Abandon Text! - Articles

Risk Management

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:24:59 -0700

Malcolm Gladwell's latest New Yorker article, "The Sure Thing," follows his trademark formula: find a truism and turn it on its head. In this case, the truism is "entrepreneurs are risk-takers." American culture lionizes the entrepreneur for taking risks that others wouldn't take, by staking huge amounts of money, time, and energy in something totally new. Gladwell finds, though, that extravagant risk is something the most successful entrepreneurs scrupulously avoid. He cites several famous entrepreneurs – Ted Turner (Turner Broadcasting), Sam Walton (Wal-mart), and Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), among others – who distinguished themselves by their superior insight and exhaustive research, and not their cahones. Hedge-fund manager John Paulson, who made billions of dollars betting against the U.S. housing bubble, may seem like a high-stakes gambler, but in fact he did months of research before he would so much as touch a credit default swap. The successful entrepreneurs took every opportunity to avoid risk, by shifting it onto outside investors, or leaning on cash reserves within a family or a family business, or simply making astute choices of business deals where they couldn't lose.

I can say that Gladwell's thesis holds up well in my own experience. I had the distinct privilege for working for Augie Turak during the early years of his startup Raleigh Group International (RGI) which sold and marketed software develop tools. His motto of entrepreneurship might have been: "Live to fight another day." "Business is very simple," he said. "A successful business has more money coming in than going out. All you have to do is remain solvent, one day after the next, until you find your niche." Turak started his venture with $10,000 and never sought outside loans. He was ruthless about controlling costs. For the first two years he didn't draw a salary. The employees took turns cleaning the office instead of hiring a cleaning service. He shunned most paid advertising, which was expensive and of questionable worth, and instead mastered guerrilla marketing tactics – direct mail to lists he traded for, email subscriptions, and all the editorial coverage he could squeeze from the trade magazines. All his sales reps were paid on straight commission, so he never had to worry about unprofitable employees dragging the company down. When he finally found a niche with a promising future – bug-tracking systems – he found a silent partner to front most of the money for the project, and found an enormous marketing partner – Microsoft – to piggy-back on for the marketing. When he finally sold the business to another software company, he held most of the equity and profited handsomely . . . because he had avoided financial risk rather than taking it.

Gladwell pointed out that entrepreneurs were willing to take social risks, even though they avoid financial ones. That fits Turak to a T. He was a master of telephone sales, and telephone sales reps risk social rejection on a minute-by-minute basis. He taught his sales force to be aggressive, to take risks, and most of all to persevere in the face of rejection and failure. He was famous for making over-the-top, impassioned sales pitches, doing things others would never dream of doing to get the sale. Once, he was pitching a quiet Japanese prospect who told him: "Prease, understand – I Japanese. We vely conservative and careful." "Conservative?" Turak bellowed. "The heck you say. What about the samurai? BONZAI! BONZAI!" Turak didn't get the credit card on that call, but everyone in the sales pit knew he had pulled out all the stops. And then, later that day, he got a call back from the "cautious" Japanese prospect: "You . . . vely good saresman. I buy."

Gladwell is only demonstrating what most performers already know: through discipline, training, and preparation, you can take something that looks dangerous and risky (like, say, a triple somersault on the trapeze, or investing billions of dollars) and make it an everyday occurrence.

Effort, Free Will, and Destiny

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:37:30 -0700

In response to Kenny's comments on the primacy of effort:

If social scientists can accurately predict whether someone will drop out of high school on the day they are born, does that necessarily mean that effort is not the primary factor in their success or failure? Maybe the social scientists have merely learned how to predict who will make the effort (e.g. people in a cultural context that values education and economic advancement) and those who will not (e.g. those who lack those forms of support). And, even if their predictions are 80% right, we could still look at the 20% who defy those predictions, and I'm fairly certain we would find greater effort as a common characteristic of those who beat the odds.
Along those same lines, consider the results of the KIPP schools (mentioned both in the New Yorker article and in Gladwell's book Outliers). 80% of the eighth graders in the KIPP program in the South Bronx scored at or above grade level in reading or math – nearly twice the New York City average. The core difference of KIPP schools: effort. Between extended school calendars and piles of homework, they make students spend 100% of their time working on academic success. The differences are dramatic. Again, nothing is a guarantee (there are still the other 20% who are not performing at grade level) but that still a huge difference.
Kenny is correct that an individual's success is vastly dependent on the context in which they are born, and that effort is insufficient without opportunity. If you pull back and consider a family's success over several generations, you will see the correlation between effort and success become much stronger. If one or more generations are willing to make the effort and sacrifices necessary to create the environment of opportunity (e.g. coming to America, working two jobs to save for kids' college, etc.) then families can readily advance from poverty to the middle class, or from the middle class to the outright wealthy. One can argue whether it is morally just that the virtues or the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children . . . but most humans would agree that it is just (to the extent anything is just in this world), and that we have a right and a responsibility to work for the advancement of our children.
All of this is tying back to our earlier (and ongoing) discussion about our moral obligations to the poor. Yes, we have vastly more than most other people in the world . . . but that's not an accident. Our wealth is the result of a particular context of opportunity, which was primarily created out of the effort, sacrifice, and risk-taking of our forebears. I think we need to pay as much attention to the virtues that created this wealth in the first place, as well as the impulse to share it with others. (More on this later.)
I agree that intelligence and willpower are strongly correlated. Notice the kind of intelligence, though. The article explicitly points out that willpower is a feat of imagination – the ability to create a mental vision of the future rewards, or to mentally erase the prospect of immediate gratification. And yet most of our schools (at least, the schools I grew up in) do very little to stimulate our capacity to imagine. Imagination and creativity were usually regarded as something extra-curricular, something beyond the pale of standard education. If you look at the report cards from the Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools, you will see that for grades one through five, "imagination" and "creativity" are never mentioned.

Earnestness is everything

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:27:18 -0700

The writers at the New Yorker keep coming up with new angles on a recurring theme: talent is Out, effort is In.

I had already written previously about Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, in which he details how effort and opportunity are more important than talent in creating super-successful people. Now, in another article, "How David Beats Goliath," (The New Yorker, May 11, 2009) he asks a seemingly simple question for a dedicated basketball fan such as himself: "Why don't more teams play the full-court press?" It doesn't take a genius to realize that a weaker team can dramatically slow down a superior team by playing the full-court press: guarding their opponents they moment they get the ball, and doing everything in their power to stop them from advancing to mid-court in the required 10 seconds. And yet, you rarely see that strategy pursued, at any level of play.

Gladwell followed up on those who did use the full-court press -- a team of 12-year-old girls in the National Junior Basketball league, and the teams of college coach Rick Pitino -- and found that they triumphed . . . at a price. The full-court press is an exhausting strategy, one that requires players to run and run and run. Few teams, it turns out, are willing to work that hard. It also makes for rather ugly basketball, a rushing and flailing of arms and legs instead of the graceful passes and shots players like to make and fans like to watch. The full-court press is stigmatized -- those who use it are met with both anger and contempt, and some officials make biased calls to discourage its use.

All this would be interesting enough on its own. But Gladwell loves isomorphisms -- he wants to see if this same phenomena maps to other sorts of struggles. And before you know it, he draws parallels with the military history, and academic studies of how underdogs prevail in battle. Lawrence of Arabia played the military equivalent of the full-court press, using the everywhere-at-once attacks of his Bedouin troops in the places his foes were weakest. They prevailed because the hustled, and refused to play by the rules that favored their opponents. Those same tactics -- small, fast, non-traditional, and out-of-bounds -- have now redefined modern warfare in an age of terrorism and insurgency. David can win against Goliath, but only by using methods Goliath finds repellant.

The triumph of effort found another voice this week in another New Yorker article ("Don't! The secret of self-control," May 18, 2009) that looked at the unexpected results of psychological research in the sixties. Some researches had created "the marshmallow test," a simple exercise to see how long four-year-olds could resist eating a treat in order to earn a greater reward later. Kids' abilities to defer gratification varied significantly, but they could also be taught cognitive tricks to make it easier. The researchers didn't realize the significance of their findings until they followed up on their subjects decades later . . . and found that the marshmallow test was profoundly predictive of success in later life. Those who passed the marshmallow test scored higher on the SAT. Those who couldn't resist the marshmallow were more likely to have behavioral problems, had trouble paying attention and maintaining friendships.

For years educators and parents have been focusing on IQ as the most important cognitive measure, when it turns out willpower was more significant. And willpower, they've found, is not some mysterious quality of character, but rather a specific skill for controlling one's attention, focusing on certain thoughts and tuning out others. Persistence of attention and effort are what ensure lifelong success.

What does this mean for our culture? I hope it signals a rejuvenation of the American meritocracy, restoring our faith that people can control their destinies, if they are willing to pay the price. The "land of opportunity" is really "the land of the opportunity to work." Effort is not omnipotent, but it's the closest thing to it.

Seed

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:14:39 -0700

"Science is culture." So says Seed Magazine on its cover. A friend of mine gave me a subscription to Seed, though I am only vaguely aware of why. Maybe it was because he knew I was a scientist as well as a spiritual seeker, and he was hoping that a regular dose of rationality would somehow sway me to enlightened agnosticism.

Seed is a curious kind of magazine. It's hard to know who, exactly, it is trying to appeal to. There are some features that clearly are appealing to the scientists themselves -- the rank and file bench workers and post-docs slaving away, with little more than their own high self-regard to comfort them. They have a regular feature, "Workbench," which is just a picture of some scientist's work space -- a desk or office or cube or laboratory -- with little annotations about the pictures and tchockas and books and papers that fill the space. I liked that, because that shows a lot of insight into what the lives of these people are like. Scientists spend a lot of time at the desk, and the view from that desk is as good a symbol as any of the monk-like existence that they lead. I was reminded of the movie Into Great Silence, a documentary about French Trappist monks, and the long shots they would take of snowy scenes outside a monk's cell. The scene that monk would look at for the rest of his life. It has beauty in it, but a bleak kind of beauty, and not what I would call hope.

I think that's part of the problem with Seed. In style it mimics other magazines of the mega-cool future, especially Wired. It has the same trippy two-page color spreads with call-out quotes from an article, something that is supposed to be provocative and compelling. The layout sometimes has the crazy collage quality of Wired, with colorful exploding graphs and maps. But then lapses just as suddenly into the clean staidness of a 1970's Scientific American. Clearly it wants to taken more seriously than billowy lightweights like Popular Science or Psychology Today. But the content falls into this weird space, more technical than puff-piece but not nearly the page length to sustain really complex content, like you would see in Scientific American. And it has social issues on its mind, and it's so serious about its seriousness about social issues that you come away with no other thought than, "Boy, do those guys take themselves seriously." None of the featured scientists smile. Well, maybe in a long shot you might see a smug smirk in the distance. A few non-Caucasian women venture real smiles, but the North American men and women . . . well, they are just too important to be caught smiling.

So the overall tone is . . . cold. Add to it the fact that it's very light on advertising -- just a smattering of full-page officious feel-good propaganda from big pharmas and big oil companies and one or two eco-cable channels. Cold, cold, cold. If the purpose of this magazine is as evangelical as it seems, to make science and scientists look more important and influential and cool . . . Well, they seem to have missed entirely on the "cool" part. The primary missing ingredient is joy. Wired Magazine explodes with enthusiasm, because its guiding ethic is capitalistic and optimistic. The people featured in it tend to have a wild gleam in their eyes, because they're planning on making a few million dollars in their twenties and getting laid tonight, and besides they are having the time of their lives, and, oh yeah, I guess the world will benefit from this cool stuff we're doing. By contrast, the people in Seed look . . . Sad? Bored? They look like people who wish other people took them more seriously. And so, of course, we don't.

Young genius, old genius

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:34:04 -0700

In one of his recent New Yorker articles, "Late Bloomers", Malcolm Gladwell delivers good news to me: not all genius artists are young. Some, like Picasso or Melville, do their greatest work in their twenties, but then others, like Mark Twain, Alfred Hitchcock, or Cezanne, make their greatest work in their forties and fifties. It's not too late for me!

Well, maybe the news is not as great as I first thought. Gladwell goes on to explore what makes these two artistic life cycles so different. The late bloomers, he explains, are exploratory -- they don't know where they are going when they start, and they spend a great deal of time trying to discover what they want to express in the process of creation. Ok, that sounds like me: a guy who starts writing a blog one day with no clear direction.

Now the bad news: those late bloomers can take a looooong time, years and years, to get to great work. Their early work is often poor . . . which means they have to spend a lot of time compensating for their lack of native talent with practice, experience, and brute trial-and-error. The process often requires patronage -- external support from sponsors, friends, spouses, and day jobs.

I got a lot of work ahead of me.

I guess I can still hope that I'm a young genius who is just getting a late start, instead of a dedicated grind who might eventually slave his way to greatness. I wrote some pretty good stuff in my twenties. . .

Yeah, right. I got a lot of work ahead of me.

The variation that we see in the life cycles of artists might be reflected in those of spiritual figures as well. Sometimes relatively young people (Ramana Maharshi, Eckhart Tolle) are seized by spiritual experiences and seem to reach some high level of insight without much evident struggle (though sometimes tremendous pain). Others, it seems, have to live through life, suffering through disillusionment and a long series of humiliations before they finally break through. Richard Rose guessed that any dramatic spiritual awakening had to happen before the age of 30, or else the seeker wouldn't have enough vital energy to "make the trip." Andrew Cohen, on the other hand, speculated that most people had to be over thirty before they would be disillusioned enough to seriously devote themselves to liberation. Vedic traditions recognized intense spiritual lifestyles could be appropriate for the young (the brahmachari) and the old (the sannyasi ).

Lots of ways up the mountain . . . some a lot longer than others.

Red Sex, Blue Sex

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:40:16 -0700

A recent New Yorker article ("Red Sex, Blue Sex," by Margaret Talbot, November 3, 2008) challenges some assumptions about whether conservative attitudes towards sexuality are really "pro-family". Some new sociological studies find that evangelicals who most strongly push for abstinence before marriage are also the groups that have the most sexually active teenagers, the highest teen pregnancy, the lowest age of marriage and (as a direct consequence) the highest rate of divorce. Meanwhile, the liberals who are generally accepting of both teenage sex and abortion are the ones having the lowest teenage pregnancy rate, delaying marriage and childbearing, and therefore having kids when they are more emotionally and financially mature.

I have mixed feelings about the results they report . . . Primarily because I have lived on both sides of their conservative/liberal divide, at least as far as sexuality was concerned. I grew up with a belief that one should postpone sexual activity until marriage, instilled by my family as a part of my religious beliefs. And I did, in fact, remain a virgin until I married.

However, I had a lot of the "blue" factors at work as well. My parents were explicit about practical perils of sex as well as the moral ones -- "if you father a child, you are the one who will be raising it, not me," my mother told me on more than one occasion. And though my mother was vehement about postponing sex until marriage, she was far from being against sex per se. Sex was not banned because it was evil, but precisely because it was good -- a sacred bond, something to be cherished and not debased. And, like many teenagers, I engaged in certain, erm, practices that only barely qualified me as a "technical virgin," as is typical of the liberal-minded prescription.

The New Yorker article didn't mention some of the downsides that I see to the "liberal-minded" approach to sexuality. It completely ignores the emotionally charged nature of sexuality. All the condoms in the world cannot protect the psyche from the ramifications of such intimacy. Today's youth might be more informed about sexuality, more careful in a practical sense, and yet they also seem numb. It seems as if the only way they could deal with the emotional consequences of sex was to shut down. I can't speak to this with any authority, since, as I said, I took a different path and have no direct experience with promiscuity. But, as one young woman told me, "With my generation, it's like, sleeping with someone is no big deal." And while some liberals might cheer at such an attitude, I find it unnerving, in the same way I found mandatory promiscuity to be unnerving in Brave New World. If we conquer sexuality by sucking absolutely all meaning and significance out of it, then I'm not entirely sure we're better off.

Interestingly, the study found that the abstinence-only works fine for those who score high on measures of religiosity -- those who go to church often and pray at home. People who get plenty of support and attention, and who are embedded in a cultural alternative to the sexed-up popular culture, can succeed in delaying sex. But, as with lots of religious groups, most who identify themselves as evangelicals are not deeply observant. So it's not enough to have the conservative beliefs about sexuality -- you have to have a lifestyle that supports those beliefs in order for them to have any significance.

All this reinforces some basic SKS messages regarding one's philosophy:

It's not enough to hold a particular belief: you have to actually act on it
It's not enough to act on a particular conviction: you have to observe the outcomes and see if they really provide the results for which you were hoping
Community and family support are vital to living a counter-cultural position

The Paradox of American Religion

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:36:29 -0700

Last week the New Yorker had an interesting review of several books about the religious convictions of the Founding Fathers, and how they have played out in the formation of the Constitution and the First Amendment. When it comes to the topic of law and religion, I have several possibly contradictory currents competing within me:

I have been the beneficiary of American religious freedom for most of my life, since I have struggled with meaning of religion and faith personally and even organized others to do the same in the Self Knowledge Symposium. So it's a darn good thing I don't have to put up with a state-mandated religion.
At the same time, lots of like-minded "spiritual seekers" of my generation are frustrated with the degree to which religion and spirituality have been divorced from public life and public discussion. If spiritual and religious values are supposed to be the bedrock of our world-view, then why is it treated like kryptonite in academia and politics? Why is even the mere mention of religion raise everyone's anti-establishment hackles? The outspoken atheists of our day, the Christopher Hitchens and Robert Pullmans of the world, make no secret of their desire to completely outlaw religion. Somehow it seems contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment to give people the freedom to practice their religion, but then forbid them to have a public opinion about it.
Like many conservatives, I have a distaste for using the interpretive power of the judicial branch to enact change. While I agree that legal understandings might evolve over time, I find myself more in the camp of Clarence Thomas and Anton Scalia, defending the "original intent" of the Constitution against the "judicial activism" of those who would, with post-modern deftness, redefine the meaning of the law to whatever strikes their fancy â€“ oops, I mean, the demands of their conscience. So, yes, it matters very much to me what the Founding Fathers had in mind with the disestablishment clause, and the separation of Church and State.

So what does the New Yorker's literature review have to say about it? Firstly, they cast some doubt in both directions, both for those who would claim we were founded as a "Christian nation," and those who would elevate secularism as the highest value in society. The founding fathers were not the sort of Christians your average fundamentalist would identify with â€“ they were deists, who recognized a spiritual reality and at the same time were skeptical of dogma and superstition. (They were, I dare say, not that different from me.) At a time when most states explicitly established an official religion in their constitutions and had religious tests for holding office, the Constitution is remarkable for explicitly refusing such tests, and, for that matter, not even mentioning God at all. It is an emphatic exclusion â€“ they clearly wanted Reason to be the foundation of their political system, and to keep religion out of it.

At the same time, they Founders were not anti-religion. They were explicit in saying the purpose of the disestablishment clause was not so much to protect secularism from religion, but rather to protect religions from each other. They very much wanted the free expression of religion, and thought it most likely to happen if no religion could establish itself above any other. And so far they have been right: America has been significantly more religious than its European peers since its independence, and indeed even more religious than the founding fathers themselves.

In a nutshell, the Founding Fathers had faith in freedom. They believed that people, and institutions, would arrive at the truth if given the freedom to do so. The coercion of an official religion was antithetical to their notion of religion itself, which had to be the individual's free and direct recognition of the Deity. Most interestingly, the Founding Fathers were not even that thrilled that we should care what they think. As Jefferson put it: "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human."

Will and Consciousness

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:41:46 -0700

Kenny sent around a New York Times article on scientific studies of willpower capacity, which basically established that we have a finite capacity of willpower that can be exhausted, but that the capacity for greater willpower can be developed over time, mostly by practice. Personal willpower is a theme that often comes up in the SKS, since it's a necessary-but-not-sufficient capacity for nearly all forms of success, including spiritual success.

A few other observations on the article's ramifications:

Given that our capacity for willpower can be exhausted, it would stand to reason that virtue requires not so much a greater capacity for willpower, so much as the wisdom to avoid temptation. Achieving any great goal usually requires revising your lifestyle, and the overall context in which you function, in order to minimize the temptations and distractions. If you want to quit smoking, the first thing you need to do is stop hanging around other smokers. If you want to study a lot, cultivate relationships with people who hang out at the library instead of the bars. Augie Turak and many other spiritual teachers maintain that this insight can be extended into every aspect of your life, until everything you do, no matter how mundane or innocuous, is geared towards cultivating the kind of life you want.
If controlling your "cognitive environment" is the key to maximizing the value of your willpower, then it also stands to reason that you ought to limit, or at least carefully control, your media intake. Commercial media are doing their darnedest to wear out your willpower to get you to buy things. They understand that if they just keep wearing you down, they can eventually get you to buy more stuff. When you watch TV, you are giving someone else complete power to pour images and ideas into your brain, with almost no time to filter, digest, or reflect upon them.
"Lead me not into temptation" would be especially important if you are trying to maintain a standard for sexual behavior. The whole "just say no" abstinence campaign is practically useless if the kids are put in situations that force them to "just say no" so often that their willpower is eventually exhausted. In his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Arily cites his research that people consistently and vastly underestimate how weakened their willpower will be when they are impassioned . . . which is why so many otherwise rational people wind up doing things they deeply regret in the morning. Rather than telling young people the right thing to do, and then consistently putting people in situations where they will be tempted not to, let's just constraint temptation to begin with. All those "repressive" things we had back in the 1950s â€“ dress codes to enforce modesty, gender-segregated schools and classrooms, curfews, chaperons, etc. â€“ are now justified by scientific evidence as sensible means to achieve a desired end.
I think the key to all willpower is not willpower at all, but consciousness â€“ an awareness of what you're doing and why you're doing it. You can't exert your willpower until you become aware of the circumstances in which willpower is called for. Once you've cultivated that capacity for self-consciousness, it can carry over into many other spheres as well . . . which is why, as Kenny pointed out, it gets a lot easier to brush your teeth twice a day if you're exercising regularly as well.

The Playâ€™s the Thing

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:31:18 -0700

NPR ran a story a couple days ago that gives me hope for our educational system: "Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills" [Alix Spiegel, February 21, 2009.]

The basic thesis of the story: it was only relatively recently, with the advent of year-round toy advertisements on television, that children's play in our culture became focused on the toy, rather than on play. Before then, play was fundamentally an activity, a free-wheeling imaginative make-believe in which children narrated stories, individually and collectively. But the focus on toys, with ever-more-articulated detail and pre-scripted stories, restricted the imaginative sphere of the child. Add to that the increasing focus on child safety, and the trend to put kids into adult-managed activities: Little Leagues, karate classes, gymnastics, summer camps, etc. (To quote the satirical newspaper The Onion: "Child-Safety Experts Call for the Restrictions on Childhood Imagination.") In the end, children had much, much less room for imaginative play.

Which, it turns out, was a disastrous mistake. Imaginative play turns out to have a strong role in the development of "executive function," a constellation of cognitive abilities that includes, most significantly, "self-regulation" -- the ability to control emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline. And executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ.

What makes this story particularly interesting for me is that it is a sweeping endorsement of Waldorf Education pedagogy. Waldorf distinguishes itself with a strong de-emphasis on early reading, instead making the ideal environment for imaginative play for younger children. In the Waldorf preschools and kindergartens, you will not find a single alphabet block. Instead you will find the raw material for imaginative play: play stands, colorful silk scarves, polished stones, pieces of wood, and extremely rudimentary dolls. You will also see lots of handwork and practical arts: knitting, felting, drawing, painting, cooking, and gardening. These are basic exercises for self-regulation.

The NPR story also helps justify Waldorf's strong prohibitions against exposure to media and commercial messages. Waldorf teachers urge parents to limit, and preferably eliminate, all TV, radio, and computer time for young children. School dress codes forbid brand logos, television characters, and all forms of writing. Now we know why: television targeting young audiences is deliberately, consciously trying to co-opt imaginative play for the sake of selling products.

Think of all the modern complaints about the rise in "attention-deficit disorder", and discipline issues in school. Is it any wonder that they can't sit still and pay attention, if we never gave them the chance to practice those abilities?

I find it exciting and promising that the mainstream culture is starting to realize what Waldorf teachers knew all along: children do not need to be little Einsteins. They need to be little children. They need to play.

Adyashanti Boom

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 04:25:47 -0700

Janet passed on to me a Sun Magazine interview with Adyashanti, a contemporary spiritual teacher in California. I'm gladÂ I read the interview before I looked at the website, because I think he comes off very well in the interview, but looks like just another Western guru with a funny name on the website. He has a teaching similar to Eckhart Tolle, but a tone that has slightly more edge and reminiscent of Augie Turak or Richard Rose. Some passages that caught my attention:

"I'm a truth guy, not a comfort guy."

"The role of spiritual practice is basically to exhaust the seeker. If the practice does what's it's supposed to do, it exhausts our energy for seeking, and then reality has a chance to present itself. In that sense, spiritual practices can help lead to awakening. But that's different from saying that the practice produces the awakening."

"Reality is always looking for a moment of vulnerability, when we let our guard down . . . it can be prompted by some tragic event: an illness, or a death of a loved one, or a divorce. Reality rushes into the cracks and presents itself."

Q: "What method do you teach people to sustaining awakening?"
A: "The first thing I say is: you don't sustain it. The conscious effort to sustain it is the ego creeping back in. It's really a complex process of surrender."

Q: "What do you think is the significance of routine in spiritual practice?"
A: "I've never thought about it. To tell you the truth, I'm always trying to disrupt routine. I'm always trying to unsettle the seeker in people, instead of give it something it can feel comfortable engaging in . . . it's very easy to use disciplines to avoid reality rather than to encounter it. A true spirituality will have you continually facing your illusions and all the ways you avoid reality. "

"Looking back I could easily say, 'Boy, I made a lot of dumb mistakes.' But I needd to do it that way. I wasn't going to let go of those identities on the meditation cushion. it would have been nice if it could have been contained in this safe environment -- bowing and meditating and meeting with the teacher -- but it often doesn't work that way. Spirituality is much more of a bloody mess than we like to admit."

"No emotion or experience is necessarily excluded from my life. Do I ever get angry? Sure, I get angry. Awakening shows us that emotions are illusions -- but that doesn't mean they will cease to arise."

Q: "What do you think happens to individual consciousness after the death of the body?"
A: "The question presumes that there is such a thing as individual consciousness. Awakening shows you that there isn't. The mind creates the illusion of individual consciousness to convince us that this awareness is ours, that it belongs to us. I imagine that, after the death of the body, it's very difficult to maintain the illusion of individual consciousness. But who knows? We'll see. I'll give you a phone call if I can. [Laughs.]"

"Statements about the ego 'disappearing' miss the mark. The ego is still there; you just see it to be an illusion."

"Most people who think they're part of the greater awakening of humanity are actually just aggrandizing their own egos . . . one of the best ways to stay asleep is to wait for a future when we'll all be awake. But, like I said, I hope I'm wrong. If the whole world wakes up tomorrow, I'll be glad that I was wrong."

The Happiness Myth

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 05:13:01 -0700

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last week that jousted at another favorite topic of season, our notions of happiness ["The Happiness Myth," by Steve Salerno]. A part of the Journal's practical, curmudeony character is that it has little use for the younger generation's endless mantras of self-affirmation and self-actualization. The editors do believe fervantly in the empowerment of the individual and energetic optimism -- this is, after all, the flagship publication of the capitalist free market -- but those attitudes are also perpetually grounded in a sense of obligation to the whole. To work merely for one's own fulfillment is, to them, self-evidently shallow. The only proper reasons for getting rich are to serve one's family, one's community, one's country, or for the sheer love of work itself.

This was one my mind because I had finished up my lecture series on ancient Greek philosophers, and I was mulling over Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, especially his take on happiness. The Greek word Aristotle uses is eudaimonia (literally, "to have a good guardian spirit") and is described as "not a mood or temporary state, but a state achieved through a lifetime of virtuous action, accompanied by some measure of good fortune." I like the fact that Aristotle recognizes that virtue is a necessary but not sufficient condition for happiness -- even the best of people are not guaranteed happiness, which I think is part of the current generation's malaise. Modern Americans feel guilty and insufficient for not feeling perpetually sun-shiny, which leads them to ultimately self-destructive quests for the next thrill, not to mention undermining the basis of all deferral of gratification and self-control. I also like the connect to virtue, which elevates happiness to more than mere circumstance or pleasure. And for Aristotle, virtue is (like everything) a matter of teleology -- everything has a purpose and an end, even people, and happiness is to found by best fulfilling one's purpose.

"Fulfilling one's purpose" sound suspiciously like Work. This also, I think, is the downfall of the current generation, which often equates leisure with happiness. I'm not the first one to notice the connection between work and happiness, either. M. Scott Peck went so far as to define love as fundamentally a matter of Work. Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiÂ noticed that the activities that make people feel most fulfilled (music, gardening, writing, and intellectual debate, to name a few) combined aspects of work and leisure. There needs to be purpose, direction, and active engagement with experience in order to be anything close to happy.

All of which makes me feel better when I'm itching to do some work on December 26. Happiness is the freedom to work on whatever you want.

Thanks for the memories

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:07:49 -0700

Oliver Sacks, the pioneer of the unlikely literary genre of modern neuropathology case studies, has a new article in the New Yorker on the most profound case of amnesia ever recorded ("The Abyss," September 24, 2007.) Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist, lost nearly all his memories and his ability to create new memories as a result of a severe encephalitis. Just as in the movie Memento, Wearing's entire universe reboots the moment he loses his concentration. Left in an unfamiliar situation, with no cues to guide his current train of thought and no memory to guide him, he continually experiences life as a series of "waking up" moments. Sachs describes the absolute horror of Wearing's existence, as documented by his heroically devoted wife in her memoir and in several documentary films. The uncanny thing about Wearing's case is that his ability to perform music, and even conduct a group of musicians, is almost completely unaffected by his condition.

Wearing's case is full of philosophical implications. For many years Augie Turak would play excerpts from a documentary on Wearing to his classes, and then ask them: "Does his life have any meaning?" Most students would immediately conclude that it did not. Eventually, however, someone would point out that our own lives were not that much different from Wearing's. We have no memories before our birth; our deaths, presumably, snuff out all memory of what came before. How, then, do we presume to create meaning in the time in between our beginning and our end?

I come away from the story with a different koans, now. I find it remarkable that so much of our capacity to do -- either simple things like making coffee, or complex things like conduct a symphony -- has almost nothing to do with our "episodic" memory of life's events, and that narratives we weave to give those episodes continuity and significance. We can act, respond, create, and enjoy without having a past, or a future. Evidently Andrew Cohen and Eckhart Tolle were correct in saying that "freedom has no history," and that the past and the future were merely mental constructions that were often completely unnecessary. And yet, Wearing's situation is not the "timeless awareness of the present" that so many gurus have praised as the height of spiritual awakening. Wisdom is not merely the obliteration of certain mental facilities.

But perhaps the most profound conclusion is the most disturbing -- the inescapable realization that we don't really think the way we think we think. We like to presume we haveÂ singular identity, and that our faculties for remembering, planning, deciding, and acting are all springing from some singular source that is me. It might seem like that, ordinarily . . . but cases like Wearing show that our mental life is constant interweaving of independent and inter-dependent threads. One part might be remembering and deciding, another doing, and yet another still watching it all unfold. And which part of all that is really me? When Wearing dies and finds himself in whatever afterlife you might expect, will his memories return to him? If you don't immediately succumb to a reductionistic materialism, such questions will stretch your notion of soul in unexpected ways.

But then again, that's exactly what the spiritual teachers want you to do. "Just keep asking the question, 'Who am I?' " says Ramana Maharshi. Wearing's awful example leads back, again and again, to the same question, and our own inquiry becomes like Wearing's own life, a repetition upon repetition, stretching yearningly into the inexplicable.

The Last Temptation of the Mensch

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:34:29 -0700

Kenny writes:

It seems to me that this silly guy [James Ogilvy]Â and his silly ideas [Living Without a Goal]Â have gotten under your skin more than they merit...

Ok, yes, that's true. I pointed out to Kenny that his "silly ideas" are pretty common, although largely unconscious, among the majority of non-religious Americans: "There is no absolute meaning or purpose, but somehow I can patch together a life that will fulfill me. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something." I wanted to stomp on that philosophy while I had the chance, with it out in the open.

But -- true confession time -- the real reason I've spent so much time hashing this book is because it tempts me. Everyone who follows a vocation has times when they wish to God they could live a normal life like everyone else. The calling that inspires them starts to feel like a burden, a chain, an impediment to their freedom and happiness. I don't think Ogilvy's book would have gotten any traction in the first place, unless people felt (or suspected) the burden of living up to a Goal. So when a voice from some postmodernist philosopher or self-empowerment guru whispers in your ear, "Imagine what life would be like without any obligations or duties . . . what would you do?" -- don't you think we'll lean a little closer? Just to savor, for a moment, the notion of "free time," and just doing whatever you felt like doing?

It is an illusion, of course. No one forces us to do anything -- we choose every role, duty, obligation, and commitment in our lives. Sometimes we forget why we were committed to something, which leads us to think ourselves in a straight-jacket when in fact we are wearing a life-preserver. Claudia Horwitz does a pretty good business with her Stone Circles organization, catering to the burned-out activists who struggle to sustain themselves in their work. The cure is almost always some combination of rest and reflection. We let go of our work, just for a moment, examine what we really want in life, and almost always find ourselves pulled right back to the life we already living, once again choosing to accept the Work we have undertaken.

Walker Percy identified the solution long ago in his self-help satire, Lost in the Cosmos: "The cure for depression is suicide." Once you have seriously considered checking out permanently, you realize that every day on this planet is a day you've chosen to be here. Suddenly everything that was a burden becomes a gift, and you walk a little lighter.

Self-Reliance

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:26:00 -0700

Man, I must have been asleep in American lit class. I vaguely remember reading Emerson's "Self-Reliance" once before, and I only took away a few sterotypicalÂ impressions. Something about the established churches "dragging a corpose behind them" . . . and a whole lot of blather about being your own man, and "imitation is suicide." Traditional religion Bad, individual Good. Ok, we got Transcendentalism under wraps -- on to Melville!

But when I read Emerson again, after many years in spiritual work, I found a much richer vein than I remembered. I still have some reservations about a completely unqualified "to thine own self be true" . . . for every person who was genuinely searching for their unique voice, I've seen dozens who were merely unread idiots who weren't even schooled enough to know that they were cliche. I suspect that most people read "Self-Reliance" five to ten years too early to be ready for that message of independence.

But the genuinely spiritual philosophy . . . it's not just knee-jerk reactions against orthodoxy. Check this out:

What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? . . .Â In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.

I suspect I read this long ago and just thought it was more of Emerson's extended metaphors. But it's actually a beautiful description of the experience of the Ground of Being. No metaphor at all -- it's as clear a description as you can get of the literal immediate Reality of life.

And Eckhart Tolle's notion of living the NowÂ doesn't seem all that revolutionary, once you read this:

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

No wonder Steiner saw in the TranscendentalistsÂ a naturally-arising appreciation of "spiritual science". They really did get it.

Trust, integrity, and higher education

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 20 May 2007 11:07:00 -0700

Time Magazine described the new high-tech means students use to plagiarize essays for their assignments (e.g. affordabletermpapers.com) and the counter-measures that universities are using to suss out the cheaters (e.g. turnitin.com). Some students have objected to their own papers being added to turnitin.com's massive database of term papers that it uses to identify non-original work, claiming their intellectual property is being scooped up without their consent. Why, they ask, should some for-profit company make money off their work? Some professors, too, were skeptical about pursuing draconian measures to catch cheaters, fearing it might actually undermine the honor code spirit that insists and expects ethical behavior from its students.

Two questions arise from this debate: can high-tech anti-cheating measures be taken (is it technically and legally possible), and should they be taken (is it morally correct and realistically advisable to do so)? I hope the answer to both is obvious.

As far as the legal case goes . . . those students are dreaming if they think they can squeeze concessions from turnitin.com. No expectation of copyright control ever existed before in the schools, so it's useless to pretend it does now. Reading a text in order to identify possible plagiarism is going to be way, waaaay inside the bounds of "fair use" in copyright law, anyway. Any school that wants to cover its butt can simply make the non-expectation explicit: "When you turn in your papers, you give us the right to share it with whomever we please to verify it's originality." Case closed. If students still feel like they want to opt out of such a system, let them vote with their feet: transfer to a school that doesn't use the systems. Or, perhaps, let them come up with their own alternative for verifying the originality of their papers -- like, say, writing them in a controlled test room . . . and paying the fees of the proctors who administer them. I have a feeling all the high-minded objections from students would vanish if they were actually asked to pay to defend their precious term papers.

Should we try to catch the cheaters? This is a slam-dunk for reducto ad absurdum. If you think that rigorously pursuing cheaters will compromise a spirit of integrity, we might as well close down all the police stations, disban the SEC, and dismantel all the accounting firms' audit departments while we're at it. A presumption of individual innocence does not mean a presumption of collective innocence. We know that over half of students admit to cheating at some point in their college careers. Anyone who wants to defend the validity of their grades should be willing to accept a level of oversight . . . especially if it's as non-invasive as an automated plagiarism test. It's like the sleazy suspect on Law & Order who refuses to provide a DNA sample -- they claim all kinds of high-falutin' moral reasons for refusing an invasion of privacy . . . while the police, and the entire audience with them, says, "Uh-huh. Something to hide, huh?"

What I find even more sad is that people don't see how terribly important these ethical matters are. Academic misconduct is not a small matter. Look around at all the countries were free civil society has completely broken down: Iraq, third-world Africa, etc. The common denominator in all these places is corruption. Once corruption becomes commonplace and accepted as a part of life, you are condemned to world in which there is no trust at all . . . which is to say, a world in which all collective effort for collective good is utterly doomed. Is this what we want to school our children in? That success can be bought? That all that matters is what you can get away with? That personal success and fortune matters more than personal integrity and goodness? If corruption (and that's what we should call it -- not cheating, not misconduct, but corruption) prevails in the university, we will have planted the seeds of our society's destruction.

I also think, coincidentally, that this whole debate only exposes the arbitrary, unrealistic, totally bogus nature of most school assignments and tests. I heard of a Duke business school teacher who told his students: "In my classes, anyone who is asked for help, and refuses to give it, is a cheater." The dean of the school heard of this policy, rushed to his office and said, "We can't have this. What kind of a world do think this would be if everybody went around helping everyone else?" (Beat . . . .wait for laughter.) If, instead of working on individual essays that are canned and arbitrary, students worked collectively on real-life problems with real-world benefactors, the problem of cheating would not be so much of an issue.