Character and Obedience

Therapy gives you insight; coaching helps you to build character.

Therapy pretends to cure the mind with new ideas.

Coaching, whether in sports or in business or in life, works to to improve your character.

It’s not so obvious that we understand what character is. Philosopher Iskra Fileva explains her position on the New York Times Opinionator blog:

Ordinarily, we envision character as a set of stable and unified dispositions: we expect the timid employee to be shy on a regular basis, not just on some days, and we picture him as a mellow father, not as a tyrant at home. Since we suppose that characters are unified in these ways, we are almost invariably surprised when it turns out that the different aspects of someone’s personality stand in tension with one another. 

Unfortunately, she is not quite right. Aristotle defined character as habitual behavior. Perhaps Fileva is using disposition as a synonym for behavior, but to my mind the two do not coincide.

You can be disposed to do something without doing it. You might be ill-disposed to decency, but if you make the effort to act decently all the time, then you are improving your character... disposition be damned.

Also, shyness is a personality trait, not a character trait. Your character involves the way you behave toward others. It defines you as an honorable member of a community. Your good character tells people that they can count on you, that your behavior will consistently follow principle.

You can be shy and trustworthy. You can also be gregarious and trustworthy.

If timidity is the opposite of courageous, then timidity would be a character flaw.

If character involves consistent behavior someone who behaves inconsistently has weak character.

Philosophers and psychologists have made much of the question, so I will offer what I consider to be the classical ethical principle: someone who behaves decorously on one day and indecorously on another day is indecorous.

To be a character trait decorum must be habitual.  A person who lacks it lacks character.

If a man is kind and generous toward his children but beats his wife, he has bad character.

Behaving well toward some people and behaving poorly toward others means that your good behavior is not habitual. Thus, it is not you.

It would take hiss forays into the realm of responsible behavior to be an effort to mask his bad character.

On the other hand, no one is perfect. There is no such thing as a human being who does not make mistakes. Good character is not perfect character.

Let’s say that you slip up; you fail to return a text message; you go back on your word; you eat your soup with a fork.

By definition, a singular piece of bad behavior does not undermine your claim to good character.

When you err, you should apologize and vow never to do it again. A person of good character apologizes. A person who does not apologize lacks good character. Anyone who apologizes and keeps making the same mistake also lacks character.

His failure to apologize tells you that his error is characteristic.

We judge a person’s character, first, through our own interactions with the person. Fileva reports that if, in our dealings with a man, he is always responsible and reliable, we are inclined to generalize from the specifics and to believe that he is responsible and reliable.

Since a personal perspective is limited, it does not really prove anything beyond the fact that he is kind to me. Fileva notes that it does not prove that he is kind.

But, how can we discover whether a person possesses good or bad character?  After all, we cannot monitor all of his behavior.

The question is salient and relevant. When a business is looking to hire someone for a job, it needs to know whether the person has good or bad character. In many businesses this is a crucial consideration.

A candidate might make a great impression in an interview. How can the interviewer know whether he is seeing someone who has put on his best face or someone who is behaving as he always does?

Businesses know that they can never know someone’s character to an absolute certainty, but they have devised ways to discern about whether they are seeing a mask or a face.

They might ask a receptionist and an assistant for their impression of the candidate. If the unfailing polite candidate is rude to the receptionist it will count against him.

Or they might invite the candidate to lunch or dinner.

If he is congenial when dealing with the senior management but barks at the busboy, then he lacks good character. If he is glib and articulate but chews with his mouth open then he has an important character flaw.

By now this is fairly well known. If you are being interviewed for a job your character will be tested, often in situations that you cannot foresee.

The best preparation is to show good character in all situations and circumstances. Use good manners when you are eating alone. Be courteous to the dry cleaner. Develop good character traits when no one is watching.

If you do, those traits will become habitual and you will evince them naturally. The more natural they become the less likely you are to lose them under stress.

I was most intrigued by Fileva’s discussion of obedience. You probably know that obedience has gotten a bad name. It has even been banned from marriage vows.

Philosophers have reasoned that people have done dreadful things in the name of obeying or following orders. Therefore, obedience is morally dubious.

True, Nazi officials tried to defend their actions on the grounds that they were obeying orders, but it is also true that the soldiers who defeated the Third Reich were obeying orders.

They were not expressing their unique individuality creatively.

Fileva offers this analysis:

… the tendency to obey, while in one sense an aspect of character, is in another sense a sign of the lack of character. For think about what we mean when we say that someone “has no character”: we mean just that he can be led in any direction and pressured to do all sorts of things. It would be a poor defense of the existence of his character if we said that really, his deeper tendency to obey united the seemingly incongruent bits of his behavior. To lack character is to lack principles, to fail to be, as it were, internally motivated.

I agree, someone who can be easily influenced lacks character. Someone who is unprincipled also lacks character.

A person who is easily influenced and pressured surely lacks principles. You might say that he is obeying his whims or the people who he wants to impress, but no one should ever believe that this is what constitutes obedience.

People who have character follow principles, not people. They certainly do not follow their whims or their bliss.

And, that requires obedience. Following a rule means obeying its dictates, despite all of the temptations to obey the whims of another person.

Obviously, there are good principles and bad principles. Character would be meaningless if you were not responsible for choosing which rules you obey.

When you keep your word you are obeying a principle, the one that tells you to be trustworthy in all things.

Fileva writes:

Unity in character is an achievement. And we have a better chance of attaining it if we take it to be a goal, rather than an existing state of affairs.  If we want pronouncements like “Up the Republic!” and “Sweetheart!” to really mean something, we’d better take these pronouncements as commitments to live up to, not as expressions of who we already are. When I declare I will be faithful to you, there is, strictly speaking, something wishful about my declaration. I do not know from where I shall get the strength to do as I promise. It is certainly not the case that I possess a “faithfulness” property that can guarantee my success. But this is not a pessimistic conclusion. For there is nothing that guarantees failure either; my past failures, in particular, do not. And would you really prefer that my success be guaranteed? I would conjecture that the answer is “no.” The power of my declaration lies, for you, precisely in that I make a promise that I can keep only if I make an effort. Nothing about my character can ensure success. There is inevitable precariousness in human interaction that stems from the very way in which we are built. But perhaps this is just what, in our dealings with one another, gives both our success and our failure to live up to our commitments real meaning.

There is a slight confusion here. Making a commitment to a cause is similar to giving your word to another person, but the two are not exactly the same. Good character has much more to do with the latter than the former. 

Fileva says correctly that giving your word does not express who you are but should count as a commitment or promise.

She is incorrect to assert that a commitment is a wish.

If you tell your child that you are going to pick him up from school this afternoon you are not expressing a wish. You are committing to an action, and you are saying that, if you are not in a coma, you will be there. There should be no separation between what you say you will do and what you do.

If you tell your lover or your spouse that you will be faithful, you had best be expressing more than a wish. No one is going to redefine his or her life as a function of wishful thinking.

Fileva says that she does not know where she will get the strength to do as she promises, but I would recommend that she find it in a sense of duty. Or better, of obedience to the principle of duty. That means that once she makes a commitment she is duty-bound to obey it, regardless of her wishes and desires.

Heroes

Who are your heroes and why does it matter?

We emulate out heroes; we want to be more like them; we strive to achieve what they have achieved.

Choosing the right heroes helps you to build your character. Choosing the wrong heroes undermines your character.

According to Paul Tough’s Sunday Times Magazine story children at the toney private school called Riverdale Country School have been subjected to a self-esteemist form of character education.

Better yet, parents pay enormous sums of money to allow administrators and counselors to deconstruct their children’s character. One assumes that they do not know better or do not dare question the school’s authority.

Children at the school do not learn how to compete, how to strive, how to work hard, or how to excel. They learn to have a heart full of the right kinds of feelings.

A counselor expressed her viewpoint: ““When I think of good character, I think: Are you fair? Are you honest in dealings with other people? Are you a cheater?.... “I don’t think so much about: Are you tenacious? Are you a hard worker? I think, Are you a good person?”

Tough describes her attitude: “Character, as far as I could tell, was being defined at Riverdale mostly in terms of helping other people — or at least not hurting their feelings.” He adds that it was “a blueprint for niceness.”

Psychologists Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson call it “a finger-wagging guilt trip.”

They are correct. These children are being submitted to a regimen that will produce a politically correct form of moral deformity.

When asked by their teachers to name people they took to be heroes the children mostly chose people who had martyred themselves for civil or human rights. Among them we find Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who immolated himself to protest an oppressive government and ignited a revolution.

While self-immolation might earn you martyrdom, do we really want to count it as a heroic gesture?

Sometimes people sacrifice themselves for good causes. Sometimes for causes that are not so good.

But, does that really make them heroes we want children to emulate. What would a child have to do if he wanted to emulate Mohamed Bouazizi? Sacrifice his life to a cause?

And what would constitute a fitting sacrifice? Would a bad report card be a sufficient sacrifice? Should he drop out of school in order to to protest grievances? Should he join ACORN?

Keep in mind that self-sacrificing martyrs do not become martyrs because they have worked hard, or because they have been trustworthy and responsible and loyal.

If the child’s hero is Alex Rodriguez he will devote more time and effort to improving his baseball skills. If his hero is Douglas McArthur he will aim at a career in the military. If his hero is George Washington he might aspire to military or political success. If his hero is Steve Jobs he will set out to focus on learning about computers.

A child who chooses the right role model will aspire to excellence. A child who chooses the wrong role model might sacrifice himself for the right cause, but his work will surely suffer for it.

The right role models are leaders; they are not solitary individuals. They work for the good of the team; they exhibit sportsmanship, discipline, and perseverance in the face of failure.

Tough’s article wonders how children learn good character. They do not learn it by being brainwashed into the self-sacrificial morality of guilt trips. They learn good character by competing for good grades in class, by participating in athletic teams or school plays or math leagues, by joining the boy scouts or the girl scouts or a junior ROTC program.

You do not build character by doing therapy. 

You do not build character by learning about yourself, by understanding why you have bad character or by learning that you can change your character by changing the way you think.

You build character by learning and following the rules of good behavior. You do not need to know why these rules exist; you do not need to know where they came from. You need merely to follow them.

Also, you learn discipline by being disciplined. You do not learn it by being worshiped as infallible. You learn perseverance by being pushed beyond your limits. You do not learn it by being coddled into a moral stupor.

   

How Much Does Character Count on Wall Street?

Who is responsible for the financial crisis? What is the ruling ethos on Wall Street and in the financial world? Did the Wall Street culture fail, or did flawed human beings make bad decisions?

If human beings bear some responsibility, why has no one been punished? What happened to justice?

Of course, there’s punishment and then there’s punishment. Being criminally indicted is one thing; being ostracized, losing your reputation and good name, is quite another.

The first requires the workings of the criminal justice system. The second requires a culture that promotes good character and sanctions bad character.

Call the first a guilt culture and the second a shame culture.

Yesterday Steven Davidoff offered an important analysis of the cultural ethos that pertains in the financial world. Link here.

He sees a prevailing system that no longer values reputation and good character but will tolerate anything you can get away with.

In a shame culture what matters is your reputation, your character, your good name.

If you get caught behaving unethically by putting your interest ahead of your client’s, then your reputation suffers and people will no longer do business with you.

In a guilt culture, what matters is whether or not you have broken a law, thus, whether or not you can be indicted and convicted by the criminal justice system.

Davidoff is certainly not suggesting that everyone who works in finance has bad character. Yet, he does provide examples of individuals who bore some responsibility for the financial crisis, but who did not lose their reputations.

They were not ostracized; they did not become pariahs in the financial world; they ended up with great new jobs.

Davidoff cites these examples: “Former directors of Lehman Brothers and Bear Steans still serve on the boards of public companies, and one, Jerry A. Grundhofer, a former director of Lehman, is on the Citigroup board. Traders responsible for disastrous mortgage bets have easily found lucrative jobs in finance.

"Or take Daniel H. Mudd, who not long after being ousted as chief executive Fannie Mae was named chief executive of the Fortress Investment Group. At Fortress, Mr. Mudd has been paid a salary and stock options worth more than $30 million in the last two years. This was despite the failure of Fannie Mae while he was at the helm, an event that wiped out almost all shareholder value and has cost the federal government more than $90 billion.”

It isn’t just that these bankers were not sanctioned for their failures; they were rewarded.

Has this always been the case? Davidoff says that it was not: “During the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs was caught up in a scandal involving the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation. The taint of the scandal drove away business for more than a decade and made the firm extremely focused on reputation.”

Why does reputation no longer matter? Davidoff sees a number of forces conspiring to undermine the value of good character.

In brief, he says that the investment banking business has become less about people, thus less about reputation and character, and more about “size and technology.”

When trading and brokerage became more important than investment banking, the value of reputation and relationships diminished.

This was even more true as trading became mechanized and digitized. The geeks and nerds who were running trading platforms were not sociable people. Their jobs and their compensation did not depend on their contacts, their client relationships, and their good name.

The larger these firms became, the less important single individuals were. Where banking used to be conducted by smallish investment banks with a limited number of partners whose capital was at risk, reputation and relationships were the lifeblood of the business.

When the firms became larger and more public, no single individual could really be held to account for the activities that were being run by quants and trading programs.

One imagines that many senior executives barely understood what the traders were doing.

And there’s more. Davidoff explains: “Again, individuals were less important as size dominated. A client now trades or does business with a bank based on its positions or ability to make a market or loan. The executive at the bank executing the transaction is unimportant.”

This diminished any single executive’s personal responsibility: “These trends have become omnipresent in corporate America generally as it too has exponentially grown. And when these companies failed or otherwise committed a wrongdoing, their size allowed their reputation to be ignored. After all, it wasn’t the executive’s fault that the bad event happened. It was just the economy or other external factors.”

Finally, officers and directors of banks and major corporations are personal friends with each other. They are more likely to excuse friends who might have institutional authority but who did not really know what was going on.

Given that they themselves do not know everything that is going on in their own companies, and do not want to be held accountable for it, they are more than happy to excuse people they consider to be their personal friends.

Given this amoral universe, a universe where reputation does not really count, Davidoff believes that it was inevitable that the government would step in to impose more stringent regulations.

In his words: “In the absence of reputation, the government and regulators act as substitutes to ensure appropriate conduct. The government becomes the enforcer through civil and criminal actions for law-breaking. So what you get is more law to cover for lost reputation.”

Here we have something of a chicken/egg problem. Which came first: the diminishing importance of reputation or the increased regulation?

After all, the banking industry was not exactly unregulated. As many wise commentators noted at the time, the financial industry was heavily regulated. Surely, it was much more regulated than were hedge funds.

It makes some good sense, too. The more you live in a regulatory universe that attempts to control your every gesture and decision, the more you will feel honor-bound to find the fault line in the system, the one thing that they forgot to forbid.

Once you are thinking in terms of what you can get away with because no one has thought to prohibit it, you are not too far away from thinking about which prohibited actions you can get away with because you are unlikely to get caught.

If the financial crisis began in a highly regulated industry, then perhaps the way to restore the industry is to reduce regulations, not to double down with them.

The Rectification of Names

By now everyone knows that the Obama administration tends to traffic in euphemism. As Roger Kimball recently pointed out, it has been violating one of the central precepts of Confucian ethics: the rectification of names. Link here.

What does that mean? It means that the administration fails to call things by their proper names. When things do not have their proper names, we do not know how to relate to them. And we do not know what we should or should do about them.

Confucius believed that such failures make it impossible to conduct business successfully. Thus, they undermine propriety and social harmony.

Of course, that is quite a philosophical leap. So let’s try to explain this arcane Chinese concept. I’ll try to make it worth your trouble.

Kimball pointed out that, a “kinetic military action,” is not the same thing as a war. An “overseas contingency operation,”  is not the same as a war on terror.

But, isn’t this just an exercise in semantics? Why does it matter?

Take an example. Let’s say that you call your friend and ask if he would like to throw a football around. How does this differ from calling him and inviting him to play a game of football?

If you are just throwing a ball around, you are not playing football. You might be preparing for an eventual game, but otherwise you are engaging in some enjoyable leisure activity.

If there's no game, there is no competition; there are no opposing teams; there are no players, rules, referees, scores,  or winners.

Playing a game of football is an intense competitive activity. Throwing a ball around is not.

If you think that your football game is just like throwing a ball around you will have misunderstood the nature of the game.

It is one thing to tell your football team that they are going to throw the ball around; quite another to tell them that they are going to play for the state championship.

If you give out the wrong information, some team members will be confused, will not know understand what they are preparing for, and might not even show up.

If you want every member of your team to be ready to play in the big game, it makes good sense to tell them that they are going to be playing in a big game.

Let’s examine the current military operations in Libya. Clearly there is an armed conflict between forces who are and are not loyal to Kaddhafi.

If we are getting ourselves involved in a war, we are taking sides. That is part of warfare. It is not necessarily part of kinetic military actions. The latter might just be a training exercise.

In addition, we do not really know what to call those who are fighting against Kaddhafi. Who are they really? If we are fighting for them, shouldn't we know who they are. Perhaps they are rebels, but that would mean that we understand not only what they are rebelling against but what they are rebelling for.

At times, our president has declared that we are on the side of “the people.” Unfortunately, "the people" is a meaningless abstraction.

All of the fighters on both sides of the conflict are people. Why are we on the side of one group of people and not another? If our motive is humanitarian, why is it not relevant that al Qaeda terrorists are also human beings?

In a war we try to kill our enemies and ensure the victory of our friends. We are not in it for an abstraction or some ill-defined motive.

While we are all in favor of less bloodshed, who knows whether, in the long run, our intervention will cause more or less bloodshed?

When the conflict is defined as a struggle between the tyrant and the people, it becomes a historical drama. But this is merely a myth. If we are not fighting a war or conducting foreign policy, then we are trying out for a role in a drama… or better, placing ourselves on the right side of an historical narrative.

As long as no one knows who these rebels are, what their goals are, and what they are fighting for, we are effectively engaging in political theatre.

While we might have prevented a massacre in Benghazi, we do not know who we saved, what they want, and what they will do once they have gained power.

Without knowing what to name our action or what to name our allies we are flying blind and sowing potential confusion.

Calling the action by its name forces us to face up to a whole series of difficult questions, first among which is: What are we doing in Libya? Or, Why are we bombing Libya?

If our goal is humanitarian, why are we not defending the human beings who are being gunned down in Yemen and Syria?

If our policy is incoherent, why would any other nation want to conduct foreign policy with us?

If it is incoherent, then others will assume that it is self-serving, not principled. If our government  conducts policy in order to ensure the re-election of Barack Obama, why would anyone want to do diplomatic business with us?

Confucius saw the rectification of names as necessary to conduct policy. But he also saw it at work in many other social contexts.

Let’s try some other examples. There is a difference between being your father and being your friend. There is also a difference between being your father and being your mother.

If you introduce your father as your friend, or your mother as your girl friend you will simply be confusing people, and ultimately, yourself. If you don't know the difference, you will not know how to behave toward your parents or your friends.

Admittedly, political correctness would insist that rectifying names, calling people by their names and using their proper titles is prejudicial. That is one way that political correctness undermines social harmony.

Confucius believed that familial relationships involve specific duties and obligations. They also impose certain taboos.

It matters that people know the nature of their relationships to others because otherwise they would not understand their duties toward those other people.

In the Confucian world, children owe their parents filial piety. This involves strong gestures of respect and deference. Calling someone your father or mother is the basis for a series of prescribed behaviors.

And those are only the beginning. Calling someone your boss or your assistant, your teammate or your competitor, your girlfriend or your wife, your husband or your ex-husband… all of these define sets of duties and obligations. They define the parameters of good behavior. Thus they ensure the good order of society.

If you would like to erase all of these terms on the grounds that we are all human beings, all members of the human species, then you will have eliminated the rules and regulations that order society. Confucius would not have approved. Neither would Miss Manners.

Let’s examine the words of the Sage himself. Confucius said: “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.”

What is Confucius trying to tell us about governance? First, that your language must be connected to the truth of things.

Meaning what, exactly?

Clearly, Confucius does just mean that we need to learn to call things by their proper names. He is also saying that we should be good to our word.

If you are good to your word, that means that when you say you will do something, it is as good as done.

If you are not good to your word, if your word does not count as a commitment to do this or that, then fewer and fewer people will want to do business with you.

When Confucius says that he wants propriety to flourish, I take him to mean that he wants the business of business and the business of government to be conducted on handshakes.

When people trust each other and know that they can count on everyone to be good to his or her word, then the human affairs will be conducted harmoniously.

If you go back on your word, you will be offending your partner. If you do not have enough integrity to keep your word, then you will probably try to escape responsibility by shifting the blame or by falling back on legalistic excuses.

You will be defending yourself on the grounds that the contract was unclear, that you did not understand it, and that it was impossible to fulfill anyway.

Making excuses when you fail to keep your word is the opposite of propriety.

If we do not keep our word and do not call things by their names, then we will not know how to conduct ourselves in society. We will not know whether to show up on time or to ignore the appointment. We will not know when or whether to expect the delivery. We will not know what we are doing or what we should be doing or whether we are doing it right.

Does Talk Therapy Ever Really Work?

When commenting on the New York Times article about Dr. Don Levin yesterday, I didn’t have time to address the larger, and more salient issue: Does talk therapy ever really work?

If you believe Dr. Levin, you would think that he was once a great talk therapist, curing scores of people. You might even take it as a given that talk therapy is an effective treatment for what ails your mind.

The question is difficult because few of us are going to agree on what does and does not constitute talk therapy. And fewer still will agree on what it means for therapy to work?

Someone you know may have gotten better while in therapy, but that does not necessarily mean that therapy made him get better. Correlation is not causation.

If today's therapists agree that the relationship between patient and therapist is the most effective aspect of treatment, that means that the therapy itself, the insights that the therapist provides, does not work.

For all of Dr. Levin’s complaining about his current professional plight, the larger truth seems to be that most talk therapy is not especially effective, and that when it is, the reasons do not lie in the treatment but in something more nebulous: the quality of the relationship between patient and therapist.

If psychiatrists were as great as they now say they were at talk therapy, fewer of them would be spending their working hours writing prescriptions for psychotropic medication.

If the relationship counts, then we should dispense with all the talk about therapy working. Because it does not. Insight does not cure; self-awareness does not curing; making your unconscious conscious does not cure.

Getting along with your therapist does cure.

The old paradigm for talk therapy assumed that therapy cures people because it reveals scientifically-based insights into their motivation, shows them the hidden meaning behind their symptoms, or allows them to express the hidden feelings that they had ignored or repressed.

Why doesn’t any of this work?

First, we need to understand the treatment population. As psychologist Jerome Frank once famously noted, most therapy patients are there because they are demoralized.

Most therapy patients feel isolated and disconnected. They are suffering from anomie, not neurosis, psychosis, or a personality disorder. (Those who are suffering from physiological illnesses are rightly treated with medication.)

If demoralized patients connect with their therapists, their feelings of isolation and anomie will diminish. If they feel that they are respected by their therapists, they will feel that they are more deserving of respect.

As I see it, this is not what you learn when you study clinical psychology or psychiatry. Getting along with other people belongs to the field of ethics, not science.

Of course, old style Freudian psychoanalysis was quite concerned with the relationship between patient and therapist. Dubbed the transference, this relationship was defined as anything but a human connection. It was a dramatic reenactment of a repressed fantasy. The patient was transferring emotions on to the analyst that supposedly belonged to an unresolved past trauma or parental failing.

By definition, psychoanalysis precludes the kind of real human connection that would actually help the patient. The best psychoanalysts do not even pretend that their method works.

Moreover, Freud thought that all human relationships were lubricated by libido. Life was not about building character. It domain was theater, and it involved seduction, the art of getting someone to do what you want him to do when he does not want to do it, and when it is not the best for him.

The relationship between patient and psychoanalyst is laden with potential conflicts and unruly emotions and attractions. Thus, many psychoanalysts have actively tried to produce conflicting feelings in their patients, the better to foster the transference.

They did it by refusing to converse with their patients, refusing to look them in the eye, refusing to take what they said at face value, and ignoring their entreaties.

When today’s therapists say that the relationship is curing the patient, they are not talking about a semi-erotic transference relationship. They are really talking about a kind of friendship where there is a reasonably open and respectful exchange of ideas, feelings, and information.

Connecting with other people requires the ability to find common ground, not to aggravate conflict. Assuming that we understand the difference between a friendship and a love affair, we will also understand that, when you are down, it is better to make a friend than to fall in love.

Of course, the only way you can learn to make friends is by making friends. Unfortunately, this is not taught in psychiatric residencies or clinical psychology programs.

Worse yet, the pretense that science can teach you about the way people become dysfunctional tends to cloud the real issue: how to become more functional and more contented with your life.

This sounds nice enough, but it still leaves us with the impression that the most important part of therapy is the therapist’s congeniality. Even coaches like to think that they are offering more than congeniality.

What is the “more?” In my view, therapists and coaches ought to be helping their clients to learn how to manage their relationships, whether personal or familial or professional. Since their world is the playing field or the arena, and not the stage, they will be coaching people on how best to play the kinds of games that constitute human interactions.

Since therapy tends to focus on the past, not the present, it is ill equipped to help people manage their current relationships.

The focus on healing illness or finding the root cause for dysfunction is not very helpful either. This focus assumes that as soon as you remove a toxin, then the person will automatically become more happy and functional.

Some people are naturals at some games, but most people who have been living in a world of therapy-induced drama are not going to pick it all up over night.

Most of the people who come to therapy are not sick. If we take the example of marital counseling, most couples who are in counseling are having trouble getting along.

They are not sick. But if they are not sick why does our culture tell them that they ought to be consulting with a physician or a paramedical professional? They might not understand what is going on; they might want to know how better to play the mating game; they might want to learn how better to manage their relationships with spouse and children.

If therapy patients have questions about current relationships, these questions concern ethical issues: What should I do? How should I handle this? What is the right thing to do, for me or for the other person?

More often than not people consult with therapists or coaches because there is no good answer. There are two different alternatives, neither one of which is very good.

Again, the fact that you are caught on the horns of a moral dilemma does not make you sick. It means that you have encountered a situation that is beyond your personal capacity.

It may be beyond you because you are young or inexperienced. It may be beyond you because your cultural background is very different from the culture of the place where you are currently living. Or it may be beyond you because it would be beyond anyone.

You do not learn this kind of ethics in medical school or in psychology courses. So, where can you learn them?

How does anyone learn relationship management? One might look outside of the domain of therapy, toward the world of business, where people understand that they need to learn how to promote comity and amity in the office.

It would be a great thing if psychology grad students were obliged to take courses in management and negotiation, through a business school.

Beyond that, these skills are best learned by doing. Human life is far too complicated and far too intricate to take one or two formulae and apply them to all human conundrums.

It is not about advanced theoretical knowledge or scientific experiments, but the wisdom that comes from experience.  Sad to say, there aren’t any shortcuts.

Procrastination

Procrastination is the thief of time. Procrastination means putting off until tomorrow what you should be doing today.

For many people procrastination is a nemesis, a demonic force that haunts their lives.

But that does not tell us very much about what it is to procrastinate, and how to overcome this self-defeating habit.

I have been wanting to write about procrastination for some time now. I won't say I have been waiting for the right occasion, and I certainly will not admit to procrastinating about the topic, but I will confess that I was waiting for a hook, a concept, something that could help us understand the problem.

Yesterday, when I saw Shirley Wang's article about people who delay decision-making, I thought I had found a cogent and coherent account of the current psychological research on the topic. Link here.

Alas, I was disappointed. Psychologists have not really clarified the issue; they have muddied it.

But I am not going to use that as an excuse to avoid the question, even if I cannot really tie it all up in a neat theoretical package. Sometime it is worth the trouble just to try to redefine the question.

Defining procrastination is very difficult. How do you know when you are procrastinating and when you are taking the right time to deliberate over a serious issue?

Wang  suggests that you are procrastinating when you spend hours trying to figure out whether to buy the argyle socks or the striped socks.

I would hesitate to call that procrastination; it sounds like you are in something of a trance, and perhaps in need of medical attention. Procrastination is a moral failing, not a psychiatric condition.

Similarly, if you are so impulsive that you jump to conclusions and make decisions without any consideration for your responsibility or the consequences of  your actions, then surely you have not really conquered procrastination.

Perhaps you  are pretending to be strong and decisive, but you will look like you're protesting too much and trying too hard. One might even say that you are afraid that other people will discover that  you are tempted to procrastinate.

You do not overcome your tendency to be gun-shy by becoming trigger happy. Both qualities show that you are disconnected from  reality.

Effective decision-making exists somewhere between indecision and impulsiveness.

Which leaves the question wide open.

Psychologists address the question by dividing the world into people who see everything in black and white terms and people who are generally ambivalent.

Those who see sharper contrasts, and who fail to consider opposing opinions, tend to make quicker decisions. According to the psychologists, their more ambivalent counterparts, people who see different sides to each issue, are more ambivalent, and thus, more likely to procrastinate.

As it happens, experiments have shown that ambivalent thinkers are generally more comfortable and less stressed than people who see the world in terms of sharp contrasts.

For my part I do not think that the word ambivalent helps very much here. The word itself suggests indecisiveness and even confusion. And it oversimplifies the problem, sometimes creating one where none exists.

Besides, what is the difference between ambivalent and deliberate? Ambivalent means you cannot make up your mind. Deliberate means that you are willing to take the time to make a reasoned and judicious decision.

Delaying a decision is not necessarily a sign of procrastination.

Some decisions are more difficult than others. Some involve more consequences for more people than others. In some cases you hesitate to decide because you are facing two bad options.

And then there is the question of experience. If you are experienced in a field you will find it much easier to make a quicker decision. Having seen similar situations before and having taken charge of them, you will feel more comfortable deciding what to do.

If you are inexperienced, you will need to take more time and give the matter more consideration. But if you are inexperienced and don't know it, you might well decide to imitate someone who has far more experience. That is a formula for impulsiveness.

And then, there's reality. Some people stand at the side of a pool for a long time wondering whether or not they should jump in. They may be wondering whether the water is too hot or too cold, whether they have allowed enough time to digest their lunch, and a multitude of other questions. They may be trying to overcome a phobia about water.

The solution is: to jump in.

And yet, someone else might be standing on the side of the pool and hesitating to jump in because the pool is empty.

Sometimes people hesitate to make the obvious choice because they intuit that there is something wrong, and refuse to proceed until they know what it is.

Finally, some people procrastinate because they are being pressured to make up their minds. If they succumb to pressure they will feel that their decision is not really theirs. That, in itself, might be a good reason to procrastinate. 

Other people have good reasons for delaying a decision. Perhaps they want to gather more evidence or consult more widely.

Other people delay a decision for bad reasons. They do not want to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, or better, they prefer to have the decision made by someone else.

Surely, there is a point at which deliberation becomes procrastination, where indecisiveness becomes a habit with a life of its own.

How do you know whether or not you have reached that point?

First, estimate the cost. How much is it costing you to procrastinate? Deliberation becomes delay when you start losing opportunities, when a situation starts careening out of your control, when everyone seems to be suspended, waiting for you to make up your mind.

At that point, you are under an ethical obligation to take a stand, to make a decision.

Second, you are procrastinating when you and your delay become something of a drama. When the world starts revolving around the will-he or won't-he aspect of your decision.

When you have succeeded in drawing attention to your own weak character and away from the problem at hand, then you are procrastinating.

The solution might be simply to flip a coin, as one psychologist suggested. The psychologist tries to see how he reacts to the coin's decision, and, if that works for you, well and good.

Finally, the real solution is to throw caution to the winds. You can and should know how to correct a bad decision. It is much more difficult to correct not having the courage to make any decision at all.

Some Thoughts on Courage

Dr. Helen Smith recently asked us all to offer some thoughts about courage. Clearly, it is a primary civic virtue, but do we really know what it is or why it matters? And why does it always seem to be defined in terms that make it more a masculine than a feminine virtue? Link here.

Unsurprisingly, much of the best thinking about courage comes to us from Aristotle. So I will follow his thought through much of this post. For those who are interested, the relevant texts are his Magna Moralia, Eudemian Ethics: Books I, II, and VIII (Clarendon Aristotle Series) (Bks.1, 2 & 8), and Nicomachean Ethics.

Aristotle believed that courage involved confidence in the face of danger. Anyone who is confident, he wrote, in circumstances where other people would be afraid is brave or courageous.

Given that courage is a civic virtue, Aristotle declared that it must be exercised rationally and freely. Someone who does not understand that there is danger is not being courageous; he is being foolhardy. And someone who gets carried away by passion and commits actions that would otherwise be called courageous does not represent the embodiment of virtue. You cannot be courageous if you do not know what you are doing.

As was his wont, Aristotle defined courage as something that exists somewhere between cowardly and foolhardy. In our terms, courage exists somewhere between trigger-happy and gun-shy.

The key to being courageous is knowing when, where, and how to put it into action.

There is no courage in picking a fight for no good reason with someone who is of no importance. And there is no courage in refusing to face any and all dangers. Shying away from any action that would endanger you is not courageous.

To be courageous, you need to know whether the specific situation requires an act of courage, and whether you are the one to perform it. And then, of course, you need to perform it.

Courage exists in action, not in feeling or thought. You may feel that you are extremely courageous but if, when the time for action comes, you do not act courageously, you will have failed the test.

As Dr. Helen points out, the crux of the issue is the connection between courage and masculinity. Is courage just an outmoded stereotype that forces men to conform to society's idea of manly behavior? Or are we at fault, as Dr. Helen suggests, for teaching men to be cowards?

If you look at these issues through the lens of evolutionary psychology, they become more clear. Since men are very often stronger than women and children, they have been called upon to protect and defend those weaker than they.

When men want to show themselves to be suitable mates, they try to prove their courage, their willingness to risk life and limb, their ability to face extreme danger... in order to show that they can protect women and children.

Again following Darwin, reproductively speaking, men are the more expendable sex. By what must be considered an insidious patriarchal plot, women's lives are considered to be more valuable than men's. A woman's contribution to reproductive success far exceeds a man's, thus a man has the liberty to hunt and fight, to be away from home for extended periods of time, while a mother does not.

For men wounds are badges of courage. For women they are signs of vulnerability.

If this is true-- and we have no real reason to think it is not-- then boys are more prone to fight, to struggle, to compete, and to take unnecessary risks to impress girls. As everyone knows this starts at a young age, in the schoolyard.

And as everyone also knows, girls find the boys who win fights to be more attractive. Unless, of course, they are bullies who pick on those who are weak. The greater the strength disparity the less the courage involved.

By definition, a bully is not going to be a reliable protector. His impulse to hurt the weak speaks ill of his capacity for courage.

When children are involved, the courage often involves a strong dose of posturing. Given that boys do not have very many adult responsibilities the chances for them to demonstrate courage are limited.

Yet, when grown men indulge in the same posturing, we do not see them as courageous, but as pretenders.

Sometimes, in their politically correct deliria, today's schools decide that vigorous competitive activity, especially the kind that boys love, must be outlawed because it promotes the wrong kinds of stereotypes.

Evidently, these efforts to stifle boys' nature leads these same boys to displace their impulse onto video games, violent sports, and even gang activity.

Some might say that boys have a violent streak, an aggressive impulse that leads them to want to hurt others. I would prefer to say that they are developing their civic character, their courage, by trying it out in different situations.

Can girls and women be courageous? Of course, they can. But even today, when women have many more opportunities to exhibit courage in the workplace, there is still no real sense in our culture that girls should engage in violent sports and vigorous struggles as a means to proving their suitability as mates.

But, what happens in the culture when women are encouraged to learn martial arts... as a means of protecting themselves? What is left of the man's role of protector if women declare themselves fully capable of fending for themselves?

In my view, this image of the new female warrior who does not need a man, but who can defend herself and her children, is illusory. It is a convenient fiction for the politically correct crowd, but far more easy to portray in fiction than to live out in the world.

Unfortunately, some segments of our culture promote this intellectual deformity. Then they are shocked to discover that women do not really find these newly feminized men all that attractive after all. Pity to those men who accept these ideas unthinkingly and fail to develop their capacity for courage. Link here.

[A warm welcome to those of you who have gotten to this post via Instapundit or Dr. Helen. My thanks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith for linking it.] 

The Obama Perplex

The more we see of him, the more we hear him, the more we are all perplexed by Barack Obama. The American people voted for him and wished fervently for his success, but increasingly they feel, as Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post, that "he casts no shadow." Link here.

This should not be too surprising. When you vote for a fictional character, you will likely get a fictional character. If you thought that Obama was going to redeem America's original sin of racism, and that this would heal the nation's financial plight, you were obviously deluded. And if you thought that the financial crisis was punishment for America's sins, you are far more religious than you think.

When Cohen said that Obama does not cast a shadow he meant, I assume, that when it comes to Obama there is no there there. When you take away the preening and the posturing, when you strip away the rhetorical swirls, his animadversions and circumlocutions, you will find yourself faced with someone who is fundamentally insubstantial.

Last weekend Cohen was reading some suggestions about how Obama might recover his poll ratings and salvage something of his presidency. All were written by serious pundits.

While the pundits all had cogent suggestions, none of them really resonated for Cohen. He simply did not see how Obama could implement any of them.

In order to act a leader has to be someone; he has to have presence. And Obama, Cohen suggested, is not someone. Neither Cohen nor anyone else has any real idea of Obama is.

When Obama called himself a blank screen on which people project whatever they want him to be, he was saying that he was simply not sufficiently present to take up space and to assert his leadership.

This sounds a bit metaphysical. It is as difficult to grasp as Obama's character, but it is worth the effort.

Among other things, it means that just because you have received the most electoral votes and have been duly installed in the office of the President of the United States, that, in and of itself, does not make you the president.

As I and many others have pointed out, Obama did not work his way up the ladder and did not really earn his place at the top. He was not made president because he had accumulated a series of great achievements. He was elected because he had accomplished nothing, and therefore, he offered people the opportunity to imagine anything they wanted about him.

Obama was cast in the role of president. Somehow or other the American people had been convinced that they were voting for the next American Idol or the next Top Model. They redefined the role of voter and transformed it into casting agent. They were not asking: Who can best lead? But, who best can play the part?

So, Obama was cast in a role and, therefore, he has always looked like something of an impostor.

Then Cohen took his reflection a step further. He was reading about comparisons between Obama and Ronald Reagan, and again, something went tilt in his mind.

With Reagan, Cohen wrote, people always knew who he was; they knew what he stood for. They might have voted for or against him, but they knew what they were voting for or against.

Reagan might have started out as a movie star, but he had worked his way up to the office. And therefore, this actor occupied the office better and more surely than does Barack Obama.

In Cohen's words: "Reagan ... was not defined solely by gauzy campaign ads but by countless speeches, two contentious and highly controversial terms as California governor, and a previous race for the presidency. There was never a question about who Reagan was and what he stood for. Not so Obama. About all he shares with Reagan at this point are low ratings."

And also: "What has come to be called the Obama Paradox is not a paradox at all.... He supported the public option, then he hasn't. He's been cold to Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu and then all over him like a cheap suit. Americans know Obama is smart. But we still don't know him. Before Americans can give him credit for what he's done, they have to know who he is. We're waiting."

Why don't we know who he is? Because he doesn't know who he is.

Why doesn't he know who is? Because he does not keep his word. You do not know whether he is the man who is going to close Gitmo or the man who is going to keep it open. You do not know whether he is the centrist he was during the campaign, or the leftist he has governed as.

This means that he is intrinsically untrustworthy. And that means that there is no there there.

Being good to your word is the most important element in human character. If you say one thing and do another, there is no way that you or anyone else can know which is the real you.

By default, they will feel obliged to take your actions as more truthful than your words, but that will also force them to disregard everything your say. They will be living in a state of anxiety, never certain that you will do what you say or will not.

If people do not know you as a man or woman of your word then you cannot exist as a person of character, as a leader, or even as a reliable friend. As Cohen says, people liked Ronald Reagan. They do not much like Barack Obama.

Human identity is based on the connection between what you say you will do and what you actually do. If the two are not closely connected, to the point where everyone knows that when you say you will be there or do that, then you lack identity, and are simply not there.

To his credit, Cohen first saw this aspect of Obama in July 2008 he wrote: "Obama is not noted for sticking to a position or a person once that position or person becomes a political liability.

"He has been for and against gun control, against and for the recent domestic surveillance legislation and, in almost a single day, for a united Jerusalem under Israeli control and then, when apprised of U.S. policy and Palestinian chagrin, against it.

"I know that Barack Obama is a near-perfect political package. I'm still not sure, though, what's in it." Link here.

Many people have spent much time trying to figure out the Obama perplex. It does not make much sense comparing him to previous presidents, so they have more often evoked fictional characters.

Prominent among them is Chance the Gardener, aka Chauncey Gardiner, the lead character in the book and movie: Being There. Link here.

Chance the Gardener is one of the best fictional embodiments of mistaken identity.

A simple and not very smart gardener, Chance is mistakenly assumed to be a wealthy man named Chauncey Gardiner.

Once he has been renamed, people start believing that whatever he says is brilliant, cogent, and extremely valuable. He can offer some innocuous comments on the seasons, and people think he is giving great advice about fiscal policy. The president of the United States takes him for a genius and people are talking about making him president himself.

Chance or Chauncey is the perfect embodiment of someone who is not there, but who is taken to be there by nearly all of those who meet him.

If you do not believe in intrinsic merit or intrinsic value, and for those who believe that interpretations create reality the story of Chance the gardener dramatizes your belief system.

Now, of course, Barack Obama is a new Chance the gardener. He was the perfect candidate for the media elites who had learned their elite universities that there is no such thing as intrinsic merit or intrinsic.

Barack Obama was simply the creation of those elites, a creation that they skillfully sold to the general public.

The journalists and media executives who compromised their integrity in order to get Obama elected had studied at the best universities. There they learned that there is no such thing as intrinsic value or merit.

The might have learned this idea in a literature course. There, their professor might have explained that there is as much value in a comic book or a porn flick as there is in Shakespeare or Aquinas.

The latter are held up as intrinsically brilliant because their ideas sustain the power of the patriarchy or the capitalists.

People who learned these lessons in college applied them well in creating Barack Obama. The fact that he did not manifest the intrinsic merit that we normally seek in the president did not matter.

His merit was transcendent. He was purer for not having gotten himself dirty working in politics or business.

They may not have seen his academic transcripts or his college boards, and they may have been surprised to hear that he was the only president of the Harvard Law Review who never published an article during his tenure, but they knew that all they had to do was to keep saying he is smart for him to become smart.

No matter what he said, they pronounced it brilliant. By now, you cannot even say Obama's name without adding that he is very smart.

If he got something wrong, his fans in the media interpreted it to make it sound right. If he contradicted himself, they said that the system was forcing him to do it.

And as we now know, when anyone dared question or challenge a candidate who was, effectively, their very own creation, leftist journalists would band together and start accusing people of being racist.

In many ways Barack Obama was the product of a perfect political and media storm. But that does not mean that we really know who is or that he can function effectively as President of the United States.

As Richard Cohen put it, you have to be someone before you can do something. Right now, most people are beginning to see that Barack Obama is not someone.

When Good Parents Have Bad Children

Dr. Richard Friedman was not completely surprised when a patient tried to blame herself for the fact that her seventeen year old son was simply not a very good person. Link here.

Her two other children were thriving, but this one, who possessed no diagnosable psychiatric disorder, was rude, unfriendly, and not very nice. Truth be told, she did not really like him very much.

Dr. Friedman's response is refreshing, sensible, and surely correct.

In his words: "My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.

"But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.

"For years mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.

"But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook-- sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic-- the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children."

As I say, it is good to hear this from a distinguished mental health professional. For many years therapists made it their business to guilt-trip parents into thinking that they were at fault for everything that happened to their children.. These same therapists then defined their own treatment as a way to compensate or supplement the inferior parenting.

Thus, the culture lost confidence in real parents and ushered in an age where experts ruled.

Thus, our our therapy culture embraced the notion, as Dr. Friedman said, that any child can be made into anything at all with the proper expert advice.

As Dr. Friedman writes, there is: "a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised-- and spectacularly failed-- to make geniuses of all our infants."

He adds that what I would call therapeutic idealism, the notion that human beings were blank slates on which we could inscribe anything at all, has been succeeded by a more realistic concept, namely, that: "everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists."

Children have different potentials; parents help them to actualize those potentials, or not. Good parents understand that a child who has an aptitude for music should not be forbidden from taking piano lessons and forced to play basketball.

Good parents know that they should help their children develop their strengths, not suppress them in order to fulfill the parents' vision of the perfect child.

And yet, aptitude for mathematics does not feel like the same thing as good character. Or, not entirely. Surely, some children are born sociable; they are born gregarious; they are naturally outgoing, cheerful, and kind.

Other children are born mean; they are born fighters and dramatizers; they do not like other children and are constantly provoking arguments.

These children might be more than unusually individualistic. They may need to find activities and a career path that does not require intense interpersonal contact. They would do better at trading than at sales. They might be better at golf than at football.

While we cannot make a born mathematician into a star baseball player, we do believe that we can and should help children improve their character.

But you would not be able to do it with psychotherapy. According to Dr. Friedman, the most promising results have come from coaching.

Surely, there are limits, but we should take Dr. Friedman's words seriously: "There are some interesting studies that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching."

Link to the studies here.

What Matters More in a Relationship: Hot Sex or Loyalty?

How many times have young women been told that hot sex is the key to developing a long term relationship? How many times have they heard that they will need to dole out steaming hot sex in copious quantities, or else he will look elsewhere?

This is not entirely untrue, but it is slightly misleading.

If a woman comes into a relationship with world class skills at hot sex, if she is the hottest of the hotties, then, the average man is going to decide, immediately, that she is not relationship material!

Friends with benefits: Yes! Hooking up: Yes! Bring her home to Mom: No way!

However much he will thrill in her superior sexual skills, he will always, in the back of his mind, be asking himself: Where did she learn that?

If anyone suggests to young women that they can best prepare for long term relationships by developing their sexual skills, or that they are going to be rejected if they are not highly proficient at this or that kink, he is leading them astray.

The better she is, the more in demand she will be, and less she will be considered relationship material.

This does not mean that hot sex does not matter. If it is hot sex that grows with the relationship, that is optimal.

If a woman enters a relationship with seriously deficient sexual skills, if she is slightly awkward performing certain sexual acts, that will immediately count as an asset.

If, as the relationship develops, she acquires greater and greater proficiency at acts sexual, well then, that will surely redound to her credit.

If the sex is theirs, it is a good thing. If it is just hers, that is not such a good thing.

More than a few women will now be thinking that they cannot turn the clock back to their virginal youth. Should they fake naivete and modesty and even awkwardness?

If they want long term relationships, the answer is: Yes, they should.

If a woman knows that it is best not to divulge details of her sexual past, does it make any sense for her to advertise what she has learned from said sexual past?

The truth is, many people, both men and women, will tolerate less than optimal sex for quite some time in a relationship. This, in itself, suggests that sex is not quite the deal maker or deal breaker that it is knocked up to be.

Loyalty is. People will tolerate bad sex a lot longer than they will tolerate disloyalty.

Here's one discussion, offered by one SIwerner, via HookingUpSmart.

In his words: "The way they most show their lack of ... loyalty is the way many women will 'disengage' from their own man when another (of higher alphaness, typically) man approaches....

"I see it occurring all the time in social settings, a woman is obviously with one man (holding hands, his arm around her, or hers around his waist, etc.). But then the other man comes near, and not only does the woman move away from her man, she will often step between her man and the approaching man, facing that incoming man, with her back to her man.... Could it be any more obvious a signal that she's willing to consider other offers."

Even if she is not willing to consider other offers, she must consider the message she is sending to her man, the other man, and the rest of the assembled guests.

She is saying that her allegiance, her loyalty, is, dare I say, up for grabs.

Of course, there are other ways that loyalty is at play in a relationship. For the record, most of them are gender neutral.

If one partner has a problem at work, the other partner should show loyalty first, and wonder about who is right or wrong, second.

If a couple is having dinner with another couple and one partner gets into an argument, the other partner should always take sides with his or her partner.

It is not a moment where it matters whether he or she is right or wrong. What matters is solidarity, thus, loyalty.

Members of couples are always being called upon to attend functions that matter more to one than the other partner. Whether it is a business function, a dinner with clients or staff, a weekend with family... these occasions are not necessarily what the other partner wants to be doing.

And yet, you are obliged to attend, and if you don't you will be taxed with disloyalty, for letting your partner down. More than that, your job at these functions is to make your partner look good.

If you look or sound like a fool, that will reflect on your partner and will be considered a betrayal. If you look like you do not want to be there, everyone assembled will assume that your partner does not inspire very much loyalty in you or that he chose someone with bad character.

These are only some of the ways that loyalty plays itself out in a relationship. I have rarely if ever seen disloyalty trumped by hot sex.

Greens Behaving Badly

Quick! Stop the presses! Someone call Tom Friedman. We need a quote! We need a quote!

The research results are just now coming in, and they are not good news for the self-appointed philosopher-king of the Green Revolution.

The results are unambiguous. The science is settled. As Newsweek reports, when someone performs a Green action, an action that is designed to benefit the planet, he is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal. Link here.

And what about rudeness. If you act like a self-righteous green prig are you more likely to be rude to your friends and neighbors?

The research tells us that you are.

Someone call Tom Friedman. Does he know that buying green products erodes your character? What does he have to say about that?

To follow the logic, the Green Revolution must be producing an epidemic of bad behavior. The more you buy organic produce, eschew plastic bags, and replace all of your old light bulbs... the more you will behave badly toward your neighbors.

Researchers call it "compensatory virtue." That guy who is carrying his groceries in a hemp bag is so full of his own feelings of virtue that he feels that he has the right to lie to you, to treat you rudely, to be a generally bad neighbor.

Let's be clear about the moral dimension here. If a man contributes to PETA and refuses to wear leather, but then goes out and beats his wife... the only reasonable conclusion to make is that he is a wife beater. In his mind, he may feel that he is so virtuous that the world owes him something in return, that he has the right to punish his wife for not using environmentally correct cleaning products, but this does not obviate the fact that he has bad character.

The same applies to singers and actors who feel that because they have contributed something special to the nation's aesthetic pleasure that they have the right to abuse whomever they please however they please.

The so-called good behavior does not balance the bad behavior. If you do not behave well with consistency, then you are not a person of character.

Someone who tries to convince himself that he is virtuous because he built an environmentally friendly home, but who then lies, cheats, and steals ... is using the pretense of virtue to rationalize and hide his character flaws.

The fact that Bernard Madoff contributed to worthy charities does not make him less of a criminal.

This being the case, Newsweek explains how we can go about producing better behavior among the citizenry. All we need to do is to eliminate: "... the halo of self-congratulatory, smug virtuousness that surrounds green behavior."

Sometimes, Newsweek offers some genuine surprises.

The research results should not really surprise anyone. Whatever made you think that joining the Green Revolution meant that you care about people. Greens care about minnows, about the Delta smelt, about kinkajous, and about pigeons.

Some Greens have succeeded in cutting off the water supply in California's Central Valley, the nation's most fertile farmland, the better to save the Delta smelt. The Green Revolution thinks nothing of abolishing-- by fiat-- the livelihood of tens of thousands of farmers in order to save a four-inch long fish.

No feelings for the farmers, their fellow citizens. All of their feelings for a smelt.

The relevant principle here is: beggar-thy-neighbor. Or at least it would be relevant if the Greens saw the farmers of Central Valley as their neighbors, as their fellow citizens.

It is worth noting that Greens do not see themselves as citizens of the nation or as members of a community. They define themselves as citizens of the planet. For Greens, as Tom Friedman once said, green is the new red, white, and blue.

I don't want you to think that this is a quibble, but the idea that you can have an identity and perform virtuous actions as a citizen of the planet, or a citizen of the earth, or as a citizen of the cosmos is patently idiotic. Citizens are citizens of states; they are citizens of organized social groups.

When you join the Green Revolution you exchange your identity as a citizen of these great United States for membership in a cult. If the green flag is replacing the red, white, and blue... we are no talking about something in addition. We are talking about a substitution.

Cults do not promote ethical behavior; they are usually at odds with organized communities and states.

More often than not, cults promote a simulated virtue in order to hide from public view the predations of the leaders of the cult. They do lots of charity work to hide the fact that behind the scenes the leaders are abusing the younger members of the group.

Cults are usually very secretive. And that is the tip-off. If you have to hide what you are doing, you are probably up to no good.

If ethics, as it has always been defined, involves improving your character so that you will better be able to get along with other members of your community, then the kind of pseudo-virtue practiced by Greens has nothing to do with virtue. It is not only self-congratulatory, but it is a narcissistic simulation of virtue.

Ethical behavior is what you should do to be a member in good standing of a community. Doing the right thing means doing the right thing as an American or a German or as a citizen of Japan.

If Greens declare that we are all citizens of the planet or of the earth, they are, effectively removing the ethical dimension from human behavior.

Ethical behavior defines your membership in a group. If you systematically deviate from the ethical norms and customs of a group you can be expelled or cast out.

When you define yourself as a citizen of the planet, there is nothing you can do that would effectively make you not be a citizen of the planet. Thus,there is no need for ethical behavior that would facilitate social harmony. In its stead, cults require a series of pseudo-virtuous actions that people perform to demonstrate that they are true believers in the cult.

This is one revolution that we can happily live without.