," Bernard asked with naked excitement. Bernard, like all of us, had this tendency not to be able to hear anything after he'd expressed an idea, except as it related to what he said.

Maddie looked at him with a tender smile. Her eyes seemed to water a little. She touched his hand. "Sure, Bernard. I agree with you. Love creates a new you by destroying the old you. It's not afraid to call the old you retarded or dis-associate with it. It feels a little destructive sometimes, but ..." she trailed off.

"So you've known this for some time," asked Bernard, quickly turning her agreement into hurt that she knew this even before he did.

Maddie laughed again. "Bernard, Bernard, Bernard," she shook her head. "I didn't know it the way you said it. But it makes sense to me, yes."

Bernard paused and then he asked her, "Who transformed you? It wasn't Jacob, was it?"

"It was me," Maddie said. "I finally learned to love me and that changed everything." She patted his hand again. "You should try it, dear. It would do you good."

I'll Take the de-scrambled eggs - Separating Self and Society

It is a wonderful thing that we’re unable to predict. If we could, it would suggest a lack of control over events, a lack of autonomy for the human race. Prediction suggests determinism; unpredictability suggests freedom.

I’ve previously made the distinction between social and technological innovation. The more I try to make this distinction operational, the more it seems to me that dissecting the two is like trying to put a wedge between heads and tails.

A car is clearly a technological innovation. It has moving parts and relies on inventions as diverse as rubber tires and steel ball bearings.

Of course, a car is also clearly a social innovation. It changes the range a person can travel in a day and greatly multiplies the number of people who can be grouped daily to work on tasks like building cars. It creates a huge separation between work and home.

Any successful social innovation introduces some new technology – even if it is as silly as the dance moves in the Macarena. Any successful technological innovation moves with or drives social innovation. If 150 million people had not agreed to turn over their network of friends to Facebook, the software (the technological innovation) would have been a curiosity. If people never dared to climb into a car (social innovation), the horseless carriage would have been an historical footnote of less importance than any given outbreak of influenza.

Progress depends on the play between these two. An innovation has to enable people to do something – has to have a technological component. To matter, it has to change behavior – has to have a social component.

One of the things that I don’t know about this is how the dance works. Is technology gradually changing to allow us to express our true selves? Or is humanity - human nature itself - changing, led in new and unpredictable directions by technology? And even if it is true that the technology and humanity are now co-evolving, which is the lead in this strange dance? Does this question even make sense in a world where we’re now engaged in genetic engineering?

Has the question of human nature always been bound up in questions of culture and technology? Or are those merely manifestations of human nature? Are technology and society as intrinsic to being human as fingernails and sleep cycles?

Is it not just that it is not possible to drive a distinction between social and technological progress. Perhaps it is not even possible to drive a wedge between self and society.

Just wondering.

From Self Absorbed to Self Aware - the Return of the Novel?

The novel’s great era didn’t just coincide with the rise of the university and the specialist because of rising levels of literacy – it helped to ameliorate the feelings of anomie and isolation of the specialist. Suddenly, a growing number of workers found themselves busy in tasks that required focus that excluded others and unique skills that made it difficult to relate to friends and families. The novel made us feel less alone.

But the novel did more than provide access to the inner life of others, giving us access to the psychic space of the woman in the apartment across the hall or the guy in the next office. It reassured us that our own insecurities, lusts, petty grievances, and imaginings did not make us freaks but, instead, made us part of the human race. Everyone, as it turns out, has some kind of struggle.

And yet today, the world of reality TV and Internet confessionals – media like blogs and YouTube – now provides us with ample reassurance that our petty neuroses and animal instincts are not unique. And maybe celebrity stories and powerful video has eroded reading.

But I think that this comes with a cost. Novels force reflection that video and quick articles or posts do not. In a novel, we’re forced to project ourselves into the lives of the character. A good novel will actually kick start our own process of reflection. A novel makes our own thoughts more articulate, providing us with not just vocabulary but vocabulary of the inner life. Through a great novel, we discover some portion of ourselves.

Gaining access to the inner life by video and celebrity scrutiny, by contrast, seems to confuse self absorption and self awareness. We lose ourselves in the characters we see but we are never really forced to consider our own lives, never made to reflect.

All this to report some potentially good news. By one measure, reading is still lower than it was in the early 1980s or 90s but rose over the last 12 months for the first time since 1982. If our mindless living –invasions, spending, and eating of the last few decades - has done anything, it has certainly provided us with material enough to think about. It might provoke us to become more contemplative, more reflective. Crazy optimist that I am, I love the notion of this possibility.

Just Try to Change the World and See if it Doesn't Change You

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
[excerpt from a David Foster Wallace speech]

I used to think that social progress and individual development were somehow unrelated. I now think that social progress is the surest form of individual development and would go so far as to suspect that individual development is - at best - unsustainable without social progress.

If you live in amongst a horde of Mongolian warriors, you're not likely to have many career options outside of organized homicide or be much rewarded for advocating peace. Until there is some kind of social progress, your "development" simply won't have a place to unfold.

And yet our social reality is to us almost what the water is to Foster Wallace's young fish. The differences between two 15 year old girls in medieval Europe are almost negligible compared with the differences between a 15 year girl in medieval Europe and a 15 year old girl in modern Australia, yet we tend to focus on differences of individuals within cultures and social constructs rather than focus on changing those cultures and social constructs.

And maybe the real punch line to this is that nothing changes an individual quite like undertaking the task of changing the world. Attempting to change the individual without changing society is a dicey proposition. Attempting to change society without changing the individual is impossible.

Bernard on Where Life Is

Bernard sighed.

“How is it going, Bernard?”

“I’ve been spending too much time alone,” he said.

“That’s not all bad, is it?” I asked, trying to point to the positive.

“Ha!” he said. “You and the tiresome optimism.”

“Well, alone can be restful,” I said.

“Left alone we’re animals,” Bernard muttered. “Our brains are too big for us to live alone, big enough that they become just an annoyance. When we’re made a part of a community, our brains have a place to be.”

“Yeah, but in community you can so easily feel outnumbered,” I protested.

“Sure. Sure,” Bernard surprised me by agreeing. “But that’s because we look at it all wrong. Everyone is made to feel ineffectual. Even the president, the leader of the free world.”

“Meaning?” I raised my eyebrows.

“Well, we don’t acknowledge that we only exist in relationships. All of our thinking about the world imagines the oddest thing – it imagines that we exist in isolation from each other. If your model of the world is wrong, you can't be very effective.”

“Why?”

“Well part of it is the issue of reductionist thinking – the tradition of analysis in Western thought that loves to pull apart things to understand them, as if communities and markets and people were watches. But it is more than that,” Bernard took a sip of his coffee. “We get alone to think and then we make that assumption – this matter of being alone – the default assumption about the context. There was a reason that Socrates did his work in conversations. He knew that philosophy outside of a community was meaningless.”

“But they killed him.”

“Sure. But that was because what he did impacted the community. They wouldn’t have executed him if not for the fact that he actually had an influence.”

“So, what truth do we miss when we’re thinking in isolation, Bernard?” I knew he had something more to say.

“A hermit has no opportunity for love or compassion. Life comes out of interaction – our own lives get defined by our relationships. The quality and intensity of our relationships determine the quality and intensity of our lives. Your relationship to people you love or hate, your work or your play, the ideas that swirl around you. This is what you you experience of life. When loathing or contempt or apathy comes creeping into your relationships, that is what you experience of life. If your relationships get defined by love or engagement, that too is what you experience of life.”

“Wow.” I shook my head. “What’s in your coffee?”

Bernard smiled as warmly as I’ve seen him smile. “It is not a question of what is in my drink but instead, who is at my table.” He reached out to squeeze my hand, a gesture that suddenly felt oddly intimate, and said, “Thanks for giving me a place to be today. I needed this.”

"We all need to be," I said stupidly.