Did We Just Send the American Competitive Spirit into Therapy?

Last week Tiger apologized. The event was so momentous that trading briefly stopped on the New York Stock Exchange as everyone tuned in to Tiger.

One of the greatest individual competitive athletes of our time, a man who was a hero and role model to businesspeople everywhere, had been brought down, at least temporarily, by scandal.

Tiger had cheated... on his wife. He did not cheat at golf. He was not dysfunctional in any real sense of the word. But he had been condemned by the media and by no small percentage of the populace for having gotten down and dirty with a few too many women.

For now I wonder what Tiger's downfall says about America. Tiger Woods was not just a guy who played a lot of great golf. He symbolized the American spirit, better yet, an American competitive spirit that had garnered a series of extraordinary successes.

As I watched and listened to what appeared to be a PR-driven apology, I was shocked to hear Tiger indulging therapy-speak, I could not help asking myself: Did we just send the American competitive spirit into therapy?

At a time when we need to restore our competitive fight, when we need to buckle down to restore the nation to its former greatness, we need role models. We need people who have fought and won, who have exhibited qualities of hard work, focus, and concentration. And who shown how to win. We need people like Tiger Woods.

And now, thanks to the therapy culture, we don't have him ... for a while.

We all do well to recall that many people in this country believe that our nation's success, its competitive spirit, its can-do attitude, its lust for victory covers a dark secret. Such people believe that America's success is tainted, that we could not have won fair and square, but that we exploit the less fortunate and oppress anyone we can.

Those who think such thoughts prescribe penance as the proper solution to the problem. They think that we need to be punished, the better to pay for our sins. In that way we will redeem our souls and get used to coming in second or third.

As I said I was surprised to hear Tiger invoke therapy. Personally, I hope he was just paying lip service to our culture's values. As Ann Althouse noted, therapy has become, if not an adjunct to, a substitute for, religion. Link here.

Surely, this is all somewhat confusing. In principle, Tiger Woods is doing sex addict rehab. I have already expressed my doubts about that. Link here. Since I want to keep some hope alive, I even accepted the reports that Tiger has been a less than willing participants in the 12 step-inspired meetings.

But many people mistake 12 step programs for psychotherapy, so it is worth the trouble to distinguish them. First, 12 step programs guide people to change their behavior. They do not concern themselves with examining root causes or true issues that lead to addiction. Second, 12 step programs, when they exist outside of a medical facility, are not led by health care professionals. Nor are addicts' sponsors required to be health care professionals. Most often they are not. Third, 12 step programs aim at a spiritual re-birth. Therapy presumably seeks something akin to medical treatment or cure.

So let's hope for Tiger's sake that he has not succumbed to the siren song of therapy. About the American competitive spirit I am not so optimistic.

What's Wrong with Journalism?

I couldn't have said it better myself. And it wasn't for lack of trying. In a post a few days ago (link here), I tried to explain what has gone wrong with the American media. This morning Alison Gopnik outdid me in Slate. Link here.

In her first paragraph Gopnik demonstrates, in a nutshell, what is wrong with American journalism today.

In her words: "It is a truth verging on truism that journalism is about telling stories. But what exactly is it that narratives-- good stories-- do for us? Stories work because they explain important or unusual or compelling events in terms of our everyday psychology-- the causal principles that we all understand by the time we are 4. A good journalism explains why the health care bill failed, for example, by telling us about the beliefs, desires, and emotions of the wavering senators."

What's wrong with this statement? A great deal, as it happens.

Begin at the beginning. Instead of arguing for a point of view Gopnik presents her opinion as a self-evident truth, as though it were axiomatic, and as though only a fool would dare disagree.

Asked what journalism is about, most of would say that it is about fact more than story, about information more than narrative coherence?

As I have suggested, one of the most important problems with journalism today is that it has lost track of facts, and gotten caught in a web of well-constructed narrative fiction.

Can a good journalist weave the facts into a compelling narrative? Surely, he can. But when he does so he will always run a significant risk, because the rules for constructing a compelling narrative are not the same as the rules for reporting the facts accurately and objectively.

As for objective reality, Gopnik has no real interest or concern. She would likely not accept the action of the editor of the Atlanta Progressive News-- firing a reporter for believing in objective reality (link here)-- but she is on the same page. When she says that stories relate everyday events to everyday psychology, she is saying that we cannot understand facts and events within an historical context. She believes that we must personalize everything, make it relevant to our everyday lives.

Do you really believe that events around the world are unintelligible unless we can see how they are affecting us personally? I don't.

As for what Gopnik means by "everyday psychology," I do not have a clue. She appears to be saying that a journalist must tell stories because we all think like 4 year olds and 4 year olds relate to stories better than to facts.

For my part I believe that most adults have put away the toys of their childhood and have learned more adult mental functioning, to the point where they can think of events in terms of something other than their personal experience. I also believe that adults can grasp objective realities even if they are not quite as entertaining as good stories.

Finally, Gopnik feels that good journalists must explain why the health care bill failed by revealing the emotional make-up of the "wavering senators."

Wow. And more wow. Only the truest of true believers would say that the problem with the health care bill was the emotional health of the "wavering" senators. Gopnik seems to imply that the health care bill would have passed if certain senators had had more therapy!

Has it never crossed Gopnik's mind that these senators might have been deliberating, not wavering, and that in a deliberative democracy, this is a right and proper thing to do. And why would it not make to sense that some senators voted against the bill because they believed that it was not in the best interest of the country.

Shouldn't journalism tell us what is in the health care bill, what it would cost, what it would mean in terms of the national economy, and whether or not we can afford it? The more reliable information we have the less we will rely on stories to fill in the gaps.

Do We Really Need "The Rules?"

Every time I read a column by Jag Carrao, aka Malibu Rules Girl, I am struck by how sound and sensible it is. Maybe I am becoming sentimental with age, but I find it refreshing to read a coach who is consistently offering good advice about dating... and who is not trying to recruit young women into a cult or indoctrinate them in an ideology. Link here. Carrao bases her coaching on The Rules.

Ever since Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider published The Rules some fifteen years ago, they have been targeted by what Alex Witchel called: "talk show firing squads of feminists." Link here. To say the least, Fein and Schneider struck a nerve.

For reasons that deserve some serious thought, the notion that women could retake control of their dating lives by acting more like ladies, or better, by treating their femininity as an asset, was an offense against everything that feminism held sacred.

Many women read "The Rules" and followed its precepts. Others ignored them. By and large, the therapy culture did not like the rules. It persuaded many women that following rules was like playing a game, and they if they started playing games they would be compromising their hearts.

Both feminists and therapists have franchises to protect, and protect them they did.

On the one side Fein and Schneider were attacked for being reactionaries and for being tools of the patriarchy. On the other, they were denounced for not being experts, and for not having formal training in psychology.

This latter is more than passing strange. The truth is, if you spend so much time dating that you become an expert in the field, then the chances are very good that you have never had a durable relationship. And if you try to study dating in a psychology program you are not going to learn very much about the realities of the new rituals.

I prefer to think of "The Rules" as a form of folk wisdom. Fein and Schneider succeed where experts have failed. In this way they remind me of 12 step programs. What expertise, what degrees did Bill Wilson have when he sat down with Bob Smith to create the 12 steps?

When Wilson and Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous the great minds of the therapy profession had little or nothing to offer to addicts. Moreover, they were threatened by a treatment program that was being given away for free.

Does the same apply to relationship advice? I would conclude from the popularity of The Rules, that therapists had not been doing a very good job offering dating and relationship advice.

Better yet, just as 12 step programs offer a way for addicts to replace bad habits by good ones, so do "The Rules" offer a series of concrete behaviors that can, with practice, become good habits replacing bad ones. As I wrote yesterday, you cannot overcome bad habits with an epiphany; you need to work on building your character. Link here. And building character always involves learning to follow rules.

Even today, when you read the comments Carrao's column elicited (after the column linked above) you see that the old therapeutically-correct version of dating and mating still holds sway in many a mind.

Thanks to the therapy culture and feminism too many people can no longer wrap their minds around the fact that men and women are not the same thing. If you enter into a relationship with a member of the opposite sex you must recognize that that person will not always be thinking, feeling, and acting in the same way that you do. You do not need to know a lot of Darwin to accept this, but you do have to know some.

However much they protest to being men and women of science, therapists have concocted a therapeutically-correct version of relationships that ignores a lot of basic Darwinian facts. In their view a relationship is formed when two fully-actualized and thoroughly neutered human persons achieve a meeting of the mind, body, and soul.

Why anyone would claim this to be science is beyond me.

The therapeutically-correct relationship can be formed when people are true to their hearts, when they are open and honest to love, and when they have undergone enough therapy to become fully actualized human potential.

Of course, this is hokum. Or, if you like, snake oil. As Carrao is at pains to point out women who open up too much or too quickly often get hurt. Her rules-based advice is designed to allow women to take their time, to let a relationship develop, and not to rush into relationships as though they were desperate for any kind of soul mating.

When therapists say that you need not play by the rules so long as you open your heart to love, it sounds too good to be true. It is.

And think about this: what happens when a teenaged girl receives this message about complete openness and honesty and concludes that to have a boyfriend she must starting texting him pictures of the more intimate areas of her anatomy?

Or when the same girl has learned from talk shows that it is bad to feel ashamed of her body, and decides to demonstrate that she is sufficiently adult to overcome shame and starts sexting?

Or what happens when she gets slightly older and decides to reveal all of her feelings and secrets on her blog or Facebook page?

Doesn't this talk about openness and honesty, this attack on modesty and decorum, encourage, directly or indirectly, behaviors that are going to prevent young women from developing good relationships?

Certainly, a girl who engages in sexting is not playing games or being manipulative. Clearly, she is not a Rules Girl. But why does the culture insist that a young woman who retains control over her intimacy, who does not give it away willy-nilly, is playing games, compromising her heart, and being manipulative?

Before demeaning the notion of playing games, keep in mind that the alternative is protracted psychodrama, accompanied by soul-scorching anguish. What else would a woman feel after she has given everything she has to someone she did not really know?

As Carrao explains in her recent column, people need to step back, to take a deep breath, and keep something in reserve, before plunging into the deep end of a relationship. She advises a measured exchange of information and feelings, where one person does not open up completely while the other keeps his or her counsel. It may feel like an effort to hold something back, but if your partner is not on the same page, you are out on a limb sawing it off.

Therapeutically-correct relationships are a mirage. They are trotted out to play off the insecurities of women. They do not lead to good relationships where equals attract and settle down with equals in situations where there are no rules. (Between us, a situation where there are no rules and no prescribed behaviors is called anarchy. It is not happy valley.)

In truth, the reality of the current dating scene has no real resemblance to what therapy has prescribed. In denouncing "The Rules" feminists and therapists have not opened the door to better and more meaningful relationships; they have made the world safe for hook-ups.

The most important recent invention in the dating game is the hook-up... nothing more or less.

Open, honest, free spirited, in touch with their sexuality at levels their mothers never imagined, many of today's young women have become expert in the art of the kind of anonymous random sexual encounters that are called hook-ups.

But is it really new? Does hooking-up really represent an advance in human social interaction? I have already written about this, and I have already said that I do not believe that the new dating rituals are very original or are very good for women. Link here.

Is hooking up a new social institution, up there with marriage, courtly love, and Victorian courtship? Hardly. When you have a woman in a sorority who is hooking up with a man who has already hooked up with five of her sorority sisters-- that she knows of-- it is not really a new thing. I agree that she is not a rules girl; she is behaving like a harem girl.

Before you set off on the path to liberation, and before you accept that you are advancing the good of women, think about how well it has turned young women into harem girls.

When women live together as sisters, and when a different one is proud of being chosen for one night to have sex with the kind of imitation alpha male who is now called a pick-up artist, you are seeing something that closely resembles a harem.

After the hook-up the harem girl goes back to her sorority, to the company of other women. Or she may go back to her consciousness-raising group. The important point is that she is not expecting to have a relationship with the man; she may not even desire one. Her circle of sisters provides the emotional ballast that she needs. Especially if the women spend their time complaining about the emotional immaturity and inconstancy of men.

The sad part is that when women do not follow the rules, men are not going to treat them very well. Too much exposure, too fast, usually leads men to shut down. They see exposure as a demand and suspect that it masks desperation. When your date jumps into the deep end, you might feel that you want to rescue her, but more likely, you will feel put upon, and want to get out of there as quickly as possible.

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.

"Women Will Never Forgive Tiger"

According to Jessica Grose: "Women will never forgive Tiger." Link here.

She adds that it does not really matter. The audience for golf is so predominantly male that it is not all that important whether women ever forgive Tiger Woods.

Rachel Larrimore agrees that it does not really matter all that much, because Tiger Woods is not running for public office. He is not Mark Sanford. He is not a role model for children and adults alike. Link here.

So far, so good.

As I read these remarks one thought keeps coming back: What about Bill Clinton?

Perhaps it is a slight exaggeration to say that women forgave Bill Clinton. Truth be told, most of them, including so-called defenders of women's rights, were lining up to rationalize his behavior. If feminists did not forgive Bill Clinton, the reason is that, in their eyes, they did not have to. He did not do anything wrong.

And what about Hillary? You might say that she was absent when Bill Clinton offered his insincere apology.

True enough. But it is also true that she was out in front, in public, defending him against his critics. To her mind the Lewinsky affair, to say nothing of the other accusations of sexual indiscretions and worse, were simply a Republican plot to undermine the Clinton presidency.

When it came to her dignity as a woman-- question that motivates the discussions about the behavior of Jenny Sanford, Elin Nordegren, and Silda Spitzer-- Hillary Clinton was not exactly a role model.

The Decline and Fall of the American Media

I am hardly the first to notice-- actually I am late to the party-- that it is too facile to blame the internet for the decline of the American media.

Very often when people shift the blame to things that are completely out of their control-- technological progress, for example-- they are showing their own unwillingness to take responsibility for their own failures.

Grand old media outlets like the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, CNN, and MSNBC began to lose readers and viewers at just about the time they decided that their function was not to provide information, but to slant information, to provide pseudo-news that would induce people to think a certain way.

The Atlanta Progressive News, whose sad story I reported yesterday, (link here) is just the most egregious example of overt media bias, derived from the kind of theoretical education that today's media barons received in college.

A few years ago a man whose politics were radically leftist-- he was a follower of Noam Chomsky-- was comparing the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. He remarked: "As Chomsky said, at least with the Wall Street Journal you can trust the facts."

The Wall Street Journal is doing well; the New York Times is fighting for its survival. The Economist is thriving; Time and Newsweek have shrunk to shadows of their former selves.

Fewer and fewer people are going to spend money to be told what to think and to be treated with contempt if they do not follow the party line.

It is, I believe, a question of integrity. Journalistic integrity means reporting the facts, providing objective information, not slanting the facts to promote a specific candidate or point of view.

Liberal journalists will man (or woman) the barricades to defend the separation of church and state. They ought to show the same zeal when maintaining the separation between fact and opinion.

The sad part is that so many of them have been indoctrinated in radical thought that they simply do not believe that there is a difference.

Take the issue of the decline and fall of the Obama presidency. According to Newsweek editor Jon Meacham the fault does not lie with Obama, but with us, the people who hold slavishly to a system of constitutional government that has outlived its usefulness. Link here.

Meacham, who pretends to be a rational being, reacts to the election of Scott Brown by saying that we need to rewrite the constitution. For all of his high seriousness Meacham is really throwing an adult tantrum. If he can't get his way, let's rip up the constitution.

The fact that Obamacare is wildly unpopular does not register with Meacham.

Meacham disguises his contempt better than liberal panjandrum and Slate editor Jacob Weisberg. Rather than blame Obama's leadership, Weisberg blames: "the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large." Surely, he is referring to Republicans and Independents. Link here.

Does Weisberg really believe that people who consistently vote Democratic are more intelligent and more adult than those who vote otherwise?

Unless you believe that people who vote Democratic are ipso facto more intelligent and mature, Weisberg's statement is positively idiotic. But it is the kind of nonsense that shows contempt for people who do not think as he does; thus it must count as a lame rhetorical ploy.

The difference here is not between left and right. It is between publications that have retained their journalistic integrity and those who have sold theirs for ideology.

The Economist is not an opinion magazine; it does not fill its pages with right wing screeds. Now, read its analysis of the current American political crisis. Link here. It is sober, sensible, and informative. It calls it as it sees it, and is not burdened with the ideological need to defend Obama.

Is it really a wonder that people continue to read The Economist while they flee Newsweek?