Category: Living

When I was a teenager, one day during a history lesson my teacher quoted Lord Acton, the nineteenth century British historian: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  I was of an impressionable age and this was exactly the sort of epigram that appealed to me: short and poetic in form, but deep and insightful in meaning.   I made a mental note to remember and apply it in my thinking.  For someone disposed to play the intellectual rebel – as I was then and am now – the quotation has much to offer, since the authority figures who disapproved of my free-thinking could now be dismissed by me not just as reactionaries, but as corrupt reactionaries.  Fathers, teachers, ministers of religion: all are men of power and, drawing on Acton’s sharp observation, it was easy for me to assert that to the degree that they were powerful they were also corrupt.

A year or so later, I saw a paperback copy of Acton’s essays in a second-hand bookshop, which I bought (obviously: the habits of a lifetime, by definition, start when we are young), brought home, and then started to read.  I was surprised, indeed disturbed to discover that I had been seriously misled by my teacher.  What Acton had written – in a letter, as it happens, the text of which was included in the book of essays – was this: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  He had qualified the abrupt and striking claim in the first half of his sentence by two words that significantly changed its meaning.  Not power corrupts but power tends to corrupt.

A tendency is not an inevitability; the universal cannot be presumed but requires reference to the particularity. In future, before dismissing the utterances of the powerful as the voice of corruption, I would have to assemble some actual evidence for such a claim: it might tend to be true in general but was it also true in this specific case?  Knowledge, I had discovered, is not the same as pithiness.  A good lesson to learn young, for sure, but one that is not always ready at hand, not always the mind’s preferred approach, because the world is easier to deal with when it can be described in simple terms, using straightforward intellectual constructions that can be applied – lazily, if we are being honest – to any and every example that comes to mind.

We are readily disposed to make use of general categories into which we can gather all cases.  It is instinctive; perhaps an instinct cultivated by our determination to survive.  In a recent conversation, driving north from Boston (MA) to Scarborough (ME), Peter mentioned Stephen Jay Gould, the famous Harvard palaeontologist, who wrote many popular books about evolutionary biology.  I once heard him give a public lecture in London (UK) on the question, Is there such a thing as human nature?  His answer: the human brain has evolved to deal well with type-type recognition (“she ate red berries and was buried; these berries are red so I better not eat them”) but deals poorly with statistical analysis (“of the twenty types of red berry in our local habitat, only one is poisonous to humans; so most red berries, including this one, are unlikely to harm me”).  Thus, he concluded, while it is not clear that there is such a thing as human nature, it is clear why humans are predisposed to think that there is: we tend to think in types.

Whether or not we have an evolutionarily acquired disposition to classify everything and everyone into groups, at the very least it seems clear that in our speech we are prone to adopt the short-form unqualified generalization.  In part, this is because the rhetorical force of brief, bold statements is much greater than longer, subtle ones.  Slogans are better able to mobilise minds, both for the personal and the political.  Benjamin Franklin – also of Boston (MA) –  was adept at crafting pithy sayings, which are easily remembered because they pay no account of the occasions on which they don’t apply:  an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest sounds so much better than an investment in knowledge of certain kinds, will likely provide a better return than many other forms of spending, but not in all cases and not over all time periods, despite the fact that the latter is true and the former is not. Likewise, the claim that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it could be made much more accurate through further elaboration but would almost certainly lose its appeal and become less memorable in the clarifying process.

I am tempted to say, “always avoid unqualified generalizations”, except that this warning is itself an unqualified generalization, and thus to be avoided.  Instead, I recommend acknowledgment that, “carefully qualified statements about specific cases are more likely to be true (and, therefore, more likely to be helpful) than unqualified statements about general cases; although this is not always the case, because every general rule has important exceptions, thus demonstrating that rules are mostly derived from statistical norms rather than universal truths, except in those very rare cases when they are universally true”.   I hope that is clear.

To summarise, as pithily as I am able: error tends to brevity, but accuracy tends to prolixity. But please note well, as Acton did, the important qualifying role of tendency.

My recent visit to the US provided two illustrations of this point.   What might the weather be like in New York City during the fourth week in September?  Nowadays that’s an easy question to answer, since the Internet is awash with meteorological data.  A brief search provided me not only with the average temperatures, both highs and lows, plus daily rainfall (all very useful information) but also data on the range of cases that might be encountered.  In other words, not just the mean for heat and precipitation, but also how far the extremes in both directions might stray from that mean.  I could therefore predict not just what was likely but what was possible.  All very interesting as a summary of general weather history for the city, but for me, visiting specifically during the fourth week of September in the year 2019, and wondering what to pack – should I bring sun-glasses and sun-cream, or a raincoat and a hat? – the more pertinent question was, What will the weather be like in NYC next week?  That the mean temperature ranges between 16 and 25 Celsius is interesting, but not what I most cared about, for which I needed an accurate weather forecast, rather than rich data on historical averages.  (As it happens, the city enjoyed higher than average temperatures, closer to 30 than 25 most days that week.)

En route to New York, as Peter drove us from Scarborough (ME) to Boston (MA) to catch the Amtrak train to Penn Station (NY), we talked about our time working together at the investment management subsidiary of a global financial firm, back at the start of this century.  It was a pleasure to reminisce.  Later that day, staring out of the train window at the New England countryside, I thought about my last couple of years of employment there, when I was asked by the CEO to set up and then chair a Diversity Committee for the European office.  As part of this process, I interviewed the (mostly male) members of the Senior Management Team, to solicit their thoughts about the current state of diversity within the firm (very simply: dire) and what should be done about it (very disappointingly: not much).

I remember well a conversation with one senior manager, who told me, with no hint of embarrassment, that the reason why there were no women in his investment team (to be clear, none at all: not just fewer than 50%, but actually 0%) was because to be in his team required a high level of competence in mathematics and – alas! – women were just not as good at maths as men.  This from a Managing Director of a firm which insisted that all its investment strategies should be thoroughly evidenced by data and implemented with care, to achieve good performance and avoid the concentration of risk.  In other words, his team only bought assets for our clients after they had taken account – at great expense of research time – of the detailed characteristics of each asset, its likely performance and how it would help to diversity the existing portfolio.  When we hired staff for our business, however, the firm paid almost no attention to well-documented evidence of skill acquisition and learning potential, relying instead on the intuitive judgments (also known as the prejudices) of the senior managers.  Rather than ensuring that new hires brought diversity to the existing team, as a matter of deliberate choice we concentrated our risk by repeatedly hiring in our own image.

This story is neither unusual nor surprising: it reflects how the finance industry was, and in many cases still is.  For all its sense of being at the cusp of innovation and change, it remains – mostly – a place of conservatism and embedded privilege.  As Stephen Jay Gould explained, we tend to think in particular ways, because as a species we have evolved to give precedence to type-type recognition ahead of a rigorous statistical examination of the data.  We tend to think in ways that proved very successful at an earlier stage of our evolution, but which might not be so helpful for our next survival challenge; and we find it hard to abandon what worked well last time around.  However easy this is to understand, it is impossible to excuse.  Sloppy thinking is sloppy, irrespective of its evolutionary pedigree.  And not just sloppy, but also dangerous, wrong and unjust.  Knowing the average tells us nothing about the individual.  The mean is not the best.

We need to remind ourselves regularly that many red berries are edible and that some are delicious; we need to acknowledge that some women are not just good at mathematics, but better than most men; and, based on recent experience, I can assure my readers that sometimes the last week in September is the perfect time to visit NYC, when the sky is bright blue and the sun is warm, and Manhattan becomes – as Ella sang – an isle of joy.

 

Two days ago, I flew from London to Belfast, which takes just over an hour, traversing the Irish Sea but remaining at all time within the airspace of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  This is not so unusual: flying from Melbourne to Hobart takes around the same time and – likewise – crosses a sea but not a national boundary; and the flight I took in December 2017 from Oakland to Kona took five and a half hours, travelling over a large expanse of the Pacific Ocean and across three time-zones, just to move from one of the fifty constituents of the United States to another.

Later that day, driving from Belfast to Co Donegal, on the west coast of the island of Ireland, took close to three hours.  At one point in the journey – as I crossed the River Foyle, by the bridge that connects Strabane and Lifford – the road signs began to announce the speed limits in kilometres rather than miles per hour.   Another helpful notice reminded me – in English, French and German – that I should drive on the left-hand side of the road, as both the British and the Irish have always done.  These signs drew my attention to the fact that I had just crossed the border: I was now in the Republic of Ireland.

Here, the dark line on the map runs along the river, where it was drawn nearly one hundred years ago.  What the line represents – for the past, the present and the future – is hotly contested on both sides.  Like the water that flows down from the Sperrin Hills, into the Foyle estuary and out to the North Atlantic Ocean, the meanings that attach to the line are in constant flux and flow: you never cross the same border twice, as O’Heraclitus said.  Drawing a line on a map and calling it a border is a simple solution to complex problem, merely delaying the need to find a better, more lasting resolution, and at the price of making this patch of ground (or riverbed) the focal point for seemingly endless conflict.  Which side of the line you come from is supposed, by many, to determine which side you will find yourself in other disputes and disagreements.

The line on the map that now separates Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland was initially intended to create two self-governing provinces (one primarily Protestant and one primarily Catholic) on the island of Ireland, both of which would remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.  Now, one hundred years later, it seems as if it might soon become the hard border between the United Kingdom and the European Union, a barrier designed to control and restrict free trade and free movement.  The boundary has therefore become economic rather than theological, but this has improved neither the quality of the debate, nor the level of responsibility for the consequence of their actions, among politicians about why a line might be needed and how it should be managed.  Each century has its own dogmas, which attract the energies and enthusiasms of the dogmatists.  Times change, waters flow, intransigence remains.

Drawing a line on a map, to segregate people according to their religion, became the standard British approach in the twentieth century, allowing us to abdicate responsibility for the social and economic consequences of imperialism, and to re-assert our “greatness” in world affairs, all other evidence to the contrary.  The planned partition of Palestine, where Britain had been granted a mandate to govern after the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918, failed in the 1940s leading to war and seventy years of displacement and exile for the Palestinian people.  The partition of Punjab and Bengal, to carve West and East Pakistan out of the Empire of India in 1947, precipitated mass migrations, murder, rape and abductions, and in due course a civil war.   (The British judge, who drew those two lines, around 3,800 miles in length, spent six weeks on the task having never previously visited India).

This is not to say that before these border lines were drawn, everyone in Ireland, Palestine and India lived peaceably with their neighbours.  There have always been arguments between and within communities, sometimes based on religious differences, but often on other grounds too.   Building peace and prosperity is a multi-dimensional project, which takes time, skill and resource.  It is a task for us all, not one that can be delegated to the cartographers.  Lines on maps do not change the way people feel about their neighbours, but merely give them a highly visible objects to fight over with their neighbours: the line concentrates the mind, accentuates the differences, focuses the anger.

Later today, I will fly into City Airport in East London.   When the plane touches down I will feel that I am back home: not because I have re-entered the United Kingdom (an event that will take place hours earlier when I cross from Co Donegal to Co Londonderry) but because, however much I enjoy spending time on the island of Ireland, it is in East London that I feel most myself; where I feel I belong.  Why?  Because London it is not a nation but a city; not full of one sort of people, but of many; not a holy shrine, but a secular metropolis; not the place I come from but the one I chose to move to.  It is a home that I share with many others who want to create their own sense of who they are, rather than inherit to it; to live in the present rather than inhabit the past; to be defined by character and not by location.

This cosmopolitanism ideal is not new.  It dates to the Stoics, one of the early schools of Athenian and Roman philosophy, many of whose leading thinkers were originally neither from Athens nor Rome, but who travelled to those cities because that was where the intellectual life of the ancient Western world was primarily conducted.  One theme of Stoic thought emphasizes that the truly ethical life can be lived anywhere, and everywhere; it is not where you are from, nor your current status in society that matters; rather how you choose to live you life, how you choose to develop your character.  The Stoics were the original citizens of the world, for whom the person, not the place, matters most.   Of course, it helps to live in a place where there are many others who share this belief: cosmopolitanism is not an easy choice when surrounded by those who believe in blood and soil.

Later this week I will board another plane to fly again across the water, this time to Boston, coincidentally a city with some strong Irish connections.  There I will be met by Peter, and driven to his home in Maine, close to the border between Canada and the United States of America, a line drawn on a map, between two former British colonies, which has turned out to be less contentious than most.  There we will be joined by Viktoria and one or two others, for a weekend of conversation alongside the sharing of food and wine.  We all come from different places – different nations, cultures, languages, education and employment – and yet our lives have intersected in somewhat random ways, and we have discovered common interests and attitudes, shared values and ideals.  We will make a mini-community – just a few of us for just a few days – but we will not need to draw lines on a map to do so.

I understand that out ability to meet as friends is premised upon our enjoyment of privileges – money, time, education, employment opportunities – that are not evenly shared around the world.  I also know that many of those who are most determined to draw lines on maps, and to assert the importance of these boundaries, are themselves privileged people.  Borders are generally not the work of the poor, but devices constructed by the rich and powerful, who want to keep what they have and not to share with others, whose wealth is measured by the quantity of what they own rather than the quality of who they are.  Enclosed lands are the product of enclosed minds, another reason for wanting to pull down the fences.

While I am lucky enough to be able to cross the border, I will continue do so.

My son has returned to school.  He’s now in second grade, with a new teacher, a different set of classmates, and a summer of experiences added to his emerging view of the world. He spent half of his summer in Seattle and half in Scarborough, in his father’s new home, along with a couple of side trips, one to San Antonio (where he spent a couple of days with the family of a friend and a reader of this site) and one to Pittsburgh (where he spent three days with his mother’s parents and hopefully absorbed as little as possible of their general air of angry disappointment).

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, his school got a new principal.  I don’t envy public elementary school principals in the least.  They are only mid-level administrators; their relationship to the teachers is governed by a union collective bargaining agreement over which they have no control (the district administration owns it), which ties their hand on making active personnel decisions.  Curriculum is similarly controlled at once by district standards and, subversively at the classroom level, by the actual teacher; the principal can only rule by hearsay and indirect pressure.  And yet parents, staff, and the district looks to them as “leaders” of their schools.  It’s perhaps the most difficult leadership role one could imagine: no discretion, no actual responsibility, but an almost avalanche of accountability.

The “clients” of the principal’s school, moreover, are by and large insane: parents.  As a parent who tries not to be a pain, but as a co-parent with someone who extends her own hypochondria to her child, I know I’m part of the problem, but I’ve been able to develop relationships with teachers and staff which reveal what is probably not a very interesting fact: most parents are either hypersensitive to any perception that their child is not special, is not perfect, is not getting 150% of the resources available to them, or else have ditched their child at the foot of public education and said “he’s yours now, I’m going back to working two jobs, or nursing my opioid addiction, or acting like a child myself.”  One special education teacher told my ex-wife and me that they wished every set of parents were as understanding and dedicated as we were; given my knowledge of our own situation, it made me freeze in terror in consideration of what other parents must be like.  And yet principals, one step behind the actual teacher, are viewed by parents as the focal point of accountability in the school.

The only levers principals have are their ability to communicate, their charm, and their ability to migrate or deflect blame so as to ensure the environment’s purpose – to nurture and teach small children on the small part of their lives’ adventure from toddlerhood to pre-pubescence, hopefully imparting some knowledge and developing their intelligence as well – is not disrupted by the external forces of politics, budgeting, and parental interference that could bring it crashing down.  Deflect blame for idiotic budgeting or standards or curriculum decisions to the district or state or federal authorities; communicate to staff and teachers the collective views of parent associations in a way which mitigates the flame of uninformed criticism most parents direct towards the educational process; shield the student body itself from the worst incivilities of the external forces of union representatives, from the district administrators and school boards with one eye on the election cycle and another on their careers, from their own parents’ worst behavior.

Being a principal is therefore a courageous endeavor, but it requires a kind of magically light touch.  And my son’s new principal has fists of ham.

My son came home from the first day of school and mentioned that the school lunch routine had been altered.  His school has six grades – K through 5 – and two grades at a time each have lunch at a given half hour slot; his second graders share it with the kindergarteners.  Last year, when first and fourth graders shared the half hour, the children were invited to mingle, the idea being that older kids could “mentor” the younger kids and younger kids could maintain the relationships they had in kindergarten.  Functionally, it meant that the kids found their friends and enjoyed their time together, building the easy familiarity of mealtimes with non-family members.  This year, though, each class – not grade, but class within each grade – has to eat at the same table.  My son didn’t like this.  I didn’t particularly care, but I found it odd that we had yet to get any communication from the principal that described her philosophy to running the school, to managing the day, blah blah blah.  I was, apparently, going to find out about how the school was administered via the helpful descriptions provided by a seven year old.  I thought to myself okay, I should probably meet his teacher and have a catch up with the office staff.  No biggie, but for a new principal, this felt like an opportunity lost.

Then what will become known as the Great Pledge of Allegiance Kerfuffle of 2019 erupted.

A word of background for our non-US readers who may not be aware of the Pledge of Allegiance: the Pledge is a brief “pledge” that school children have repeated for years at the beginning of the school day.  “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  The monotony of it, combined with the uses of concepts and words like republic, indivisible, liberty, justice, inspires parody amongst most schoolyard wits, and a vague sense of proto-fascism for anyone who worries about the dangers of rote with respect to political thinking.  Indeed, the Supreme Court ruling that established the right to dissent and refuse to repeat the Pledge by any child made one of those wonderful comments that make Supreme Court rulings the modern equivalent of the Nicomachaen Ethics:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein”

How lovely.  How true.  Another wrinkle in all of this is that as originally conceived, the Pledge would involve children holding their right arms outstretched, palm down, slightly elevated, directed towards the flag in the front of the school room.  Picture a couple dozen kids with the Nazi salute towards the US flag in 1935 and you’ve got the right idea. That changed after the war, but still, the image probably does as much to me to indicate the brilliance of Justice Robert Jackson’s quote above as the words themselves.

Another bit of background: my son goes to school in Seattle, possibly the most left-wing major city in the US.  It has been for over a century; it was the only major city to have a Socialist mayor and city council (in the 1910s), and remains so left-wing it’s wrapping around the other side.  People compete to be more politically correct, to reject any notion of traditional politics.  Jeremy Corbyn would be viewed as mainstream here, or more likely as a bit suspicious simply by virtue of his age, skin color, and willingness to engage in party leadership.  Obama is viewed as a half-hearted sellout whose only real virtue was to be black – I’m sorry, I can’t actually mention that he’s black because that would be racist, only black people can mention race in Seattle, and while I can apologize for the apostasy, I can never be forgiven for the sin.  [Discuss: compare with the evangelical conception of pre-destination and French revolutionary concepts of the unforgiveability of dissention].  In such an environment, the Pledge of Allegiance in north Seattle is so passé as to be outside of the realm of consideration – and that is as obvious as oxygen.

And one last point: I did the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school from probably first grade til fifth or sixth grade, I can’t remember which – and possibly more but at that point it certainly didn’t register.  And I remember distinctly that no one cared.  By making it a non-event – by making it insignificant, by teachers and students running through the motions, by no one caring one iota except to get through it – we Mainers, we who are a fundamentally disdainful and inconsiderate people, ensured that there was not the least taint of fascism in what was an essentially fascist dogmata.  We ensured it was empty – neither true nor false, just a tedium, like the daily message from the principal over the PA system, which was to be endured so as to continue with the full meaning of life.

So we return to the Great Kerfuffle: while we didn’t get any thoughts on her intentions for the school, we did get a blast email from the principal just before the school year started, a form letter saying she was excited to be coming to the school, she’d been in education for 24 years, was a mother herself, the normal blather.  Again, no mention of any changes, indeed an overarching tone of “nothing to see hear, move along.”  A week into the year, we received an email:

As the new principal of [the school], I have structured our morning routine as I have for many years as a school principal: by having students come to my office to lead the Pledge of Allegiance.  The recital of the pledge is required by state law, RCW 28A.230.140, and School Board Policy 2333.  As a result, it is important we follow the law and equally important we follow the portion of the law which permits students to not participate.

I know in recent history the pledge was not done at our school. I understand that the pledge can be controversial, and I am aware of its history and know how it came into being.  Because of that, this change in routine surprised some of you and caused you to be concerned. I am sorry for surprising you with this change. I respect your concerns and want to assure you that I also respect the right of any student to not participate in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. However, as I must follow the law and district policy, we will continue to include the pledge in our morning routine.

Again, I apologize for surprising you with the change in routine. Thank you for your feedback – it is always encouraged to help us do our best work in support of your student’s education. Last, I look forward to working with you this year to have a GREAT year at [the school]!

Oddly, this is now becoming a regular occurrence in my life: receiving a surprising, out of left field email from a leader – a corporate CEO, a divisional executive, a principal – which at once violates so many rules of leadership that it seems almost calculated to offend.  In each case, the leader admits to making a change which is (a) made with no notice, (b) made with no concern for the impact or opinions of the affected population, (c) justified by some regulation which by their own admission appears to be interpretive at best, more likely discretionary, and certainly irrelevant or counterproductive in practice, and (d) is passed off pathetically with a chipper send-off, oozing with a cowardly hope that the controversy will all blow over and everything will be dandy tomorrow.

Making changes of any sort without notice is usually a bad idea.  Even if the change is essentially not a choice, it’s always a good idea to give the veneer of optionality to a change so as to make people think that they’ve been involved.  Often that’s just advance notice – hey folks, we’re doing something we haven’t done in the past, starting tomorrow, it’s the law so I can’t stop it but just wanted you to know – and that advance notice gives people the choice to prepare, to think about it.  If they show up and haven’t thought about it then it’s their fault; the choice, therefore, is to think about it.  But that’s a choice, at least, even if it’s a false one.  Psychologically, it makes things a bit easier.  Did the principal do this?  No.  Fists of ham.

Now, obviously, not every change in the school routine is going to be previewed with parents.  My son came home and mentioned that the end of day routine had also changed: instead of all kids taking the bus home going to the cafeteria, they now congregate in a single classroom for each grade, and then a teacher brings them to the bus zone.  That’s fine, and no one wants to be engaged at that level of change (although this being Seattle, someone will I’m sure have complained that her daughter’s inability to go to the cafeteria on her own is an implicit block to building her self-esteem and an example of the patriarchy limiting freedom of movement).  But the Pledge of Allegiance change is not the same thing as lining up for a bus.  In north Seattle, the Pledge was predictably going to be controversial.  It takes no particular knowledge to realize that it is fundamentally different than who kids sit with at lunch.  And yet the principal seemed to think that it was, given that she gave exactly the same weight to one change as the other in terms of expecting parental response.

As a leader, this means she either took no time to learn about the population of families who were being served by her school, or that she knew their political proclivities and didn’t care about their view, or that she knew their political proclivities and felt the best way to make things happen was to try to sneak one by them – despite the fact that she had possibly the worst co-conspirators in the world, children between the age of five and eleven, to rely upon to keep the secret.  Or even worse for a public elementary school principal, she thought she was dealing with a rational group of adults who would understand that there was an unenforced and ignored law and school district policy that had not been observed but obviously needed to be.  What?  Assume a group of parents would be rational?  That makes you insane because it is so obviously incorrect – and it now forces all of us to question whether she has any decent sense of judgment whatsoever.

Which brings us to the third failure: hiding behind rules.  The weakest of moral arguments is “I was just following orders,” but as legal arguments go, it generally passes muster – and as an administrative argument, it’s almost impeccable.  But that’s what makes it so pathetic as a leader: what passes as a bureaucratic necessity is morally empty.  Leadership isn’t about administration; it’s about morality, exhibiting the courage to do what is right, not what is dictated.  We admire leaders who are willing to discern this difference, and in fact, we end up being attracted to leaders who play-act this discernment despite our own judgments of right and wrong.  We do so because of the courage required to reject dictated requirements, and we presume that that courage is accompanied by a moral notion of what is right.  That is a fallacy – Nietzsche’s attempt to conflate “that which the courageous assert” with “that which is right” has been demonstrably proven false so many times that it’s tedious (if sometimes necessary) to remind us of it – but the willingness to believe in the fallacy only reveals the underlying truth.  “Following orders” is universally viewed as morally bankrupt, even as it retains its value in organizational constructs; “doing what is right” is universally viewed as good, even as organizations revile the sentiment behind it, that the organization is not universally good.

For the principal – caught in the vise between district administration, union represented staff, and fundamentally insane parent clients – falling back on bureaucratic necessity is particularly false.  Only the district will view it as valid – but given that they had turned a blind eye to ignoring the regulation and policy of the Pledge to date, it was clear that the principal in this case was invoking an empty administrative requirement.  She was, in other words, going to die on a hill that the district had already abandoned.  The union and the parents – both of Seattle, both therefore fundamentally antithetical to the Pledge and what it represents – were going to despise her for the act and even more so for invoking the bureaucrat’s last disputational resort.

This again reminded me of other settings in which I’ve found myself of late.  From work – in a workplace imbued in the habits of peacetime military obfuscation and false bureaucratic duty – to just the general engagement we all have with administration, at the town level, the state level, the federal level, the international level – the willingness to cowardly hide behind “this is the law and this is what I’ve been told to do” despite the glaring reality that The Law writ large is contradictory, and what one has been told to do is patently in contradiction to the mission and the reality of what one is supposed to do by the underlying principles of The Law, is rampant.  We do not live in a world of false news: we live in an era of false principles, and in an environment – much like the interwar era of Franz Kafka, and Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth; of John Dos Passos and H.L. Mencken; of the postwar era of Joseph Heller and Mordecai Richter – of absurdity and of a lazy willingness to accept the judgment and fundamental exhaustion of responsibility of the organization, at the expense of the intuition and individual accountability of the self.  My son’s principal, in her pathetic and strange first email to parents, embodied it all.

And to close it off with have a “GREAT year” at the school – despite hiding behind pathetic an unenforced regulations, despite ignoring the sensibilities of all the constituencies to whom she had some accountability, despite making what can only be seen as a significant change with no notice and thus without even a modicum of professional discretion – simply adds insult to injury.  Again, I compare it to my own professional experience – this is neither surprising nor unusual; rather it is boring, normal.  It’s what I’ve encountered at all the companies by which I’ve been employed; only rare individual leaders have bucked the trend.  Lately I’ve encountered fewer and fewer such leaders, and when I’ve tried to act as what I think of as a proper leader, not just an administrator, I’ve encountered the full force of what a bureaucratic culture can bring to bear.  But the life of a republic – the promise of both liberty and justice, in a world in which such concepts should be available to all, in a sense making us all indivisible as a human species, on a small world which is indivisible without our consequent destruction – demands that we continue to be courageous, that we continue to ignore administrative imperatives in the name of the good.  In other words, we can, Viktoria, have a robust argument about the nature of that Good – whether it is beauty, or truth, or justice – and whether there can ever be a singular good.

Oddly, though, the Great Kerfuffle of 2019 will probably produce something different.  This being north Seattle, the general reaction is to fragment.  My ex-wife is on a Facebook group site on which like-minded parents are trading stories of their own agony in facing the falsehoods behind the Pledge.  A Mexican parent sees current immigration policy as an affront; others recount their experiences as minorities and recoil from the implications of the homogeneity behind the Pledge’s founding principals.  Instead of uniting behind a message of “this administrator is incompetent,” the emerging theme is to fragment the community behind two opposing and equally false viewpoints.  One group views the Pledge as a fundamentally good thing, and those that don’t see it as being anti-American – even in north Seattle, there are a lot of “patriotic” Americans who see symbols as sacrosanct.  And the other views the Pledge as being symbolic of the vague fascism that comes with nationalism, that is willing to associate personal slights experienced as black / immigrant / LGBTQ people by mainstream society with one of the symbols of that mainstream.  Both therefore endow a symbol – a thirty-one word rote bad poem recited hand over heart to a piece of fabric – with meaning.  If we’re going to care about the Pledge, then the administrator has a kind of duty to pay attention to the regulations – if you don’t like it, change the law.  If we don’t care about it, though, the Pledge becomes meaningless and empty… but north Seattlites are too earnest to see that possibility.  So both sides harden, crystalize, and miss the point.

Both abdicate their ability to do what my classmates, teachers, administrators, and community did in the 80s, which is to render the symbol powerless via a collective will to ignore.  The principal at my son’s school wants to reinstate it?  The best way to render it powerless is to not care.  It’s to take the principal’s desire to “do something” as the ravings of a pathetic, powerless, and cowardly administrator with less leadership skill than my seven year old son.  The potential of a community is to make symbols, any symbol but especially the ones imposed by faceless institutions, meaningless through disdain – but by taking the administrators and their symbols seriously we lose that power.  We have lost the collective ability to ignore – and that may be the greatest danger we face as a liberal democratic civilization.  We need to be able to collectively not care.

Ironically, my company’s values includes “loyalty,” which I’ve thought about a lot lately.  I’ve come to realize that loyalty is the polar opposite of allegiance: loyalty is earned, every day, while allegiance can only be demanded and forced.  I learned loyalty to the republic, for the flag for which it stands, by inverting the notion of allegiance and coming to value the principles on which the republic was founded (even if the practical outcomes were imperfect, to say the least), the statements of the Supreme Court (well, most of them – Dred Scott is only one of many cringeworthy abominations), the best moments of liberty and justice that it can produce – and realizing that that loyalty required my ability to challenge the republic, to reject its falsehoods when they came about.  Loyalty is being true to what is right in a mission; it is not blind.  I hope my son learns the same.  And if the result is that he is a bit impudent, that he’s a bit iconoclastic, that he maybe crosses the line into disrespect: well, he’ll be his father’s son.  He’ll be loved no matter what.

 

I just came back from a few days at Peter’s and it was lovely to witness his life: with his son and his parents near by, his new dog and his new house.  We ate fried clams, walked Rosie, played Uno.  No one won but we enjoyed ourselves.  When I crossed back into Canada, the border agent seemed doubtful that I hadn’t bought anything.  Even with the weak Canadian dollar, tourists shop in the USA by the mere habit of it.  I was too busy being present with my dear friend and his family to indulge in consumerism.  We didn’t even go to a proper sandy beach and yet, I’ll forever treasure the normalcy of these few days.  

When Alan was asleep and Rosie finally calmed herself, it was bluntly apparent that Peter and I are atypical individuals.  Amidst the daily acts of living, which Mark aptly reminded us can be either joy or a grind depending on the meaning we assign to the routine maintenance of our lives, we etched out precious minutes to delve into existential questions.  The Nature of Love.  What is Religion: a cultural system or something more?  If more, what differentiates it from ideology?  We asked tough questions and evaluated hypotheses.  We didn’t solve the equations of the Universe, but we discerned the known from the known-unknown, questioned ourselves as to the unknown-unknown and even accepted a category of unknowables.  We acknowledged the magic and unpredictability of our recursive sentience.  And yet, we still ate, drank and slept like all those unaware or unwilling to face the complexity of our social world.  

We debated: what prevents ‘typical’ individuals from questioning the meaning of their lives — individually or collectively?  Peter claimed circumstances: that everyone has the potential to fathom their inherent personal complexity and our emergent collective one, but not everyone has the education or intellectual and emotional resources to do so.  I am more defeatist and existentialist at my core: culture indeed might prevent greater social enlightenment, but individuals still choose what becomes the focus of their attention.  But in hindsight, I think that we might have been saying the same thing: who is morally responsible for a life spent sleep-walking?  The unconscious agent or its repressive culture?  

On the spur of the moment, I had decided to drive to Peter’s because I needed to let my ‘existential’ soul loose.  I knew that Peter would welcome my inquisitions: that he would listen and welcome my seriousness.  This is my one life — my rapidly dwindling finite days on Earth — and there is nothing more serious to me than figuring out what I shall do next.  But this attitude is often a ‘mood killer’ and I genuinely respect those who don’t want to anticipate further than their next dinner.  Still, I am in the early days of a new path and I know perfectly well that the choices I make now will ripple into the future in unknown and unknowable ways.  I needed my friend to tell me that it’s ok to be scared… but that it’s not ok to resist my radical authenticity.  Embrace. Breath. Release. Repeat.  

We talked about the fascinating ways in which our minds work.  This is not an easy topic to approach because we usually assume that another mind functions just the way that our own does.  At the onset, it is the best assumption we can make — for we don’t have direct access to another person’s introspective subjectivity.  To gain hints at another’s experience of living, we must communicate — build an intersubjective understanding — and even then, our experience of another person’s mind will only be indirect.  Our human super-power of empathy merely opens the door to ‘other minds’; yet already, it is intermediated (and transformed) by the need to put lived experiences into words.   

Peter expressed his amazement at my dualistic linguistic abilities.  I confirmed that my French and English consciousnesses ‘understand’ different things for a text even when ‘literally’ translated.  Languages are indeed irreductible to one another — there is always something lost and something else created when we transform meaning across parallel symbolic systems.  

I shared that my mind functions less rationally than others seem to think.  For the most important decisions in my life, I feel my way forward.  With rationality (left side brain), we seem to be able to justify one thing and its opposite.  Knowing that rationality can lead me astray, I never give it the final say.  

There is a place in my brain that ‘feels’ like a deep well.  I can look at its surface and I may see two different things: 1) as a mirror, it reflects what I project.  This inner-mirror presents what my rationality has already constructed.  Reflecting on this reflection is useful but I must nonetheless be careful — for there is no reason to believe that Rationality is fundamentally ‘True’ simply because the very best it can be is ‘Internally-Coherent’.  ’Truth’ comes from somewhere else… From deep within the well.  

When I make the conscious effort to see beyond my inner-reflection, beyond what I have already chosen and how I have defined myself, I can see the well for what it is: 2) my unconsciousness.  The 90% of my brain that doesn’t use words to express itself.  It acts like an oracle to whom I can pose questions, yet one that I must decipher.  The well expresses itself in impressions that cannot be justified.  To be able to feel them, I must be silent.  Therefore, my mind doesn’t live in endless chatter.  Thoughts emerge, bubble over.  They come fully formed, with the strength of a conviction. Or tentatively, as potential solutions.  My psyche is only another sense-organ which processes, as inputs, those impressions emerging from my unconsciousness.  

To feel my way forward, I cannot dictate what I expect to find.  I must be sensitive to my impressions.  I embrace, interpret, hypothesize them and then wait to see how a proposal ‘sits’ within my well.  If it re-emerges later on with the same outline, then I know that I’m on the right path.  If not, I must ask a better question.  It’s definitely an iterative process.  I’ve changed circumstances many times in my past because my well told me that ‘I was wrong’.  The well is never wrong — only my capacity to read the tea leaves, to listen to its wisdom…  Already, giving a verbal explanation of this fundamentally pre-reflective process distorts it slightly.  But it also frees me!  How joyful is it to be known that intimately!  

Peter told me about his fundamentally mathematic mind.  As empathetic as I am, I could not relate as fully as I wished.  I do not dream in differential equations.  The closest I come to thinking through mathematic equations is through complex optimizations.  I see curves of future potential, opening and closing according to the choices we make today.  I try to anticipate the shape of these curves.  My decision-making abilities have slowed to a snail’s pace because I’ve reached the kink in the curve of exponential complexity.  I am consciously embarking on a journey that — I hope — will change not only my consciousness but that of Many.  Because of the recursive nature of human sentience, I cannot anticipate how my choices will affect other people’s choices.  I do not have access to the second degree feedback loop that may or may not ‘kick in’ as I live a more public life.  As a contributor to the creation of intersubjective understanding, I can only (and barely) control how to present my contributions.  Their effects extend infinitely beyond my reach. 

When I resolve to be less shy, it means that I will be more brave.  Less paralyzed by my optimizing mind.  I vow to proceed with my a-typical path in full awareness that I cannot optimize the consequences of my actions.  I’m emerging.  I must leap with unjustifiable faith into an unknowable future, one that my words and praxis will stir based on imperfect knowledge.  This is scary but the best I can do.  

A few nights ago, I went to my local theatre to see a production of a recently composed opera, based on an old Italian fairy tale.  The libretto was both light- and warm-hearted, the singing and playing were both competent, and while the evening was enjoyable, nonetheless I left the theatre dissatisfied.  The narrative structure in Act One hinted at Greek tragedy, but the concluding Scene in Act Two was pure Hollywood.  Reflecting on my disappointment, I concluded that there is good reason why fairy tales tend not to work well as the source material for opera.   In the best opera, most, if not all the principals lie dead on the stage by the time the curtain falls.  By contrast, the best fairy tales conclude with the narrator’s assurance that the main characters will now live “happily, ever after”.

I do not intend to say more about opera, at least not in this text.  Instead I want to write about living happily ever after: what would that be like?

I remember a poem by C P Cavafy, titled “Monotony”, written in 1908 and here translated from modern Greek by Aliki Barnstone:

From one monotonous day, another day
follows, identically monotonous. The same
things will happen. They will happen again.
The same moments find us and leave us.

A month passes and brings in another month.
We easily guess what is to come:
the same boring things from yesterday.
Then tomorrow no longer looks like tomorrow.

One reason I like this poem is for the way Cavafy generates tension between form and content: there is repetition as day follows day, month follows month, and the same things happen again and again.  But he is careful to tell us that the days are monotonous, and that the things are boring.  It is not their repetition that is the problem but their intrinsic uninterestingness.  Boredom is a feature of the events themselves not their repeated recurrence.  From which we might infer that a life of repetition could potentially be an interesting life – a happy life, a life in which tomorrow truly looks like tomorrow – even though this particular exemplar, the life about which Cavafy writes, is neither interesting nor happy because what is endlessly repeated is by nature dull.

Many of the moments of our lives, which find us and leave us, do so daily.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will eat: which means that I will also buy ingredients, cook food and clear away the utensils after consuming what I have prepared.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will go to sleep: which means that I will also brush my teeth, wash my face and make the bed after rising in the morning.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will read: which means that I will also browse my shelves for material, sit for an hour or more in my chair and return my glasses to their case after perusing the chosen book or magazine.  For most days of the rest of my life – not the unusual days, the extraordinary days, but the normal days – it is these habitual activities that will determine whether my life is lived happily, ever after.

(I take it that “ever after” in this context means “for a good while”, and not “for time without end”.  For immortals, the problem of monotony will be harder to resolve).

One part of the secret to living a happy life comes from avoiding war, famine, or the premature deaths of those we love, but success in these cases mostly remains beyond our control.  We cannot always avoid adversity, however much we try, and unluckiness can surely be the enemy of happiness.  Finding satisfaction in the quotidian is, I think, another part of the secret: if we can adjust our sense of pleasure to focus on the enjoyment of the everyday, we increase the likelihood of a happy life.  Many facets of our daily lives can be thought of as tiresome chores which distract us from greater, more meaningful activities, but I suspect that thinking in this way makes the achievement of greater things less likely.

Which brings to my mind another poem, titled “I Want” and written in 1933 by Ricardo Reis, one of the anonyms of Fernando Pessoa, here translated from the Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin:

I want – unknown, and calm
Because unknown, and my own
Because calm – to fill my days
With wanting no more than them.

Those whom wealth touches – their skin
Itches with the gold rash.
Those who fame breathes upon –
Their life tarnishes.

To those for whom happiness is
Their sun, night comes around.
But to one who hopes for nothing
All that comes is grateful.

Chasing after wealth and fame is foolish, for all the obvious reasons, but so too is chasing happiness as an end-in-itself.  Enjoying what we have, what is given to us – the daily repetitions that structure our lives – can bring pleasure enough, and anything additional should be treated as a gift.  Reis (Pessoa) wants no more from life than his days of life: they suffice; living itself is good enough.

Pessoa’s poem echoes the writings of Benedict Spinoza, whose Jewish ancestors had left Portugal for Holland, rather than accept forced conversion to the Christian faith.  Spinoza was himself expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for refusing to abjure his radical theological views.  He was a man denied the security afforded by membership of a strong national or religious community, a man who depended on the kindness and discretion of a small group of like-minded friends, themselves at the margins of Europe’s emergent Republic of Letters.  He was a man who, though he might think as he pleased, needed to be very careful about saying what he thought; he was a writer whose caution led him to remain unpublished in his lifetime.  Yet, he was also by all accounts a happy man.

At the start of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (written in the late 1650s), Spinoza writes that experience had taught him that “all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile”.  This might be taken as a wholesale rejection of my suggestion that happiness can be found in the enjoyment of the quotidian.  But while he dismisses the pursuit of wealth, honour or sensual pleasure for their own sake as routes to happiness, Spinoza is careful to note that these three need not be obstacles to happiness, so long as they are considered only means to a greater end.  That end – true happiness – he describes as “the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature”.  To understand what Spinoza means by this enigmatic statement would require extensive commentary on his great philosophical treatise, The Ethics (published in 1677, shortly after his death).  However, for my present purposes I want only to draw attention to a claim that he makes – emphatically – in the fourth chapter (paragraph 42), where he writes that “cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good”; or, as another translation puts it, “there cannot be too much joy”.  Spinoza is sometimes portrayed as a man who lived an austere life and developed an austere philosophy.  On the contrary: he was a man who found great joy in both his life and his thought.

Whether we find the things that regularly occur in ordinary life to be empty and futile, depends less on their intrinsic nature and more on the way we think about them.  If we chase wealth, fame or pleasure as our goals, we are likely to find the daily routine to be no more than a daily grind.  By contrast, if we take pleasure in small, repeated actions – the daily making of coffee, a weekly swim, tending a garden through the seasons – our happiness can be founded upon these well-loved routines.  Should some wealth, fame or pleasure appear in our lives – by effort, merit, or accident – they may bring us supernumerary joy.  But we are more likely to be happy if we do not depend on the extraordinary as the source of our happiness.

Which is another way of saying that whether we are happy – or not – is consequent more on how we think about our lives and less on what happens to us during our lives.  If we understand, as Spinoza did, the union of the mind with the natural world, or if we learn, as Pessoa did, to hope for nothing, then we can enjoy the routines of daily life cheerfully because such a life can be lived with joy.  What once were considered obstacles can, in practice, become vehicles to true happiness, if only we adapt our minds to the reality of the world.

I do not mean by this that happiness if only to be found by withdrawal from the world, escaping into a sheltered, scholarly or poetic renunciation of public life.  Spinoza spent much time thinking and writing about politics and science: his retreat into domesticity was forced upon him by the lack of intellectual and social freedom of his time.  And he is the most materialist of all philosophers, denying the existence of a separate realm of spirit, mind or ideas, distinct from the physical universe.   His approach to happiness is not founded on an abandonment of the material world, but on the whole-hearted embrace of it.  And for him, as for most of us, for most of the time, this embrace is centred on the repetitive daily tasks that form the bones of our lives, the skeleton upon which all else we do hangs.

In classic fairy tales, the hero and heroine live happily, ever after, once the dragon has been slain, or the wicked witch/wizard has been defeated, or the enemy’s attacks have been thwarted, allowing the protagonists to enjoy many, many days in peace and quiet.  Happily, ever after, implies a time of calm, a time of wanting no more than the days themselves.  Does this sound monotonous?  Maybe so, but only if we choose to find days of peace and quiet to be dull.  If we learn to take pleasure in them and their sufficiency, we need not think of them as empty and futile.   And, in addition to the great pleasure we obtain from eating, sleeping and reading – over and over, time and again – we can also go to the opera once in a while, to enjoy the spectacle of der Lieberstod, content that it is others, not us, who chose death in ecstasy over repetitious daily life.