Making and Keeping Friends

Gretchen Rubin has compiled some useful tips for making and keeping friends, thus, for managing friendship. She adds a note to the effect that having friends is one of the basic building blocks to a happy life.

Link here.

The Joy of Aging

We all do it. We all get older. We are all getting older on a daily basis. Yet, unless we are a first growth Bordeaux we do not believe that there is any joy in aging.

At best, we might say that someone is aging gracefully. When a man seems to be stoic about his inevitable and inexorable decline we grant him a measure of virtue. Mostly, for not bothering us with the details of his physical degradation.

It's almost too much of a cliche to say it, but our culture values youth. It adores the young; it yearns for their lithe perfect bodies; it seeks to emulate their passionate natures, their imprudent actions. We are looking for a way to freeze youth in time, so that we will never change, never get old, never suffer the ravages of advancing age.

We all want to be young again. We regret that we never can. We want to regress to those halcyon days when life was one big party, when we had no cares, no responsibilities, and nothing to keep us from the pursuit of pleasure.

Since I am not, by any measure, any longer in the bloom of youth, you should know what is coming next.

The joy of youth is one thing. No one should ever judge the young for acting their age. But do those of us who are no longer young really want to return to those days when we were callow, inexperienced, and immature? Do we want to go back to the time when we were dependents, not responsible for ourselves or anyone else, outsiders to the great game of human commerce and community, buffeted by decisions made by others.

Would you want to trade adulthood for a life of dancing on the beach? Do you really want your children to grow up and become beach bums?

By valuing youth beyond reason-- and that is what it means to erect a cult to youth-- we are emulating the passionate intensity of youth. But we are also telling ourselves that at some point, relatively early in our natural life span, we are going to reach our peak. After that peak, life is all downhill.

In a youth culture we tick off the years in terms of what we lose: our looks, our clear skin, our glow, our health, our hair, our minds, our bodily functions... until we become dottering and drooling old fools depending for the most elementary vital functions on the kindness of nurses.

And you were wondering why so many people get depressed? Or why happiness is so elusive?

We may all consider that we are in perfect harmony with nature, but our youth culture forces us to fight it at every turn. Some of the battles in this war are innocuous enough. We are rushing off either to whiten our teeth or to smooth our our wrinkles. We indulge every manner of cosmetic surgery... all to prevent that dread possibility that we might actually look our age.

So desirous are we of recovering our lost youth that we plunge into psychotherapies that induce regression to earlier childhood states. We find some strange salutary pleasure in keeping in touch with our inner child.

Those of us who think that adolescence is the highpoint of human moral development indulge in constant and meaningless rebellion against all manner of authority.

We have engaged ourselves in a losing war against nature, and then we wonder why we find it so difficult to feel any measure of happiness.

As Aristotle put it, happiness involves progress, it involves improving our skills, getting better at what we do well, learning through experience. As Aristotle knew well, happiness is antithetical to a culture that worships youth.

If you are still basking in the glow of youth, I can promise you that the older you get the more you will see the virtue in the Chinese precept called: filial piety. It refers to the respect that youth owes to age.

Filial piety recognizes that age most often embodies the wisdom that comes from experience, and that youth should respect such wisdom. Young people who cannot take advice will spend their lives reinventing the wheel.

The young follow their passions; they accumulate objects; they seek pleasure with a wild abandon that the rest of us are supposed to envy. The young are short on experience; thus they are constantly learning from their mistakes. And they need to have enough freedom to make some mistakes.

Older people are more temperate in their demeanor, more rational in their judgments, more tolerant in their outlook, more skilled at social interactions, and more dignified in their demeanor.

Nowadays we in the West are engaged in a great struggle against rising Asia, especially with the empire that is China. Can we succeed in this struggle if we are always looking back with nostalgia for a lost time and a lost feeling? Would it not be better to do a 180 degree turn and start facing forward, looking to the joy of self-improvement, and the special joy of a more ethical perspective on life.

Is This the End of the Obama Era?

It wasn't a lot of fun while it lasted. But yesterday spelled the beginning of the end of the Obama era in American politics. At least, we can hope so.

It took the American people exactly one year to discover that they had been tricked by a candidate who presented himself as one thing and governed as another.

Last night the people of Massachusetts drove a stake through the heart of the three-headed beast that was the Obama domestic agenda. The three heads of health care reform, cap and trade, and card check were a vampire sucking the jobs out of the American economy.

Scott Brown's victory also voiced a resounding No to Obama's pathetic attempts at foreign policy. True enough, we are more liked around the world. But we are also less respected. The people of the world are no longer convinced that America will defend its interests or those of its allies.

The election rejected Obama's habit of apologizing for America, his tendency to talk the country down, and his failure to embody American national pride.

And it voiced a resounding No to Obama's treatment of terrorists. Some said that Obama's reaction to the panty bomber started moving things in Brown's direction. Clearly, when Brown stated that we should be spending our money defeating terrorists instead of hiring lawyers for them resonated among the Massachusetts electorate.

The election rejected Obama's politics of personal arrogance. It asserted the value of democracy over Obamocracy.

Those who have been saying that the election humiliated the president and his party are correct.

Humiliation, via ridicule, can be used to demoralize opponents. It can be used to punish enemies. It is a direct assault on personal pride, but it can also be used to attack and diminish the false pride of arrogance.

As it happens Obama has a gift for ridicule himself. I imagine that he obtained it by channeling Jon Stewart. But his gift seemed to abandon him when he flew into Massachusetts last weekend to support Martha Coakley by ridiculing Scott Brown.

There Obama made jokes about Scott Brown's old truck. They weren't funny. But they did remind everyone of Obama's arrogance, elitism,and condescension. Why attack someone whose pickup has 200,000 miles on it....

Obama declared that anyone can buy a truck. Say what? Meaning what? The trope fell flat; there was no substance to it. Obama was winging it, but he didn't know that the wind was no longer with him.

Now, as Paul Begala said on CNN last night, it's a question of Obama's character. Begala said, correctly, that people show more character dealing with defeat than they do embracing victory.

But then, just as I was nodding in silent assent to his notion, Begala offered his prescription for good character. He declared that if Obama had character he would stand on principle, show what he believed in, and assert his ideas strongly and without hesitation.

Yikes. Begala seems to believe that strength of character lies in zealotry, in being a true believer, in ignoring the voice of the people.

Actually, Massachusetts voters were making an important point about character. Having character means keeping your word. When you say one thing and do another you show that you cannot be trusted. When you pretend to be one thing as a candidate and act like something else when you are elected, you are showing that you have no character. And when you talk down the nation you are leading, then clearly you have no character.

Obama's troubles with his health care initiative derive from the simple fact that he ignored the polls that insisted that the American people did not want it. He assumed that he could impose his will on a recalcitrant and ignorant people. And he imagined that they would eventually thank him for leading them out of the darkness and into the light.

Real character requires effective leadership, working with opponents as well as allies, to solve the real problems that are now bedeviling the country. Real character requires that we put the national interest over the party interest, and that we do what is best for the country, regardless of the effect on our own political fortunes.

Those who think like Begala want Obama to channel populist anger and redirect it against the banking industry. As though that would solve the problem of chronic unemployment!

Of course, the Obama agenda is more about the will-to-power of an over-educated elite than it is about solving problems.

Last night the people of Massachusetts let Obama know who is the real boss. It was an amazing we-the-people moment.

It is nice to opine about how this election will be a wake-up call like 1994. Unfortunately, a single election does not have that much in common with the electoral tsunami that swept the Democrats from power in 1994.

Sen. Scott Brown will surely stop the Obama agenda in its tracks. This is a good thing. And his election may well foreshadow a very bad time for the Democrats this November.

Still, it does not introduce a new political agenda or create a major political realignment. Nancy Pelosi is still Speaker of the House and Harry Reid is still in charge of the Senate.

Their wings have clearly been clipped, but neither they nor the president has an economic growth agenda. They will talk a lot about jobs, but beyond spending more money they do not seem to have a very clear idea about how to bring down the unemployment level.

Obama is not going to pull a Bill Clinton. The 1994 election radically transformed the political landscape. It brought in a new Congress with a new agenda called the Contract with America.

When Bill Clinton signed the bills that constituted the major part of the Republican agenda, he help produce a period of economic growth and prosperity. For the moment no such transformation looks possible this year.

If you have read this far in my post you definitely deserve a reward. The best I can do is to link an article that expresses the level of anger and disappointment that we saw in the polling booths of Massachusetts yesterday.

Its author is Mort Zuckerman, centrist Democrat and Obama supporter, Chairman of a company called Boston Properties, media mogul, and sensible commentator on the passing political and economic scene. So here is Zuckerman's article on Obama. It's title says it all: "He's Done Everything Wrong." Link here.

Memoirs, Confessions, and Therapy

Daniel Mendelsohn opens his excellent essay about memoir with Sigmund Freud's exclamation that he could never write an autobiography. Link here.

Considering that memoir-writing is endemic to our therapy culture, Mendelsohn is correct to begin his review of Ben Yagoda's book: "Memoir: A History" with Freud's statement.

Freud had been offered a $5,000 advance to write a memoir. He refused because he felt that he could not do it without indulging in an unacceptable level of indiscretion.

Since Freud believed that a truthful account of one's mental life would reveal intemperate, sordid, and criminal wishes, he chose to demur.

He added, as a note, that the genre invited, even encouraged, self-deception and mendacity. According the his theory, the ego would never allow the level of truth-telling entailed in complete and honest self-exposure.

Then, Freud mentioned, that for $500,000 he would feel tempted to write an autobiography. Thereby he proved his own point, revealing one of his own sordid desire.

It reminds me of an old joke. There are several versions. Here's one: A man asks a woman whether she would sell her body for $1,000,000. She replies that she would certainly be tempted. He then asks whether she would sell her body for $10. Indignantly, she refuses: "What do you think I am?"

To that the man replies: "We already know what you are. We are just negotiating the price."

Surely, many people write memoirs to make money.Some others, Yagoda says, feel compelled to exhibit themselves. Given our cultural values we see these tendencies played out every day in memoirs, on talk shows, and in so-called reality shows.

And yet, it was not always thus. The first, and probably still the greatest memoir, was the "Confessions" of Saint Augustine.

Hopefully, you will grant me that Augustine was not an exhibitionist and was not in it for the money.

If we have suffered Freud's influence we will have difficulty granting him a more savory motive. If we have gotten beyond Freud, then we might say that Augustine was sacrificing part of his dignity for a greater cause, the Christian faith. For Augustine the memoir served to proselytize his faith and Church that embodied it.

Augustine was writing of his own journey from "utter abjection to improbable redemption." But he was doing so from within a social organization.

Most people overlook this most important and rather obvious point. For a member of the Christian Church confession is a sacred duty; it is an essential part of the sacrament of penance.

Usually our therapy-addled minds cause us to question the motives of people who write memoirs. I am suggesting that we try thinking of their rhetorical force, that is, the effect they are producing on other people.

Clearly, Augustine was not revealing sins to gain fame or fortune; he was setting an example, showing others how to confess. Since the privacy of the confessional is inviolate, how else would Christians know what was expected of them?

I have often said that the therapy culture and much psychotherapy derives from religion, not from science or medicine.

As Michiko Kakutani described our culture: we are acting according to: "the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art."

Where Augustine wanted people to confess in private to a minister of the Church, the therapy culture induces people to confess in private to someone who pretends to represent science. And it declares that psychotherapy will grant them the kind of redemption that can only be demonstrated by writing a memoir.

People confessed to priests in order to redeem their sins. People write memoirs to show that they have been redeemed, that is, cured.

Like confession, psychotherapy is strictly private; its secrets are fundamentally inviolate. And, like confession, psychotherapy lures people into what Mendelsohn describes as: "unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupcon of meretriciousness."

But how then did this pseudo-scientific process give rise to a blizzard of memoirs? Why are so many people willing to embarrass themselves, reveal family secrets, and betray friends?

Perhaps there is an element of sophistry here. The therapist, like the priest is enjoined not to reveal what takes place in therapy or confession, but that does not mean that the patient is burdened by the same constraints.

But why is it that penitents have never showed the shamelessness that seems endemic to our therapy-laden culture?

Ask the question that way and you can see the difference between the Church and the therapy culture. The Church must grant its members a dignified public face because it constitutes a community. As a community it is organized by principles of respectability. Had it insisted on public confession it would have undermined its cohesiveness as a community.

True believing members of the therapy culture might feel like they are part of a virtual community, but they are not, by virtue of their participation in therapy, members of any real community. In fact, therapy tends to weaken if not sever social connections.

Like the Church the therapy culture traffics in sin and guilt. But where the Church grants some validity to shame, the therapy culture dismisses it as inimical to individual human self-actualization.

This means that the therapy culture has its roots in an anarchic impulse; the Church has one of its roots in an organizational impulse.

According to the therapy culture the hallmark of mental health is overcoming shame. If that is true, then the best way that you can show the world how healthy you are is to reveal your most sordid secrets, regardless of the effects this will have on others, and regardless of the damage you will do to your social ties.

When Augustine confessed in public, he wanted people to flock to the Church to confess in private. When the therapy culture promoted shamelessness in the form of public exhibitionism, it induced many people to do the same.

Why should this be so? When your friend embarrasses himself in public, you might feel compelled to run over and cover him up. If it is too late to cover him up, you might have recourse to the second best solution: exposing yourself. If you do so, he will not feel alone and awkward; he will feel more normal.

When you respond to a public memoir by writing your own or by going on television to confess your sins you are not doing God's work, you are doing Freud's work. You are striking a blow against society's repression of the glory of the naked human body and of raw human emotion.

Bringing the Green War Home

First it was an anecdote. Then it became a trend.

When Stephen Asma described his six year old son chastising him for using too much hot water it was charming. See my comments here.

But when the New York Times reports that marriages and families are being torn apart because one spouse is an environmental fanatic while the other is merely "sensitive," it is not longer charming. It is a cause for alarm. Link here.

If you read Leslie Kaufman's article you will see clearly why this is so. Fanaticism is the enemy of civility. Zealots believe that everyone must obey their rules because their cause trumps all others and because their goddess is the one true goddess.

Getting along with other people, whether by engaging in civil debate or by creating a harmonious home life, pales into insignificance when you believe that have been called upon to save the planet from imminent doom.

Since Kaufman and the therapists she interviewed believe that the most hard-core environmentalists are female, I think it fair to say that these people have turned themselves into action heroines... into Wonderwomen.

Sad to say, our culture has found yet another way for people to live their lives in mythic terms. And it has also taught people that falling in love with an idea-- regardless of whether it is true or false-- is more important than loving your husband or children.

Worse yet, once you begin worshiping the goddess you no longer feel the need to respect anyone's personal freedom. The man who is digging into that juicy sirloin is equivalent to Nazi war criminals. Thus, he has no right to his taste in food. And thus, the kind of everyday ritual that cements family bonds is sabotaged in the name of a higher truth.

I would call this sophistry, but it's more like brain fever.

Once they bring their green war into the home environmentalists become monumentally rude. They insist on imposing their own will on their husbands and children. Woe unto him who refuses their imperious demands.

As the Times points out, more than a few marriages are or are going to be endangered by this sloppy habit of thought.

As happens with many of the causes that masquerade as progressive, this movement is clearly reactionary. Giving up creature comforts, learning to live with less, adopting a more hardscrabble way of life... all of these are occurring at a time when the nation seems to be losing ground, especially in manufacturing and industry.

As manufacturing jobs continue their dread migration to the other side of the Pacific, some Americans are getting much too good at adapting. Under the banner of environmentalism they are insisting that it is good to have less.

If they had their way environmentalists would shut down much of the nation's energy grid... being as half of it is run by coal power... and teach people to walk more, to bicycle more, and to grow their own food.

These modern survivalists have never come to terms with the fact that the Industrial Revolution did not merely bring us the cotton gin and the steam engine. It brought us modern sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics, and a far longer lifespan than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It also benefited women by making work more a matter of mind than of muscle.

While some Americans still believe that the nation ought to be competing against the emerging Asian economies for jobs and wealth, others would just as soon give up.

In this war their true cause is surrender. God help us if they prevail.

The Checklist-Driven Life

Just in case you were looking for a way to make your life conform more fully to the Protestant work ethic, Atul Gawande has the answer: checklists. Link to his Financial times article here. Buy his new book, "The Checklist Manifesto" here.

Hard work, discipline, focus, concentration, attention to detail... these qualities, known to produce success for those who follow them rigorously, are embodied in decision-making processes that involve checklists.

Amazingly enough, Gawande notes, everyone knows that checklists improve their decision-making and lead to greater success. They just refuse to use them.

In his words: "In the money business everyone looks for an edge. If someone is doing well, people pounce like starved hyenas to find out how. Almost every idea for making even slightly more money-- investing in internet companies, buying tranches of sliced-up mortgages-- gets sucked up by the giant maw almost instantly. Every idea, that is, except one: checklists."

Why this strange will to ignore the obvious, even at the cost of success. Gawande explains it correctly: people ignore checklists because they want to make their lives conform to a myth. Given the choice between being a mythic character that fails and a human being that succeeds, they choose the former.

In Gawande's words: "We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. There's something deeper, more visceral involved when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow seems beneath us, an embarrassment, to use a checklist. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great-- those we aspire to be-- handle situations of high stakes and complexity. They truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating."

Somehow or other our culture has taught us how to work less effectively. It has imbued us with the values of spontaneity and creativity. It has taught us to make decisions based on intuition and gut feelings.

And it has pronounced this way more normal and healthy than the old checklist-driven way of doing things.

This is another way of saying that we owe this, among other counterproductive practices, to the therapy culture.