Get Thee to a Gym

No one will ever receive a Nobel Prize for discovering how exercise contributes to good health, but someone should.

We greet the latest in heart surgery with awe, but we tend to ignore the benefits of exercise. Or better, we know about it, but don’t do it.

The press reports breathlessly on the benefits of the latest anti-depressant, but it has downplayed the role that aerobic exercise can play in promoting good mental health.

Apparently, we prefer to maintain our health by having things done to us. We find it difficult to go out and do things that will keep us away from doctors and hospitals.

If motivation is needed, yesterday the Huffington Post offered even more reasons to get yourself to the gym.

Among them: exercise will help reverse cognitive decline; it will improve your memory; it will help you to make better decisions and it will improve your self-control.

And that’s not the half of it.

Link to the HuffPo article here. 

Multiculturalism Gone Wild

Doubtless, you have been following the riots in Sweden. A state that prides itself on its multiculturalism is beset by violence. To its shock, the violence is being committed by an ethnic group that has happily received all of Sweden's generous welfare benefits, but refuses to assimilate. 

Hint: it’s not the Finns.

The Daily Mail reports this morning:

It is supposed to be the model multicultural state. But Sweden is facing problems of its own after gangs of immigrants spent a fifth consecutive night rioting  in Stockholm.

Officers are battling to keep the capital under control after hundreds of cars were torched, a police station set alight and fire services kept from  a major blaze by a stone-throwing mob of youths.

The riots seem more like an insurrection than an expression of grievances:

Lars Bystrom, a Stockholm police spokesman, said: ‘Such fires are mainly lit to lure  the police to the scene, who are then attacked.’ 

He admitted officers have been forced to change their tactics, saying: ‘Now if there is a small fire that is not likely to spread, and there is no risk to life, we will send out a patrol and keep an eye on it from a distance.

‘But we are not going to bring in the fire brigade unless it’s really dangerous.’

The attacks on emergency service workers have led to private security companies telling employees to stay at home, as mobs have started attacking anyone wearing a uniform.

Several public transport routes have also been cancelled after rioters started hurling petrol bombs at buses.

A Swedish government that has been falling over itself to provide asylum to refugee-seekers from around the world has discovered that some cultures are not as pusillanimous as its own. It prides itself on its liberal socialist values. Now it is paying the price.

Some people prefer learning the hard way:

Government leaders have been stunned by the ferocity of the violence in a country which has long been touted as a paragon of social justice.

For decades, supporters of multiculturalism have pointed to  Sweden as a classic example of a society which allows immigrants to continue practising their  own culture while living peacefully alongside their host communities.

Around 15 per cent of Sweden’s 9.5million inhabitants were born outside the country.

Unfortunately for the idealistic Swedes, it’s almost impossible to integrate such large numbers of foreign-born immigrants in a short period of time. And this does not even consider the fact that large numbers of these new immigrants do not want to become part of Sweden.

Astonishingly, even the Daily Mail does not have the nerve to mention that the rioters are Muslims.

Meg Jay on Twentysomethings

I wrote admiringly about clinical psychologist Meg Jay last year, so I am happy to present a link to a TED talk she gave about the perils and the promise of being a twentysomething.

My thanks to commenter Leo G for drawing our attention to it in the comments section.

To my mind Jay is pointing toward a new and more productive form of psychotherapy. As you listen to her recount the way she worked with Emma, you will see that she does not shower Emma with empathy, does not tell her to introspect and does not talk about Emma’s issues.

Jay’s approach is practical and tough-minded. She does not want her twentysomething clients to believe that their post-college years are a time for purposeless meandering, an extended adolescence that should be indulged while waiting for adulthood to arrive.

She helps Emma to get a grip on her life, to make a plan and to take action to change what she can change. 

Why Don't More Women Lean In?

Why don’t women lean in more often? Why don’t they assert themselves on the job? Why don’t they work harder to move up in their companies? Why don’t women actively try to gain more responsibility in the business world?

Sheryl Sandberg wants to know. And she is not alone.

Most who have asked this question have arrived at the same conclusion. Sexism has forced women to stifle their potential in order not to threaten the patriarchal order.

Absent sexism, men and women would hold an equal number of executive positions. The world would then become as feminists wish.

Sandberg has suggested that women should assert themselves, be more aggressive, and lean in to take on more responsibility and authority.

It feels like Sandberg is saying: “Yes, you can.”

Of course, Sandberg is not merely offering a pep talk for young women. She has presented herself as a role model. Her glamour shot on the cover of her book, to say nothing of her marriage and family are meant to assuage the qualms of women who might believe that leaning in will compromise their prospects for marriage and family.

This is a variant on a feminist narrative that many women have bought into.

It has been telling young women that when they become successful in their careers they will naturally be more attractive to men.

Women who succeed in business and professions are less needy, less dependent and more autonomous. Since men want women who have their own careers and do not depend on them and who are not around the house very often, they will, by deferring marriage in favor of career, end up having it all.

If a woman does not need a man she will be freed to love him for all the right reasons. She will not love him for his power, prestige or income. She will love him for other, deeper reasons.

And, if she is not a needy clinger herself, a man will love her for who she is, not for her ability to do laundry.

Many women have chosen to live their lives as this narrative dictates. They have postponed marriage in favor of career. They believe that once they have established their careers they will move on to marriage and children, secure in the knowledge that they will have made themselves more attractive to men.

Then, they will, if they choose, easily find a wonderful husband and will have careers that cannot be derailed by the demands of marriage and parenting.

One needs to emphasize that the narrative disrespects women. It assumes that if women do not lean in, there must be something wrong with them. 

Most women have bought the message of deferring marriage and childrearing, but they have not become true feminists, in the Sandberg sense of the term, because they have not been as aggressive as she was in advancing up the corporate hierarchy.

And yet, a recent study suggests that women decide not to lean in, thus, that that they avoid more stressful jobs for a reason that has nothing to do with sexism. What is holding them back is: cortisol.

Katy Winter reports the story in the Daily Mail:

The old adage that women can’t ‘have it all’ may have more than an element of truth in it, according to scientists.

A new survey has revealed that high powered career women who have stressful jobs may struggle to find love.

In addition to long hours, which can make finding time for romance hard, the stress of a busy job causes an increase in the level of the hormone cortisol, which research suggests makes women less good-looking to men.

Men were asked to rate the attractiveness of women’s faces and those who had high levels of the stress hormone were rated lower.

So, women who do not lean in are not crazy and are not traitors to feminism. They chose less stressful jobs and avoided tough and demanding assignments because they knew that the increase in stress would raise their cortisol levels and make them less attractive to men.

It should not be news. Everyone knows, or should know that women who develop powerful careers are more likely to remain single and childless.

This does not in any way mean that a woman should choose one or the other path. But, if a woman wants to put career first, and especially to put a powerful Sandbergian career first, the likelihood is that she will have more difficulty finding a husband and having children.

Forewarned is forearmed.

The Art of the Schmooze

More often disparaged than praised, small talk counts as an important social skill.

Serious thinkers often demean those who know how to exchange a few words of little consequence with new or even old acquaintances.

In the business world everyone knows that the ability to “schmooze,” thus, to engage in small talk, is invaluable.

How much business will get done if colleagues or customers or clients bare their souls or try to turn every conversation into a discussion of profound philosophical matters?

When people schmooze they connect. When thy bare their souls they think they are connecting.

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson derided small talk as a worthless exercise. On the other side of the debate, his contemporary, the sometime ethicist Lord Chesterfield advised his son to master the art of small talk, the better to advance his social and career prospects.

In her essay on small talk Dora Zhang revives Samuel Johnson’s description of two people talking about the weather:

Of course, the perfect obviousness of the weather is why it’s also the ultimate sign of banality. Samuel Johnson famously observed in 1758 that “when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.” 

In the hands of a skilled wordsmith like Dr. Johnson, the stuff of everyday human conversation is rendered ridiculous.

Thanks to Dr. Johnson, among others, serious people make an effort to avoid small talk. They prefer to remain tongue-tied.

Better to be silent than ridiculous. When you keep silent people will assume that you are cultivating deep thoughts. When you engage in small talk they will think that you are empty-headed and inauthentic.

Picturing two mindless beings exchanging information about the weather or the baseball scores or the market closing will provoke gales of laughter in the illiterati, but if we give the matter a little thought, it is not as absurd as it seems.

When two people who have never met discuss the weather, they are connecting. They are trying to find a place where they can connect; they are looking for common ground.

They know, as John Maynard Keynes was supposed to have said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

People connect over what they hold in common.

Even when it comes to those who are near and dear to us, we spend a great deal of time communicating information, that is, objective facts. This affirms our connections and allows us to remain connected.

Why is that such a bad thing?

If the same two strangers meet in a bar or at a party or even in an elevator and launch into a discussion of their feelings, it will be more difficult for them to find common ground.

You are the ultimate authority on what you feel. No other individual can have the same relationship to your feelings.

If you share an intimate detail with someone you have never met, you are imposing an unreasonable demand. Conversation involves reciprocity, so your interlocutor will feel obliged to expose something of himself in order to complete the exchange.

But, when he does, he will feel that he has just exposed himself to a stranger. Normally, he will never want to see the other person again, the better to forget what happened.

You may call it authentic; I call it rude. You do not make a human connection by imposing yourself on another person.

If you are exposing an opinion, a stranger can choose between disagreeing and agreeing. If he does not want to be disagreeable, he will assent. Thus, the two of you have become of one mind.

But being of one mind does not mean that you have found common ground in an objective reality that any other individual would see. It means that you have established something like a folie à deux.

True enough, you have connected, but your connection has separated you from the mass of humanity. You are not in the world; you are in your own world.

Be this as it may, philosophers and psychologists tend to be contemptuous of small talk.

Zhang explains the point:

Although a sometime topic of instruction, small talk, as is clear by its very name, possesses no great stature among the arts of conversation. No one, after all, aspires to banality. So we wield our scorn for vacuous chatter like a strand of garlic, warding off the contaminating musk of inauthenticity. The allegiance to high-mindedness and substance that most of us have carefully displayed at one time or another was summed up in a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting a dinner table in ancient Greece, where a father admonishes his son: “If you don’t have anything profound to say, don’t say anything at all.” It’s no coincidence that this cartoon is set in antiquity, at the birth of Western philosophy. As a group, philosophers have been the most vocal critics of empty chatter. It wouldn’t be hard, in particular, to imagine that dinner table scene taking place chez Martin Heidegger. His 1927 Being and Time offers an analysis of Gerede, translated as “idle talk,” which forms probably the best-known philosophical critique of this phenomenon.

In the age of authenticity more people aspire to authenticity than know what it is. But, we have it on the authority of no less a philosopher than Martin Heidegger, the godfather of authenticity, that small talk or idle chatter is bad.

Heidegger’s extended the category of idle chatter to any use of language that is formulaic, that repeats commonly accepted wisdom and that expresses what everyone thinks, rather than what I think.

Authentic speech, in Heidegger’s philosophy, wells up from the depths of your soul. It is original and personal and unique to you. It might involve your latest research into Western metaphysics; it might express your sentiments about the state of German politics in 1933.

It is authentic because it is purely personal, even poetic. It is not a hodgepodge of impersonal statements that involve, not just the weather, but the conversational filler that we use to grease the wheels of human connection.

Whatever you think Heidegger meant by it all, we cannot ignore the fact that he believed that he had seen his theories come alive in the German Nazi Party.

In 1988, philosopher Thomas Sheehan wrote in The New York Review of Books, that with the new revelations about Heidegger’s Nazism, his philosophy should be read through the filter of his political activities and political beliefs.

Apparently, Heidegger became disillusioned with the Nazi Party because it was not fulfilling its potential. Still, he never renounced his membership or recanted his Nazi views. In his opinion, the inner truth and greatness of Nazism had been betrayed by Hitler’s cohorts.

Apparently Heidegger preferred the Nazism of Ernst Rohm’s Storm Troopers ( the SA) to that of the more technocratic Heinrich Himmler.

When Heidegger became rector of the University of Fribourg he set about to Nazify it. He resigned his rectorship in 1934 immediately after Hitler and Himmler liquidated Rohm and his SA in what is called the Night of the Long Knives.

Clearly, the brown shirts of the SA were not interested in connecting with people. When a member of the SA saw a Jew on the street, he was not looking to schmooze.

Rohm’s SA was in the business of threatening and intimidating prospective opponents of the Nazi regime. Its mode was street theatre and its weapons were clubs. Obviously, a man as aesthetically refined as Martin Heidegger would naturally have been drawn to the SA.

Wikipedia describes it:

Its traditional function of party leader escort had been given to the SS, but it continued its street battles with "Reds" and its attacks on Jews. The SA also attacked or intimidated anyone deemed hostile to the Nazi agenda, including uncooperative editors, professors, politicians, other local officials and businessmen.

The Storm Troopers took their socialism seriously. Wikipedia continues:

They largely rejected capitalism (which they associated with Jews) and pushed for nationalization of major industrial firms, expansion of worker control, confiscation and redistribution of the estates of the old aristocracy, and social equality. 

The SA was not in the business of doing business. It did not try to reach out to the opposition or to find common ground with it. The SA worked to impose the Fuhrer’s will, his ideas and his feelings on everyone else.

The next time a Pied Piper comes along to suggest that you give up schmoozing in the name of authenticity, think twice before going along.

Postmodern Celebrity

Today’s celebrities are not like yesterday’s. And we are poorer for it.

So says George Packer in a New York Times op ed. We worship celebrity, he explains because we are burdened with overwhelming inequalities and a lack of opportunity.  

Packer defines celebrity:

What are celebrities, after all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. They loom larger in times like now, when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions — governments, corporations, schools, the press — is falling.

Packer is correct. We do not live in an age of widespread opportunity. He doesn’t say it, but in the Age of Obama opportunity and enterprise have been overtaken by a politics that emphasizes, as I have suggested, “bread and circuses.”

We believe that hard work is not rewarded, so we settle for non-stop entertainment.

Why would people not lose faith in institutions when the institutions seem more interested in increasing their power than in serving the people?

In the old days, the distance between the individual and the celebrity was narrower. We aspired to improve ourselves; we sought out role models; we worked hard at our tasks; we believed in just rewards. We weren’t stymied by bureaucratic overregulation, brainwashed by schools or fed the party line by the press. And we did not witness people being receiving extravagant rewards that had no real relation to their contribution to society.

The old-time celebrities come from a bygone era. Do you remember them:

The “stars” continued to fascinate, especially with the arrival of TV, but they were not essential. Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Perry Como, Joe DiMaggio, Jack Paar, Doris Day and Dick Clark rose with Americans — not from them — and their successes and screw-ups were a sideshow, not the main event.

Today,  celebrities are everywhere. People who would, in the past have been business leaders are now elevated to the rank of celebrity.

Packer offers an illuminating list:

Our age is lousy with celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that seem less than glamorous. We have celebrity bankers (Jamie Dimon), computer engineers (Sergey Brin), real estate developers/conspiracy theorists (Donald J. Trump), media executives (Arianna Huffington), journalists (Anderson Cooper), mayors (Cory A. Booker), economists (Jeffrey D. Sachs), biologists (J. Craig Venter) and chefs (Mario Batali).

There is a quality of self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an empire, with the business imperative of grow or die — a process of expansion and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them.

No one can aspire to the wealth and influence that these celebrities wield, so everyone is left with the unenviable task of picking up the crumbs that the rich and famous throw at the masses in grand gestures that resemble noblesse oblige.

Packer has grasped the salient point, but he should have taken it a step further and asked who is in charge of public education and who dominates the marketplace of ideas.

Packer suggests that ordinary people are diminished to the point where they can only participate vicariously in these “celebrity monuments” by purchasing a trinket with the celebrity’s name or signature affixed to it:

The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

George W. Bush’s signature legislative achievement in the field of education was the No Child Left Behind Law. Now, in the age of Obama, celebrities like the president have been leaving everyone behind.

Reputation's Reputation

Somehow or other, reputation seems to have gotten a bad reputation.

Women, in particular, have been told that they should do as they wish, follow their bliss, act on their desires… and not care what anyone thinks of them.

These days, anyone who tells a young woman to be careful about her reputation will quickly be shouted down.

In a world where everyone is supposed to be seeking the elusive state called mental health, the therapy culture has declared that you can only get there by overcoming repression, overcoming shame and letting it all hang out.

Reputation is for saps, we are told. You cannot let loose with all your deepest feelings and worry what other people think of you.

The truth is, any human relationship will be damaged by being too open and too honest. A good reputation will contribute mightily to your success, both in your personal relationships and on the job.

No one wants to associate with someone who is disreputable, who cannot be trusted and whose word is not his bond.

Thus, it is with tongue firmly in cheek that Alison Green lists some of the best ways to ruin your professional reputation.

Since your professional reputation is one of your most valuable assets, you ought to be working to enhance it. Thus, her advice is well worth heeding. I will right-side it.

I will compress Green’s list, to begin with the most important one: keep your word.

When you say you will do something, do it.

When you say you will do something and it becomes inconvenient to do it, do it.

When you say you will do something and it becomes impossible to do it, do it anyway.

Obviously, there are occasions when it is impossible to keep your word, but you should not be thinking of the exceptions. You should be telling yourself that when you commit, you do it.

If you accept a job offer, you do not have the option of backing out of it.

If your actions should always follow fast upon your words, it is also bad to speak untruths. Lying damages your professional reputation.

If you recommend someone for a job when you know that the person is unqualified, you are lying. When you offer a recommendation, don’t think in terms of doing a favor for a friend. Act as though your reputation is on the line. It is.

And Green points that you must also avoid drama. Despite what the therapy culture has been drumming into your ears, you do better to keep your emotions to yourself.

Green explains:

It's normal to occasionally get frustrated, but you're crossing a line if you're yelling, slamming doors or snapping at people. It only takes one incident like this to get a reputation as the angry guy with whom no one wants to work, and that's a label that's very hard to shake.

Obviously, the same applies to emails. Do not, Green says, use email to express your feelings openly and honestly:

Whether it's jotting off an angry response to a new policy at work or sending a bitter reply after you get rejected for a job, angry letter bombs are hard to live down. You'll look like someone who doesn't know how to address concerns calmly and professionally, and most people will respond by giving you a wide berth.