I’m rather happy at the moment. My friends Mark and Viktoria – both excellent writers with different styles – have joined me on this site, adding their own journeys to the mix, and that is enormously satisfying. I had hoped that would happen, and that there might evolve a kind of dialogue that will stretch all of us – writers and readers, sometimes both in the same body – and would forge, hone, and sharpen the combination. And Engagement seems to be doing the trick. The three of us are engaged in a struggle, not with one another, but with an idea.
I visited some friends in Houston this weekend, and while sitting on a chilly Texas November night, one of them evoked something that made me think she must have just read Viktoria’s most recent post, although apparently she hasn’t (she’s gone off the Internet for two weeks now). She described how she was so caught up on being a wave, on the motion of moving back and forth and being moved, that she forgot that she was the ocean as well. I liked how that was expressed, because what is “the ocean”, after all. It’s not a sum of parts, a sum of discrete volumes of water or a combination of forces. The ocean is a thing, a singular thing; it is both the waves and the endless depth which sit below that permeable barrier with the air above it, just as it is also the rock and crust below it upon which it sits and moves and changes.
Viktoria’s analogy is different; she makes the point that she sees me, in my roles in large organizations and in breathtakingly normal places like San Antonio, as a kind of captain, or maybe more precisely as a willing member of a crew. She sees me as trying to push the tiller and steer a new course, and also as trying to teach the crew a new way of steering altogether. But I don’t think that’s what I was trying to say in my last essay.
Similarly, Mark pointed out that the “where” or even the “how” of our engagement with the world comes down to preferences. Hong Kong or Poland, he said, is simply a matter of taste. After reading Vik’s essay I thought, well, does the ocean choose where it sits? Does a wave choose its spot on the sea? And if I’m on board a ship, how much choice in the matter do I have anyway, either? Isn’t someone else deciding where to steer – unless I’m the captain, and even then there are cargoes and passengers and owners who are telling me where they wish to go, regardless of my desires? I think all of us would agree, after all, that what we’re talking about here is not a vacation cruise, it’s not a three-hour tour and we aren’t talking about Gilligan and the Professor.
So I’ll try to clarify a bit. What I was trying to reflect on in my last essay was the question of why I feel compelled to be a part of the large, bureaucratic organizations where most of my working life has focused, and to live in places that aren’t glamourous either. Even in New York, I lived in a part of the Upper West Side which was at the time located in the weird no-mans-land between West 98th Street and Columbia, and in London, I lived in Greenwich, where no one else who worked in Canary Wharf lived (which was odd, but that’s a longer story). Otherwise, it’s been the great middle tier: Seattle, Edmonton, now San Antonio, and maybe Manchester if I’m lucky. I’ve also chased particular kinds of organizations instead of something glamourous – no hedge funds for me, thanks. Instead of just chasing wealth or power or the types of things that people with my background – highly educated, with a strong emotional support network, advantages of birth and geography and, let’s face it, being white and male – usually not only pursue, but are encouraged to pursue, I keep gravitating back towards mid-tier, even mediocre organizations, the kind that are tailing out into an unseemly failure (WaMu) or a more or less permanent life in the land of pathos (a recent British bank, say).
The learning mechanism that is society provides all the best incentives to those who pursue glamour: mating opportunities, access to sensual pleasures, adoration, the feeling of power. But I’ve fairly systematically rejected most of the opportunities for glamour in favor of opportunities for learning, and learning of a specific kind. I’m not seeking to see what it is that “the best” of people get to pursue. I’m trying to understand what it is to be human, and since most human beings won’t have my education, or my opportunities, or my purely lucky “advantages” of where I came from, it strikes me that understanding the human condition requires being deeply immersed in the mundane.
That’s both my choice – but in saying this I don’t mean to juxtapose myself to Viktoria’s choices, for example. As she averts to Sharpened Engagement, she too is trying to both understand and to influence, although from a very different perspective. We are both making different decisions about “how” to engage, somewhat out of preference but I think Viktoria struck on something when she asked if there wasn’t some kind of existential masochism at work. It’s a fair charge: I know much of my ability to engage in this project in the way I do owes itself to accidents of birth and fortune, and that others who may possess “innate” abilities to stretch their own understanding and the world’s understanding far beyond that of me get stuck working in the claims department in Tampa because they didn’t have the accidents of birth and fortune working in their favor. I consciously try to downplay my “non-innate advantages” in order to test whether my own abilities really are that – abilities, led by conscious action to hone them – or whether they are simply accidents with no real just dessert to support them.
But I come back to the ocean here. If “we” collectively are the ocean, and “we” individually are also the ocean – which is the analogy I feel, as I don’t feel like we’re on a boat or a ship and I don’t think there’s any real practice of steering that describes what life feels like – then while on the one hand, I see what Viktoria is saying (some of us are the benign ocean just off Barbados, while others of us are the malevolent tempest of the waves crashing into Cornwall), but on the other, there’s still no difference. We all should understand the fullest possible range of experiences – and, I’d argue, weighting them by how they are lived, time- and population-weighted across the human landscape. We cannot succeed in having total coverage, but more is better than less, I’d argue. She’s right, I’m not normal – my weekly trans- and inter-continental plane journeys being exhibit A in her case – but I’m trying to use that abnormality, that freakishness, to its best advantage in at least using it to understand the broadest possible cross-section of humanity in ways that still enable me to have the conversations and shared experiences that allow for two-way change, for me to explain my position at least occasionally as I also absorb what others want to reveal to me.
In that regard, I enjoy organizations of all kinds because that’s where the vast majority of us are either herded or direct ourselves to express much of our humanity. We are social, political creatures; finding ourselves creating, expanding, and even perverting social organizations is, seemingly, one of the most essential expressions of our humanity. So I spend time in them, lots of time – frustrating, annoying time mostly, but the best learning doesn’t happen idly, and to be sure, there is a lot of shared success and really transcendent learning, epiphanies both of the conscious, intellectual sort and of the much deeper, spiritual kind, that takes place while I’m wearing an ID badge in a soulless office building. Few of us are brave enough to strike out into paradise on our own, to paint or write or create, but luckily I’ve been able to know and be a part of the lives of those sorts of folks too, and I’ve even been able to learn from them and, if they are to be believed, to influence them as well. Spending time immersed in office park land, while being mindful and aware of alternatives, is allowing me now to ask some different, harder questions: why do some people with all the talent they need still feel constrained to not run with it freely – and why do some people with all that talent and skill still freely choose, without constraint, to stay in middling organizational life? These people are good, friendly, lovely, warm people; they are no more or less “aware” than those people who decide to jump into the full expression of individual talent. I do what I do, as I said in the last essay, because that’s a really interesting question.
It’s actually more interesting than taking deposits and making loans, but even there, I’ve always found banking – and its collective, organizationally corralled but still innovative and individualized full expression across us as participants in the banking system and the system as a rectified expression of itself – to be interesting because of the question behind it. Why do we humans define value the way we do, across our interactions and our desires and our hopes and fears? It’s not terribly different from what I’m poking around in when I sit and listen in cubicle D02W.E1.6 as my neighbors talk about their kids in football practice and their favorite taco joint and the organization of information on page 5 of the board capital deck. Money – banking – expresses a certain kind of external organization of value; how people structure their days and lives – up to and including the decision to exit organizational constructs and embark on individualized lives in a new way – expresses a kind of internal organization of value. In addition, or maybe because of this focus, banking’s notion of “value” is always quantifiable, while this dance of individuality versus organization across time and relationships is much less so, is much more a function of vague feelings or sensations.
Mark and Vik are both correct in the sense that we all – all three of us, all of us period – are engaging, each in our own way. While Mark’s preferences are a vital component, I think speaking strictly of “preferences” is probably too optimistic; spending vast amounts of time in corporate bureaucracies, not often at the upper echelons, reveals that people’s constraints remain far more in play than we think. The ex-girlfriend once observed that we are in a period of human history which, for the first time, has physical want as being basically covered; we need not fear famine or lack of housing or clothing, even at very low levels of income. Speaking as a middle class member of one of the top 10 most advanced economies, I think she overstated the case. And even as we cover base needs, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that we are social, political creatures. The constructed needs we feel driven by, because of social constructs – friend and family networks, traditional and post-traditional social networks, and the historical narratives we find ourselves embedded in within the physically constructed worlds of cities and houses and streets and buildings – are just as real, and just as trapping, as the fear that hundreds of millions of people still feel regarding the source of their next meal.
I’m not normal, and I certainly don’t pretend to be. (Ask my ex-wife or my son. They will vigorously agree.) I don’t think I can even try to be normal. What I can, and want, to try to do is to put myself in “normal” experiences (ie., experiences that the vast majority of people in the modern, developed world contend with, on a time- and population-weighted basis), knowing that there is not one monolithic “normal” but a whole host of such experiences, and I’d like to understand as much as I can of such things. Not in a slumming or tourist sort of way (cue up “Common People” by Pulp, please), but in a here-I-am, I-need-a-paycheck-too way, and I need to fill my own “needs” in life via the means we’re all given access to to fill them. I’m not going to intentionally handicap myself either – but I am going to avoid the simple expedient of chasing the glamour – the ease, the emoluments – that our social construct would offer to me if I just would be willing to not examine the world and would just respond appropriately to the incentives and punishments that society puts forth.
I think, actually, that’s what Vik and Mark are doing as well, and it’s why we’re all interested in this exercise. We’re pursuing a question, and although I like how both of my friends have moved towards a kind of Aristotlean-Epicurean synthesis of “what is the good life, and how do we live it, and is it sustainable or is it a mirage” while acknowledging that we aren’t yet even close to properly articulating that question. All three of us – in different ways – are rejecting the social enticements on offer in favor of pursuing the question. And we’re all trying to experiment with pushing others also to reject the social enticements, certainly in their most simplistic forms, in favor of a deeper questioning of their own preferences.
Hmmm. That last word came out on its own, a Freudian slip as an obvious, though unintentional, reference to Mark’s view that really, all of this is down to preferences. I’ll defer to him here, although not in the Poland versus Hong Kong way that he expressed it initially. I think our preferences – both quantifiably expressed in how we spend our money and save it, and less quantifiably expressed in who we choose to love or pursue or reject or ignore – are at the root of all of our questions. Our preferences reflect against a background of opportunity, awareness, and time. The people who are writing on this site – and, probably, almost all of our readers – are engaged in the task of understanding those preferences, both in reference to ourselves and in exploration of how human beings like ourselves, in expressing their preferences and with their unique and bespoke mirrors, construct a social and physical world that then creates the backgrounds against which new people – lovely two year old girls in Scarborough, Maine, petulant in their desire for still water over sparkling, and six year old boys in Seattle, interested in Lego Trains but not so much in Lego Star Wars sets – will build their own expression of a world.
All of you – and especially Mark and Viktoria – are helping to hone the way I’m exploring that process. And I truly hope these essays, standing on their own sometimes but also when read in the aggregate, are helping our readers in their own exploration.
As always, thanks for reading. Thanks for including us in your own journey as well. The essence of water is, that it is one.
Peter
This is a good reply, thoughtful and admirable. I have no doubt that working in mid-quality bureaucracies can be interesting, rewarding and valuable; and the aversion to “glamour”, in its various contemporary social manifestations, is also to be commended.
However, as you move beyond the description of your experience and choices (using this term here specifically because I accept your point that to refer to preferences might imply a blindness to the cultural construction and limitations of what we think we want) to a more general description of the world, I worry that the words “normal” and “mundane” are doing too much work.
You say that you are not normal, but who is? We all think of ourselves and our loved ones as special, even when we fall roughly in the middle of many distribution curves for social attributes of one sort or another. And why think of one place as mundane and another as glamorous? To me that seems to be a needless concession to those who crave glamour, that they might be on to something.
i was reminded of Hemmingway’s quip, in response to F Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that the rich are different. Yes, wrote Ernest, they have more money.
We are all normal and we are all special. We make choices about where we live and in what way we make a living. Some of us – me as well as you – have had plenty of luck with those choices. Nevertheless, the really important question, the ethical question that we all must confront, is not about the where or the what, but the how we choose to live our lives – wherever we are and whatever we do – and especially how we live in way that is meaningful for us and respectful of others.
Mark
I think you’re right about mundane in particular; that’s not the right word for what I’m talking about. But I think when you do take time to ask difficult questions about what it means to live the good life, you run the risk of disconnecting from those who don’t ask those questions. Some of those, admittedly, are simply lazy, or are avoiding the question because they know they would self-indict their own choices. I’m not really talking about those; I’m talking about the people who don’t have the ability to do that, either by circumstance (they have to work three jobs just to pay the rent), or by a kind of trained blindness.
The former category is often forgotten, I find, by those of us who are lucky – and I’m impressed by your work in microfinance as a means of staying focused on that broad group of people, even in developed markets, which are still somewhat imprisoned by economic need. But the latter category is just as often avoided. These are people who have been given an answer to what living a good life is and they stop asking whether it’s true or not. This is the “normal” individual, I’ve found; it’s normal not to ask how to live, it’s normal to simply not question at all.
Those people do, actually, confuse me. I don’t know how not to question, and beyond that, how not to question recursively, how not to doubt my own capability for reflection and improvement. Even some of the most outwardly brilliant, outwardly wise and at peace individuals I’ve met – and admired for a time – often had obtained that veneer of peace and wisdom by simply choosing not to ask questions any longer. And it struck me as obvious that they were ignoring something central, but generally, they would just change the subject. Or garden, or knit, or play golf, or make wine.
Again, it’s just confusing to me, how “normal” not asking is. I guess part of the search for me is wondering why that is the case. In that regard, I’ll stick with normal but I hope this is a good clarification. And I’ll drop mundane. That’s too… boring.
Wonderful new essay, by the way –
–P.
I recognize your four-fold classification scheme, and agree that the lazy and self-serving are less interesting cases (note, not less important) than the busy and the blind. However, I remain uncomfortable with the word normal, simply because its dual meanings make it so easy to slip from agreeing that something is normal (meaning common or average) to agreeing that something is normal (meaning natural or normative).
Let’s agree that many people lack the energy and resources to ask questions about the purpose and meaning of their lives in any systematic way; and that this fact gives those of us who do have the energy and resources a prima facie obligation to support redistributive policies that seek to improve the well-being of those who don’t.
Let’s also agree to be puzzled by those who have the opportunity, but choose not to take it; who are blind to the questions or, perhaps, have settled on a simple set of answers that lack plausibility. For me the question is whether this is principally blindness to the urgency of the question(s), or blindness to the possible uncomfortable nature of the answer(s). Or, to put this another way, are they not looking, or are they looking away?
– M
Agreed on all points. It’s interesting; I think my own sense of “normal” has dropped the parallel meaning of natural or normative, which would inform why I find it makes sense but why it would be uncomfortable with you. I’m going to go and check to see how I might be flipping between the meanings unconsciously – thanks for the alert.
I have a few thoughts on your posts and both your comments:
1) I think your rejection of ‘glamour’ might be linked with your rejection to control as a way to engage with the world. The glamorous places you mention, the hedge funds and other enclaves of wealth, prestige and power, are specifically that: enclaves from which the powerful can rule, removed from the populace, free from seeing the effects of their decisions. By congregating, the elite forms an echo chamber and legitimize their way of living. As I am exploring my past (in writing the memoir of my early years), I am discovering that someone with a strong need to control – others or enterprises – might also wish to create its own domain to ‘live unchallenged within the illusion of that control’. You clearly don’t want to live in those enclaves; but mostly because the individuals within them as usually ‘performing’ their lives (for the benefits of others) as opposed to ‘living their lives’. This is why the rich and ‘glamorous’ just seem so ‘fake’ once you get to know them. And if you challenge them, they will show you the door instead of rebutting – just because they can.
2) So you choose the ‘mundane’. Having now started to read Charles Taylor (please Peter; never and I mean never try to emulate his writing style !), he mentions at some point the distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘higher’ times, and between ‘profane/secular’ versus the ‘sacred’. In the former, it’s life as usual; in the latter, it’s those special moment when everything can change, when there is a type of magic in the air. If you take that definition, you might want to be open to live in both – as long as it is not an enclave like in my point above.
3) However, please do not feel that you need to ‘lower’ yourself to be immersed in the real life. I mean, by all means stay open to the plea of the less fortunate than you are. But, you are not making anyone a favor by ‘falling short of your potential’, just because your potential happens to be broader because you are a white male. You are privileged, so use it to help others. But don’t feel that you need to ‘be less of yourself’ to connect with those who possibly can’t even comprehend the types of things you know and wonder about. What I am saying is: use the advantages of your birth and fortune – they were given to you (maybe for a reason…). I figure that my birth and luck in life – my fortune – is simply giving me a legs-up in attempting to do something that is very hard, and would be impossible without my good fortune. I will not squander the benefits that my luck in life is providing me, just to ‘compete’ with others in a more egalitarian way. This would be squandering a gift of ‘Providence’ and I choose to think that it would be a waste.
4) An interesting after-thought: Why do some not question ‘what is the good life’? Are you just not seeing the obvious? Why would a social system -a power structure- encourage ‘dissent from within’ by promoting the doubting of its own cultural foundations and underpinnings? I think Wisdom is the only thing that one can gain by questioning, and wisdom – while very precious to us – is certainly not valued in the same way that wealth, prestige and power are.
5) Mark, something that is normative – as in, promulgated as the standard or expected behaviors – becomes common and average over time – as more people adopt the norm. I see the nuance you are highlighting, but norms create ‘the normal’. There is not as much of a distinction in meaning; only a feedback loop between the two senses of the term ‘normal’. I’ll leave the ‘natural’ aside, because I strongly believe that diversity is the only ‘normal’ thing out there !
PS. We are both not looking and looking away. We are taught to see and maintain illusions. And most people are NOT masochists: they don’t usually ‘go out of their way’ to suffocate and drown under the weight of existential crisis… Even if those questions are right in front of them.
Viktoria
Sorry, but I’m sticking to my two meanings of normal. The distinction is relevant to John Stuart Mill’s idea that we should engage in “experiments in living”, rather than follow just what everyone else does. The good is not the average.
To see the difference, consider someone who exclaims, “but’s that’s not normal!”. Do you take that as a criticism? Or as a compliment?
– M