Thank you for writing-- I always look forward to your essays, which even as they describe problems, leave me (perhaps oddly) hopeful.
Your essay today made me think of one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's less well known speeches.
'"There are some things in our nation and in the world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted...Maybe our world is in dire need of a new organization, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos who, in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who finally came to see, after all of his vacillations, that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson who, in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, and who, in the midst of his own ownership of slaves, scratched across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." As maladjusted as Jesus Christ who could say that "he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword."
Through such maladjustment I believe that we can emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice..."'
MLK was really brilliant - and it's unfortunate that people have worked so hard to try to reduce him to a few quotes that have been kind of turned into cliches.
This is, as usual, well thought and beautifully rendered. I typically find myself reacting paradoxically to this line of thinking; as I’ve aged, I’ve tried to be less disgusted, less appalled, less horrified, and more accepting. But an essay like this moves me; I find your condemnation of the “just let it go” approach convincing.
Is it possible for me to even explain my position without becoming trite or inane? I suspect not.
I have drifted for years in the direction of believing that “we used to be better” or “we could be better” are both dangerously seductive. But I don’t think the danger is because they can’t possibly be true. I think the first is not true, except in limited ways, and with pounds of caveats, and I think the second is true mainly as an abstract proposition. But the danger isn’t necessarily in their being false, even if I assume I’m correct about this guess. I think the danger is in internalizing the guilt that goes along with it. Could I have done so much more? Of course. Would that result in either an improved world or an improved me? I doubt it. But do we usually test that theory out? Some of us do, I suspect. I also suspect a large majority of us reject the guilt, pronounce ourselves healthy for rejecting it, and try not to think about it too much.
I feel like I’m wandering here, so I’ll try to sum up my way of thinking about it all. I rely on two sentences:
1. Humans— we’re bad at this.
And
2. You do what you can.
I no longer gain comfort from being disgusted by the many examples of audience capture and related phenomena you me to here. I continue to feel that disgust; sometimes I get there on my own, and more rarely, I get there from reading or hearing from someone like you who is chewing over all of it. But I’m not comforted by the disgust, because I don’t feel morally superior to the people who give in to the tide and undertow. I may be slightly better, on paper. Perhaps if I were in their shoes I would compromise less, and perhaps I would not. I’ve never been close enough to success to be in the neighborhood of the more egregious options for compromise. Does this leave me innocent? No. My lack of success has made me more obsessive, more grasping, more dedicated to my work and my ideas, and thus I’ve neglected people I love, people who care about me. Have I done this to a heinous degree? I hope not.
I try to be a good listener, to balance out my endless writing and talking.
Is it a paradox that I try to make my peace with all of it, while also trying to still occasionally steep myself in the ideas like yours that bothered me more when I was younger? Maybe. I feel like “making peace” with it shouldn’t mean banishing the harsh realities from your mind, or perennially letting yourself off the hook. But I also think that some of us— you, of course, but also me to a lesser extent— because I really do shut much more of it out than you and many others do—
I think that some of us really are troubled by things that a lot of us are able to shut out. And I think the challenge for people like us is to balance the disgust with a guilt-free attempt to get through each day with something like happiness and something like a sense that this life has value despite the many built-in human flaws we can easily see in others and in ourselves.
I’m amazed that I am able to carry it off, most of the time. I am fortunate to have a handful of people that believe in me, sometimes with more confidence than I have in myself, and those people help a lot. I try to do this for a handful of people, too. Does this make up for the number of people who have kicked me out of their lives? I don’t know. I have a self-serving answer there, but I won’t say it out loud.
I think the trick is to develop an acceptance that isn’t denial. This means accepting yourself more than it means accepting others, especially the greatest villains. Even a tiny bit of villainy in yourself can be harder to accept than the largest villainy in others. If you need a rationalization to help you with this, I like this one— if you are going to help anyone, or make the world better even a little bit, you’re going to have to avoid burnout. And nothing gets you to burnout faster than the inability to accept.
I imagine that many of the people whose compromises disgust you started down the road with this kind of rationalization. The trick here is to believe you can do better with it. Not that you will be better enough to pronounce yourself “good,” but just a little bit better. And it’s easy enough for me to believe that of you, or of myself. Essays like this give me hope for some of us. For the writer, some hope. For the reader, some hope. And it’s always nice to imagine that there are more of us than it seems. I think it’s entirely reasonable to guess that this can be true, even likely; it’s far easier for us to feel alive to the villainy than to notice the many quiet attempts to rise above it.
thank you, as always, karl, for reading. I am most struck by your last bit: I do think that people who want to make things better are in the majority, and I do feel hopeful for that. But I don't think "it’s far easier for us to feel alive to the villainy than to notice the many quiet attempts to rise above it." For me, at least, I trained myself to obsessively notice the latter, so much so that I would have to say I was intentionally, wilfully blind to the whole picture because I was trying so hard not to notice and reckon with the bad things happening around me, and to the realities of the systems I was in. I even did this when bad things were happening to me! Shrugging them off because the person did 1 thing right in the whole sorry debacle, etc. I suspect I may be somewhat unusual in this, but then again, with the self help industrial complex trying to push more people to behave as I did, perhaps not.
As is my habit, I’ll pretend that my generalization included your caveat, and I’ll say this: I think there are a lot of people doing what you’ve just mentioned, and I have done it, and I think we go one way on some days (or decades) and another way at other times. Both ways are easy, when it’s your time to find one of them easy. You’ve obviously lived long enough to make both types of category errors. I think I’ve lived long enough to feel that the most dangerous error is to pick one error and stick with it.
Okay, now I say something you won’t hear me say too often— now I need to go exercise for a few minutes.
"I think I’ve lived long enough to feel that the most dangerous error is to pick one error and stick with it." Yes, this hits. :) One must move as one is moved.
Have you ever read Disciplined Minds, by Jeff Schmidt? It's a book about how "professionals" are selected to be less radical, more subservient to power, heavily inspired by his time as a physics grad student. I read it in undergrad, back when I was really into this sort of thing, fearful for my future.
There is something very admirable in scholarship and the ideal of academia, at least to me. But I think the whole setup of university life works to devalue scholarship as a vocation. Some is explained in a strange history book by David Noble (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/122336/a-world-without-women-by-david-f-noble/). All those very clever boys, showing off how smart they are. The enormous pressures to get funding that are now seen in many US and European universities, especially in STEM, makes it worse. I had a revelation after a depressing trip to DARPA that I was essentially in sales, except I didn't get to keep any of the money.
oh i need to get this book. i have been studying the reformation a little for creative reasons and had been starting to notice some of this also (i mean some of what is in the summary on the penguin website).
I, too, have started to notice that we're essentially in sales but we don't keep the money. Bleak. It's possible to carve out some space away from that dynamic within the profession but it is not easy and the space is constantly being eroded from various ends.
So great!! I am often intrigued by the motivations for cowardice and am a big fan of this exploration. The different ideas of what professions stand for to the people inside them feels like it goes in tandem with the way that social 'ground truth' ideas operate, like 'taxing more to prop up welfare is bad' and 'there is a correct number of disabled people that this particular health secretary is able to vibe out'. If X is taken to be true, then Y is ok but Z is an unacceptable disruption of it. Is there something about academia as a selector for people adept at motivated reasoning as a written format of sales techniques? Which then pervades into the way that academic hierarchies are reproduced and sustained? X is that we are here for good reasons, so Y is we act honestly (!) and Z is we align with the highest status actors who will affiliate.
(Only responding perhaps to the initial part of the piece): I recall for myself sitting in my college graduation in the rain while James Wolfensohn (of the World Bank fame) basically gave a commencement speech with the same tone of "we fucked up the world, now it's you're job to fix it." It's not even "sorry we messed up," not even a BAD apology.
I remember when he was announced as the speaker thinking "why on earth would I want to listen to any apologia BS this guy will say???" and hoping that the protesters would turn out en masse. But the cavalry (police on horseback iirc) and bone-chilling May rain seems to have turned them away. But when people rail about the Youth saying "OK Boomer" I think of That Guy and how I wish he had gotten pneumonia from the rain instead of the rest of us.
For the first time in... a few years, ahem... I was moved to look up the Anglo Saxon. The original phrase "sylfes cræfte" is especially apt to your purposes here, meaning something like "by his own powers" whereby cræft can be physical or mental. (Dictionary link below.)
What surprised me is that "self-help" is listed by the OED from 1628. It is a translation, and rather a free one I think, of "nec spes libertatis erat nec cura peculi" according to GPT (I got the text online and used GPT to translate): meaning "there was neither hope of freedom nor care of savings", i.e. savings as self-help.
They list a moralising instance in 1765. Then there is Carlyle and Kingsly. And ofc in 1859 there was Self-Help by Samuel Smiles (the year of On Liberty and Origin of Species). I can't add the image of OED here but will DM.
Anyway, there seems to be something quite old about the idea of "sylfes cræfte" as, in your nice phrase, "refusing outside help".
You know which book was very handy in helping me recalibrate my perspective after a brief brush with (my country's closest facsimile of) elite academia?
It has a lot of (negative) things to say about solipsistic/navel gazing/self centered approaches to "self-help" in the sense you initially mention. And it has a certain recapitulation of themes in the historical classics of what we may call the "wisdom/virtue genre" (the Stoics, Confucius, Montaigne and such) that ease the suffocation one may feel in the conditions of our liquid modernity.
(and please, I beg, don't let the "culture war" positionings of the author make you dismiss it outright, I promise you'll find a substantial locus of agreement)
THANK YOU for your moral clarity. I often find myself railing against the idea of assuming others have good intent or any intent at all (and, like you, I often think about Kendrick Lamar when I do it).
To add to the excellent quotes in the comments, I like Jonathan Kozol, another "maladjusted" person: "There is a tendency to assume that the extremes of expression are always wrong, and that the truth, by its own preference, likes to live in the middle. It doesn’t always live in the middle."
In my mind the field who specializes in studying collective action problems is political science. Not that we have good solutions to the problems you describe, but the right mindset is there. Or at least I want to believe it.
I was intending to diss my own field! I think economists should be interested in this professionally -- and some are, like Zingales, I feel a little bad I only gave him the footnote.
To cut through some of the intent, virtue, rhetoric thicket, in international development work, I've valued the work of anthropologists like Anne-Meike Fechter, Heather Hindman, David Mosse. By focusing in on practices, they helpfully point out heterogeneity even in the teeth of incentives - sometimes people just decide to act differently (better).
(They're building on Bordieu and habitus. I found them via Severine Autesserre's work).
----
People shouldn't totally skip past the Headley translation. It definitely shouldn't be the only translation you read, but its got a lot more laughs in it than Heaney, which is good in itself and helpful for understanding what it takes to communicate with immediacy in a boozy, rowdy mead hall.
Thank you for writing-- I always look forward to your essays, which even as they describe problems, leave me (perhaps oddly) hopeful.
Your essay today made me think of one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's less well known speeches.
'"There are some things in our nation and in the world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted...Maybe our world is in dire need of a new organization, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos who, in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who finally came to see, after all of his vacillations, that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson who, in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, and who, in the midst of his own ownership of slaves, scratched across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." As maladjusted as Jesus Christ who could say that "he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword."
Through such maladjustment I believe that we can emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice..."'
I didn't know about that quote --- I love it. Thank you for sharing it.
Great quote. The speech is here:https://www.onu.edu/mlk/mlk-speech-transcript
MLK was really brilliant - and it's unfortunate that people have worked so hard to try to reduce him to a few quotes that have been kind of turned into cliches.
This is, as usual, well thought and beautifully rendered. I typically find myself reacting paradoxically to this line of thinking; as I’ve aged, I’ve tried to be less disgusted, less appalled, less horrified, and more accepting. But an essay like this moves me; I find your condemnation of the “just let it go” approach convincing.
Is it possible for me to even explain my position without becoming trite or inane? I suspect not.
I have drifted for years in the direction of believing that “we used to be better” or “we could be better” are both dangerously seductive. But I don’t think the danger is because they can’t possibly be true. I think the first is not true, except in limited ways, and with pounds of caveats, and I think the second is true mainly as an abstract proposition. But the danger isn’t necessarily in their being false, even if I assume I’m correct about this guess. I think the danger is in internalizing the guilt that goes along with it. Could I have done so much more? Of course. Would that result in either an improved world or an improved me? I doubt it. But do we usually test that theory out? Some of us do, I suspect. I also suspect a large majority of us reject the guilt, pronounce ourselves healthy for rejecting it, and try not to think about it too much.
I feel like I’m wandering here, so I’ll try to sum up my way of thinking about it all. I rely on two sentences:
1. Humans— we’re bad at this.
And
2. You do what you can.
I no longer gain comfort from being disgusted by the many examples of audience capture and related phenomena you me to here. I continue to feel that disgust; sometimes I get there on my own, and more rarely, I get there from reading or hearing from someone like you who is chewing over all of it. But I’m not comforted by the disgust, because I don’t feel morally superior to the people who give in to the tide and undertow. I may be slightly better, on paper. Perhaps if I were in their shoes I would compromise less, and perhaps I would not. I’ve never been close enough to success to be in the neighborhood of the more egregious options for compromise. Does this leave me innocent? No. My lack of success has made me more obsessive, more grasping, more dedicated to my work and my ideas, and thus I’ve neglected people I love, people who care about me. Have I done this to a heinous degree? I hope not.
I try to be a good listener, to balance out my endless writing and talking.
Is it a paradox that I try to make my peace with all of it, while also trying to still occasionally steep myself in the ideas like yours that bothered me more when I was younger? Maybe. I feel like “making peace” with it shouldn’t mean banishing the harsh realities from your mind, or perennially letting yourself off the hook. But I also think that some of us— you, of course, but also me to a lesser extent— because I really do shut much more of it out than you and many others do—
I think that some of us really are troubled by things that a lot of us are able to shut out. And I think the challenge for people like us is to balance the disgust with a guilt-free attempt to get through each day with something like happiness and something like a sense that this life has value despite the many built-in human flaws we can easily see in others and in ourselves.
I’m amazed that I am able to carry it off, most of the time. I am fortunate to have a handful of people that believe in me, sometimes with more confidence than I have in myself, and those people help a lot. I try to do this for a handful of people, too. Does this make up for the number of people who have kicked me out of their lives? I don’t know. I have a self-serving answer there, but I won’t say it out loud.
I think the trick is to develop an acceptance that isn’t denial. This means accepting yourself more than it means accepting others, especially the greatest villains. Even a tiny bit of villainy in yourself can be harder to accept than the largest villainy in others. If you need a rationalization to help you with this, I like this one— if you are going to help anyone, or make the world better even a little bit, you’re going to have to avoid burnout. And nothing gets you to burnout faster than the inability to accept.
I imagine that many of the people whose compromises disgust you started down the road with this kind of rationalization. The trick here is to believe you can do better with it. Not that you will be better enough to pronounce yourself “good,” but just a little bit better. And it’s easy enough for me to believe that of you, or of myself. Essays like this give me hope for some of us. For the writer, some hope. For the reader, some hope. And it’s always nice to imagine that there are more of us than it seems. I think it’s entirely reasonable to guess that this can be true, even likely; it’s far easier for us to feel alive to the villainy than to notice the many quiet attempts to rise above it.
thank you, as always, karl, for reading. I am most struck by your last bit: I do think that people who want to make things better are in the majority, and I do feel hopeful for that. But I don't think "it’s far easier for us to feel alive to the villainy than to notice the many quiet attempts to rise above it." For me, at least, I trained myself to obsessively notice the latter, so much so that I would have to say I was intentionally, wilfully blind to the whole picture because I was trying so hard not to notice and reckon with the bad things happening around me, and to the realities of the systems I was in. I even did this when bad things were happening to me! Shrugging them off because the person did 1 thing right in the whole sorry debacle, etc. I suspect I may be somewhat unusual in this, but then again, with the self help industrial complex trying to push more people to behave as I did, perhaps not.
As is my habit, I’ll pretend that my generalization included your caveat, and I’ll say this: I think there are a lot of people doing what you’ve just mentioned, and I have done it, and I think we go one way on some days (or decades) and another way at other times. Both ways are easy, when it’s your time to find one of them easy. You’ve obviously lived long enough to make both types of category errors. I think I’ve lived long enough to feel that the most dangerous error is to pick one error and stick with it.
Okay, now I say something you won’t hear me say too often— now I need to go exercise for a few minutes.
"I think I’ve lived long enough to feel that the most dangerous error is to pick one error and stick with it." Yes, this hits. :) One must move as one is moved.
"here are about 5-7 broad approaches, which are different, but there is still remarkable conformity beneath each archetypal hood."
This is a fact about humans and the number 7, not a fact about substack. There are seven basic plots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots, seven universal archetypes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots etc
The common thread is that the number of items we can keep in mind is seven, plus or minus two
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
Fun read!
Have you ever read Disciplined Minds, by Jeff Schmidt? It's a book about how "professionals" are selected to be less radical, more subservient to power, heavily inspired by his time as a physics grad student. I read it in undergrad, back when I was really into this sort of thing, fearful for my future.
Here's a review: https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/01BRrt.html
that looks like an amazing book, thanks so much, sounds like my whole medical career
There is something very admirable in scholarship and the ideal of academia, at least to me. But I think the whole setup of university life works to devalue scholarship as a vocation. Some is explained in a strange history book by David Noble (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/122336/a-world-without-women-by-david-f-noble/). All those very clever boys, showing off how smart they are. The enormous pressures to get funding that are now seen in many US and European universities, especially in STEM, makes it worse. I had a revelation after a depressing trip to DARPA that I was essentially in sales, except I didn't get to keep any of the money.
oh i need to get this book. i have been studying the reformation a little for creative reasons and had been starting to notice some of this also (i mean some of what is in the summary on the penguin website).
I, too, have started to notice that we're essentially in sales but we don't keep the money. Bleak. It's possible to carve out some space away from that dynamic within the profession but it is not easy and the space is constantly being eroded from various ends.
Yes. I was bad at academic sales, so perhaps that affected my perspective.
So great!! I am often intrigued by the motivations for cowardice and am a big fan of this exploration. The different ideas of what professions stand for to the people inside them feels like it goes in tandem with the way that social 'ground truth' ideas operate, like 'taxing more to prop up welfare is bad' and 'there is a correct number of disabled people that this particular health secretary is able to vibe out'. If X is taken to be true, then Y is ok but Z is an unacceptable disruption of it. Is there something about academia as a selector for people adept at motivated reasoning as a written format of sales techniques? Which then pervades into the way that academic hierarchies are reproduced and sustained? X is that we are here for good reasons, so Y is we act honestly (!) and Z is we align with the highest status actors who will affiliate.
(Only responding perhaps to the initial part of the piece): I recall for myself sitting in my college graduation in the rain while James Wolfensohn (of the World Bank fame) basically gave a commencement speech with the same tone of "we fucked up the world, now it's you're job to fix it." It's not even "sorry we messed up," not even a BAD apology.
I remember when he was announced as the speaker thinking "why on earth would I want to listen to any apologia BS this guy will say???" and hoping that the protesters would turn out en masse. But the cavalry (police on horseback iirc) and bone-chilling May rain seems to have turned them away. But when people rail about the Youth saying "OK Boomer" I think of That Guy and how I wish he had gotten pneumonia from the rain instead of the rest of us.
For the first time in... a few years, ahem... I was moved to look up the Anglo Saxon. The original phrase "sylfes cræfte" is especially apt to your purposes here, meaning something like "by his own powers" whereby cræft can be physical or mental. (Dictionary link below.)
What surprised me is that "self-help" is listed by the OED from 1628. It is a translation, and rather a free one I think, of "nec spes libertatis erat nec cura peculi" according to GPT (I got the text online and used GPT to translate): meaning "there was neither hope of freedom nor care of savings", i.e. savings as self-help.
They list a moralising instance in 1765. Then there is Carlyle and Kingsly. And ofc in 1859 there was Self-Help by Samuel Smiles (the year of On Liberty and Origin of Species). I can't add the image of OED here but will DM.
Anyway, there seems to be something quite old about the idea of "sylfes cræfte" as, in your nice phrase, "refusing outside help".
https://bosworthtoller.com/6643
This is so cool!! so you could literally have characters in historical novels use the term self-help in the early modern period!!!
when I do an edit of the piece i'll update with a link to this comment :)
"Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen." (Adorno)
You know which book was very handy in helping me recalibrate my perspective after a brief brush with (my country's closest facsimile of) elite academia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Hypothesis
It has a lot of (negative) things to say about solipsistic/navel gazing/self centered approaches to "self-help" in the sense you initially mention. And it has a certain recapitulation of themes in the historical classics of what we may call the "wisdom/virtue genre" (the Stoics, Confucius, Montaigne and such) that ease the suffocation one may feel in the conditions of our liquid modernity.
(and please, I beg, don't let the "culture war" positionings of the author make you dismiss it outright, I promise you'll find a substantial locus of agreement)
THANK YOU for your moral clarity. I often find myself railing against the idea of assuming others have good intent or any intent at all (and, like you, I often think about Kendrick Lamar when I do it).
To add to the excellent quotes in the comments, I like Jonathan Kozol, another "maladjusted" person: "There is a tendency to assume that the extremes of expression are always wrong, and that the truth, by its own preference, likes to live in the middle. It doesn’t always live in the middle."
In my mind the field who specializes in studying collective action problems is political science. Not that we have good solutions to the problems you describe, but the right mindset is there. Or at least I want to believe it.
I was intending to diss my own field! I think economists should be interested in this professionally -- and some are, like Zingales, I feel a little bad I only gave him the footnote.
To cut through some of the intent, virtue, rhetoric thicket, in international development work, I've valued the work of anthropologists like Anne-Meike Fechter, Heather Hindman, David Mosse. By focusing in on practices, they helpfully point out heterogeneity even in the teeth of incentives - sometimes people just decide to act differently (better).
(They're building on Bordieu and habitus. I found them via Severine Autesserre's work).
----
People shouldn't totally skip past the Headley translation. It definitely shouldn't be the only translation you read, but its got a lot more laughs in it than Heaney, which is good in itself and helpful for understanding what it takes to communicate with immediacy in a boozy, rowdy mead hall.