Should We Wave Good-Bye to Feminism?

Its impassioned adherents claim that feminism comes in waves. I confess to not being enough of a surfer to have followed all of the waves of feminism, so I am not sure whether we are at wave three or four.

Why waves? Because it allows feminists to gloss over the contradictory positions that different feminists have taken on different issues. Some feminists have believed that sex with a man is always a form of exploitation; some feminists have seen pornography as a form of female empowerment; some feminists celebrate sexual freedom and self-expression.

These contradictions subsist because feminism is like a cult trying to attract more and more adherents. When you tell young women that they can believe whatever they believe, that they can behave however they will, and still join the ranks of feminists... then the concept of different waves is a valuable recruitment tool.

But what if contemporary feminism has fallen into a complete contradiction? Could it be that feminism is more about sacrificing your life to an ideal than about defending women in the world? What if feminism does not much care about what happens to women as long as they are feminists?

Will this realization usher in a new wave of feminism or cause the movement, the cause, and the cult to wilt under the weight of its own contradictions?

Such were my thoughts after I read Philosophy Professor Nancy Bauer's recent reflections on the state of feminism, with special reference to the crucial importance of the now ubiquitous Lady Gaga. Link here.

We should certainly have predicted that what with the monumental cultural importance of Lady Gaga, Her Gaganess would eventually be enlisted as a feminist recruiting tool. Especially for teenage girls.

You love Lady Gaga; you want to become just like her; now, you can do it by becoming a card-carrying feminist.

What does Prof. Bauer say about Lady Gaga: "Apparently, even though she loves men-- she hails them!-- she is a little bit of a feminist because she exemplifies what it looks like for a woman to say, and to believe, that there is nobody like her."

A truly remarkable philosophical jumble, this statement makes you wonder what passes for philosophy in serious universities these days.

Anyway, Bauer believes that even if a woman loves men, even hails them, she can be a little bit of a feminist. Does this mean that she can be a lot of a feminist if she does not love men, if she feels contempt for them?

What does it mean to be a feminist? Bauer says that it involves being able to say and believe that "there is nobody like her."

Now, one does understand the appeal of such statements. Women do want to be loved uniquely; they want to be seen by their lovers as so special that they can offer something that is so unique that no one can take their places.

One wonders what this has to do with feminism or Lady Gaga. It seems merely to be an aspect of femininity. Women's fashion always allows for a larger zone of creativity than does masculine attire.

I will guess that since Bauer asserts firmly that femininity is a social construct, she would not accept that interpretation of her statement.

I suspect that it means that she takes Lady Gaga as sui generis, a creature that is so unique that she has nothing in common with any other creatures. Call it a perfect expression of individuality if you like.

If we were merely talking about Lady Gaga you could say that there is something relentlessly unique in her self-creation. But if that is true, it is hard to see how she can also be a role model. Anyone who modeled herself on Lady Gaga would be adopting traits and characteristics that are not uniquely hers.

Of course, Lady Gaga is not really a role model for young women, nor should she be made into a feminist icon, because she is simply a celebrity, an entertainer. Granted she is very good at it, but there are very few people who achieve the status of unique celebrity-- a star.

If you look at this through Thomist eyes, celebrities are earthly angels... most often of the fallen variety.

What does matter is that if you are uniquely individuated like Lady Gaga then you do not really belong to a human community. You live elsewhere; in a world of your own creation. I am not going to criticize this. But you have to be willing to pay a very steep price to pull it off. And it is mostly not an example that anyone should be encouraged to emulate.

Bauer's larger point is that a celebrity like Lady Gaga can adopt all of the tropes of femininity while trying to deconstruct them at the same time. If you are not thoroughly conversant with philosophical double talk, you may think of it as self-parody.

At what point then does self-parody become a contradiction in terms, and what is the price that this exacts on the young women who have decided that they can live their lives as they please, in full defiance of social norms, but also in complete contradiction to the requirements of rational thought and self respect?

In various prior posts I have expressed my view that feminism has some considerable responsibility for the hook-up culture that prevails on college campuses. Nonetheless it is not with any real sense of satisfaction that I find a philosopher explaining and justifying hooking up on the grounds that it is liberating and empowering.

And ask yourself what these feminist grandees would have said if a man had suggested that it was empowering for women to get drunk enough to give blow jobs to strange men.

In Bauer's words: "If there's anything that feminism has bequeathed to young women of means, it's that power is their birthright. Visit an American college campus on a Monday morning and you'll find any number of amazingly ambitious and talented young women wielding their brain power, determined not to let anything-- including a relationship with some needy, dependent man-- get in their way. Come back on party night, and you'll find many of these same girls... wielding their sexual power, dressed as provocatively as they dare, matching guys drink for drink-- and then hook up for hook up."

Given the relatively lesser body mass of women compared with that of men, matching men drink for drink is a fool's errand. Anyone who glorifies such behavior has completely lost touch with reality.

And why should Bauer be in awe of the fact that these girls can match men, hook up for hook up? If these women are so desirous of becoming unique individual self-creations, why should they be trying to imitate male behavior?

And let's not overlook the piece of undisguised contempt for "some needy, dependent man" with whom these women might have relationships. The latest wave of feminism prefers hooking up to relationships.

According to Bauer, the party ends with said liberated empowered inebriated woman down on her knees. As Bauer so nicely expresses it: "When they're on their knees in front of a worked-up guy they just met at a party, they genuinely feel powerful-- sadistic even."

As I said, if a man had called this an empowering experience he would have been run out of town.

These new wave feminists have learned to hold men in contempt but then get so drunk that they feel obligated to offer them oral relief when said men get "worked up."

If you think that this is a sign of emancipation, well then, I am not very encouraged about the current state of academic philosophy.

These women have been convinced by their philosophy professors to allow themselves to be used for someone else's sexual pleasure. They have been so thoroughly indoctrinated, even brainwashed, by their teachers that they actually believe that falling to their knees in front of the mighty phallus is empowering.

As for whether or not these girls are free to say No, well, after they have been matching these guys shot for shot, their freedom, I would say, becomes more compromised. And if they have learned in their courses of advanced theory that they themselves have elicited said erectile response, then they have probably also been taught that they now have a fundamental moral obligation to service what they provoked. Some might call it: taking responsibility.

Bauer wants to explain this away by telling us that these women are strong enough, free enough, and powerful enough to live out these contradictions.

If we were talking about adults, I would say that if they are fool enough to believe her then they are free to do as they please. We are, I would say, somewhat more concerned that young women, those who are vulnerable to the siren song of this form of pseudo-philosophizing, are more often than not its victims. And that, I will say for my part, I find very, very sad.

"The Jews Are Being Scapegoated Again"

How has it happened that the lessons of Nazi genocide have been so thoroughly forgotten? How has it happened that in time of economic crisis the world has chosen to scapegoat the Jews?

Shelby Steele's excellent article in the Wall Street Journal provides a cultural analysis of the current state of scapegoating. According to Steele, we in the West have absorbed all of the lessons of what I would call a guilt culture, and, as a consequence, we now find ourselves crippled, unable to assert our values, and unable to stand up for a kindred culture in the Middle East. Link here.

In Steele's words: "... the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremicist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past-- racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on."

People who have been trafficking the lessons of guilt culture might not have realized the practical consequences of teaching the nation to feel guilt about all of its achievements, but these consequences are all too real nonetheless.

It is not really an accident that the progenitor of cultural deconstruction, Martin Heidegger, was an avid and unrepentant supporter of the Third Reich.

We, and by extension, the Israelis, are the champions of modernity. We and they have built the greatest modern societies,with free market capitalism, democratic institutions, the rule of law, and all the rest. Next to this example the Palestinians must feel inferior. They have fallen back on grievances and a cult to victimization.

As Steele explains it, victims grant themselves a moral superiority over modernity. The mind of the victim thinks this: "And in my victimization I enjoy a moral and human grandiosity-- no matter how smart and modern my enemy is. I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy's wealth proves his inhumanity."

And Steele adds that since Palestinian self-esteem is so closely entwined with hatred for Israel, for modernity, and for the West, that Yassir Arafat could not accept a peace treaty that would have ended the war and ushered in a new age of cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians. Better to destroy, that is, to deconstruct what the others have built, than to built a modern society ourselves.

In Steele's words: "To have accepted that [peace] offer would have been to forgo hatred as consolation and meaning. Thus it would have plunged the Palestinians-- and by implication the broader Muslim world-- into a confrontation with their inferiority relative to modernity. Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace."

God Is in the Details

Strangely enough, there are two famous quotations about details. One says that God is in the details. The other says that the Devil is in the details. Not surprisingly, they are not saying the same thing.

The first suggests that if you look closely at the intricacies of a thing or a problem you will find God. The second means that if you try to work out an agreement down to the last detail you will start having devilish difficulties.

I could have used either proverb as the title of this post. Given that it's Sunday and Father's Day, my better judgment recommended siding with God.

History credits Flaubert with, "God is in the details." Prize winning physicist and wise man Richard Feynman suggested two possible meanings. The first: "nearly everything is interesting enough if you go into it deeply enough." The second: "No problem is too small or too trivial if we really do something about it." Link here.

Feynman's first interpretation says that if you put in the time and energy to get into the details of a problem you will be rewarded. This is another way of saying that virtue-- here the virtue of a work ethic-- yields rewards. Even if the only reward is that the problem or the thing will thoroughly engage your interest.

Feynman's second interpretation offers sound advice. It implies that we should not dismiss problems as too small or too trivial for our attention. We should try to solve them. Problems are there to be solved, not to be ignored.

Small problems solved do not become large problems. When you are too lazy to look into small problems, or when you think that they are beneath your pay grade, they are much more likely to become large problems. Leave a small problem alone to fester and it will eventually turn into a crisis that is beyond your ability to control.

When we come to the adage, the Devil is in the details, we are dealing with something quite different. I hesitate to say that it is simply a polar opposite of the saying about God.

People say that the Devil is in the details when they are talking about an agreement between two parties. The parties might agree on the larger outline of the agreement, or on basic principles, but when it comes to applying those principles to specific situations, they find themselves at loggerheads.

How do you solve a problem when the Devil is in the details? By being detail oriented, by paying close attention to each small aspect of the agreement. You have to love detail and you have to master detail to avoid the problems that arise when negotiation moves into specifics. Someone who thinks that all the real work has been done when two parties arrive at an agreement in principle is simply not doing his job.

When we enter the realm of details there are no short cuts. It's all hard work, and it's all about putting in the extra time.

I would add a point that we can witness in the news every day. Having a command of the details of the situation is essential for leadership and effective management.

Being in charge means knowing, in detail, what is going on. It does not means mouthing platitudes or shifting blame to others.

When you say that you are responsible for handling a crisis, you are obliged to demonstrate a command of the details. The most relevant example today is Gov. Bobby Jindal's management of the Gulf crisis. Jindal is extremely oriented toward detail.

On the other side, our president disappointed even his most fervent supporters by failing to show any command of the details in a scripted address to the nation. When you can't put details in a script, you are seriously disinterested in them.

And then, we have the CEO of BP, Tony Hayward, who testified before a Congressional committee a few days ago and could not answer any specific or detailed questions about the oil gushing out of a broken pipe on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

When it comes to public hearings, we all know that Congresspeople are all grandstanding and no substance. And yet, if Hayward had wanted to neutralize the theatrics of the hearing he could simply have shown that he had studied the situation and mastered the facts. He did not have to offer solutions; he did not have to affix blame. But he should certainly not have kept passing the buck, trying to wash his hands of theproblem by stating that people on a lower level of the corporate hierarchy were making the decisions.

Slogging your way through the details serves another useful purpose. It diminishes your tendency to jump to a conclusion, to construct a narrative that comprises some, but not all, of the facts, and to shift the blame to your enemies or your underlings.

How the World Sees Obama

Usually, when the press asks how the world sees the American president, it looks at opinion polls. This would be useful if foreign policy were a popularity contest. It is not. At the risk of being taxed with elitism, we do better to look at how those who wield power and influence measure the new American president.

Who better to take the pulse of elite world opinion than Mort Zuckerman, media mogul and real estate tycoon. I believe that Zuckerman supported Obama and voted for him. He is not an Obama basher.

More importantly, he is well connected to the people around the world who conduct foreign policy.

Yesterday Zuckerman wrote an article entitled: "World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur." Link here. The article picks up many of the themes that I and others have been writing about for some time now. I am reasonably certain that it will be much discussed over the next few days.

On elite world opinion, Zuckerman writes: "... a critical mass of influential people in world affairs who once held high hopes for the president have begun to wonder whether they misjudged the man. They are no longer dazzled by his rock star personality and there is a sense that there is something amateurish and even incompetent about how Obama is managing U. S. power."

One has to wonder what took them so long. Nonetheless, neither Zuckerman nor anyone else he quotes impugns Obama's motives. They define him as inexperienced and amateurish. To compensate for his lack of understanding of the complexities of foreign policy, he falls back on his skill as a talker, even a preacher, someone who is a master of rhetoric.

Not only, but Obama believes that his verbal facility will solve all problems. When a leader does not know his limits, he suffers from hubris.

In Zuckerman's words: "The Obama presidency has so far been characterized by a well-intentioned but excessive belief in the power of rhetoric with too little appreciation of reality and loyalty."

In particular, Zuckerman looks at the way the Arab world sees Obama's handling of Iran. In his words: "The underlying issue is that the Arab world has different estimates on how to deal with an aggressive, expansionist Iran. The Arabs do not deal with Iran with the open hand of a handshake but with the clenched fist of power.... Arab leaders ask whether Iran will be emboldened by what they interpret as American weakness and faltering willpower. They did not see Obama or his administration as understanding the region, where naivete is interpreted as a weakness of character, as amateurish, and as proof of the absence of the tough stuff of which leaders are made."

Of course, the issue is not merely the president. Our Secretary of State is also a rank amateur in foreign policy. No one can really imagine that she has a sufficient grasp of the reality of the issues at play in these areas.

Zuckereman is rather too kind here: "Strategic decisions go well beyond being smart, which Obama certainly is. They must be based on experience that discerns what works, what doesn't-- and why. This requires experienced staffing, which Obama and his top appointees do not seem to have."

The problem is not the staffing, but the people in charge.

So, where are we in the era of the Obama foreign policy reset: "America right now appears to be unreliable to traditional friends, compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies. One renowned Asian leader stated recently at a private dinner in the United States: 'We in Asia are convinced that Obama is not strong enough to confront his opponents, but we fear that he is not strong enough to support his friends.'"

We can only wonder whether those who voted for Obama fully grasped the consequences of handing over American foreign policy to an amateur. If were swept up in the wave of rock-star glory, they should prepare themselves for a rough landing.

How to Lead

I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about leadership. It is all the more important when our leader-in-chief is such a poor leader.

As of now, this is not partisan sniping; it is the general political consensus.

Criticism might warn you not to emulate President Obama, but it does not tell you how to lead effectively.

This morning I was reading some great columns by Robert Sutton about what makes for a great boss. Link here.

Sutton arrived at his leadership principles by interviewing effective leaders and the people who work for them. His ideas are generated from the bottom up.

There are far too many good ideas in his article to cover in a single post. For today I will examine the first quality that makes for good leadership. Which Sutton calls: knowing what it feels like to work for me. He elaborated on this point in a further column. Link here.

Clearly, Sutton is not telling leaders that they need to go around feeling everyone's pain. If this had been yet another call for empathy it would not merit my or your attention.

Since every leader knows that he sets an example for others, thus, that his mood and attitude become the gold standard for his company, he takes time and care to present the qualities that he wants to see more of.

People emulate their leaders. Good leaders know it and behave accordingly.

But that is not exactly what Sutton is getting at here. He has something else in mind: Good bosses, he says: "... devote real energy to reading expressions, noting behaviors, and making constant adjustments to help their people think independently and express themselves without reservation."

This is not just a great leadership skill; it forms the basis for all effective interpersonal communication.

A good leader, Sutton is saying, will constantly adjust his conversation, his attitude, and his comportment in order to be sure that his staff, his employees, even his colleagues always feel that their views are respected. He might have added... to be sure that all those who work for him will be motivated to do their best work.

If you are a leader and no one is willing to give you bad news or to offer new ideas, the chances are very good that you have created the wrong kind of atmosphere in your office.

If a staff member has difficulty talking to you or expressing himself fully then you are probably doing something to make him feel that his views are not respected, and thus, that you simply do not care to hear what he has to say.

Just as conversation is not about expressing your feelings or thoughts willy nilly, regardless of how they will affect anyone else, so leadership is not about giving orders and telling people what you think regardless of how they will affect your team.

You want your team to function optimally, so you care more for the reactions you are eliciting than how it feels to get things off your chest.

Evidently, person-to-person, face-to-face conversation facilitates this aspect of leadership. When you are in someone's presence and are looking him in the eye, you can more quickly tell how well you are doing. If you see that you are losing him, or that he is starting to feel intimidated, then you must quickly revise your conversational tactic.

People who are good at public speaking try to develop this facility. They are constantly reading the audience reaction; counting the number of people who are nodding off or heading for the exist. If they see that they are losing their audience they shift gears, go off script, turn off the teleprompter, and try to engage their audience before it is too late.

Anything less than face-to-face conversation adds degrees of difficulty. It is easier to read the panoply of gestures that you can witness when you are talking with someone directly than it is to grasp the reaction of someone who is talking on the phone, or via email, or texting.

Remarkably, Sutton's advice flies in the face of the kind of conventional wisdom that the therapy culture has been purveying.

Where the therapy culture tells us not to concern ourselves with how we look to others a good leader is constantly aware of how he looks to others.

Where the therapy culture has tried to teach people, under the guise of free association, to say whatever comes to mind regardless of the effect it will produce on others, good leaders are constantly adjusting their speech in order to ensure that their listeners feel respected and valued.

Which means that many forms of therapy are going to undermine your leadership skills... in a very serious way.

So, Sutton tells both actual and potential leaders to ask themselves to ascertain how it feels to work for them. He is not concerned with the leader's knowing how it feels to be in charge, to be on top, to give the orders... but, how it feels to be one of those who is reporting to the boss, who is receiving the orders, and who has just been put down for offering an opinion in a meeting.

This is easier said than done. It reminds me of the experience of editing your own writing.

Bad writers tend to believe that however they feel while they are doing the writing is a sign of how good or bad it is.

They develop a form of self-delusion, in the sense that they ignore the effect their writing might or might not have on an outside reader.

A good writer always edits his writing. He does so by first putting it aside. He needs to break out of the mindset he was in while he was writing. Then, after a time, he can hopefully return to it with fresh eyes. A good writer is a good editor, and being a good editor means being able to read as though he were someone else.

Knowing what it is like for someone else to read your writing strikes me as similar to knowing what it is like for someone else to work for you.

It is an interesting psychological state, an ability to get out of oneself, and to put one's hopes and feelings to the side. And it also involves a considerable level of humility, to say nothing of an ability to tolerate considerable psychological pain.

If you start asking yourself what it feels like to work for you or what it feels like to read your writing, then I promise that you will have to tolerate many moments of pure and utter embarrassment.

Call them cringe-worthy moments, if you like. They are times when you read something that you wrote and say to yourself: How could I have written such a thing? Or, what was I thinking?

When you are a leader, and you start asking yourself how it feels to work for you, you will have many moments when you become positively horrified about how bad you look to outside observers and about all the difficulties you have place in the path of your best employees.

"It Was Like He Was Raised by Wolves"

We all have our own ways of falling out of love. There are no right and wrong ways to discover that our hopes have been dashed, or that we have been fooled, tricked, or had. Finding out that we have misjudged someone's character or misread our own feelings is painful indeed.

We have all had the experience. We have all gotten over it. Such is life.

And most of us do it in private. We have enough trouble with our own lost love; we do not want to be privy to everyone else's mistakes.

As I and many others have noted, you do not need to have an intimate relationship to fall in love. You can fall in love with an image, with a mirage, even with an icon. You can fall in love with a celebrity, from a safe distance, and invest all of your hope in his presumably salutary persona.

And you can fall in love with a politician, with a leader, even with a demagogue.

If it ever should happen that you find yourself falling in love with a political leader, that should tell you, off the top, that he is not a very capable leader. He might be overflowing with eloquence and charisma, but if you are feeling especially amorous, you are almost certainly idealizing him. If you have to idealize a leader, you are compensating for the lack of true leadership qualities.

Such is the case of the pundits and media mavens who fell in love with Barack Obama. See my previous comments here. When you have sacrificed your professional integrity to your love affair with a mirage, you have, as they say, some serious 'splaining to do.

Thus my interest in Maureen Dowd's latest effort to salvage her love for Barack Obama. Clearly, she has been disappointed by him; clearly he has let her down. Just as clearly, she is not alone. To use one of Obama's favorite tropes, he is not the man she thought he was. Link here.

In truth, when you fall madly in love, the person is never the person you thought they were. That's why they call it "mad."

How did she get him so wrong? Having asked herself the question, Dowd responds that compared with his two predecessors, Clinton and Bush, Obama seemed to be "normal."

Leave to the side that Obama was not running against either Bill Clinton or George Bush, Dowd seems to be using the word "normal" to describe a state that is supposed to be goal of therapy. She is saying, get this, that Obama is not as normal as he seemed to be, and thus, he would be a better president, he could repair their relationship and revive her dying love, by getting some therapy!

All of those who have been imploring Obama to get in touch with his feelings, the better to project some anger about what is going on in the Gulf are saying that Obama's presidency can be cured by therapy.

If you are not immersed in the therapy culture, you might be surprised at what Dowd is implying: namely, that if Obama were more normal then he would naturally know how to provide leadership, would be able to take control of situations, and would show the right emotion at the right time.

As we all know, traditional psychotherapy has never concerned itself with practicalities like managing your life or your relationships. It has always assumed that if you resolve your past issues and get in touch with your feelings, you will automatically know how to deal with whatever problems cross your path.

It's job is to lead you toward normality, or, at least, toward a reasonable facsimile. Once you are sufficiently normal you will naturally make the right decisions and do the right thing.

In therapy, this has never really worked as promised. If you know why you are afraid of riding a bicycle, that does not mean that you now know how to ride a bicycle. In truth, the best way to get over your fear of bicycles is to jump on a bike.

The history of psychotherapy is populated by patients who have explored all of their complexes and resolved their issues to the full satisfaction of their therapists, but, who still have the same problems they had when they began therapy.

What would Obama be doing if he possessed sufficient psychological health? Dowd answers: "President Obama's bloodless quality about people and events, the emotional detachment that his aides said allowed him to see things more clearly, has instead obscured his vision. It has made him unable to understand things quickly on a visceral level and put him on the defensive in this spring of our discontent, failing to understand that Americans are upset that a series of greedy corporations have screwed over the little guy without enough fierce and immediate pushback from the president."

As it happens, Dowd is right about Obama's bloodless quality, his failure to grasp events, and perhaps even his failure to accept his role as president. And let's notice that she is trying to show him how to use strong rhetoric to express fierce rage.

But she is wrong to say that it would all be better if Obama expressed enough anger. As Dr. Helen Smith wrote two weeks ago, getting angry does not help. Link here. Great leaders are not distinguish for the quality or depth of their emotions. They are, as Dr. Helen says, cool, rational, and in command of the situation. Obama does not need to channel the rage of Maureen Dowd; he needs to emulate Bobby Jindal.

Of course, it's possible to be too cool, and too detached, so completely overwhelmed by events that you look lost.

And therein lies another kind of problem. Dowd identifies it well by quoting an especially telling remark made by Michelle Obama. In Dowd's words: "Michelle once told a friend that 'Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves.' But he seems to have come through exceptionally well adjusted."

Ann Althouse was not impressed by Dowd's begging the basic question. Althouse comments: "How does that work? Raised-by-wolfishness leads to (a semblance) of normality? Solitude fosters a deep longing to be with others and one overachieves in the appearance of normal department?" Link here.

Happily enough, Althouse includes a picture of herself under a statue of the legendary she-wolf that nursed Romulus and Remus, both of whom turned out fairly well. Even if only in mythic terms.

Look at what is implied in the notion that it was like Obama was raised by wolves. Being brought up spending too much time with yourself would not make you a very engaged and emotionally connected husband. Being alone and isolated, you would not have learned basic skills like cooperation, teamwork, negotiation, and leadership. Failing to spend enough time with others you would not have learned how to get along with others. In those cases you are not likely to know how to form friendships and relationships. And you will not have a clue about how to lead.

Someone who is brought up in isolation, who does not have the experience of fitting into groups, has probably, if he is bright, lived within his mind. And he probably relates to great minds more than to people who know how to get things done in the world, who know how to organize groups, and accomplish tasks.

If he lived in his mind, he might have come to believe that minds should prevail over matter, that minds create worlds, that a group of great thinkers can solve anything. Keep in mind that no one around Obama has had real administrative and managerial experience.

As it happens, Ann Althouse also voted for Obama, not because she thought that he was "normal" but because, she thought he was the better of the two choices. And now, she advises Maureen Dowd to accept responsibility for her vote. In her words: "We need to see what we have done. We've elected a man and we need to cast aside our silly illusions and see what we've done."

"The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People"

Taking off from Stephen Covey's famous concept, Prof. Dan Ariely has just posted a list of the 7 habits that will make you a highly ineffective person. Link here. Via Simoneon Sense.

Ariely begins with a valuable meditation about habits. Habits are automatic behaviors. When we say that a behavior is habitual we mean that it has something like a mind of its own. Whatever caused us to start doing it this way and not that way, when we continue to do it this way, without giving it any thought, it is a habit.

Habits can be good and bad. They are largely more efficient and more economical than having to think through your choices each time you have breakfast. You do not want to waste time every morning trying to figure out whether you should have Special K or a bagel for breakfast. Habits constitute life's daily routines. Without routines, and a sense of coherent organization, we would simply waste a large amount of time.

Ariely does not mention it, but one habit that must makes people ineffective is the insistence that their actions be meaningful expressions of thought or feeling. Too much spontaneity and surprise will make you highly ineffective.

Once a behavior becomes a habit, it bypasses a certain amount of mental processing and decision making. If you decided to behave a certain way because of a specific situation-- like avoiding subways after a threat has been announced-- and continue to behave that way after the threat alert has been canceled, then you have developed a habit. In this case, an ineffective habit.

Sometimes we even forget why we developed this or that habit. When we are dealing with a good habit, this is not a problem. When we are dealing with a bad habit-- like alcoholism, slovenliness, dawdling, or overeating-- it can become a problem.

Psychotherapy is divided over its willingness to accept the existence of habits. Cognitive and behavioral therapy works directly on changing bad habits; most often it follows Aristotle's concept that the best way to overcome a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. These therapies do not worry themselves about why and how the bad habit got its start. They simply want to change it.

Other forms of therapy are based on the concept that insight cures. Whether they know it or not, these therapies follow Freud. They assume that once you discover why you have gotten yourself into a rut you will naturally know how to get yourself out of it. The fact that this is not true has never much bothered practitioners of this form of treatment.

Thus, these therapies dispense with the notion of habit, and prefer to consider symptoms as meaningful experiences, albeit experiences whose meaning the person ignores.

That much being said, and without further ado, I would like to examine Ariely's list of habits that are guaranteed to make you less effective. In fact, I would not have chosen the same list, but that is not very important. Ariely offers an interesting take on bad habits, and that suffices to engage our interest.

His first bad habit is: procrastination. It has been called the thief of time; it involves putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. We all know that it is a bad habit.

An old psychological principle-- first articulated by Jeremy Bentham, I believe-- suggests that we tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Those who adhere to this principle present it as an axiomatic truth. Unfortunately, it does not work very well as an ethical principle.

Say you have a choice between an unpleasant task-- finishing a report, returning a message to someone who is not very important, chopping up vegetables for the pot au feu-- and a more pleasurable alternative-- watching a ballgame, going to a dance class, having coffee with a friend, shopping for new shoes-- which would you choose?

If you believe that you should seek out pleasure to reduce stress then you are likely to choose one of the latter options. If you believe that you should not put off until tomorrow what you should do today, you might feel ethically obligated to choose the former.

If you choose the more pleasurable activity you will be starting on the road to developing a bad habit. If the opposite, you will have laid the groundwork for a good habit, and for greater efficiency and effectiveness.

As Ariely says, after a while the prospect of performing the unpleasant duty will become more and more unpleasant, to the point where you will decide not to do it at all. Why would you not find something more pleasurable, and thus, less stressful, to occupy your precious time?

Of course, the theories that define us as pleasure-seeking organisms-- which used to be called lotus-eaters-- have no notion of the satisfaction of fulfilling obligations and getting a job done.

Ariely's second bad habit also concerns task management. He proposes that we often underestimate the amount of time that it takes to complete a project-- whether cleaning the house or getting cross town in traffic or sending out packages.

This may be caused by inexperience, or by insouciance. We might simply have no experience with mid-Manhattan crosstown traffic. But then, if we do not learn from being late for an appointment, we may develop the bad habit of underestimating the time it takes to travel in the city and find ourselves saddled with the bad habit of always being late, and of feeling obliged to invent ever more complex excuses.

Third of Ariely's list is this, which is, hopefully, limited to young people: texting while driving. For those of us who have never texted, this is the modern version of trying do too many things at once, getting caught in the multi-tasking trap of thinking that you are so superior that you can do everything at the same time.

Surely, when lose focus and concentration you will end up not doing anything well. As everyone knows, texting while driving can also be fatal, to oneself or to others or to both.

The bad news is that Ariely, who teaches at Duke, has discovered that nearly all of his graduate students have, at one time or another, texted while driving. If that doesn't get you worried about the younger generation, I don't know what will.

Ariely explains that a person who feels the need to text while driving is sacrificing short-term benefits for long term safety. But it is also amazing that students are so habituated to the form of instant gratification that texting seems to provide that neither they nor their friends can tolerate a delayed response to a message.

The fourth habit that Ariely declares will make you ineffective is: overchecking your email. This involves yielding to temptation, and especially the temptation caused by distraction. As with texting while driving this habit seems to reflect a basic anguish about feeling disconnected from others, an intolerance of separateness, and a wish to feel in constant contact with other people.

As with the third bad habit, this one also involves loss of focus and concentration. A person who is constantly checking emails cannot be properly focused on the task at hand and will necessarily become more ineffective than the person who can wait before checking emails.

The fifth bad habit concerns obsessively comparing ourselves to everyone else. Ariely calls this: "relativity in salary," and he explains it in terms of an experiment. Would you rather have a salary of $50,000 in a world where all salaries range between $40,000 and $50,000 or would you prefer to have a salary of $55,000 in a world where all salaries range between $55,000 and $65,000?

Strangely enough, most people would choose $55,000 even though that would put them at the bottom of the salary range. I say, strangely, because I would imagine that most people would choose to be at the top of the range rather than the bottom. If not, why would there be status hierarchies?

Since Ariely is a behavioral economist, I am confident that he has seen or performed research that has demonstrated his point, but I still wonder whether those who have been asked the question have been given sufficient time to give it full consideration.

Ariely's sixth bad habit is overoptimism. As he says, there is nothing wrong with optimism. If you do not believe that you will be able to complete the project then the chances are good that you will be spending too much of your time trying to figure out how you can excuse your failure. And yet, if you are overoptimistic, you might commit to complete far too many tasks in the time allotted, and find yourself with the exact same problem: how to explain away the fact that you did not do what you said you would do.

In an ironic twist, Ariely does not list a seventh bad habit. He says that he was too optimistic about his ability to come up with that many.

So, if you are looking for a seventh, I would recommend the one I offered at the beginning of this post: trying to make life into one surprise after another. Or else, making a fetish out of spontaneity. Or else, believing that all of your actions should express your thoughts or feelings.