The Perils of Method Acting

A few weeks ago, after Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tragic death, I suggested that he may have been a casualty of method acting. It was a thought, something to ponder.

Herewith my remarks:

I find it more telling that Junod believes that Hoffman died “in character?” Who decided that there is a special virtue for an actor to die “in character?” Who told actors that they had to become the characters they were playing? I think we know the answer to that one. If Junod is right, it means that it's time for the acting profession to take a few steps back from the “method.”

Surely, Hoffman was a great actor, but was it necessary for him to become the characters he was playing? Is there any real virtue in thinking that you are sacrificing yourself for your art?

On Friday, Richard Brody picked up my suggestion in a post on the New Yorker site, and offered some further insights into Method acting. I see no indication that he was specifically responding to my post, but still….

Brody defines the Method:

There’s something about modern-day acting—the style that is famously associated with Lee Strasberg’s Method and that gained currency from his Actors Studio and its offshoots—that inclines toward deformations of character. That modern school, which links emotional moments from a performer’s own life to that of a character, and which conceives characters in terms of complete and filled-out lives that actors imagine and inhabit, asks too much of performers. 

Method acting requires actors to undergo a semi-therapeutic process of introspection. In so doing, they dredge up past experiences-- experiences that would have best remained buried-- in order to access raw their own emotions. Then, they transfer the emotions to the characters they are playing.

Brody explainss:

An actor’s attempted excavation of her own deepest and harshest experiences to lend them to characters adds a dimension of self-revelation (even if only to oneself), of wounds reopened and memories relived, that would make for agony in therapy. On the other hand, the effort to conceive a character as a filled-out person, with a lifetime of backstory and biographical details, becomes a submergence into another (albeit fictitious) life, an abnegation of a nearly monastic stringency. In the effort to make emotions true, to model performance on the plausible actions of life offstage or offscreen, the modern actor is often both too much and too little herself.

As  Brody presents it, the Method pretends that fictional characters are fully human beings. If that is true, an actor must put his humanity into his character. And yet, those who teach the Method do not worry about how this exercise will impact the actors psychologically And no one seems to notice, as I mentioned in my post, that this produces a goodly quantity of bad acting.

My prior remarks:

Even if we ignore the damage it does to the actors themselves, method acting fills our screen with actors who mistake intense emotion for great acting.

There’s a reason why so many of today’s greatest actors hail from the other side of the pond. Can you imagine Benedict Cumberbatch or Tom Hiddleston (or John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier or Vanessa Redgrave) dying on a bathroom floor with a needle in his arm? 

Unfortunately, method acting also produces actors who can only play themselves. If you are the character you are playing you are more likely to take the role home with you, even to the point of playing out your dramas in the tabloids.

In Brody’s words:

Compare Brando with several of his noted predecessors, such as Cary Grant or Robert Mitchum, who seem not to become the roles they play but to turn the characters into versions of themselves. Their roles aren’t put-ons, but they do put them on: they don their roles like costumes while continuing, manifestly and even brazenly, to be—themselves. Not that actors in the early-studio era didn’t live strange or even riotous lives, but the reason was altogether different: it’s precisely because of the way their private lives flowed into their onscreen personae.

Of course, Marlon Brando counts among the most famous method actors. Brody could also have mentioned another exemplary product of method acting: Marilyn Monroe.

Who Is Julie Burchill?

Julie Burchill is Great Britain’s answer to Camille Paglia. Or is it the other way around. Perhaps Camille Paglia is America’s answer to Julie Burchill.

Paglia is an American academic, a denizen of the political far left. She is, by her own admission, lionized around the world. Burchill also inhabits the far left of the political spectrum. One of the most famous journalists in Britain, she is, according to Paglia, less well known around the world than Paglia.

Both writers are firebrands. Both grew up on radical feminism. Both have notably turned against today’s leftist cultural politics.

Both are excellent writers, though, for my money, Burchill is the better.

Burchill in particular has incurred the enmity of many of her former radical colleagues by openly declaring her love for Israel and for Jews. In British leftist circles, being pro-Israeli passes as a sin.

When it comes to the ability to live a chaotic life, Burchill has it all over Paglia. The details are readily available for those who seek them.

Like Paglia, Burchill is disaffected from today’s leftist cultural politics. Here she explains:

It’s easy for me to sentimentalise those days when the trade unions held sway, chiming as they did with the calf country of my communism, but whatever their beery and sandwichy limits, they were far better than what replaced them; the politics of diversity. While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power. The trade union movement gave us brother Bill Morris and Mrs Desai; the diversity movement has given us a rainbow coalition of cranks and charlatans. Which has, in turn, has given us intersectionality.

Apparently, intersectionality is all the rage these days.  In brief, it offers diverse groups of people the opportunity to torture themselves over their so-called privileges. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s today’s college student guilt trip.

Burchill describes it in typically gritty terms:

Intersectionality may well sound like some unfortunate bowel complaint resulting in copious use of a colostomy bag, and indeed it does contain a large amount of ordure. Wikipedia defines it as ‘the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination’, which seems rather mature and dignified. In reality, it seeks to make a manifesto out of the nastiest bits of Mean Girls, wherein non-white feminists especially are encouraged to bypass the obvious task of tackling the patriarchy’s power in favour of bitching about white women’s perceived privilege in terms of hair texture and body shape. Think of all those episodes of Jerry Springer where two women who look like Victoria’s Secret models — one black, one white — bitch-fight over a man who resembles a Jerusalem artichoke, sitting smugly in the middle, and you have the end result of intersectionality made all too foul flesh. It may have been intended as a way for disabled women of colour to address such allegedly white-ableist-feminist-specific issues as equal pay, but it’s ended up as a screaming, squawking, grievance-hawking shambles….

Entering the crazy world of intersectionality is quite like being locked in a hall of mirrors with a borderline personality disorder coach party. ‘Stop looking at me funny! Why are you ignoring me? Go away, I hate you! Come back, how dare you reject me!’ 

In-fighting and backbiting have been raised to the level of a very sad Olympic sport — that’ll be the Special Olympics, of course, the real ones being ‘able-ist’. Every thought is an ism and every person an ist in the insania of intersectionality, where it is always winter and never Christmas — sorry, ‘Winterval’. (Mustn’t be Islamophobic.) But sexism, interestingly, isn’t really the hot ticket there; women get picked on — or ‘called out’, to use the approved phrase — more than anyone. Natural-born women, that is. When it happened to one of my dearest friends last year, I became an unwitting participant in this modern danse macabre.

Did I mention, Burchill never pulls her punches.

Recently, Burchill got into something of a shouting match—or was it mud wrestling-- about the “trans” community. One of her friends, the radical journalist Suzanne Moore had incited that group’s wrath for saying some untoward things about them. Burchill rushed in to defend her.

Suzanne Moore ignited the flap with these words:

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.

When the wrath of the trans community started falling on Moore Burchill could not resist adding a few choice words, the better to clarify the issue. Here she describes her intervention:

I opined that a bunch of gender-benders trying to tell my mate how to write was akin to the Black and White Minstrels advising Usain Bolt on how to run. I stated that it was outrageous that a woman of style and substance should be driven from her chosen mode of time-wasting by a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing and their snivelling suck-ups. The usual cool, calm and collected sort of consideration I’m famous for.

For those of you were slightly confused by Facebook’s list of dozens of different genders, Burchill shows how the unfortunate, cis-gendered Moore was vilified by those who had chosen their genders from the list provided by Facebook:

Suzanne’s crime, it transpired, was to be ‘cis-gendered’ as opposed to transgendered (that is, she was born female) and not to have ‘checked her privilege’ — what passes for a battle cry in certain ever-decreasing circles these dog days. It’s hardly ‘No pasarán!’ — rather, it declares an intention that it is better to be nagged to death on one’s knees rather than stand by one’s principles on one’s feet. Consider how lucky you are, born women, before you raise your voice above that of a trans-sister! — that veritable cornucopian horn of plenty which we lucky breed fortunate enough to be born to a sensory smorgasbord of periods, PMT, the menopause, HRT and being bothered ceaselessly for sex by random male strangers since puberty take such flagrant delight in revelling in, shameless hussies that we are. 

On a more sober note Burchill attacks the intersectional crowd for reducing society to a bunch of special interests. It divides people and turns them against each other.

Burchill also grasps the intersectionality’s pretense to being therapeutic:

Though it reminds us ceaselessly to ‘check our privilege’, intersectionality is the silliest privilege of them all, a gang of tools and twats tiptoeing around others’ finer feelings rather than getting stuck in, mucking in, like proper mates — the ultimate privilege, which is to serve each other with collective love and action. 

Of course, intersectionality sounds like mindless drivel. Yet, no less than Facebook has made it official. And many publications rushed out to defend Facebook.

Now each individual can choose his or hers of its own gender. Burchill opines:

I personally can understand black women occasionally getting teed off with their apparently carefree Wash’n’Go white stepsisters. But the most recent and reactionary development within this hissy-fitting hothouse — the insistence of intersectional feminists on the right of transsexuals not to be offended — tells you all you need to know about the essential stupidity of the movement.

The idea that a person can choose their gender — in a world where millions of people, especially ‘cis-gendered’ women, are not free to choose who they marry, what they eat or whether or not their genitals are cut off and sewn up with barbed wire when they are still babies — and have their major beautification operations paid for by the National Health Service seems the ultimate privilege, so don’t tell me to check mine. 

One would like to say that only a card-carrying militant feminist could write such things. Alas, Burchill, like her friend Moore, has discovered that even impeccable leftist credentials do not shield you from the terror of the trans community.

So, let’s say that only a card-carrying militant feminist would find it so disturbing to see militant feminism disintegrating into mindless and self-defeating chaos.

A Permanent Leisure Class

One suspects that it’s yet another attempt to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.

Looking out at an economic recovery that has conspicuously failed to generate new jobs, several commentators have sought solace in a prophecy that John Maynard Keynes made in the depths of the Great Depression.

Then, Keyes foresaw a future where human beings could be freed from the burden of work. Modern technology would allow them to make a living by only working for 15 hours a week. With the extra free time they would be able to enjoy what truly matters in life: leisure, aka, doing nothing of consequence.

Ross Douthat summarized the Keynes argument:

IN 1930, in the darkening valley of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay on “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which foresaw a much happier future — one of growth, abundance and the steady decline of full-time work. Eventually, he suggested, civilization might settle on a 15-hour workweek, with three hours of daily labor being sufficient “to satisfy the old Adam in most of us.”

Of course, this assumes that the meaning of life is leisure and that human beings are happiest when they have more of it to enjoy. We need not worry about the fact that work force participation has not budged over the past five years. We should celebrate the fact that the long term unemployed now have more time to watch soap operas and to play Parchesi.

All we have to do now is to increase government subsidies to the point where the newly entitled leisure class will be able to take one vacation a year to Disney World and to have two flat screen televisions. Then, all will be well.

One hates to throw a monkey wrench into such a well-crafted argument, but it betrays an ideological bias against work. If these great minds were correct, people who retire voluntarily from the workforce with sufficient resources to play golf and bridge to their heart’s content would, as today’s buzzword has it, flourish.

In truth, nearly all studies have shown that retirement is bad for your health. When you retire you are more likely to get sick and to die than to thrill to the sound of the waves lapping the shores of Miami Beach.

Apparently, the notion that people might like to work, that they might enjoy working, that they feel better about themselves when they are on the job has escaped the minds of these great thinkers.

They ought to place Harvard psychiatrist Richard Mollica’s quotation on a plaque where it will always be in their faces. Mollica once said: “The best anti-depressant is a job.”

Those who disparage work in favor of leisure are standing on shaky ground. Or worse, they might be stuck in quicksand.

Douthat quotes Martin Wolf, distinguished center-left columnist for the Financial Times:

… we must reconsider leisure. For a long time the wealthiest lived a life of leisure at the expense of the toiling masses. The rise of intelligent machines makes it possible for many more people to live such lives without exploiting others. Today’s triumphant puritanism finds such idleness abhorrent. Well, then, let people enjoy themselves busily. What else is the true goal of the vast increases in prosperity we have created?

To understand this correctly, we need to know what Wolf means by “for a long time.” If he is talking about a time long past when a decadent aristocracy lived off of the labor of peasant masses, he might have a point. If he is offering up a leftist caricature of capitalism, he has missed the mark. Most capitalists work long and hard. They did not get where they are by taking time off for leisure time activities.

This does not mean that some of their heirs don’t turn out to be slugs, but still, Wolf should have been more precise.

Surely, reality will intrude on Wolf’s utopian vision.

While you are resting on your laurels someone else might build a better product and kill your market. Worse yet, someone else might build better fighter jets and cruise missiles. Will you gain any consolation from knowing that while they were working long and hard to produce the new military technology you were lying around the pool, inhaling chlorine fumes while working on your skin cancer?

If someone else decides to out-work you, you will become less competitive. The techno marvels that you counted on will decay, become decrepit and malfunction. If you have lost the habit of working hard, what are you going to do then?

The Keynesian vision depends on a self-contained world. It feels like a new mercantilism. It fails to take into account international competition and free trade.

Douthat adds that this vision of a new economy of leisure might just become dystopian. In fact, it is almost guaranteed to become so.

In Douthat’s words:

They’re leaping from a policy designed to protect the new economy’s potential losers to an optimistic vision of more general age of leisure, and based on current trends I’m just not sure that leap is warranted. It seems just as likely that what Wolf calls (perhaps not entirely aptly) “triumphant puritanism” would continue to set the tone for the more successful portion of society, who would continue to work 40, 50, 60 hours in a quest for positional goods, and that as a result you would end up with an even more exaggerated version of the social segregation limned by Charles Murray and others — in which Belmont is Belmont and Fishtown Fishtown, and never the twain shall meet.

He continues:

The promise of upward mobility and equality of opportunity would look like a transparent sham in a society with a hypercompetitive elite and a non-working working class. Likewise, the ideal of social equality — which is the really valuable thing that many liberals are groping toward in their critiques of the 1 percent — would probably suffer dramatically if full-time work, like the two-parent family before it, became something that only the better sort of American was likely to experience. And while a sufficiently generous basic income would no doubt raise living standards and reduce deprivation at the bottom, the experience of Appalachia, among other blasted social landscapes, suggests that it’s very easy for the absence of work to intertwine with social pathologies in ways that government assistance can’t necessarily ameliorate. The workless society could be a place where the “potential for a more enjoyable life” is available to all … but it could just as easily be a society with more alcoholism, more drug addiction, more obesity, lower lifespans, more social isolation, and less human flourishing overall.

Well said…. “A workless society” might very well be a breeding ground for psychopathy. More people will work off the books and their work might not fall within the bounds of the legal. How many of the chronically unemployed find jobs with gangs?

No one is likely to sit idly by while others gain the satisfaction and the prestige that comes from work. No one is likely to content himself with an iPad while others possess larger homes, cleaner neighborhoods, better-educated children and so on.

The chasm between those who work hard and enrich themselves and those who are living off the dole is likely to produce resentment.

In the absence of work, people will experience more anomie, more “social isolation,” as Douthat puts it. People who are isolated and alienated, and who feel insulted by being made part of a permanent group of people that society has deemed useless or unnecessary, will often express their feelings antisocially.

America the Isolated

I see little reason to disagree with George Friedman’s observation. Americans, by and large, have tuned out the world. They no longer care what is happening in foreign countries. When they notice crises around the globe, they shrug.

In Friedman’s words:

Last week, several events took place that were important to their respective regions and potentially to the world. Russian government officials suggested turning Ukraine into a federation, following weeks of renewed demonstrations in Kiev. The Venezuelan government was confronted with violent and deadly protests. Kazakhstan experienced a financial crisis that could have destabilized the economies of Central Asia. Russia and Egypt inked a significant arms deal. Right-wing groups in Europe continued their political gains.

Any of these events had the potential to affect the United States. At different times, lesser events have transfixed Americans. This week, Americans seemed to be indifferent to all of them. This may be part of a cycle that shapes American interest in public affairs. The decision to raise the debt ceiling, which in the last cycle gripped public attention, seemed to elicit a shrug.

By way of analysis Friedman suggests that Americans have traditionally ignored what was going on elsewhere because two large oceans have always separated it from elsewhere.

For the most part, he continues, nations that are actively interested in foreign affairs are most often those who are forced to do so… for reasons of geography.

Friedman writes:

Of course, there are times when Americans are aroused not only to public affairs but also to foreign affairs. That is shaped by the degree to which these events are seen as affecting Americans' own lives. There is nothing particularly American in this. People everywhere care more about things that affect them than things that don't. People in European or Middle Eastern countries, where another country is just a two-hour drive away, are going to be more aware of foreign affairs. Still, they will be most concerned about the things that affect them. The French or Israelis are aware of public and foreign affairs not because they are more sophisticated than Americans, but because the state is more important in their lives, and foreign countries are much nearer to their homes. If asked about events far away, I find they are as uninterested and uninformed as Americans.

Of course, he continues, Americans develop an extraordinary interest in what is going on elsewhere when it intrudes on their lives. When we were attacked on 9/11 we became very interested in Afghanistan and the Muslim world. Were there an oil shortage we would be far more concerned about what is happening in Venezuela.

He explains:

It's not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it's that their interest is finely calibrated. The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat. The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with. Americans may turn out to have been wrong about these things in the long run, but at the time, an issue must fit these criteria. Afghanistan was once seen as dangerous to the United States, its outcome uncertain, the issues clear. In truth, Afghanistan may not have fit any of these criteria, but Americans believed it did, so they focused their attention and energy on the country accordingly.

It sounds like America has entered a new period of isolationism. If people in foreign countries are hell bent on killing each other, let them do it without us. Why should we should we interfere, spend our blood and be disrespected for as much. The more America becomes energy independent the less we care about the Middle East.

Friedman than analyzed the isolationism that gripped America before World War II:

The isolationists opposed involvement in Europe during World War II for a number of reasons. They felt that the European problem was European and that the Anglo-French alliance could cope with Germany. They did not see how U.S. intervention would bring enough power to bear to make a significant difference. They observed that sending a million men to France in World War I did not produce a permanently satisfactory outcome. The isolationists were willing to be involved in Asia, as is normally forgotten, but not in Europe.

I would not have been an isolationist, yet it is hard to see how an early American intervention would have changed the shape of the European war. France did not collapse because it was outnumbered. After France's collapse, it was unclear how much more the United States could have done for Britain than it did. The kinds of massive intervention that would have been necessary to change the early course of the war were impossible. It would have taken years of full mobilization to be practical, and who expected France to collapse in six weeks? Stalin was certainly surprised.

Strangely, Friedman does not name the president who was conducting foreign policy in the build-up to World War II. Similarly, he does not name our current president.

Even if he is merely trying to assess the national mood, surely the American attitude toward foreign affairs is influenced by the president.

Effectively, Friedman offers something of an explanation for his failure to connect FDR with American isolationism in the 1930s. He declares that there was nothing anyone could have done to save France in 1940. This misses several important important points.

The crisis leading up to the fall of France did not begin in 1940. The menace that was Adolph Hitler did not begin in 1939 or even 1938. It had been an ongoing crisis, one in which FDR did not very much involve himself.

Since we are dealing with counterfactuals, and since one good counterfactual deserves another, I would point out that we do not know what would have happened if Roosevelt had been actively engaged in diplomacy with our European allies throughout the 1930s. For all we know, a failure of American leadership created the power vacuum that allowed Hitler the chance to try to fulfill his depraved wishes. 

Why didn’t FDR get involved in vigorous diplomacy before the war? Three reasons present themselves.

First, the New Deal notwithstanding, the nation was still mired in a Great Depression. When things are going badly at home you direct your attention to solving those problems first.

Second, FDR was an amateur in foreign affairs. He was not elected to be a foreign affairs president and did not know how to conduct effective diplomacy.

Third, FDR was a polarizing figure who sought to impose his will on the nation. He was more a divider than a uniter. A house divided cannot direct a unified attention elsewhere.

With a different president, a Theodore Roosevelt, one imagines that the crisis in Europe would have been dealt with more effectively and more skillfully. At the least, it would have been managed. 

As for our current wave of isolationist fervor, it may well be that we Americans have lost interest in foreign affairs for similar reasons.

First, Obama’s stimulus notwithstanding, the nation still has not recovered from the Great Recession.

Second, Obama is an amateur on the world stage.

Third, Obama has governed by dividing the nation and by trying to impose his will on it.

In one way, Obama distinguished himself from FDR. By necessity Obama has tried to portray himself as a world leader. He has tried to get involved in foreign policy issues and to present himself as a world leader.

Unfortunately, most of these efforts have ended in failure. They have made Obama and America look diminished. Many citizens have concluded that Obama can do no better than to embarrass himself and America. In that case, perhaps it is best that, for now, America cultivates its own garden.

The State of the American Marital Estate

Prof. Eli Finkel has not yet published his book on the current state of marriage in America, but he has offered a tease in a New York Times column.

In part, his study involves statistical surveys. In part, it involves cultural analysis.

The data tells us that the marriages of college graduates are far more durable than the marriages of high school dropouts.

Finkel reports:

One of the most disturbing facts about American marriage today is that while divorce increased at similar rates for the wealthy and the poor in the 1960s and ’70s, those rates diverged sharply starting around 1980. According to the sociologist Steven P. Martin, among Americans who married between 1975 and 1979, the 10-year divorce rate was 28 percent among people without a high school education and 18 percent among people with at least a college degree: a 10 percentage point difference. But among Americans who married between 1990 and 1994, the parallel divorce rates were 46 percent and 16 percent: an astonishing 30 percentage point difference.

Some have taken offense at the notion that a good marriage seems increasingly to be the preserve of an elite, but the data tells us that marital happiness correlates with financial security. There is nothing strange or bizarre about the correlation. The data also affirms Joel Kotkin’s analysis of a new American proletariat.

Pychologists like Finkel are not satisfied with mere statistics. They want to know how happy today’s marriages are.

By his report, the results are not very encouraging:

Consider, for example, that while the divorce rate has settled since the early 1980s at around 45 percent, even those marriages that have remained intact have generally become less satisfying.

Finkel believes that our expectations about marriage have changed. Over the past few decades we have decided that marriage should be all things to a couple. The worst part is that people expect it to be a therapeutic experience. When it does not provide us with a therapeutic uplift, we feel that something is wrong.

Psychologists believe that the new expectations require more time. They conclude that people would be happier in their marriages if they spent more time at home and less time on the job.

Speaking for his co-authors, Finkel explains:

Our central claim is that Americans today have elevated their expectations of marriage and can in fact achieve an unprecedentedly high level of marital quality — but only if they are able to invest a great deal of time and energy in their partnership. If they are not able to do so, their marriage will likely fall short of these new expectations. Indeed, it will fall further short of people’s expectations than at any time in the past.

But, if people work less and spend more time at home they will usually earn less. They will have fewer promotions. They will enjoy lower status and prestige.

Will any of those contribute to your marital happiness? Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. Obviously, the division of household labor and the gender differences also play a role.

I am naturally intrigued by the notion that today’s couples believe that their marriages should be like therapy. Isn't therapy working well enough all by itself? Why do people need to take therapy with them into their marriages? Unsurprisingly, the advent of the therapeutic marriage dates to the Vietnam counterculture.

In Finkel’s words:

Since around 1965, we have been living in the era of the self-expressive marriage. Americans now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth. Fueled by the countercultural currents of the 1960s, they have come to view marriage less as an essential institution and more as an elective means of achieving personal fulfillment. “You make me want to be a better man,” from the 1997 movie “As Good as It Gets,” could serve as this era’s marriage ideal. In the words of the sociologist Robert N. Bellah, love has become, in good part, “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves.”

Unfortunately, this feels like taking a bath in psychobabble. It shows that when therapy becomes a culture it tells people how they should conduct themselves in their marriages. By presenting its opinions as science, it has succeeded in imposing them on more than a few people.

When Bellah says that marriage is about “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves” you come away with the impression that people today are full of themselves.

In place of this absurd task of mutual exploration, how about a little sex? Are modern couples so absorbed in their journeys toward self-actualization that they neglect to make love?

As Finkel notes, credit or discredit for this ethic of self-actualization belongs to Abraham Maslow.

The Economist described its basic tenets:

Dr Finkel told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this week that most married Americans expect their spouses to develop profound insights into the essential qualities of their other half, fulfilling their needs for esteem and self-actualisation. A spouse, these days, can be expected to be a confidant, lover, co-parent, breadwinner, activity partner and therapist. This, he concludes, makes being happily married harder than it was in the past.

Unfortunately, depending so much on your spouse is more a symptom than a cure. If you expect your spouse to be everything for you, you probably do not have very fulfilling friendships, family ties or work.

But, then again, it might be the other way around. If you try to make your spouse the only other person in your world, you are not likely to have very many good friendships, family ties or very much career success.

Finkel is correct to call thes the new mode “the all-or-nothing” marriage. He should have added that all-or-nothing thinking characterizes depression. This type of marriage should count as a symptom, not as a cure.

I have little doubt that more and more people conduct their marriages and their lives as therapy. Witness the television show “Girls.” Just because it’s the newest thing that does not mean that it’s a good thing.

How does it happen that people who are pursuing a self-centered goal can function within a cooperative social relationship? Bellah seemed to believe that mutual exploration will do it, but if each spouse is devoting him or herself to actualizing all of his or her full human potential, it becomes impossible to do anything more than to pay lip service to the other person. In some cases, lip service works just fine, but still….

These definitions leave no place for responsibility or for negotiation. They ignore the importance of a couple's rituals and routines. But, since these are the ways we affirm our commitment to a marriage, we are left with two souls baring themselves soulfully and trying to create a connection that they would better affirm by developing more couple routines.

Still, expectations do contribute to our happiness. If we believe that all marriages are as fulfilling as the therapists pretend, and if we judge our own marriages against the fictional accounts we read in the media, we are likely to be dissatisfied.

An unrealistic expectation can make a marriage more difficult. If someone chooses to spend more time at home trying to have a therapeutic marriage and less time at work or with friends, he will be dislocating himself from his social network and expecting that his wife will provide something that she cannot reasonably provide. If he sacrifices friend time for wife time, he might believe that she owes him something. When she cannot provide it, he might demand it. 

This is not a formula for a happy marriage.

Finkel understands that in many cases the self-actualization solution is a dead end. So he recommends readjusting expectations:

But if couples lack the time and energy, they might consider adjusting their expectations, perhaps by focusing on cultivating an affectionate bond without trying to facilitate each other’s self-actualization.

Whatever he means by an “affectionate bond” it sounds like he is encouraging them to sit around exchanging feelings. Surely, a woman would be more comfortable and at home doing so than would be a man. If she expects that her husband will provide something that she should be gaining form her girl friends, she will be dissatisfied. 

Those who want to bond with their spouses should, as I mentioned, developed couple routines. They should also treat each other with courtesy and respect, to be trustworthy and reliable in all things great and small.

The New American Proletariat

It isn’t entirely the fault of the Obama administration, but more and more Americans have, of late been falling out of the middle class. Joel Kotkin explains that they are becoming a new American proletariat.

Kotkin adds that, under the Obama administration, the decline has accelerated.

He explains:

The biggest issue facing the American economy, and our political system, is the gradual descent of the middle class into proletarian status. This process, which has been going on intermittently since the 1970s, has worsened considerably over the past five years, and threatens to turn this century into one marked by downward mobility.

The decline has less to do with the power of the “one percent” per se than with the drying up of opportunity amid what is seen on Wall Street and in the White House as a sustained recovery. Despite President Obama’s rhetorical devotion to reducing inequality, it has widened significantly under his watch. Not only did the income of the middle 60% of households drop between 2010 and 2012 while that of the top 20% rose, the income of the middle 60% declined by a greater percentage than the poorest quintile. The middle 60% of earners’ share of the national pie has fallen from 53% in 1970 to 45% in 2012.

This group, what I call the yeoman class — the small business owners, the suburban homeowners , the family farmers or skilled construction tradespeople — is increasingly endangered. Once the dominant class in America, it is clearly shrinking: In the four decades since 1971 the percentage of Americans earning between two-thirds and twice the national median income has dropped from 61% to 51% of the population, according to Pew.

Roughly one in three people born into middle class-households, those between the 30^th and 70^th percentiles of income, now fall out of that status as adults.

Undoubtedly, there are many reasons why this is happening. And there are a number of different policy solutions, outlined well by Kotkin.

And yet, combining Kotkin’s column with the news about how American schoolchildren, like their British counterparts are falling behind in math (see previous post), we should consider the possibility that Americans have been poorly trained and educated.

If Americans lack the skills or the discipline required to add value to an economic enterprise, they will lose out to people who do have them.

How much can a child who lacks math and technology skills contribute to the economy? How much can a child who lacks confidence and competitive drive advance himself in the marketplace?

If Americans cannot contribute enough to justify their earning the wages that will place them in the middle class, they will become a new proletariat.

How did it happen?

In part, it happened because learning has been dumbed down. It was more important to ensure that mediocre students not feel badly about being mediocre than to encourage them emulate children who were doing better.

The smarter children  are bored; they learn to hate school; they will never live up to their potential.

Moreover, if hard work is not rewarded, why work hard? If everyone gets a trophy, why learn the discipline that produces excellence?

How else did it happen?

In the past, math and science were domains where boys excelled. One day, our educrats decided that the disparity of aptitude and achievement was a sign of sexism. They responded by ignoring boys in class in favor of girls. They wrote the curriculum to make math and science ore girl-friendly.

Apparently, the more girl friendly math does not compete well with the math they teach in Asian countries.

Ironically, these policies are based on gender stereotypes. They are not merely denying boys the ability to develop their skills at math and science. They are refusing to allow girls to learn how to compete.

Believing that girls prefer to cooperate and to join together in circles of caring, they insist that learning become a cooperative enterprise where no one should do so well that he makes other children feel bad.

Evidently, the message has not reached Asia. Besides, the Tiger Mom brought up two daughters. She had no problem demanding of her daughters rigorous discipline and a strong work ethic..

In the name of girlifying math and science education our pedagogues seem to have deprived both girls and boys of skills they need to compete in the world economy.

The result: a feminized American workforce is competing in the global economy against children who have not chosen to suppress all signs of masculinity.

And of course, culture matters. Are children taught that America is a great nation that has achieved great things? Are they being inspired to become part of a successful nation? Are they taught that America has enjoyed great successes in building a nation, growing an economy, and winning wars?

Or are they taught that America is an organized criminal conspiracy, run by male patriarchs who have exploited the weak and the poor for their advantage? Are they taught that America is an imperialist, colonialist power that has robbed the rest of the world? Do they learn that the only good thing America has ever done is to feel empathy for those who have lost out and to give them charity?

If children are not taught pride in their nation they will not have pride in their own work. If they feel demoralized by a systematic attempt to teach them how to diminish and demean their their nation, they will transfer the skill to themselves. If they believe that success is a crime, they will never be able to develop their talents.

The result: a new American proletariat.

Falling Behind in Math

There’s more to life than being good at math. And yet, when a nation systematically fails to teach its children proper mathematics, it puts its future at risk.

The Daily Telegraph reported the results of an extensive study of high school students’ math performance around the world.

It found that the children of upper middle class British professionals not only performed worse than the children of their Chinese counterparts. They performed worse than the children of Chinese manual laborers..

The Telegraph explains:

British schoolchildren are lagging so far behind their peers in the Far East that even pupils from wealthy backgrounds are now performing worse in exams than the poorest students in China, an international study shows.

The children of factory workers and cleaners in parts of the Far East are more than a year ahead of the offspring of British doctors and lawyers, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Obviously, the British newspaper was more interested in the decline and fall of the British Empire than in what has been happening in American high schools.

But, the Telegraph eventually reveals that the children of American professionals do not do any better than their British counterparts, when compared with lower class Asian children:

The report said: “In the United States and the United Kingdom, where professionals are among the highest-paid in the world, students whose parents work as professionals do not perform as well in mathematics as children of professionals in other countries — nor do they perform as we as the children in Shanghai-China and Singapore whose parents work in manual occupations.”

Does it matter? Of course it does.

Elizabeth Truss, the education minister in Great Britain explained:

The reality is that unless we change our philosophy, and get better at maths, we will suffer economic decline. At the moment our performance in maths is weakening our skills base and threatening our productivity and growth.

Where’s the Tiger Mom now that we need her?

All of those who criticized the Tiger Mom as an abusive parent, who disparaged self-discipline and even rote learning, have some ‘splaining to do.

And, so do the American educators who foisted “fuzzy math” on the population because they decided that right and wrong answers would damage a child’s illusions of self-esteem.

There you have it: sacrificing our children’s and our nation’s future to a dumb idea.