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Quickness of understanding is a mental faculty, but right doing requires the practice of a lifetime.     Goethe

I was sitting alone in the restaurant – which serves informal French cuisine with a good selection of regional wines – immersed in the New York Review of Books, when two young men – mid-twenties, one starting out in finance the other in politics – sat at the table next to me.  Their discussion was brisk and uninhibited, hard to ignore despite my best intentions.  After several minutes of gossip about mutual acquaintances, one changed the subject abruptly.

“Have you read this book by Daniel Kahneman?” he asked, “it’s called Thinking Fast and Slow.”  “No.  Is it any good?”  “Not really.  It’s far too long.  The basic idea is obvious could have been summarised in 25-pages.  He keeps repeating himself and includes endless stories and anecdotes.”  “OK that’s good to know, I won’t waste my time reading it.”

Momentarily, I was tempted to interrupt their conversation, to explain to them that if they were both to take a week off work, carefully to study Kahneman’s book and the wider literature he describes, it would be an investment that would repay them multiple times over the course of their lives.  I resisted the temptation and now I fear that both their careers will forever be blighted by loss.

These two men –still young but already in too much of a hurry – were thinking fast rather than thinking slow; which is to say, they were not really thinking at all.  When we apply our minds without reflection, without checking carefully for bias, for lack of relevant information in sufficient quantity, and for over-confidence, we tend to apply rules-of-thumb to cases for which they might not be applicable; it is quick but lazy.  Some people like to call this “intuition”, but I think “prejudice” is the better term.

Heuristic tools, which give standard answers in response to standard questions, are useful when the problems we face are minor and quotidian.  However, when things start to get harder, the quick responses soon become inadequate and a more considered approach is required.  And when we encounter problems about the most important questions in life – of freedom and duty, of value and meaning, of friendship and happiness – thinking fast is wholly unreliable.

Thinking slow – which is to say, really thinking – takes time and energy, which for evolutionary reasons we are disposed not to want to expend, even when we recognise that the standard answers will not work in this instance.  Nonetheless, without investing in the skills and disciplines of careful, reflective thought, we are condemned to rely on the first idea that lodges in our mind, which is often someone else’s fast thought, circulating around society like a virus, which we have picked up unknowingly simply through our proximity to those already infected.

What to do about lazy thinking?  Hard work seems to be the right answer.

I conceive of slow thought – that is, careful, reflective, unprejudiced thought – as a skill, which we should spend our lifetime acquiring, exercising and improving.  When we are young, we are often impatient to learn, and we have the capacity to pick up skills and ideas with great speed.  But learning to think is harder than learning to play chess or solve Sudoku puzzles.  It is harder than learning to play the piano.

Listening to Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations from 1955, when he was 22 years old, and comparing it to the recording he made in 1981, the year before he died aged 50, it seems to me that when he was young he knew how to play Bach well, but when he was older he had also learned how to interpret Bach well.  Unsurprisingly, his first recording of the work lasts for less than forty minutes, the second for more than fifty: he was playing fast and slow.

Learning to think is hard for two reasons.  First, most difficult situations we face in life are unique, even though the challenges are ubiquitous.  Learning how to support our children as they grow up, or how to manage our relations with our parents as they grow old, or how to maintain friendships over the years as the ties that once bound us together loosen apart, are experiences common to many of us; but that does not mean that there are simple, standard solutions.  Each version of the problem has its individual complexities which make it relevantly unlike other versions of the problem.  That’s one reason why books that set out ten rules for success, or seven principles that will lead to happiness, are so obviously misleading: there are no generic answers to life’s important questions.

A second reason is that as we grow older, we keep learning; indeed, one might go so far as to say (with Jürgen Habermas) that a characteristic of the human species is our inability not to learn. While all of us think differently when we are fifty to how we thought when we were twenty-five, some of us exhibit this trait more reliably than others.  As we learn, so we find better answers to questions that perplexed us when we were younger, and we also discover that some answers we previously accepted are in fact not so compelling.  Our judgement improves with use, which means that we need to keep building on its successes and working to reduce its failures.  Growing old is unavoidable, but becoming wiser is a choice, requiring time and effort.

One thing that doesn’t improve with age is our speed of thought.  Quickness is a gift of youth, and we will always celebrate the brilliance and inventiveness of the prodigy.  There is no reason to condescend just because we can no longer keep up with the generations that follow on from us.   But as Goethe came to understand – having himself been the youthful genius of German culture in the second half of the eighteenth century – the mental agility of clever young minds needs to give way to the patient accumulation of good practice, which over time constitutes a life well lived.

I recommend Kahneman’s book.  It is beautifully written, erudite and insightful.  It is both a critique of our tendency to rely on quick, immediate thoughts, and a paean to the cultivation of slow, careful, evidence-based reasoning.  It is a thorough presentation, using modern psychological research, of the case that Aristotle made more than two thousand years ago, that a lifetime devoted to good thinking is the most reliable route to happiness and the best protection against failure.

Peter’s writers block made me wonder why we write in the first place.  Why indeed? Many answers quickly came to my mind; 1) I write because I can – because I learned how to; 2) I write because I cannot notdo it – like Peter seemed to; 3) I write because I must outwardly share what lies within – like I am so compelled to do.  Still, do I write for my own sake or for you, the reader?  And in the end, does it matter why I write and to whom?

 

How can I even begin to answer such questions?  First, let’s marvel at what writing is: this most amazing invention – the apogee of human’s capacity for symbolic meanings.  With only these A to Z’sand a few grammar rules, we get to describe the reality that surrounds us and to give it a layer of meaning that doesn’t exist in the physical world. In writing, we may express what we -and others – get to perceive, think, and feel.  Ask any psychologists or anthropologists, historians or post-modern scholars, and they will confirm that writing is the super-power of homo sapiens sapiens.  The man who knows – and knows that he knows – became a civilized man the day that we committed to writing the ways we perceive the world.

 

In other words, writing is a powerful act!  Writing is not merely meaning-making and the labeling of the physical world; though that is powerful enough in and of itself! More importantly, writing is the very act of reshaping the world to our image – of changing a blank page to one exposing our inner selves, our concerns, our very ideals.  There is nothing in the page that constrains what is to be written…  Only the writer decides.  The blank page is pure freedom.  And yet it is agony too, because that page requires from us an unparalleled commitment to individuality.  What we choose to put on that page is the sum of who we are, filtered through what we choose to write about and how we address it.  The page is also fundamentally social as soon as it shared, because it becomes an extension of ourselves embodied in the physical (or virtual) reality – ready to be judged mercilessly by others.  Described like that, no wonder a writer gets blocks?!  So take it easy on yourself Peter!

 

Am I sometimes afraid of this power?  You bet’cha!  My life would be much easier if I didn’t write, if I wasn’t compelled to take a stand.  Yet writing is one of the most powerful means of action that we still possess in our post-modern world.  With each word I choose, each subject I explore, each logical argument I build or train-of-thought I follow, I empower my individuality.  Hence, through my writing, I keep at bay the countless forces, much greater than myself, that aim to force me into conformity.  Or at least, I tell myself so…

 

So if this is why I write – to be my own person, with control over the meaning I choose to assign to my surroundings and experiences – then what does it mean when I suddenly can’t write?  Does it mean that I am losing control?  Does it mean that my fears outweigh my desire to be known as the unique snowflake that I am?

 

When the fear to be misunderstood rises to such a level that I feel stymied in my writing, I take a long deep breath.  I go back to asking myself: why am I writing?

 

Again, the answers flow: I write to find myself, to discern my essence, my nature.  I write to capture my fleeting impressions, my (maybe precious?) observations. My words are my rebellion.  They are my emergence.  I write to build a bridge between my conscience and yours…

 

Recently, I’ve been quite silent on this blog.  I am writing my memoir and it is taking all my literary bandwidth – and then some.  It is the story of how an ordinary baby girl transformed into a social philosopher; told through her Quebecois upbringing and personal ordeals.  I write every morning: sometimes I feel elated, sometimes I sob.  Either way, I delve deep into how and why I became who I am.  And I wonder: when I’ll be done, will I be free from my past?  Is knowledge really power?

 

I am making peace with a difficult past.  Like the phoenix, I am rising.  Yet I realized last week that the man who inspired me to strive, the man who set me on my path, the one whom I tried so hard to please – he’d now never understand what I am trying to accomplish with my words.  That tribute I am writing for his influence on my life, he’d consider it a parting insult!  This realization merely silenced me again: it hurts so much to know that some minds are closed to anything butwhat they choose to believe.

 

Still, I march on.  I reveal.  I rejoice in the act of writing, in how it makes me feel.  Both powerful and vulnerable.  Alive to and yet slightly removed from the beauty and messiness of existence.

I started writing this blog because I couldn’t not write it.  I kept writing it because I couldn’t not write it.  But last month, I couldn’t write.

I still really can’t.  It’s been an eventful month, though, don’t get me wrong.  I have things to say – I’ve read John McPhee’s 2006 book, Uncommon Carriers, about freight transport in North America, and I’ve read a 1979 assembly of Hericlitus, and I’ve read my son The Trumpet of the Swan by EB White, and my parents gave me Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and I’ve finally finished the second volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.  The ex-girlfriend has ignored my happy new year’s message.  The ex-wife has railed against the existence of our ex-marriage.  My son has gotten more amazing, more loving, more open, and at the same time more curious and more independent and more individual.  My father has gotten better and much worse all at once.  My career has gotten more interesting and more confusing and more wrong and more right all at once.  I have too much to say, too much to think about, and I can’t write.

Tonight, I got to the airport five hours ahead of my flight.  It’s the red eye, as usual, the typical flight every two weeks between the desolate Pacific Northwest and the strange airy desert dust hellscape of south Texas.  I got to the airport early because I had a conference call that started at five thirty Ante Meridian, well before my son woke up, I took the call on my laptop and my cell phone from behind the bathroom door while he slept, and after the call I was exhausted and just wanted to crash in a familiar place, which for me is an airport.  At seven Ante Meridian I opened the door and turned on the lights and put the phone on mute and woke the son up, and made bacon and put a plate of blueberries and pear and while I had one ear on the conference call talking about fixed income asset management which had no chance of being relevant to the people whose savings I’m responsible for, and I encouraged him to put on proper trousers and eat fruit and semi-crispy bacon and color in the star which represented the story I read to him the prior night.  I put on proper trousers myself, and a t-shirt and a sweater, and made myself a coffee, and tried to convince myself that the whole package, of conference call and studio apartment and upcoming flight back to office and flight back in a week and a half, was worth it.  It was, because I put the call off mute and asked a question and it stopped the call and the global megacorp airhead on the other end realized that they weren’t going to get the contract.  The question helped nine million depositors, most of whom have no idea how a bank works.  My son needed to get his socks on.

I asked my friend if she liked horror movies.  It made more sense than the question I asked the global megacorp.  But it was on text, so no one cared.  I hit send and realized I had asked a question that meant a lot but really just cared about whether she responded.  She could say she loved horror movies – which I don’t like – and I still would care.  If she said she loved them and needed me to love them, it would be different.  But she didn’t.  Horror movies aren’t her favorite genre.  My favorite genre, frankly, is probably spaghetti Westerns.  That and romantic comedies.  Sports related romantic comedies.

The ex-girlfriend hated earnest things, but she watched earnest movies – Finding Nemo, Coco – with a kind of desperation.  She craved validation through the exultation of the heroes; I kept finding sympathy with the bit players, with the servants in the background, which queered her narrative.  She hated that.  And now I have a job that exists to help the servants in the background – the ones who don’t know what a bank is for and never will.  And I spent eight hours this morning on a conference call on behalf of the background heroes today that made me realize that there are no heroes any more.  The best we can hope for is service, of those who serve us.  A bad pun.

I had a bad day today and don’t know why.  But for all of that, I woke up to an alarm and a conference call, and an hour and a half later the most beautiful creature on earth stirred and asked me to be quiet.  He was in his bed, next to mine even though mine was empty, he stirred and curled and purred and went back to sleep, and I remembered why I had done everything I had for the past six years, during which I left my wife, during which I torridly joined with the ex-girlfriend, during which I left her and let her leave me.  I thought about why I longed for the voice of the new friend in Maine who called me that night, why I needed this time on my own, this time finally, to read The Arcades Project, why I didn’t want to leave Seattle but didn’t either want to head to San Antonio, why I knew I’d never be able to tell my father what I wanted but knew he’d also understand it all.  It wasn’t really a bad day but it felt that way.

Collapse time and I’m at the airport bar again, hungry.  I ordered the Alaskan Ling Cod fish and chips, along with a couple of dry Gibsons, and the phone rang, silently, letting me know I had missed the calls.  I called the missed number back.  I spoke idiotically, happily, amazed.  She had called me, and her voice was amazing.  It was a voice that let other people tell their story.  I wasn’t sure how to tell mine.  But it was good to hear her voice.

Two hours later, I’m waiting to board the flight to Chicago.  I’m just glad I’m writing again.  I’ll write something worthy of Mark and Viktoria soon.  But tonight, I’m just glad I’m writing.

Everyone has a character of their own choosing, it is chance or fate that decides our choice of job.

Yesterday my team lost and consequently I was unhappy.  (Not least because they were beaten by the team my daughter supports).  I’m not unfamiliar with the experience of losing, which happens often enough.  The top English football teams will probably play more than fifty competitive games in a season and even the very best will lose around ten per cent of those in most years.   But being a fan – in my case, supporting the same team since I was eight years old – dictates that I will be happy when they win and unhappy when they lose.  Their successes and failures become mine, by proxy.  If I were indifferent to my team’s results, then I would no longer be a fan.

This being so, why be a fan?  Why put myself in the position that I allow events over which I have no control – no influence whatsoever – to determine my feelings, my mood, my sense of well-being?  Why risk the possibility of happiness in this way?   To understand my rationale, consider the words of a celebrated former manager of Liverpool Football Club, who once explained:  Someone said to me, ‘To you football is a matter of life or death!’ and I said, ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’.  It’s instructive to reflect on why this might be true.

Among the famous schools of classical Greek philosophy, the Stoics were renowned for their claim that happiness was to be achieved by living a virtuous life, and that those who were virtuous were happy, whatever befell them.   They taught that we should strive to cultivate a virtuous character and that if we did then, irrespective of our place in society, the circumstances under which our life passed, and the good or bad luck that we encountered day by day, we would be happy.   Since virtuous actions and dispositions are within our power to choose – everyone has a character of their own choosing, says Seneca – it follows that our achievement of happiness is consequent solely upon decisions we make for ourselves.   Fate might cause us all sorts of problems, but it cannot remove our power to determine our happiness.

This has always been a controversial claim, and not just because of the employment choices that fate allowed Seneca to make.  Well before the Roman Stoics set out the case for being indifferent to fate, Aristotle had noted – in the Nicomachean Ethics – that when external events turn out very bad for us, as was the case for King Priam of Troy, it is hard to see how we can continue to be described as happy.  Aristotle accepts that small pieces of good or bad fortune that are outside of our control clearly do not weigh down the scales of life one way or another.  It is possible for someone to experience modest bad luck from time to time, but to live an active and virtuous life and to achieve happiness.

However, whether the big events of our lives turn out well or badly for us will have a material impact on our ability to live well and to be happy.  If we enjoy many major strokes of good fortune, they will add beauty to our lives and enable us to demonstrate nobility in our actions; conversely, if many important events turn out badly for us, they will crush and maim our happiness, through the pain they bring us, and because they hinder our ability to act virtuously.   Even in these cases, Aristotle thinks that the noble character of a virtuous person will shine through, visible in the way that misfortunes are borne.

Aristotle’s argument – that we achieve happiness through our pursuit of virtue, but that external circumstances might constrain our ability to live a good life and achieve lasting happiness – has a parallel with the more recent argument that Karl Marx made, that we make our own history, but we do not make it as we please but under the circumstances that we inherit from the past.   The point for both philosophers is that context is material and, therefore, the belief that our destiny and our happiness are wholly within our own control is illusory.

This is a lesson that is easy to forget, especially when for lengthy periods nothing significantly bad happens to us.  When context is persistently benign, we disregard its threat.  Few of us ever undergo a transformation in the circumstances of our lives of the magnitude that King Priam witnessed, and many of us manage to avoid serious episodes of bad luck for decades.   We are thus seduced into forgetting the fragility of our pursuit of happiness.  We might work hard at living well, we might believe that we are happy, but then, one day, things fall apart.  Due to circumstances beyond our control, and irrespective of the virtues we have cultivated for many years, our grasp on happiness is gone, perhaps not lost forever, but certainly damaged irreparably.

My team losing is not a disaster.  The result was bad rather than good news for me, but it did not weigh down the scales of my life.  My sadness will be very temporary, but the reminder is valuable.  Every time my team plays, they risk losing and I risk a modest bout of unhappiness; but every day, my happiness is in jeopardy, for it might be snatched away from me, subject to the vagaries of ill-fortune.  That’s why sport might well be more than a life and death matter: because it reminds us that achieving happiness is never fully in our control, that we are vulnerable to fate, that contingency must be accommodated and borne with dignity.

There’s a further lesson here too, that should encourage us to be suspicious of Seneca’s over confidence.  He believed in his power to isolate himself from fate but, famously, was forced to kill himself at the insistence of Nero, his former pupil, who suspected his involvement in a plot.  A noble death?  Perhaps, but also an unhappy end to a long and rich life.

Aristotle shows greater wisdom, both in his appreciation of the nuanced relationship between the virtuous life and happiness, but also in his reminder of our permanent vulnerability to having our happiness snatched away from us.  We can be better prepared for whatever the future holds if we avoid hubris and wishful thinking.

 

Over the last seven weeks, I’ve been writing my memoir.  As I tell my relatives and close friends about this new endeavor of mine, I get a few distinct reactions.  The majority says: “Wow, you’re brave!  I can’t wait to read it”.  To which I laugh nervously in response to their enthusiasm because, yes indeed, I am pouring my mind and heart on those pages.  And while I am not yet ready to share, I know that the day will necessarily come when I will release my ‘story’ into the world.  “Can’t wait !” V. ironically replies.  But a notable minority reacts differently, not quite daring to ask: “What is so important in your life that you think that people will be interested to read it?”  There is not a lot that I can answer to that.  I say: “Well, one day I’ll be a famous philosopher, and then people will read my memoir of how I got to become who I am…”  That satisfies them, yet it pinpoints how ‘ordinary lives’ are perceived as ‘unimportant’ as a subject of study or interest.  I mean: our memories are important, if only to ourselves and our family, but hopefully as a medium through which the ‘being human’ is captured in all its glorious details.

 

It’s with these observations in mind that I read Peter’s last blog ‘Orality and History’.  Throughout, I felt that memoir writing is – or clearly can be located – in between the written narrative art of history – focused on groups and trends – and the oral traditions of family lore.  Just last week, I spent several days interviewing my relatives – my book’s characters – to try to understand their lives, their motivations, the very impulses that caused them to live and act the way they did. I must confess that I wasn’t as objective and methodical as the oral historian Peter describes.  My questions and my notes were shaped by my own story; the narrative that is currently taking shape.  But I still just tried to make them talk, and it was surprisingly hard to get them talking (especially the men).  Yet we talked about many things that I didn’t know, and I felt – within those conversations – an intimacy that is so rarely present in our lives that when it does arise, we can feel a shift in the air.

 

Most people do not see how precious their life experiences actually are. We take our past for granted: our life lessons as just ‘natural events’ in our lives.  Who would dare to care about how one voted in the Quebec referendum (for sovereignty – 25 years ago)?  Having participated in these conversations just recently, I can understand how amazed Peter is to have met an oral historian – in Maine no less.  Because, a third reaction that I am also getting a lot is: “Oh, I would want to do that too!” but instead of rushing to the computer to work their story out in words, they proceed to tell me all about their lives.

 

I would argue that, for all the people I interviewed recently, none will make the effort to ‘literally’ put their lives into written narratives, yet they all could talk about their lives with a relatively high degree of introspection: even my Grandpa who, at 81, came alive in front of my eyes talking about the car he bought just a few days before wooing my grandmother.  If only we -society – could capture orally what they – everyone – have to say, everyone could then be included in History as we currently understand the discipline.  Because I agree that there are a few missing links between the macro-level – of nation-building for example – and the fact that it took my grandpa to drive the truck that brought the iron beams to the construction sites.  This link – this gem of both my personal and ‘national’ history – I just found out, but even this micro-level is too specific for me to see how ‘the past’ emerged from within the lived experiences of millions of men and women.  It would be a very interesting thing to do, and I wonder – Dear Oral Historian – if that is the goal of your discipline to do something like that?  Could we, by taking/tagging/grouping the oral account of millions of people, ‘hear’ the narrative of our society emerge?

 

Here I am, in the midst of searching my past, interviewing my relatives for their memories, for the moments in our lives when we ‘became’ who we are.  And yet, this formation of our identities cannot be taken in isolation from the History of our society.  And while I do think that I lived a pretty interesting life – at the micro-level -, the real fascinating bits are the ones in which I can see the bigger processes of History appear in my little individual choices.

 

In the end, my life might be only one unique expression of what it means to be alive.  Yet, I capture, abide by and react to norms, habits and the conditions of a much broader social environment.  My reflections, my inner world, is – at once – unique and part of this shared narrative of History, made especially vivid because it so recently unfolded…  I am not sure yet how to link all my ideas and experiences in a compelling – interesting to read – narrative, but the process of discovery itself is awe-inspiring.

 

So, can memoirs – and subsequently the macro-analysis of memoirs – be the missing link?  I believe so! What do you think?