WHAT’S
HAPPENING TO OUR SOCIETY?
I’ve not written an essay for some time, thanks to a
series of disruptions starting with last winter and ending (hopefully) with
computer issues.
Neuro-science teaches us that our brains physically
change in accordance with our activities, a scary thought given how many people
spend their time.
In this piece, we’ll consider two categories of change,
products of modern times. To start, there are two book reviews, the first
copied from ‘The Economist’, the second from a review posted on Google. You’ll
find them interesting, and there is a common theme. More later.
The first:
PEOPLE are too full of themselves, says David Brooks, a
columnist for the New York Times. Joe Namath, a star quarterback of the
1960s, once shouted to his bathroom mirror: “Joe! Joe! You’re the most
beautiful thing in the world!”—with a reporter watching. But it is not just
celebrities who puff themselves up, and the evidence is not just anecdotal. The
proportion of American teenagers who believe themselves to be “very important”
jumped from 12% in 1950 to 80% in 2005. On a test that asks subjects to agree
or disagree with statements such as “I like to look at my body” and “Somebody
should write a biography about me”, 93% of young Americans emerge as being more
narcissistic than the average of 20 years ago.
With the rise in self-regard has come an unprecedented
yearning for fame. In a survey in 1976, people ranked being famous 15th out of
16 possible life goals. By 2007, 51% of young people said it was one of their
principal ambitions. On a recent multiple-choice quiz, nearly twice as many
middle-school girls said they would rather be a celebrity’s personal assistant
than the president of Harvard University.
In “The Road to Character” Mr. Brooks charts the change
in popular culture that made this possible. This involves digesting troughs
full of tripe such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love”, a bestseller that
tells women that “God dwells within you as yourself, exactly the way you are.”
(Mr. Brooks claims to be “the only man ever to finish this book”.)
Not everyone these days is a self-loving birdbrain, he
admits. Some are meritocratic materialists who have “streamlined [their] inner
humanity to make [their] ascent more aerodynamic”. Mr. Brooks offers an
alternative—and more austere—set of values to live by. People need to
rediscover that “the ultimate joys are moral joys", he says. He offers a series
of chapter-length biographies to illustrate this idea.
He tells the story of Frances Perkins, who rather than
looking inside herself to find a purpose in life asked what the world was
calling her to do. After she saw workers hurling themselves from windows to
their deaths to avoid the great fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in
1911, she devoted herself to campaigning for better working conditions. She
rose to become Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labour, and was
instrumental in the creation of Social Security (public pensions) in America.
The ultimate sin, for the Oprah generation, is to be
repressed. Nonsense, says Mr. Brooks. Dwight Eisenhower spent his life
repressing his inner self, and it helped the Allies win the second world war.
He “spent the nights staring at the ceiling, racked by insomnia and anxiety,
drinking and smoking”. Yet “he put on a false front of confident ease and
farm-boy garrulousness” to raise the troops’ morale. He was splendidly
inauthentic. Later on, as president, he was willing to appear tongue-tied if it
would help conceal his designs. Indeed, he was happy to let people think him
stupid, which “is how we know he was not a New Yorker”.
This is not a reactionary book. Mr. Brooks acknowledges
that earlier generations pointlessly abstained from certain pleasures and
cruelly disregarded the rights of women, non-whites and sexual minorities. His
heroes are both ancient (St Augustine) and modern (Bayard Rustin). He stresses
that all were flawed (Eisenhower took a mistress, whom he treated icily, for
example) and some were often miserable (Samuel Johnson, author of the first
English dictionary, lived in terror of hellfire). If you want to be reassured
that you are special, you will hate this book. But if you like thoughtful
polemics, it is worth logging off Facebook to read it.
The second:
Today’s children are growing up in a new reality, one
where they are attuning more to machines and less to people than has ever been
true in human history. That’s troubling for several reasons. For one the social
and emotional circuitry of a child’s brain learns from contact and conversation
with everyone it encounters over the course of a day. These interactions mold
brain circuitry; the fewer hours spent with people – and the more staring at a
digitized screen -- portends deficits.
All of that digital engagement comes at a cost in face
time with real people – the medium where we learn to “read” nonverbals. The new
crop of natives in this digital world may be adroit at the keyboard, but can be
all thumbs when it comes to reading behavior face-to-face, in real time –
particularly in sensing the dismay of others when they stop to read a text in
the middle of talking with them.
Then there are the basics of attention, the cognitive
muscle that lets us follow a story, see a task through to the end, learn or
create. In some ways the endless hours young people spend staring at electronic
gadgets may help them acquire specific cognitive skills. But there are concerns
and questions about how those same hours may lead to deficits in core
emotional, social, and cognitive skills.
The ingredients of rapport begin with total shared focus
between two people, which leads to an unconscious physical synchrony, which in
turn generates good feeling. Such a shared focus with the teacher puts a
child’s brain in the best mode for learning. Any teacher who has struggled to
get a class to pay attention knows that once everyone quiets down and focuses,
they can start to comprehend that lesson in history or math.
Rapport demands joint attention -- mutual focus. Our need
to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the
ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.
At the third All Things D(igital) conference back in
2005, conference hosts unplugged the WiFi in the main ballroom because of the
glow from laptop screens, indicating that those in the audience were not glued
to the action onstage. They were away, in a state, as one participant put it of
“continuous partial attention,” a mental blurriness induced by an overload of
information inputs from the speakers, the other people in the room, and what
they were doing on their laptops. To battle such partial focus today, some
Silicon Valley workplaces have banned laptops, mobile phones, and other digital
tools during meetings.
After not checking her mobile for a while, a publishing
executive confesses she gets “a jangly feeling. You miss that hit you get when
there’s a text. You know it’s not right to check your phone when you’re with
someone, but it’s addictive.” So she and her husband have a pact: “When we get
home from work we put our phones in a drawer. If it’s in front of me I get
anxious, I’ve just got to check it. But now we try to be more present for each
other. We talk.”
Our focus continually fights distractions, both inner and
outer. The question is, what are our distractors costing us? An executive at a
financial firm tells me, “When I notice that my mind has been somewhere else
during a meeting, I wonder what opportunities I’ve been missing right here.”
It’s not just that we’ve developed habits of attention
that make us less effective, but that the weight of messages leaves us too
little time simply to reflect on what they really mean. All of this was
foreseen way back in 1977 by the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon. Writing
about the coming information-rich world, he warned that what information
consumes is “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention.”
From "Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence."
Copyright 2013 Daniel Goleman. Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins
Publishers.
I’m
back.
The
foregoing articles relate to the growing trend toward reduced personal
interactions and the harm to individuals as well as society. A related trend is
that of shortening attention spans, a phenomena that most writers are
constantly reminded of. It seems that shorter attention spans have a number of
negative consequences. One that I notice is the absence of listening, of
focusing on the other person in order to understand his/her full thought. This,
of course, is often the result of the other person’s inability to focus on and
express a complete thought. (Everybody loses.)
GREEK LESSONS
Will
they, or won’t they? For some time now, we’ve been kept in suspense by the
on-going drama surrounding Greece’s economic problems, and whether they (the
Greeks) will accede to European demands for economic reform. At this writing,
it seems that they’re buying into Europe’s plan, but the outcome doesn’t
matter, the lessons are the same. Largely missing has been an understanding of
how they got into this mess and whether we in the U.S. are headed for a similar
predicament.
In
my opinion, the underlying problem is populism wherein politicians tell people
what they want to hear without due regard for the consequences, such as ever
increasing debt. Sound familiar?
The
Greek situation is also a classic case of lender culpability, wherein lenders
make irresponsible loans for their own selfish reasons. Europe seems to be just
too good in their desire to keep Greece in the Euro. But why? Might their
banks, and the Greek bonds they hold, have something to do with it? And without
Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the Euro, might German currency
appreciate making their exports more expensive?
Recall
our own situation when banks issued mortgages unpayable by the borrowers, urged
on by politicians through Fannie and Freddie. The taxpayer made good, and our
politicians tell us it was a good deal, we got our money back. What’s missing
is the fact that a massive misallocation of resources took place at the hands
of our politicians. We should have been improving, not paying for past
mistakes. Look at our infrastructure, we’re patching and replacing not
improving as is necessary for a healthy economy--one that can pay for the debts
we’re piling up.
It’s
not reasonable to expect voters here, or in Greece, to keep up with the illogic
in political propaganda, especially when it’s paid for by big-moneyed special
interests. So how does it end?
Beats
me, but of one thing I’m sure: The politicians and special interests will never
change a winning game.
Joe
Bakewell
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