Anger Mismanagement

Outside of the worlds of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics most of what passes for conventional wisdom in the therapy world is little more than diluted and distorted ethics.

Since these precepts pretend to be scientifically valid, journalists often pick them up and present them as objective facts.

As I occasionally mention, David Hume famously showed that science does not contain an ethical dimension. It can describe what you did, not what you should do.

Today Elizabeth Bernstein tackles an intriguing issue: how best to express anger; as the saying goes, she punts. Link here.

I was somewhat hopeful when I started reading the article. Bernstein is correct to say that we learn to express anger by watching the way our family members express theirs. My hopes were dashed when she gratuitously added that the way to overcome parental influence is to have lots of therapy.

If it happens that your parents did not present a very good example of how to express anger, then the solution is to find someone better to emulate.

From there Bernstein presents the therapeutically correct way to express anger.

It makes you-- or, I should say, me-- want to rush to open a volume of Aristotle’s ethics.

Where the therapists are clearly in over their head, the philosopher did, literally, write the book on ethics.

When he addressed the question of how to express anger, Aristotle did not think in terms of what a person who had been therapied to within an inch of his life would do. He described how a virtuous person should do it.

Given that therapeutic correctness is enmeshed in a gauzy empathy, it sees the expression of anger as a productive moment in a relationship.

Given that anger, almost by definition, is hostile and aggressive, you have to wonder how the therapists could have decided that it is going to restore loving affinity to your relationship.

According to Bernstein the therapeutically correct expression of anger should lead to a hug. I would say that if it leads to a hug you have not expressed anger effectively… if at all.

We get angry because someone has offended, insulted, or demeaned us. Having been knocked down we want to get up, to assert our dignity, and that can only be done forcefully.

Do it nicely and you are not expressing anger. You are accepting the diminished status you have just been assigned.

Aristotle would have said that the failure to respond to an offense with the right kind of anger makes you subservient, even servile.

For now, let’s examine the therapeutically correct way to express anger, as Bernstein, relying on her “experts,” presents it.

First, she says, when you feel a rush of anger, you should take a deep breath.

Here, I concur, in part. It is often a good idea to reflect on what has happened, whether you are right to feel anger, and how best to express it.

Yet, the larger issue is when and how to express your anger. If the moment is right, you would do well to get angry. As the old saying goes: carpe diem. Procrastination is not always your friend.

It is not always right to get angry on the spot, but it is also not always right to sit back and think it over.

Second, Bernstein says that you should make an appointment to express your anger. She wants you to say that you need some time to calm down, and would like to find a convenient time to discuss the matter.

This is obviously wrong. If someone has disrespected you, you should not respond with a gesture of respect. That would feel like a reward. And why would you want to telegraph your punch, thus to put him on guard? This is beginning to sound like: Anger for Eunuchs.

If you make an appointment to tell someone something that he does not want to hear, will make him more or less likely to show up?

Third, the experts believe that your first move should be to excuse and explain yourself.

By that they mean that you should begin by saying that while you would normally shut the person out or get angry, this time you are trying to do things differently.

So, now we learn that the best way to express anger is to declare, from the top, that you are not going to get angry.

When you say that you are trying out a new technique, you are saying that your anger is less serious, more theatrical… even a rehearsal.

If you follow this step, you will have told the other person not to take your anger very seriously. This means that you are afraid of his reaction, and thus, are willing to accept subservience.

Fourth, you are supposed to tell the person that it takes courage to express your anger and you already feel badly because you know that it is hard to hear that someone is angry with you.

This tells you to open with an apology, accompanied by lots of ego massage. Again, we are in the realm of subservience.

So far, not a single angry word has passed your lips. You have shown yourself to be weak and pusillanimous, afraid of your own shadow.

If the other person has not yet started to laugh at you, the only reason must be that he is having too much fun watching your squirm.

Fifth, you can now express your personal feelings. Not your angry feelings... Heaven forfend. No, you must open up about your hurt feelings, thus continuing to place yourself in a feeling of weakness.

If the insult that has occasioned your anger was intended to weaken you, then, by expressing your weakness, you are embracing the lower status that the insult was conferring on you.

Besides, when you say your feelings have been hurt, you are appealing to sympathy and pity.

Still, no anger.

Sixth, you are now supposed to excuse the other person. Therapists recommend that you say that you know that the other person did not mean to hurt your feelings, and that you would like to give him the opportunity to explain himself.

But, what gives you the right to occupy both sides of the conversation? And how can you presume to speak for someone else? Are you that afraid of hearing what he might say?

Keep in mind that if you are not acting like someone who has been insulted, then your friend will be thinking that he did not do anything wrong. He treated you as servile because you are servile.

Besides, the last thing you want to hear is an explanation. You want to hear a sincere apology.

If the apology is accompanied by an explanation-- the Devil made me do it; I was having a bad hair day-- it is, by definition, insincere.

If you get the expression right, your antagonist will apologize, accept responsibility for what he said, not try to explain it away, withdraw it, and vow not to say it again.

At that point, you do not shower him with hugs and kisses. You forgive him.

The therapeutically correct way to express anger expresses no anger. Score one for the therapy culture.

In order not to wallow in despair, let’s turn to Aristotle’s view.

The philosopher makes two essential points. These concern the way a virtuous person can express anger.

First, like all emotions, anger can be excessive, deficient, or tempered. Not too much means that the anger should be directed toward the person who caused offense, and should not, in degree, exceed the severity of the offense. Not too little means that you there are times when you cannot and should not ignore offensive behavior.

Some people are irascible; they get angry too often for reasons that do not seem to pertain to the situation at hand. Others are diffident, they do not seem to know when they are being abused, so they absorb it and wonder why they feel like they lack self-respect.

In Aristotle there is no one-size-fits-all view of anger, and there is no single formula that tells us how to express it.

How should one express anger? Aristotle’s statement is classic: “The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and, further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised. This will be the good-tempered man, then, since good temper is praised. For the good-tempered man tends to be unperturbed and not to be led by passion, but to be angry in the manner, at the things, and for the length of time, that the rule dictates; but he is thought to err rather in the direction of deficiency; for the good-tempered man is not revengeful, but rather tends to make allowances.”

But how do you know what is right here? That, after all, is the fundamental question.

In my view, you have gotten it wrong if you have made yourself and your emotion the center of attention. You have gotten it right when you have directed attention toward the person who has offended you.

When anger is expressed effectively it will shame the other person, causes him to apologize, quickly, directly, and sincerely.

If he fails to apologize, that can only then mean that the offense was intentional, and that he will continue to treat you as subservient.

In that case, expressing anger is fruitless. It’s best to cease contact with the person.

What Is Civility?

For the past few weeks, everyone has been paying lip service to civility. If that were all we needed, we would now be awash in civility.

Of course, we do not feel more civil. We feel like we have been sprayed with the byproducts of excessive lip service: spittle and drool.

There’s no civility in that.

Nor is there any civility in lecturing people about the need for civility. If you want people to be more civil, set a good example. As John Podhoretz pointed out, when the crowd at the memorial service cheers raucously, it is not a civil moment.

Let’s start over, by trying to understand what civility is. Right now, most people think it’s just another word for nice. They think that civil is the opposite of angry.

On both counts, they are seriously mistaken. Which may explain why we are not very civil.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with anger. Sometimes anger is the only right emotion. And you don’t always need to keep it to yourself.

If a politician promises one thing and delivers another, he has defrauded you. If you do not feel even a twinge of anger, you are a clod.

Aristotle said that the right anger is found at the mean between too much and too little anger. If your anger is proportionate, you should express it civilly. That means, Aristotle says, expressing it: “to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way….”

If you lose control of the emotion and fail to express it within the confines of polite discourse, you are not being civil.

Kind and nice are not always civil and are not always right. If someone attacks you, physically or morally, responding with kindness is not civil; it is pusillanimous.

In truth, civility is not about how you feel. It is about how you act toward other people. Civility is as civility does.

As a code of conduct, civility entails politeness, courtesy, and good manners. It’s opposite is rude, crude, coarse, vulgar, and tactless.

Your soul can be awash in lovely sentiments, but if you don’t know how to chew with your mouth closed, you will not be behaving civilly.

You may feel all of the world’s gratitude, but if you fail to send a thank-you note, you are being rude.

Civility is not about how you feel, but about how you make others feel.

When people confuse civility with kindness they are recommending that you go out and get some therapy.

They are telling you to purge your negative emotions and to get in touch with your warm, fuzzy ones.

If you reject therapy, civility’s proponents will happily police your language, the better to cleanse it of any words that might give offense.

Neutering your language is not a sign of civility. It is a sign of oppression.

If you want to become more civil, you should not be rummaging around in the depths of your soul to conjure up some niceness. You should be logging on to Amazon to purchase a few volumes of Miss Manners.

Civility lies in formal gestures, in rituals and ceremonies. It does not lie in the full and open expression of feeling.

If you want to practice civility, you should do so in all of your behavior, whether in everyday etiquette or in political debates.

When it comes to political debate, civility lies in the formal gestures of respect that legislators seem always to use: “the distinguished gentleman,” “my esteemed colleague,” “my dear friend.”

These are not lip service. They are gestures of respect. They assert, openly and actively, that disagreements are not personal. They allow a full and open airing of each side of the argument.

We have been losing our civility for decades now. It was a casualty of the 1960s counterculture. Incivility became de rigueur when the antiwar movement declared war against the Vietnam war.

Rather than present their arguments civilly, young radicals believed that they could only advance their cause by being revolting.

Led by the Weathermen they organized a mock insurrection, called Days of Rage, at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Of course, they had to fight in the streets. Otherwise people would have thought that they were against the war because they were cowards.

Even for those who were not allied with William Ayers, the counterculture glorified rudeness and made it a way of life. It insisted on the virtue of spontaneous enthusiasm over the polite and respectful performance of social rituals.

With the election of George W. Bush and the Iraq War the antiwar movement was roused from its torpor. The armies of incivility awoke and ramped up the rhetoric and heaped vitriol on anyone who supported Bush and/or the war.

Compared to the violent rhetoric thrown at the Bush administration, Tea Party activists who showed up at Town Hall meetings and exercised their rights to free speech decorously, if somewhat loudly, were amateurs.

Why We Should All Love Miss Manners

For quite some time I have considered Miss Manners to be one of our great moral philosophers.

Hopefully, you will not be smirking or thinking that I am setting you up; I am entirely serious.

Many of us have been led to believe that etiquette-- the field in which Miss Manners has excelled-- is just a trivial aspect of ethical behavior. If we have accepted that idea, we need but remind ourselves that George Washington-- yes, that George Washington-- consumed etiquette books with uncommon ardor.

Washington believed that he could only found a Republic if he knew the proper rules for kindness, consideration, and courtesy. He also believed that etiquette books would help him to create rituals and ceremonies that would allow citizens to participate in it.

Today‘s thinkers tend to believe that America was founded on ideas. George Washington understood that a nation cannot live on ideas alone.

Even if that were not true, etiquette would, Miss Manners has been at pains to teach us, make life more pleasant and enjoyable.

The word ethics comes from the Greek word “ethos” which means character. Ethics is about how to build good charcter, the better to have more harmonious personal interactions and to live in a more functional community.

Ethics aims at social ties. It concerns what happens between friends, not what happens in the family.

The basic ethical principles were written down in religious texts and by philosophers like Aristotle. No one has really added anything substantive since. Principles have been disputed, especially by those who want to rationalize unethical behavior, but they have not been expanded or revised in any significant way.

The basic ethical principles are relatively easy to understand. Problems arise when it comes to their practical application.

Knowing the principle of negotiated compromise is one thing. Knowing how to effect a compromise between two parties who are lunging at each other’s throats is quite another.

Which leads us to Miss Manners. She does not express her ethical thought via a philosophical treatise, but in newspaper columns where she examines specific problems offered by individual readers and tries to shed some ethical light on them.

They are, as a young therapist once told me, essential reading for anyone training to do therapy or coaching. Isn’t it better to learn how to evaluate real moral dilemmas than to ram a patient’s experience into a grand narrative where he is enacting his one true Freudian desire-- to copulate with his mother?

Wouldn’t it be better for therapists to see their patients as normally constituted human beings confronting difficult, even insoluble, moral dilemmas? Wouldn’t that be better than assuming that they are sick or deranged or perverted?

Not because mental illness does not exist. It does and it should be taken seriously. Yet, most people who consult with therapists and coaches are not sick; they need moral guidance more than they need medicine.

In her column this morning Miss Manners confronts the kind of problem that arises for people who live in a society that does not value privacy. Link here.

A woman writes in to explain that she is dating and loves a man who does not belong to her social circle. She is shy, a prim and proper church-going lady. Her boy friend is a self-described red neck.

People who come from different communities often have different values. How can this young couple reconcile theirs?

The man in question seems to feel that their bedroom antics are worthy of public display. When he exposes them to her circle, she gets angry and embarrassed. He dismisses her concern as a symptom of her feeling embarrassed to be dating a red neck.

Her evident discomfort has not caused him to refrain from continuing to spill their intimate secrets.

Despite it all, she loves him, and she has come to believe that once she figures out how better to express her feelings to him he will naturally want to stop.

Of course, Miss Manners will have none of it. Basing her thinking on the venerable idea that we should respect the feelings of other people, she expresses her dismay that the woman’s boyfriend would not cease and desist as a gesture of respect for his girlfriend’s feelings.

She writes: “Meanwhile, he should be restraining himself, whether he understands or not, because it is important to you. That much anyone ought to be able to do out of love.”

A wonderful response, most especially because Miss Manners is also saying that doing the right thing does not require you to understand why. As I have been discussing the past few days, insight should never be a precondition for good behavior.

The boyfriend should do it here and now, because it will take too much time for this woman to offer him a long course in basic ethical principles. How can you explain to someone who lives in a “tell-all” culture, why privacy matters? And why in a culture that honors intemperate self-expression over all other social values, you should respect the feelings of other people?

In her words: “It will be quite a job for you to explain, in a tell-all society, that there is dignity in reticence, beauty in modesty and pleasure in having your own intimate world for just the two of you. These are subtle concepts which will take a while to get across as you point out examples in others and in your own lives.”

Miss Manners does not tell this woman what to do about her relationship. She merely tells her what she has a right to expect from a man who loves her.

Happily, she also corrects the woman’s therapy-induced misapprehension: that the man needs to understand the basic principles of privacy before he shuts up about their private life.

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.

The Love You Don't Deserve

A few days ago I posted about Wendy Atterberry's advice to a beautiful lovelorn twenty-something New Yorker. Link here.

The self-described pretty girl wrote in for advice because she did not understand why she could not find the love she deserved.

Atterberry suggested, and I seconded her advice, that love is not a basic human entitlement; it is something you have to work for. It doesn't just show up at your door. You have to put in some effort.

Since I often emphasize the importance of the good old work ethic, I was more than happy to see it applied to a situation outside of the office.

Apparently, not everyone was so quick to embrace Atterberry's advice. To her, and my, surprise, a brigade of self-esteemists wrote in to The Frisky to take serious exception to her views. Link here.

The entitled youth of America have come to believe that they have an inalienable right to happiness. They deserve true love, and if they cannot find it there is something wrong with the world.

This same cohort also believes that when they go to work, their company owes them a fulfilling experience. Their employers should tolerate their being late, their not completing their assignments, and their taking time off to go to concerts.

It is worth thinking about this. When you do not have a solid work ethic, your character flaw does not just manifest itself on the job. When you lose the work ethic, or better, when the educational establishment has drummed it out of you, the consequences extend into your love life.

You go to school and your teachers, inspired by the therapy culture, does its damnedest to beat the work ethic out of you. It teaches you to feel good about yourself not matter what your level of accomplishments and achievements. It refuses to encourage you in your effort to build up your character. It would rather work overtime to show you how to deconstruct it.

It's one thing to say, as Tom Friedman wrote in the NY Times last Sunday, that we are not going to be able to compete with foreign cultures when they have a strong work ethic and we do not. If America's children do not do their homework, and if they think that college is party time, they are not going to be able to compete in the global marketplace against their cohorts in India and China.

In her continuing effort to show her peers the light, Atterberry applies these principles to issues of love and happiness: "Why should people deserve to be happy if they aren't willing to put in the effort? Why would anyone deserve happiness if they aren't doing anything to make themselves, let alone others, happy? People should to work for what they want-- including a successful relationship-- before they're said to be deserving it."

She adds that the entitlement mentality disincentivizes people, drains their motivation and tells them that the world owes them, not just a living, but love and happiness. If they do not receive it, they will be able to put their education to good use: they will file grievances and complain about it.

In Atterberry's words: "This idea that we're all deserving of happiness regardless of effort does us all-- society in general-- such an amazing disservice. It makes us passive people. Where's the incentive to better ourselves? Where's the incentive to help create happiness for others?"

In her view, if you want to be happy start by thinking of  what you can do to make other people happy. It's a quaint notion: do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

The work ethic, an ethic that values experience and character, applies to the world of work. As Atterberry says: "Do you deserve a great job if you haven't bothered to gain experience? If you don't have the education for it? If you haven't prepared for an interview or polished your resume or done anything at all to make yourself attractive to a potential employer? Of course not."

Kudos to Atterberry for nailing this one.

The Italian Work Ethic

We all need a concept to grasp the world financial crisis, so how about this one: the Italian work ethic.

I could have chosen the Greek work ethic, the Spanish work ethic, or the Portuguese work ethic, but the New York Times has a great story today about how Fiat Motors is trying to introduce a serious work ethic into one of its Italian factories, so we are stuck with the Italian work ethic. Link here.

The concept feels like an ironic take-off on sociologist Max Weber's famous concept of the Protestant or Puritan work ethic. That's because it is. Link here.

Weber posited that Northern European and other Protestant cultures were defined by a work ethic that was largely absent from Southern European and more Catholic countries.

Europe is divided into North and South. America is divided into North and South, and these divisions, culturally speaking, involve different attitudes toward the value of work.

When you think of the Protestant or Puritan work ethic, you feel austerity, a hardscrabble life, one that is largely lacking in fun and pasta. Imagining the Protestant work ethic does not bring a smile to your mind.

On the contrary, the concept of an Italian work ethic offers a wry, ironic amusement, because we do not associate Italy with the greatest commitment to hard work.

And that is a problem. If you want to live well and enjoy life, normally you need to earn enough to pay for it. If you want to live well and enjoy life but do not earn enough to pay for it, you have to find someone else who is willing and able to do so.

You might have a generous trust fund that pays you to do nothing. Otherwise you will need an equally generous credit line from which you can borrow and borrow and borrow... until you simply run out of credit.

And that, as the Times reports, is the situation that Southern Europe is trying to come to grips with today.

Given that Italy and its neighbors have figured out that they cannot borrow their way to prosperity, and thus, that their model of social democracy has run out of credit, our brilliant president has chosen to try to turn America into a Southern European style social democracy!

Go figure!

Within the Fiat factory in Pomigliano, the debate has been engaged. Workers have awakened to the notion that if they are going to compete in the world economy, keep their jobs, and pay off the nation's crushing debt, they are going to have to work longer and harder.

And that will require a massive cultural revolution. One that devalues hedonism and revalues work.

As one might expect, some have suggested that work makes people miserable, that work kills, and that work is bad for your health.

Nonetheless, chronic unemployment without a generous line of credit is not a lot of fun either, so the workers have voted to recommit themselves to their jobs, even if that means showing up consistently, and on time.

Yet, one man's sloth is everyone's loss of productivity. When teams of workers are responsible for different aspects of automobile production the absence of a few workers here and there has a deleterious effect on productivity. Almost, self-evidently.

But the signs of transformation are there too. As the Times reports: "Yet for every worker resisting the [cultural] shift, many more have decided that having a job is better than unemployment. After months of tension, 63 percent of the employees voted in June to accept Fiat's plan, which would penalize employees for abusing sick days, give them shorter lunch breaks and forbid them from striking during periods of high demand."

Will the new austerity and a new work ethic save these Southern European countries and the Eurozone? We do not yet know.

For now the storm seems to have passed. The governments of Southern Europe have adopted severe austerity measures. And people seem to have reached an understanding of the need for a new work ethic.

And yet, these countries may also be in such a deep hole that more forced austerity, in the form of a severe recession or even a depression, might be unavoidable.

The storm seems to have passed, but that may also mean that we are in the eye of the storm.

Friendship

Most psychological theories take the family to be the basis for all human relationships. They privilege blood ties over social ties.

Whether it is Freud's Oedipus complex, his family romance, or the mother/infant dyad, psychologists have theorized human development in terms of relationships within the family. If they look at the way people connect and interact outside of the family, they tend to see those as family dynamics writ large.

The relationships that interest psychologists, the ones they take as meaningful, are based on you and your relations.

Yet, society is not one big happy family. It is an alliance among families.

If you believe, as Aristotle did, that humans are social beings, and that their social being surpasses their blood ties, then you will privilege a different kind of human relationship... friendship.

And you will also understand why Aristotle, who wrote the book on ethics, saw friendship as the basis for ethical behavior. With very few exceptions, you will always be related to your family, regardless of how badly you behave. With your friends, however, you must be on best behavior. In the absence of blood ties, friends can appear and disappear at will.

You do not choose your parents; nor do you choose your children. You do choose your friends, so you bear a greater responsibility to choose your friends well. In many ways, your sanity, serenity, and success depends on it.

These were some of my thoughts as I was reading philosopher Todd May' reflections on friendship in the New York Times yesterday. Link here.

We are indebted to Prof. May for offering a cogent essay on the topic. Friends are intrinsic to the fabric of our lives; yet we have a largely inadequate idea of what it means to be a friend.

Prof. May reminds us that Aristotle defined three kinds of friendship. I would call them good, better, and best.

The lowest level involves friends who you keep around because they are entertaining. They provide you with a certain quantity of pleasure, and thus have a limited but distinct value for you. They make you laugh; they are fun to be around; they are the life of the party.

If that is all there is, you are not likely to trust them, and thus, theirs will a friendship deficient in virtue.

The second level involves people with whom you do business. This is friendship by quid-pro-quo, friendship that has social or economic utility. I would add that there may be more to this kind of friendship than just the reciprocal exchange of goods, but the friendship will have been formed by necessity, because it is useful to both parties.

Both of these kinds of friendship involve what the person can do for you. In the first, the entertaining friend provides you with pleasure. There seems not to be any requirement to reciprocate. In the second, the useful friend provides something, but you are also obliged to reciprocate.

In the third, and highest form of friendship. your friend likes you, not for what you can do for him, but for what a good person you are. You like his virtue; you like what is best about him; the two of you are in harmony or in synch; neither of you is in it for material or hedonic gain.

Let's not make this sound too selfless. Clearly, if you are friends with someone who is widely considered to be a good person, you yourself are likely to accrue more respect for being his friend. More people will think well of you if you are friends with someone they admire and like. If your friend is notably reliable and trustworthy, your being his friend will immediately enhance your own reputation in society.

When Prof. May comes to the third type of friendship, something strange happens. As he is thinking of the ultimate act of friendship he recalls a time when he was 17 and recovering from back surgery. Hooked up to a morphine drip, his mind was floating in and out of consciousness. At one moment he awoke to find a friend sitting in the room. The boy had dropped by to keep him company and stayed around for he knows not how long.

Is this the ultimate in friendship? Does it tell us that the highest form of friendship is self-sacrifice, an act of charitably giving of oneself with no real hope for any gain, even the gain that accrues from receiving the pleasure of someone's company?

One can say that it takes a friend to sit by a friend in a hospital room. And yet, Aristotle said that friends seek out the best in their friends, and seeing someone in a semi-comatose, drug-induced state, is not seeing him at his best.

I would content that Prof. May has confused a religious virtue, charity, with the kind of secular virtue that Aristotle favored.

I would imagine that Aristotle was thinking about the times when friends have brunch, go to a ball game together, have a conversation, or take a walk in the woods. Friendship always involves reciprocity; give and take. It is like an extended conversation. If this is true, then it is strange indeed to think that you have an experience of friendship with someone who cannot reciprocate.

Surely, it is a good thing to visit sick friends in the hospital. If you neglect one of the basic duties of friendship you are less of a friend. But since duty always involves reciprocation, the assumption behind the selfless action of human charity is that your friend will do the same for you.

To say, as Prof. May says, that you are doing it with no expectation of getting anything in return, strikes me as inaccurate.

Prof. May is also making a larger, social point. He is arguing that the fabric of society is being eroded by the fact that we think too often in economic terms, in terms of profit and loss, and that we are therefore losing our moral compass.

I find this to be somewhat strange too. First, it sounds like a formula for a permanent welfare state, for taking care of people who presumably are so completely drugged out that they cannot take care of themselves. I had thought that we had already learned that excessive welfare induce people to avoid gainful employment.

Second, the notion that we give things away without any hope for any reciprocity is a formula for exploitation. If you gain nothing from an exchange then you are effectively being used.

Finally, it is stranger still to think that one of the banking practices that got us into our financial mess feels very much like what Prof. May is prescribing. Charity is all well and good, but what if it becomes the basis for banking? Would that not produce something like the banks that gave mortgage loans to people who would never be able to repay them?

Hephzibah Anderson Is Chastened

In addition to having a wonderful name, Hephzibah Anderson has written a wonderful book.

Her title says it all: Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex.

The book is written for women. It is also beautifully written.

It begins with a premise. The author has an epiphany one day and discovers that she has been following a life path that does not lead to the love and marriage that she desires. She has misspent a portion of her youth and wasted her intimacy in a series of hookups, of meaningless sexual experiences, punctuated by some serious relationships.

The decides to set herself right by vowing to remaining chaste for one year.

Her year of chastity must count as something of a purge, an effort to overcome the past. As such, Anderson's book must count as an antidote to the despair many young women feel when they discover that serial hookups are not going to lead them to love and marriage.

I would mention that there is a larger psychological issue at work here. We have all done things that we wish we hadn't. If we do them often enough, we become someone we wish we weren't. Given the psychological and social aftershocks of such behaviors, how does one go about recovering one's self-respect?

Anderson offers a variant on that theme. Once a woman has had her share of hookups, once she has given enough of her intimacy away for free, how does she get it back?

Many young women have this experience. Given their sexual past, their "number," they despair of ever recovering their reputations and their self respect. And they do not see how they can get from where they are to where they want to be.

How do you get something back when you have given it away? How does a woman retake possession of her intimacy when she has been treating it as though it were the same as a man's. How do you stop, in Anderson's words, "forcing yourself to conform to masculine ideals."?

And how do you step back from the edge after you have lived the feminist lifestyle to its limit and discovered that it has cost you your femininity, your ability to experience life as a woman?

Anderson makes a vow, to herself at first, to abstain from sexual intercourse for one year. Note that she does not abstain from all sexual experience, but she vows to abstain from generative sex, thus privileging the one sexual act that many of today's intellectuals tell us is just another way to feel pleasure.

Her vow does not plunge Anderson into a nun-like existence. To be fair, many nuns have not had very nun-like existences either. And despite what the Freud-addled culture would have you believe, it does not make her repressed, crazy, sick, or unattractive to men.

Given the amount of misinformation that floats through the Zeitgeist it is worthwhile for young women especially to see that they can refrain from intercourse and still have intimacy, love, and romance.

What Anderson does lose, and not regret losing, is the round of painful dramas that seem naturally to follow the round of meaningless hookups. At one point in the book she sees a couple in front of a house involved in an especially drama-laden confrontation, and feels grateful that that is no longer her life.

What did a year's worth of chastity do for her: "... chastity has returned to me a sense of the private, of an inner space that is mine and mine alone."

Of course, there is a larger moral issue here. Anderson does not just remain chaste; she keeps her vow, strictly. And this, in and of itself, is morally chastening.

If you want to own your experience, you have to be able to keep your word. Even if the person to whom you have given it is merely yourself. If Anderson recovered her intimacy then one basic reason must be that she kept her vow, even when she was the only one who knew that she had made it.

In the past vows of chastity have led to mystical journeys and various other forms of sublimations. And yet, Anderson does not set forth on a journey into mental space or even a journey around the world. She does not go into therapy. To her great credit she does not set off on a therapeutic journey that ends with her falling in love with a Brazilian beach bum.

She struggles with her vow; she gets involved with men; she wonders how she got to where she is; she continues to live her life, personally and professionally. And she seems to enjoy it more than she had when she was trying to live up to a masculine ideal or a feminist ideology.

The Condom as Moral Principle

[Notice: some readers have expressed a preference for my positive, constructive posts. In truth, I prefer them myself. Nevertheless, today's post is not going to fall within that category. Forewarned is forearmed.]

In the beginning condoms were a reasonably effective contraception.

During the Great American Sexual Revolution they were touted for their hygienic capabilities. Under the mantra, Safe Sex, condoms were extolled for their ability to reduce the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, STDs.

Finally, condoms became a moral principle. As more and more people accepted sex as a universal human right and a staple of a healthy lifestyle, adolescents were led to believe that sexual activities were morally acceptable if a condom was involved.

If we ask how all of that has been working out, the answer is: not too well.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are 19,000,000 new cases of sexually transmitted infections in the United States every year. We may well be declining as an economic power, but we are still one of the world leaders in STDs.

How can we explain this? According to Michael Weinstein, the reason is that we have such a negative attitude toward condoms. Link here.

You might give Weinstein credit for being counterintuitive, but we can also tax him for failing to appraise the situation objectively.

The Safe Sex message is pervasive in the culture. Whenever sex is mentioned on television, someone will add that a condom must be in use. [They really mean that if a male is involved in the sex act, a condom must be used.]

Condoms are widely available in drugstores and convenience stores. They are not hidden behind counters; they are not whispered about behind closed doors. Men carry condoms with them at all times. Women carry condoms with them at all times. If you dare say that condoms contribute to immoral behavior you will be quickly shouted down as a modern day Typhoid Mary, an enabler of contagion.

Condoms are everywhere, but so are STDs. Is this a puzzlement?

Not to Michael Weinstein. He explains that the epidemic of STDs has been caused by the Puritanical culture that systematically disparages condom use. Yes indeed, you heard that right.

Weinstein feels that there are not enough condom ads on television. And he adds, in his Huffington Post column, that our culture has failed because we do not openly distribute condoms in coffee shops, beauty salons, and barber shops.

In Weinstein's world, the next time you have lunch you can choose among soups, sandwiches, beverages, and strawberry flavored condoms.

One suspects that he will not really be happy until the Catholic Church finds a way to include condoms in the Eucharist.

You will be thinking that it serves me right for reading the Huffington Post. I will concede that you are partially right. But reading the HuffPost allows me to analyze cultural influences from all possible angles. Just because someone cannot write or think clearly does not mean that he does not exert a cultural influence.

Anyway, Weinstein continues that European cultures have lower rates of sexually transmitted infections. How does he explain it? Like this: "Sex positive European cultures... are sexually permissive but don't have the level of disease or unwanted pregnancies that we have. America-- moralistic in its attitudes, yet hedonistic in its behavior-- makes for a dangerous brew."

Do your best to ignore the syntactic muddle of that last sentence. I suspect that something got lost in the editing.

Presumably, European countries, with their more enlightened attitudes, make condoms more readily available. Do you think that this applies to Roman Catholic countries? Are condoms readily available in Parisian beauty salons?

And don't these countries have a rather moralistic attitude toward sexuality? How did it happen that these sexually repressive cultures, places like France and Italy, produced some of the world's greatest hedonists. I am thinking of the Marquis de Sade and Boccaccio's Decameron.

For all I know European countries have fewer STDs because they have suffered less of the influence of the Great American Sexual Revolution and had enough sense not to induce a generation of young people to practice the art of hooking up.

One strains to imagine how the culture that invented hooking up, Girls Gone Wild, and Bill Clinton is moralistic. Or how young people who grow up with a steady diet of pornography are guilt ridden because of our sexual past.

Is it fair to say that American youth do not talk about sex enough or that they talk about it too much? That they know too little or too much about STDs? That they have received too little or too much instruction in the proper use of the condom?

As I see it, condoms are as much the problem as the solution.

Once you tell children that only one moral principle defines whether sexual behavior is right or wrong-- is a condom in use?-- you are also giving them permission to do as they please. Supposedly, the condom protects them.

But, against what does it protect them? Against some, but most certainly not all, sexually transmitted diseases. That much is true. But it does not protect them against the emotional consequences of random, anonymous sexual acts. And it does not protect them against their own moral sense, against their intuitive understanding that some sex acts in some circumstances are wrong.

Think what you will, sexual behavior has always been subject to prohibitions and prescriptions. Some sexual acts are prohibited and others are prescribed. There is no such thing as a human culture that judges all sex acts as created equal.

Don't you get the impression that condom merchants like Weinstein are trying to lull young people into a false sense of security in order to induce them into becoming sexually active before they are ready?

Besides, if hooking up were such a natural and normal thing to do, why do young people need to get drunk to do it? Keep in mind that drunkenness is a primary reasons young people forget to use a condom.

Let's say that Weinstein is asserting his adult moral authority to encourage condom use. Why would young people take his word for it? Now that we have spent decades trying to disembarrass young people of their tendency to respect authority, why would they now respect the authority of someone who touts the virtue of condom use.

If young people do not respect your authority, then they are going to try to find out for themselves whether condoms are a good or a bad thing. After all, the parents who tell them to use condoms all the time must have had some experience of condomless sex... by definition.

Call this adolescent rebelliousness, if you like. Or say that children need to learn some lessons by trial and error. Do you really want them to learn the lesson of unsafe sex by trying it out?

And they are going to try it out.

Even if an adolescent understands the risk, he or she might also understand that greater risk produces greater pleasure. As Susan Walsh suggested on her blog, Hooking Up Smart, high risk behavior produces an endorphin rush that enhances pleasure.

If pleasure is the meaning of sex, as many enlightened critical theorists insist, then why would people not forgo condoms in order to have more pleasure. If pleasure is good for your mental health, isn't more pleasure better for your mental health?

Keep in mind that for Weinstein, among many others, sex is not really about reproduction. He writes: "The last tie between sex and reproduction was severed by the pill."

Sacre bleu! Whatever does that mean? We know, as a matter of scientific fact, that human sexuality distinguishes itself for the fact that it can take place without there being any possibility for reproduction. That does not mean that sex has nothing to do with reproduction, it means that human sexuality functions by a calculus that differs from that of other mammalian species where females experience estrus.

And, just because the experience is pleasurable, that does not mean that the meaning of the experience lies solely or primarily in the pleasure experienced. A simple analogy will explain this well. Eating sushi is a pleasurable experience; no one with a whit of sense would say that the purpose of the experience is to provide a new and different way to feel pleasure. The purpose of the experience is nourishment.

One might take the example of thumb-sucking. For an infant this activity might be pleasurable, and it probably does not provide much nourishment. But this does not mean that when the same infant suckles his mother's breast, he is just in it for the pleasure.

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.

Coaching Lessons: How to Overcome Bad Habits

For those of us who have absorbed the lessons of the therapy culture the notion of overcoming bad habits feels... dare I say... simple-minded.

It feels how-to. And that is clearly well below your IQ and your intellectual competence.

Nevertheless, if you are willing to suspend disbelief for a few minutes, let's give some thought to Dan and Chip Heath's new book: "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard." For a review, follow this link.

Surely, change is hard. Habits become like old friends. Discarding them causes severe psychic fallout... to the point where you are sure to start questioning your wish to change them.

Unfortunately, the therapy culture makes it even harder to change bad habits. It teaches us that they are meaningful experiences, that they express past traumas or unspeakable thoughts, and that we can only overcome them when we discover the hidden message and translate it into words.

By that time the bad habit will no longer be a bad habit. It will be a bad impulse. Worse yet, it will have been shown to reveal a fundamental truth. Once you accept that it contains a truth, you no longer have a real incentive to change it. How can you deny a sordid truth without being accused of being simple-minded and weak-willed?

Surely, this contains a high level of theoretical elegance. It makes for a good narrative. In practice, it never works.

Even those who defend this theory most vigorously will tell you that the best you can do is to engage in an endless struggle with the bad impulse. You will keep trying to suppress it and it will keep popping up.

As I said, this is theoretically sophisticated. And if you like to attach yourself to serious theory, regardless of whether it works in practice, be my guest.

The alternative is not, in fact, an exercise in simple-mindedness. I hope I am not being too defensive if I argue for the habit-changing approach by bringing out the big guns. Actually, the biggest theoretical gun of them all... Aristotle.

According to Aristotle repeated bad behavior is a habit, not a meaningful experience, and not the expression of some basic truth about our or human nature. A bad habit does not express anything that we should want to know.

But if that is true, then we do not need to learn to live with it or to learn to control it. Life is not and should not be an interminable struggle against bad habits of impulses.

According to Aristotle, we overcome bad habits when we replace them with good ones. In fact, that is the only way to conquer a bad habit.

But then, how do you do it? According to "Switch" you make a plan; you develop a program; you establish rules, and define certain attainable tasks. And then you go out and follow the rules and complete the tasks... one by one.

Of course, it's easier said than done. And it is far more difficult to do than to undergo years of psychotherapy in the hope that one day you will have an epiphany that will make it all make sense and still allow you to keep your old friend, your bad habit.

The True Meaning of Friendship

I like a good theoretical abstraction as much as the next guy, but ethical principles are best taught through parables. You cannot fully grasp the principle without seeing it in action.

The situation described in a letter to DoubleX columnist Lucinda Rosenfeld is pretty close to being self-evident. I am not writing about it because you are going to find it puzzling. A minimal knowledge of the duties friends bear to their friends will give you the answer. As many of Rosenfeld's readers have testified, any time you find yourself in such a situation you know what to do.

And yet, however obvious the ethical precepts involved, Rosenfeld completely missed them. For which she was greeted by an avalanche of furious replies, all of which expressed outrage at her failure to understand the issues involved. and recommended that she be fired. To these replies Rosenfeld answered that she was happy to have agitated everyone, because that meant that was doing her job.

How often do you see dozens of impassioned replies to an advice columnist, all of which agree on the single point that the columnist is completely wrong and ought to be fired. The women who wrote in did not consider her advice to be wrong. They thought it was dangerous.

Dangerous to our friendships. If people start taking Rosenfeld's advice seriously there will be fewer and worse friendships in the world. For young people who have left home and taken jobs in big cities, friendship provides a sense of community and connection. If you have moved away from your family and cannot count on your friends, you are in serious trouble.

As nearly all of the commenters remarked, Rosenfeld does not have any idea of what is involved in friendship. Apparently, she was chosen as columnist because she wrote a novel about friendship. That should really tell you all you need to know.

Anyway, the first column, with Rosenfeld's reply is linked here. Her reply to her detractors is linked here.

Let's call this the parable of the bad Samaritan, or else, the parable of the ethically-challenged advice columnist.

A woman goes to a concert at a small venue with her two closest friends. At some point she is drugged. When she goes to the ladies room and does not come back her friends do not look for her and do not call her. They leave without her.

She has no recollection of what happened between the moment she left for the ladies room and the moment she woke up in the ER. Apparently, a policeman had found her lying along on the sidewalk and had her sent to the hospital.

Though she does not remember it, she was told that she also called her two closest friends from the street. She was sobbing hysterically, asking them for help. They were already at home so they told her to go back to the club. They offered to call an ambulance.

The woman was taken to the hospital. There she called her mother who lived 2000 miles away. Distraught at what she was hearing the mother also called the two friends and begged them to comfort their daughter at the hospital. They refused.

After the hospital told the woman and her mother that she could not be released unless someone came by to pick her up, she called her two closest friends again and asked if they would help her get discharged from the hospital. Under duress, and angrily, they managed to come to the hospital the next morning and drove the woman to her car. Then they left her to drive herself home.

The woman tells Rosenfeld that she cannot help feeling abandoned by her friends. And she asks whether she is expecting too much from them.

Let us posit a touching naivete in this woman. Apparently, she had not noticed that these two women were anything but friends. Perhaps she has very few friends. Perhaps the two of them tolerate her out of pity.

None of that really matters. What matters here is that Rosenfeld dismissed the situation glibly. She replied that when it comes right down to it you can never count on your friends, only your family and lovers. She adds that if she were roused from her bed by a 4:00 a.m. phone call she would not bother to get dressed and go to the hospital.

Thus, the outrage of her readers. Reasonably so. After all, it does not matter whether you are dealing with a close friend or a not-so-close friend, and it doesn't even matter if she had gotten drunk at some point in the past, friends look after friends, friends care for friends, friends have duties to friends.

Since you choose your friends, but not your family, your duties are in many ways stronger. However naive this young woman is, what can we say about her two supposedly closest friends who have been pretending to be her friend for ten years.

At the very least these two women should be seriously ashamed of their behavior. As should Lucinda Rosenfeld.

[Additional comments on Rosenfeld by Ann Althouse here, and Lindsay Beyerstein here.]

Is America a Nation of Liars?

Are we, as Newsweek proclaims, "a culture of liars," or do we just like to beat ourselves up, for sins real and imagined? Link here.

Are we a bunch of flagrant, raging, incurable liars? Do we cheat all the time, break all the rules while pretending that being honest and trustworthy are for chumps? Do we believe that the more you cheat the more you get ahead?

Jessica Bennett raises these points in an unfortunate article from Newsweek. If she had set out to show us why no one ever reads the magazine any more, she has certainly succeeded.

If she believes what she is saying, then public virtue, honestly and integrity, is a sham. The only relevant distinction is between those who lie well and those who do not.

You do not even have to pretend to be a good person; you can spend your time worrying about whether or not you are going to be caught in your lies.

I would like to think that Bennett is being ironic, but I fear that she has been seduced by those who wish to glorify lying. In her words: "Liars get what they want. They avoid punishment and they win others' affections. Liars make themselves sound smart and savvy, they attain power over those of us who believe them, and they often use their lies to rise up in the professional world. Many liars have fun doing it. And many more take pride in getting away with it."

Bennett does not seem to believe that anything bad happens when people get caught in their lies. She feels that they just get away with it, as in Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford, Elliot Spitzer... none of whom really got away with lying.

In Bennett's world: "socially successful people... are good liars.... Lying adolescents are more popular among their peers."

What is possible compensation is left for those who insist on telling the truth?

At first glance this seems to be intuitively implausible. Do you want to hire someone who has lied on her CV? Would you keep a friend who has lied to you? Do people always get away with identity theft?

If your intuition had not put you on guard, the flimsiness of Bennett's reasoning should set off warning sirens: "Students who succeed academically get picked for the best colleges, despite the fact that ... as many as 90% of high-schoolers admit to cheating."

Is it too much to expect that an editor might have picked up the offense against reason here? Let us imagine that a large number of students cheat at one time or another. They might get outside help on a homework assignment; they might sneak a peak at someone's test answer.

Do you think that that means that students can cheat their way to Harvard or Duke? Were the best students those who were best at cheating their way through high school? Did they cheat on their SATs?

Besides, what happens if you are caught cheating? Is it an exercise in hypocrisy to punish a cheater when we are all cheaters?

The notion that successful people get away with lying is equally offensive. What about the "liar loans" that contributed mightily to our financial crisis? In the end no one really got away with lying on their mortgage applications, not the lenders, not the borrowers, not the financial system.

Unfortunately, Newsweek paints the topic so broadly that it makes us think that we do nothing but lie, and that we are lying to ourselves if we think otherwise.

But Bennett does not distinguish between flagrant falsehoods and good manners.

Being polite and well-mannered means that we engage in certain formal social rituals, like shaking hands and offering greetings.

Would you consider yourself to be a liar if you tell a friend you are happy to see him when your heart is not bursting with joy. The expression is a ritual formality; it does not even pretend to express a metaphysical truth.

If you were less than happy to see a friend and said as much, you would simply be rude. If you did it often enough you would soon become friendless. Would your passion for an abstract idea-- the truth-- compensate for your friendlessness.

Ritualized expressions of greeting are not lies; they are ritualized expressions of greeting. They affirm a social connection. Nothing more or less.

The psychologist who called them "an omnipresent white noise that we have learned how to tune out" has no real understand of how people connect in society. I am confident that the failure to perform such a ritual would immediately be noticed and would be received as the rude dismissal that it is ... in truth.