Arts

Good Boss, Bad Boss: Lecture by Robert Sutton

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Stanford’s Robert Sutton is a favorite of mine among management experts. I’ve been a fan of his work ever since reading his HBR article “More Trouble Than They’re Worth” and the book-length version The No-Asshole Rule. His book Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst is another well-researched, but highly enjoyable read. Sutton offers tremendous advice for those in leadership positions. These include:

  • “Don’t crush the bird”: find the balance between micromanaging and undermanaging.
  • “Grit gets you there”: perseverance toward long-term goals.
  • “Small wins are the path”: break down big challenges and long-term goals into smaller, achievable goals.
  • “Beware the toxic tandem”: be aware of how others perceive you and avoid selfish behavior.
  • “Got their backs”: protect and defend your people.

Sutton highlights this excellent, one-page summary:

You can see a lecture by Sutton below.

 

Writing Ourselves: An Interview with Jack Harrell

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Over at Worlds Without End, I’ve written a review of Greg Kofford Books’ new publication Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism by Jack Harrell. I explain,

As one who does not consider himself a creative writer (at least not a fiction writer), I was a bit hesitant to attempt a review of a book almost entirely dedicated to the art of writing. Yet, as I made my way from essay to essay, it became clear to me that Harrell was not merely talking about writing, but was describing the essence of Creation itself. In short, Harrell is discussing what has become known as the “cultural mandate” in Genesis 1 to become co-creators with God. And this in turn is about transformation and new creation; the first steps of eternal progression (at least from a Mormon perspective). As Harrell explains in the touching first essay, “…I’ve learned that God is with us in every desire to improve. Anyplace can be a starting place with him…Whatever we make of ourselves, whatever circumstances we come to, God can turn it to good.” He imagines God saying, “Now is a good time…This is a good place to begin” (pg. 5). For me, the essays are connected by two major strands of thought: a Mormon theology of creativity and the meaning and morals of the work itself.

…There is much more in Jack Harrell’s book that I have not touched on: the place of violence in literature, authenticity, the agenticity of imaginary characters, the euphoria of peak performance, etc. But the themes above struck me the most. Harrell’s way of weaving together tales from his childhood, reflections on Mormon theology, and writing insights as an expert craftsman calls for contemplation. It is a meditation on ordinary life; an invitation to construct meaning out of life’s chaos and disorder and put it into words. It encourages readers to be creative in their ventures, to become co-creators with God, and to transform this world for the better. It encourages them, much like the Maclean boys, to “glorify God, and to enjoy him” in their craft. But most of all, it encourages them to write about it. Readers will find themselves exploring old feelings and new thoughts. Even better, they may find themselves putting pen to paper soon after.

You can hear an interview with Jack Harrell on Greg Kofford Books’ Authorcast here.

DR Editor in New Book: As Iron Sharpens Iron

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This past week, Greg Kofford Books–what I consider to currently be the best publisher in Mormon Studies[ref]I often describe it as a Mormon version of Eerdmans or IVP Academic[/ref]–released a new volume edited by Julie Smith titled As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture. As the description explains,

Our scripture study and reading often assume that the prophetic figures within the texts are in complete agreement with each other. Because of this we can fail to recognize that those authors and personalities frequently have different—and sometimes competing—views on some of the most important doctrines of the Gospel, including the nature of God, the roles of scripture and prophecy, and the Atonement.

In this unique volume, fictionalized dialogues between the various voices of scripture illustrate how these differences and disagreements are not flaws of the texts but are rather essential features of the canon. These creative dialogues include Abraham and Job debating the utility of suffering and our submission to God, Alma and Abinidi disagreeing on the place of justice in the Atonement, and the authors Mark and Luke discussing the role of women in Jesus’s ministry. It is by examining and embracing the different perspectives within the canon that readers are able to discover just how rich and invigorating the scriptures can be. The dialogues within this volume show how just as “iron sharpeneth iron,” so can we sharpen our own thoughts and beliefs as we engage not just the various voices in the scriptures but also the various voices within our community (Proverbs 27:17).

I’m honored to be included among the contributors. My essay features a fictionalized dialogue between Mormon and the patriarch Jacob (Israel) on the subject of wealth. As I explain in the opening of my essay,

Mormon’s entire life was consumed by war and violence brought by what he saw as divisions created by wealth, vanity, and economic inequality. His abridgment of the Nephite records often highlights the pride of the rich and inequality as the source of conflict. Yet, the patriarch Jacob—later renamed Israel—is depicted in the Genesis account as being very prosperous and often pursuing wealth at the expense of others.

Be sure to check it out. You can read a Q&A with Julie Smith on the book here.

 

No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

This book got off to a kind of rough start for some of the same reasons that Harry Markopolos had such a hard time getting the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff in the decade leading up to Madoff’s enormous Ponzi scheme finally publicly immolating: he’s kind of an abrasive character who comes across as arrogant, confrontational, and self-promoting. I’m glad I stuck with the book, however, for two reasons. First of all, the grating tone is smoothed out substantially as you realize that–while perhaps a little melodramatic–Markopolos seems to be entirely sincere in his intentions and oblivious to his abrasiveness. Second, because–as far as I could tell from the book, which is laden with supporting material and testimony–he was exactly right. He did determine early on that Madoff was a fraud, he did everything in his power to bring it to the SEC, and the SEC did absolutely nothing to follow up on his claims, even though there were incredibly quick and easy ways for the fraud to be validated.

One of the most interesting things about this book, however, is the way it interfaces with two other books I’ve read over the past month or so: Political Order and Political Decay and The New Jim Crow.

In Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama makes a vibrant, international case for the importance of strong state institutions. Although he is associated with the American right, Fukuyama eschews the conventional more/less government for an emphasis on quality rather than quantity of state institutions. He spends a lot of time looking at what is required to make state institutions effective: a delicate balance of autonomy and accountability. It’s impossible to have read that book recently and not see connections again and again to the SEC as described by Markopolos.

For example, Fukuyama emphasizes the importance of professionalism–often accomplished through objective, standardized testing–in helping state institutions retain independence (because rigorous testing confounds political appointments) and high morale (because the testing acts as a kind of filter to create a cohesive social group within the institution) in addition to the more obvious benefits of competence and knowledgeability.

Markopolos makes the exact same points although–lacking Fukuyama’s framework and context–he doesn’t quite connect all the dots. He notes that the SEC is staffed primarily by lawyers with no quantitative expertise or practical industry experience and that this makes the incompetent and overly deferential to the businesses. He also faults the SEC for being far too deferential to industry and afraid to do its job and go after major fraud and abuse. He doesn’t quite make the connection between the two, however, noting that the low standards for SEC employees not only lead to inexperience workers, but also foster the subservience and passivity of the SEC directly.

Francis Fukuyama Professor of International Political Economy at the KUB University of Braband at Tilburg Netherlands Photo: Robert Goddyn/UPA Photo
Francis Fukuyama Professor of International Political Economy at the KUB University of Braband at Tilburg Netherlands Photo: Robert Goddyn/UPA Photo

One of Fukuyama’s broader points is that, in the arena of modern liberal democracies, the United States has always lagged behind in terms of quality of state infrastructure. This is mostly because our democracy emerged before our institutions modernized, which historically is a recipe for disaster. The US was able to right the ship in the second half of the 19th century when a wave of progressive reforms professionalized the federal civil service and we ended up with fairly respectable institutions, although still nowhere near the quality (in terms of professionalism and efficiency) of states like Germany or Japan that modernized before they liberalized or states like the UK that–due to unique class structure–were able to fairly painlessly push through reforms in a matter of years that took the US a major national movement and decades to emulate.

The SEC was not one of the agencies that Fukuyama chose to focus on, but it could have been. His analysis would have fit perfectly with Markopolos’s, both in terms of the content and also in terms of the conclusion: America’s national institutions are once again in a period of deep corruption, inefficiency, and impotence.

One of the key points that Michelle Alexander makes in The New Jim Crow is that mass incarceration is primarily the result of the War on Drugs (rather than violent crime):

As numerous researchers have shown, violent crime rates have fluctuate over the years, and bear little relationship to incarceration rates, which have soared during the past three decades regardless of whether violent crime was going up or down. Today, violent crime rates are at historically low levels, yet incarceration rates continue to climb.

Moreover, whites and blacks violate drug laws at basically equal rates, but it is the black population that bears the overwhelming burden of suspicion, policing, prosecution, incarceration, and life with a criminal record while the white population–equally as likely to consume drugs–is blissfully ignorant and immune to the pointy end of the War on Drugs.

The question is: why? The laws and policies that constitute the War on Drugs are colorblind, not racist. One possible explanation is sheer racial animus: the police and prosecutors and legislators who enact and define the War on Drugs hate black people, and they deliberately–but covertly–use the War on Drugs to attack them. This is not plausible, however, and instead Alexander focuses on unconscious racism and incentives.

For example, the federal government–in an effort to win points by looking to be tough on crime–through massive resources into encouraging the War on Drugs by offering money to police departments that showed high numbers of drug convictions. And so:

It is impossible for law enforcement to identify and arrest every drug criminal. Strategic choices must be made about whom to target and what tactics to employ. Police and prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs, and some initially opposed it, but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if we’re going to wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be taken prisoner? That question was not difficult to answer, given the political and social context.

Michelle_Alexander_2011_02
Miller Center of Public Affairs flickr page, Charlottesville, VA

The incentives made it clear that arrests would happen. The question was just: where would they take place? And the answer, inevitably, was “among populations with the least ability to fight back politically.” Thus, the War on Drugs is not an effect of pre-existing racism as much as it is a cause of racism. This does not make the War on Drugs unique, however. If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn from studying the history of racism in the US, it’s that racism is always instrumental. The first consideration is always power. Racism is a servant of that quest for power. And this goes back to the very beginning. The slave trade was initially not very racist, in that the gap between white indentured servants and black slaves was fairly minimal. Slavery was, for example, not hereditary. A black child was born free, not slave. After Bacon’s Rebellion, however, when white servants and black slaves rose up together to fight against the elites, slavery was reformed as an institution to make it racially defined. Why? Because that allowed elites to split the coalition of poor whites and poor blacks. So: the quest for power created the racial aspect of slavery which, in turn, created race.

The point is that power and class warped the War on Drugs so that affluent (predominantly white) neighborhoods are left in peace and poor (predominantly black) neighborhoods are treated like warzones. There’s crime everywhere, but it only gets enforced where it makes political sense to do so.

White collar crime is the mirror image of the War on Drugs, and that’s where the connection to No One Would Listen comes in. Markopolos makes it clear that Madoff was far from unique: the entire financial sector is riven with dishonest and blatant criminality. Here’s one example:

My younger brother had had similar experiences. At one point he was hired by a respected brokerage firm in New Jersey to run its trading desk. On his first morning there he walked into the office and discovered that the Bloomberg terminals that supposedly had been ordered hadn’t arrived. Then he found out that the traders didn’t have their series 7 licenses, meaning they weren’t allowed to trade. And then he learned that the CEO had some regulation 144 private placement stock which legally is not allowed to be sold. But the CEO had insider information that bad news was coming, and he wanted to sell the stock. My brother explained to the CEO, “You can’t sell this stock. It’s a felony.” The CEO assured him he understood. My brother went out to lunch with the Bloomberg rep to try to get the terminals installed that he needed to start trading. By the time he returned to the office, the unlicensed traders had illegally sold the private placement stock based on insider information. My brother had walked into a perfect Wall Street storm.

He called me in a panic, “What do I do?” I said, “These are felonies. The first thing to do is write your resignation letter. The second thing you do is get copies of all the trade tickets. Get all the evidence you can on your way out the door. And the third thing you do is go home and type up everything and send it to the NASD.” That’s exactly what he did. The NASD did absolutely nothing. These were clear felonies, and the NASD didn’t even respond to his complaint.

So Markopolos’s brother witnesses felonies, gathers the evidence, and alerts the NASD and then… nothing. Just as Markopolos realized what Madoff was doing, gathered the evidence, and alerted the SEC and then… nothing. He sent them at least three or four major document dumps over a decade. Later on, he put together 20 other whistleblower cases, tied them up with a bow, and delivered them to the SEC for prosecution and again: nothing. Every one was rejected.

Poor blacks are convenient targets. Police departments and municipal governments essentially extort them by unequal application of laws. Rich white investment bankers are inconvenient targets. Gov’t agencies assigned to regulate and monitor them essentially act as their servants by unequal application of laws. As Markopolos points out, the SEC and other agencies would go after fraud cases now and again, but only small fish. They’d never touch the big guys, the rich guys, the influential guys.

Putting together Markopolos, Fukuyama, and Alexander doesn’t lead to a cheery or rosy view of the state of the United States, but I do think it’s a useful view. And besides, one lesson of Fukuyama is that political decay can be reversed. Institutions can be revitalized. One lesson of the Civil Rights is that human dignity can be broadened and justice can move forward. And–while Markopolos did not succeed in convincing the SEC to stop Madoff before he his scheme had ballooned from $7B to $60B, he did become a professional fraud-fighter after that, and so even in his case there is the potential for good to come out of bad situations. I think we all sense that the nation is not in a good place, but having an accurate understanding of what is wrong is the first step to finding truly effective solutions, and these books–to me–seem to work together to provide a substantial piece of that understanding.

“I know who you are now, and I name you my enemy.”

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For those who haven’t read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, Wormwood is the demon the letters are addressed to. It’s Wormwood’s job to weaken faith and encourage sin in the human he’s assigned to, and the letters are from his uncle, a demon named Screwtape, who gives Wormwood advice on how to do this.

Yesterday while meandering through Spotify, I came across the song “Dear Wormwood” by the Oh Hellos.  From what I can tell, the song is about a demon who weakened the singer’s faith since childhood and how the (now adult) singer is recognizing and trying to overcome the demon’s influence.

I’m a secularist, and by that I mean I don’t practice a religion and don’t have faith in anything supernatural. But I’m a reluctant secularist, and by that I mean I had good experiences with the religion of my childhood, I miss it and wish it were true, but I don’t actually believe it is. From that context, the song kind of hits a nerve.

You can listen to it here:

Here are the lyrics, though I recommend listening to it first or concurrently rather than reading them on their own:

When I was a child, I didn’t hear a single word you said
The things I was afraid of, they were all confined beneath my bed
But the years have been long, and you have taught me well to hide away
The things that I believed in, you’ve taught me to call them all escapes

I know who you are now

There before the threshold, I saw a brighter world beyond myself
And in my hour of weakness, you were there to see my courage fail
For the years have been long, and you have taught me well to sit and wait
Planning without acting, steadily becoming what I hate

I know who you are now

I have always known you, you have always been there in my mind
But now I understand you, and I will not be part of your designs

I know who I am now
And all that you’ve made of me
I know who you are now
And I name you my enemy

I know who I am now
I know who I want to be
I want to be more than this devil inside of me

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

According to Amazon, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a best-seller. It’s not hard to see why. This deeply interesting book is also a deeply flawed book, and all of the flaws are calculated to make the book more sensationalist and provocative than the underlying research truly allows.

First of all, Harari is all-in for the hypothesis that the Agricultural Revolution was a colossal mistake. This is not a new idea. I’ve come across it several times, and when I did a quick Google search just now I found a 1987 article by Jared Diamond with the subtle title: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Diamond’s argument then is as silly as Harari’s argument is now, and it boils down to this: life as a hunter-gatherer is easy. Farming is hard. Ergo, the Agricultural Revolution was a bad deal. If we’d all stuck around being hunter-gatherers we’d be happier.[ref]Sometimes they go farther and argue that disease had a hard time spreading when population densities were low, so hunter-gatherer societies were also healthier.[/ref]

The primary problem with this argument, philosophically, is its naked hedonism. I’m pretty sure I’d be happier if I just stayed in a perpetual, drug-induced high. And yet I don’t see Harari or Diamond (or any ostensibly sane person) standing outside of drug rehab facilities wearing a sandwich board warning heroin addicts that they’d be better off just staying high. Could it be conceivable that there’s more to life than minimizing the amount of time we spend procuring a bare minimum of resources to sustain life? The most frustrating thing about replying to this line of argument is that it’s absurd to even have to spell these things out. Isn’t the human penchant for dissatisfaction one of our noblest attributes? We’re not satisfied, and so we go out and we invent. Discover. Explore. Build. And, while we’re at it, plant and harvest.

Of course, it’s possible to take that to an extreme. Ideally, we find some way to balance the capacity to enjoy what we have–to live in the moment and to be accepting of the past–without giving up on our noble ambitions and desires to better ourselves, those around us, and the world we inhabit. The fact that this just might involve working more hours per week doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea, and the fact that I have to explain any of this to folks like Diamond or Harari is just plain silly. Their arguments are not insightful or provocative. They’re just childish.

Sadly, since this is one of the first arguments that Harari makes, he starts out by digging a deep credibility hole that he never really climbs back out of. He compounds it with other silly fad-arguments like the idea that we didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticate us! Thus:

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated homo sapiens rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the standpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the Earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost 10 times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

The biggest problem here is that the very first thing that Harari argues for in his book is the distinction between “humans” (a term that covers many species) and “homo sapiens” (a term that refers to just one particular species). He puts all kinds of emphasis on this distinction, including making it the title of his book! And yet, in the passage above, he treats “wheat” as just a plant. Yet, according to Wikipedia, wheat is a term (like human) that refers to nearly 2-dozen distinct species. Again, it’s a hit for his credibility to be so sanctimonious about a technicality in one case, and then so cavalier about it in another. More than that, however, it substantively undermines his argument. Because the reality is that in domesticating various plants and animals, humans were engaged in slow-motion genetic engineering. The result, from the various species of wheat to animals like dogs and chickens, is a species that is genetically distinct from their ancestors. This matters a lot. Because if Harari wants to define a species genetically (which he does) then the domesticated wheat species is not the same thing as the wild wheat species from which it was derived over tens of thousands of years of selective breeding.

To clarify this mistake, imagine that he tried to argue that humans were domestictaed by wolves instead of vice versa. And so now wolves live in the houses of their domesticated humans, right? Well, no. Dogs have domesticated humans, but dogs (Canis familiaris) are not the same things as wolves (Canis lupus, Canis rufus, Canis lycaon, etc). And so you can’t say “wolves domesticated humans” because man’s best friend is no longer a wolf. Similarly, the wheat that we grow for food everywhere isn’t the same creature as its wild ancestor. Once again, this isn’t just wrong, it’s silly. When you see memes on the Internet about how cats own humans, that’s funny. When you see someone trying to turn the exact same Internet joke into a serious scientific point in an ostensibly non-fiction book, it’s just sad and a little pathetic.

Harari’s book suffers a lot from this kind of sloppy sensationalism. In addition to these examples, he also spends a lot of time ironically stating that there are no objective values on the one hand and then–often within mere sentences–making sweeping claims about how modern society is better than ancient society in this or that particular respect. Better, according to which values? It’s just another example of the utter failure of ostensible relativists to actually enact the relativism they claim to believe in. If there are no objective values, then there’s no basis for making statements like that.

So, enough of the criticism. What’s good?

Well, for starters, his separation of ontological concepts into three categories: objective, subjective, and inter-subjective is actually quite useful. He is sloppy about conflating “subjective”, “myth” and “false” (these terms are not synonyms, but he think they are), but the definition of inter-subjective as distinct from mere subjectivity is really quite good:

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them. Marie Curie, one of the discoverers of radioactivity, did not know during her long years of studying radioactive materials, that they could harm her body. While she did not believe that radioactivity could kill her, she nevertheless died of aplastic anemia, a disease caused by overexposure to radioactive materials. The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. Many a child believes in the existence of an imaginary friend who is invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world. The imaginary friend exists solely in the child’s subjective consciousness, and when the child grows up and ceases to believe in it, the imaginary friend fades away. The intersubjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the intersubjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear. Intersubjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of histories most important drivers are intersubjective: law, money, gods, nations.

I also liked a lot of his later theories. As much as he made a hash of the Agricultural Revolution, his argument about the interrelationship between imperialism and science, for example, was really quite fascinating.

Scientists have provided the imperial project with practical knowledge, ideological justification, and technological gadgets. Without this contribution, it is highly questionable whether Europeans could have conquered the world. The conquerers returned the favor by providing scientists with information and protection, supporting all kinds of strange and fascinating projects, and spreading the scientific way of thinking to the far corners of the Earth. Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far. There are very few scientific disciplines that did not begin their lives as servants to imperial growth and that do not owe a large proportion of their discoveries, collections, buildings, and scholarships to the generous help of army officers, navy captains, and imperial governors.

This is a genuinely insightful argument, and it’s one I’d never heard before. It’s not hard to see why. Our culture–especially our intellectual culture–continues to treat science with a great deal of deference and respect. The mere existence of the term “social science”–combined with the embrace of statistical and other formal mathematical techniques in economics, psychology, etc.–all show how deeply ingrained this deference is. But imperialism? That’s practically a bad word in academic settings. Imperialism is pretty close to the Original Sin, as far as anyone residing in the Ivory Tower would believe. And so obviously it’s incredibly uncomfortable to suggest that imperialism and science are linked or even, not going quite that far, that historically science got a significant boost from imperialism. This is an embarrassment to modern Western sensibilities, and so the only kind of person who will bring it up is someone like Harari who seems intent on offending every conceivable member of his audience. The only time when mockery is really called for is in response to power, and so it is deployed appropriately in this case, and that is where the same penchant for kind of immature provocation turns from an annoyance (as with his silly theories about the Agricultural Revolution or wheat domesticating humans) into something important and serious.

Along these lines, I was also really struck with his argument about the consumerist-capitalist ethic. Here goes:

How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person according to which profits should not be wasted and should instead by reinvested in production. It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labor between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally minding every penny. Today the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need. The capitalist and consumerist epics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is “invest”. The supreme commandment of the rest of us is “buy.” The capitalist-consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal: they were promised paradise, but only if they cultivate compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideas that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ. Most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha. And most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. this is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.

Given his frequent borrowing of ideas I recognize from other sources, I suspect this is not original to Harari[ref]I had the audiobook, so I have no idea if he’s got footnotes.[/ref], but it is fascinating to me.

There are several more examples of these kinds of points Harari makes that are contrarian and interesting. Some I was already familiar with (such as the nonsensical notion that primitive humans lived in harmony with their environment, something that approaches farce once you actually look at the global swathes of mass extinctions that actually followed the spread of homo sapiens around the globe) and others were either new or particularly well-reasoned (such as his explanation of corporate personhood and intersubjective reality via Peugot). For those reasons: I do recommend reading this book. Just take everything in it with a grain of salt.

How (Not) To Be Secular: A Lecture by James K.A. Smith

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Years back, Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor published his 800+-page tome A Secular Age. I actually checked it out from the library once, got about 15 pages into it, and didn’t pick it up again until I had to return it. I realized that it was something I’d have to spend a lot of time not only reading, but chewing on. Given that I was still a newly-married undergrad, I decided to revisit it at another time.

I still haven’t tackled Taylor’s book, but I did recently complete James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Smith’s book acts as a summarized walkthrough of Taylor’s, illuminating and at times taking issue with the some of ideas presented. By reading Smith’s book first, I feel prepared to take on the entirety of Taylor. In short, Smith and Taylor argue that the Western world has become a disenchanted one in which belief in God is just one option of belief among many:

A society is secular insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested). At issue here is a shift in “the conditions of belief.” As Taylor notes, the shift to secularity “in this sense” indicates “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace”…It is in this sense that we live in a “secular age” even if religious participation might be visible and fervent.[ref]Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, pg. 20.[/ref]

Shifts towards secularization led us to see ourselves as free agents closed off to external meaning, influences, and forces. Social ties and hierarchies were no longer seen as being grounded in higher, sacred orders. Reality was no longer a cosmos full meaning and purpose, but merely a universe full of chaos and chance. The secularity of the modern age is inescapable even for the most ardent believer. But this isn’t a subtraction story (i.e., the loss of superstition) as much as it is a change in sensibilities; a change in the water we swim in so to speak.

I’m certainly not doing the book justice in my brief summary, so I’ll just say this: anyone interested in making sense of our secular age, but hesitant to read 800 pages on the subject, should check out Smith’s book. You can see him lecturing at BYU’s Wheatley Institution below.

Soul on Fire: Appreciating Elie Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel departed this world at the age of eighty seven. He has had a tremendous influence on my life, though I never met or corresponded with him. His books were always in the house when I was growing up, and I remember my mother retelling for me the plot of Dawn, but I cannot remember how old I was. Perhaps I was nine. The details have faded but the memory remains and comes to mind quite often. Honestly, it was sobering and a bit frightening to realize that no one is exempt from life’s horrors, that even I might be forced at some point to choose between two ugly outcomes. I still hope that I never will, but it was Elie Wiesel who forced me to acknowledge the possibility that it could happen.

I have not rushed to post on Wiesel’s death because I have been picking up his works again and pondering his life. He deserves as much. I confess that it has been at least a year since I last read something of his. Wiesel himself resisted tidy conclusions. Still, something that I have noticed while following  media coverage is just how much is misunderstood about Wiesel. He had his flaws and failings, of course, and valid criticisms can (or is it should) be leveled at him. There were even survivors with more compelling views on the universality of the Holocaust than his own,[ref]I’m thinking mainly of Simon Wiesenthal and Primo Levi[/ref] and Wiesel sometimes clashed with them, but he was a powerful voice for good nonetheless. Then there was the disgraceful spectacle of people like Max Blumenthal, who possess the moral stature of a Chihuahua, publishing tweet after tweet vilifying Wiesel not long after his death was announced.

Something that I can see even in many valid criticisms is that Wiesel is being judged by our own image of a Holocaust survivor and champion of human rights should be rather than by what Wiesel actually was. To understand Wiesel we must set aside such grand images as citizen of the world and its conscience, and start with the Elie Wiesel who was deported to the kingdom of night, as he would put it. A shy but ardent Hasidic youth who viewed everything through a spiritual lens. His parents had to force him to set some time aside for secular studies, such was his religious fervor. Then came the Holocaust, an outburst of the forces of evil so intense that it destroyed his ability to believe as he once did. Wiesel always wanted to recover that simple faith, but could not. This is the thread running throughout his works, the source of the enigmatic laughter and silences that fill his stories.

Night is a powerful novel. Really needs no introduction. Dawn is not as well known, but as noted above, perhaps more compelling and troubling because it deals with the internal struggle of a Holocaust survivor faced with making an awful choice. If Night is about surviving in a kingdom where God does not act, Dawn looks at the choices one must make when acting in history instead of God. Night will make you weep, and Dawn will chill you, but if you want to get at the man behind Wiesel’s public persona then read Souls on Fire. Souls is a collection of sayings, stories, and character sketches of several 18th-19th century Hasidic masters, leaders of a Jewish revivalist movement in Eastern Europe. Wiesel has written quite a bit on this or that Hasidic master. It is a prominent topic in his writings, and though I have never bothered to quantify this, I would not be surprised if he has written more frequently and directly about Hasidism than he has about the Holocaust, but everything that he wrote eventually touched upon his experience in the camps.

The Hasidic master, or Rebbe, acts as bridge between his followers, the Hasidim, and God. The Rebbe was central to how they approached the world, so telling stories about these masters practically became a sacred duty. These were stories about hidden saints and holy beggars, miracles and prophecies, uplifting the poor and downtrodden, intense longing for the Messiah as if he were due any minute, putting God on trial for neglecting his children, and a host of other colorful episodes, but most of all about the soul and how to mend it. Sometimes cryptic and paradoxical, they all share a love of truth. These stories were used to draw man closer to God rather than simply entertain. Wiesel did that, too. “I don’t believe the aim of literature is to entertain, to distract, to amuse.”

Hasidism, then, was the world of Wiesel’s innocence, where God was close, always ready to intervene on behalf of those who loved him, a world filled with warm memories of conversations with his grandfather the devout Hasid. It was he who taught Wiesel his first stories and embodied their virtues. Hasidism was about faith. Not mental affirmation, but an attitude of trust and devotion.

In the chapter entitled Disciples IV,[ref]Wiesel, Elie, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, Random House (New York: 1972), 164-168. All following quotations are from this chapter.[/ref] Elie Wiesel relates a Hasidic legend of how Satan protested the birth of a particular Rebbe so holy that he would draw enough followers closer to God so as to destroy Satan’s kingdom effortlessly. The heavenly court recognized the unfairness of that scenario, and decided to send a rival – a counterfeit Rebbe – whom no one would suspect of serving God’s rival.

How is one to know? How does one recognize purity in a man? And how can one be sure? I remember putting this question to my grandfather. He chuckled and his eyes twinkled when he answered: “But one is never sure; nor should one be. Actually, it all depends on the Hasid; it is he who, in the final analysis, must justify the Rebbe.”

It is hard not to see this as really being about God, about Wiesel’s relationship with him. This answer to a childhood question, I think, lies behind the anger in Night, and behind the moral calculus in Dawn. Like the old chestnut, show me your friends and I will show you who you are. With Wiesel, though, there is never a simple affirmation of man’s moral superiority to God. That is a subtle nuance which even as fine a film as God on Trial (inspired by a Wiesel experience and story) misses. Man is responsible for affirming his devotion to truth through his actions and choices, perhaps even to transform his master through them. His failure to do so can have acute repercussions because God and man are inseparably linked.

“You’ll grow up, you’ll see,” my grandfather had said. “You’ll see that is more difficult, more rare to find a Hasid than a Rebbe. To induce others to believe is easier than to believe…”

Another story is shared of a Rebbe scolding God for keeping an old man like him waiting all his life for the messiah, then Wiesel’s own memory of his grandfather blessing him to see the messiah end evil, and how that caused him to tremble in Auschwitz for his grandfather. A story about a holy dance invites Wiesel to wonder how his grandfather died. For him, it is all connected. He expressed what he experienced in the camps in terms of these Hasidic tales and sayings.

One of Hasidism’s finest tales relates that the founder of Hasidism went to a certain spot in the woods to perform a ritual and utter a prayer to avert a disaster. His successor could not remember the ritual, but knew the spot and the prayer. The next Rebbe knows only the spot, and, finally, only the story remains. This must suffice, or can it? Wiesel suggests that we might be past that stage.

The proof is that the threat has not been averted. Perhaps we are no longer able to tell the story. Could all of us be guilty? Even the survivors? Especially the survivors?

That last question alone opens up a world of anguish that the trite and easy phrase survivor’s guilt can never fathom. It also lends urgency to the task of storytelling. There are no easy answers to any of these questions which occupied Wiesel his entire life.

Two sayings of Hasidic masters are given in the chapter with no commentary. “To pronounce useless words is to commit murder,” and, “Nothing and nobody down here frightens me… But the moaning of a beggar makes me shudder.” Both of these encapsulate Wiesel’s approach as author and witness. Waste no word on things that do not teach truth and fear nothing as much as another’s suffering.

There is much more that could be discussed. Instead, read Souls on Fire, especially the moving postscript describing why he wrote it. Your time will be greatly rewarded.

To end like I began, on a personal note: I was surprised to feel no sorrow at Wiesel’s passing. In fact, I almost felt happy. I typically get very emotional thinking about the Holocaust at any length. Why not now? In Jewish thought death is often considered a passage from the world of illusion to the world of truth. Wiesel loved truth but was haunted by it. He was truly a soul on fire, so perhaps now he will be able to see things as they really are, and meet with God to reconcile differences and finally have his questions answered. A chance, I feel, to regain his childhood faith.

Flourish: RSA Lecture by Martin Seligman

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Positive psychology has really taken off over the years and psychologist Martin Seligman’s Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being is an excellent summary of its findings. Seligman identifies several elements of well-being, including (1) happiness and life satisfaction, (2) engagement, (3) meaning, and (4) accomplishment. A huge factor in all of this is positive relationships. As Seligman notes, “When asked what, in two words or fewer, positive psychology is about, Christopher Peterson, one of its founders, said, ‘Other people‘” (pg. 51). Throughout the book Seligman provides exercises that can help boost positive emotions. He also discusses a couple case studies of positive psychology interventions in both schools and the military, both of which improved the well-being of students and soldiers alike. Finally, he delves into the power of grit, optimism, post-traumatic growth, and values vs. ethics. Overall, an enlightening read.

Check out his lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce below:

Healing the Shame That Binds You: PBS Presentation by John Bradshaw

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

As I was writing this post, I learned that author and speaker John Bradshaw passed away just this last month. A bit of personal history: I’ve been going to therapy on and off for the last few years. As I learned more about shame and its debilitating effects, I sought out sources on shame from both my therapist and friends who were also professional therapists. One of these sources was Brené Brown’s work, which I’ve written about here before. But the very first resource given to me was a lecture by John Bradshaw on shame and addiction. Despite his somewhat folksy, almost Southern Baptist-like way of speaking, the ideas he presented were illuminating and paradigm shifting.

I finally got around to finishing his popular book Healing the Shame That Binds You. “As a state of being shame takes over one’s whole identity,” writes Bradshaw. “To have shame as an identity is to believe that one’s being is flawed, that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing” (pg. xvii). This toxic shame leads to perfectionism, compulsion, addiction, co-dependency, etc. Bradshaw gets into the nitty-gritty, discussing sensitive topics from violence to incest (both emotional and physical). The book is an emotionally difficult, but powerful read.

You can see Bradshaw’s PBS presentation on shame below.