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A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

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For the last couple weeks I’ve been single-tracking it, consumed with a big project at work that is absorbing most of my waking hours. It’s still under wraps, this project, but suffice it to say that it involves some historical research, some text writing and some speech writing.

It makes me realize how fast the hours can pass when one is engaged in interesting work. But it also makes me realize how important it is to be balanced. It’s harder to think of post ideas this week, for instance. It’s harder to do my own writing.

Ideally, there would be double the amount of hours in every day. I would have the time to be as absorbed in my own work as I am in the paid stuff. It would still be exhausting, of course, but just think of how productive I could be!

Wasted Days?

Wasted Days?

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My reading day was only partially successful, but I did get well into Patricia Hampl’s The Art of the Wasted Day. A telling title if ever there was one, because if a part of me didn’t think reading days were “wasted” I’d probably have a lot more of them.

But if Hampl’s title tips its hat to this prejudice, her content helps dispel it. She ponders leisure and daydreaming; she counters the belief that what matters in life is the checklist. The essential American word isn’t happiness, but pursuit. How about giving up the struggle, she says, redefining happiness as “looking out the window and taking things in — not pursuing them.”

The life of the mind is what Hampl is after here, and she succeeds well in pinning it down, following its application through the essays of Montaigne and the science of Mendel. She looks closely at notions of the self and how we often have to be knocked in the head (Montaigne and St. Paul both took falls) to see the world with fresh eyes.

Because this is where the “wasting” leads us — to a different set of beliefs and to “keeping a part of your mind always to yourself,” which becomes a mantra to Hampl. It might be to more of us if we had the time to try.

The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind

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In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt uses moral psychology to explain political polarization. One of his major points is that when we make decisions we may think conscious reasoning is in charge, but actually it’s just a puny human rider sitting atop a large, strong elephant (the automatic and intuitive part of our brains). The elephant almost always wins.

What does this have to do with politics? Actually it has to do with everything, but Haidt applies it to politics in this book by pointing out that we’re often unaware of the motivations that underlie our political choices and the narratives that bind us.

Published in 2012, this book long precedes the current political paralysis — but as I read it I had many aha moments. More than Hillbilly Elegy or any newspaper or magazine article, it explains how we ended up with the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s difficult to summarize the nuances of Haidt’s argument in one post, but here’s one of the passages I found most useful.:”If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not
consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for
trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It
explains why liberal reforms so often backfire … It is the reason I believe
that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal
opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach,
change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital
inadvertently.”


What to do now? Most of all, try to understand ourselves and each other. And, of course, read. On my nightstand now: The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt’s first book.

Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me

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I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book I’d read about and had wanted to try. It’s a short book, could be consumed in one sitting, and I almost did. 
Coates sweeps you up from the first words on the page and doesn’t let you go till the end. I don’t believe in
reparations, don’t believe the chasm of race is as deep as he thinks it is. But then, I’m white. I am, in his parlance, a Dreamer, someone (white or black) who shares the dream of American exceptionalism that is built
on the subjugation of the black body. Because the body is all, according to
Coates. There is no savior, no soul or mind that lives beyond the body’s end.
But I’m not writing about this book to debate its thesis but
to marvel at its prose and its power to sweep me up in an idea I don’t believe in and make me feel its force. His idea is an ocean wave, and we readers are the shore. Given time, it might wear us down.

I read this and think about my own story, my own lens. I don’t
see the world in black and white, but I see
divisions. The gulf
between the moneyed and the non, for example, and the canyons that yawn between the left and the right.
The passion Coates brings to his story is the passion each of us can bring to our own. 
Radical Love

Radical Love

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Usually on Valentine’s Day I write about personal love. And I’m certainly thinking of it today, feeling grateful for my family and friends, all those I hold dear. But these are extraordinary times, and they call for the most radical and extreme of actions.

They call for love.

“If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter,” says Krista Tippett in her book Becoming Wise, “we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good.”

Tippett, the host of NPR’s “On Being,” describes the love shown by 1960s civil rights workers, their belief in the “beloved community” that meant they were fighting for equality with courtesy and kindness.  “This was love as a way of being, not a feeling, which transcended grievance and painstakingly transformed violence,” Tippett writes.

Though her book was published just last year, it already seems to hail from another era, a time when were not yet as deeply divided as we are now. Tippett doesn’t address the division as much as she would had she been writing a year later, but reading her book makes me think about how much further we’d be if treated each other with courtesy and kindness.

Maybe love is what we need, love translated into forbearance and understanding, into biting our tongues and holding our applause. Divisiveness got us into this mess. Maybe love can get us out.