On the Roman Republic's Decline and U.S. Politics

While I was recently reading relatively new history of the Romans (B. Campbell, The Romans and Their World), I ran across a few passages that resonated as having more than superficial connection to the contemporary western, and especially American, political scene. What made them so vivid was that in the main these passages were quotations or paraphrases of ancient Roman historians themselves.  Let me briefly discuss three of them:  signs of a declining culture (Sallust), lust for personal political power (Florus), and moral descent and civic paralysis (Livy).

The Economics of Empathy (and Thanksgiving)

In the United States, the Thanksgiving holiday is two weeks away.  For those who have experienced it, Thanksgiving can be a wonderful holiday.  Everyone across ethnic, political, and religious lines can equally participate.  Indeed, that was the purpose in President Lincoln's proclaiming it a national holiday in 1863, when the country was torn apart by Civil War.

In more recent times, Thanksgiving seems to be part of a double holiday, or at least a double tradition. Thanksgiving Thursday is followed by Black Friday, so named because it is the day when, traditionally, retail sales increase to the point that merchants begin to turn a profit for the year. That is, their books move into the black. The observance of Thanksgiving is completed by consumption. Let us not forget that the purpose is to pause and render gratitude for the blessings of one's life. From the outside, however, it could seem as though Americans are most thankful that they can hit stores at ridiculously early hours on Friday morning to spend money on largely frivolous things.

That is a cynical view of Thanksgiving.  It is one to which I am susceptible.  But there are, I believe (or would like to think), more sober observers of this holiday and the use of money.  Some people volunteer at soup kitchens for the homeless or the working poor.  Others donate money to these shelters or similar aid organizations so that they can operate to serve the needy.  Many of these volunteers and donors tear up at the thought of a child's going hungry on any day, but especially on a festive day that celebrates not just bounty but, most basically, shared life together in community.  These people recognize that although they may be celebrating life, others are fighting for it.

These benefactors, just ordinary people, are thinking not primarily of their own happiness:  watching football, enjoying tasty food, relaxing from daily labors, basking in the company of treasured friends and family.  They are trying to share the simple happiness that comes from food with others who lack it.

In a 10-minute TED talk given two years ago, Harvard professor Michael Norton takes up the question "how to buy happiness."  His research, both in the United States and abroad, confirms, perhaps unsurprisingly but still emphatically, that people report increased happiness when they spend money on others, not on themselves.  The amount of money spent does not matter.  What matters is the target.

 

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness.html

The short video is worth watching for the creative ways in which Norton and his colleagues test this hypothesis.  Some tests are even humorous.  And the results were not solely about personal happiness but, more generally, about the positive effects that accrue within groups who are charitable, empathetic, or just concerned about others.  There appears to be a multiplier effect that arises from demonstrating empathy:  the reward is greater than the investment when one invests in other people.

My sense is that this will also increase one's general sense of thanksgiving.  Spending money on others will foster an increased feeling of gratitude for one's current lot in life.  A huge part of this is through deepening personal connections.  Sometimes it comes from making the effort to establish them.

I am reminded of the Thanksgiving scene from the movie The Blind Side.  The video below does not adequately depict the scramble that the Tuohy family members have on Thanksgiving for the television where the day's American football games are being shown.  Thanksgiving in their world is about private consumption:  family members eating plates separately, watching multiple screens, and not really communing with one another.  They are alone together.  Their guest is alone by himself.  This is where the clip begins.

http://vimeo.com/67084873

Mrs. Tuohy discerns the difference, and she does something about it.  It was not enough, she realizes, to invite Michael into her home for the holiday because he had nowhere else to go.  She, and the rest of her family members, needed to make him part of their family.  And this meant that Mrs. Tuohy's family needed to act like one itself.  Disconnected viewing of television around a large room needed to give way to the connected holding of hands around the Thanksgiving table.

After all, what would have been the point of reproducing in their home the isolation that Michael already felt without one?

This is the economics of empathy:  greater rewards and personal happiness accrue when we invest in -- that is, spend time or money on -- other people.  First comes empathy, then happiness, because empathy establishes personal connection.  By it we embrace our common humanity.  This is the purpose.  But the effect is that by it also both giver and receiver become truly thankful.

Turkle: "The Flight From Conversation"

The Sunday, April 22, opinion contribution in The New York Times by Sherry Turkle, "The Flight From Conversation," largely reproduces in writing main themes from her February TED talk, which I noted and provided a link to in a prior post.

(Recent, related posts are found here and here.)

Noonan: "America's Crisis of Character"

It has been a busy week for me, so, yes, here's a link to a column rather than a long reflection on virtue and character.  Peggy's Noonan's opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal, "America's Crisis of Character," does not offer much in the way of prescriptions, but she is very astute at diagnosing -- assuming she is right -- a very large problem.

I've long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it's also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.

Now I'd go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.

Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.

Diagnosis may be the first step of treatment.  For now, it will have to do.

"Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"

That is the question that Stephen Marche asks and seeks to answer in his article by the same name in the May issue of The Atlantic:  "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"  The essay is in a similar vein to my two previous posts on new media (here and here).  And so it is worth drawing attention to it.  Among Mr. Marche's concluding thoughts are these:

Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. ... And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected ... The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. ...

 ...the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

These and related observations are not new to many of us.  But it is encouraging to see the more consistent highlighting of a real problem that is sometimes brushed off as Luddite lunacy.  Real relationships, self-reflection, salutary solitude, cultivation of confidants -- these are central to humanity and a healthy pursuit of life.  The substitution of these things through the use of technology is an important facet of contemporary life that we ignore to our peril. 

Turkle: "Connected, but alone?"

In private correspondence, a good friend pointed me to the recent TED talk by Sherry Turkle, "Connected, but alone?", which also dovetails with my recent post "Free Your Mind."   The MIT professor's thesis:  "Our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do; they change who we are" (at 2:36 minutes).

Ubiquitous and incessant texting, for example, creates the "illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."  And "you can end up hiding from each other even as we are all constantly connected to each other" (at 5:02 ).  Why?  Because, as she explains more fully, "technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. ... we're lonely but we are afraid of intimacy.  And so from social networks to social robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship" (at 12:13 ).

Real relationships, including the art of personal conversation and self-reflection, are suffering:  "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding.  And we clean them up with technology. ... we sacrifice conversation for mere connection" (at 7:10).  (A similar, if differently articulated, observation is made by Jonathan Franzen in his essay/address "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.")  Constant use of technology is, to restate Turkle's thesis, altering humanity, our self-conception of it, and ourselves (and our duties) as relational beings within it.  It is, in this sense, reshaping not just what we do as humans but who we are as humans, both individually and in community.

Ms. Turkle's most recent book, Alone Together:  Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, explores related ideas in more detail than her TED talk.  The book is  reviewed in The New York Times, and she was interviewed, among many appearances, on "The Colbert Report."  Her 20-minute TED talk, which includes some practical suggestions for navigating the technological/relational minefield, is embedded below.  And yes; it is okay to watch this engaging digital media video about the relational dangers of digital technology -- just not in board meetings, during family breakfast, or at a funeral.

"Free your mind"

I have close friends who were assigning to their college students "unplugged" experiments years before it was fashionable to do so. 

Inconsistency, Fallacy, & OWS

Last fall I was a bit confused by the entire Occupy Wall Street (OWS) phenomenon.  So I asked two friends with polar perspectives to help me understand what was going on, what was at stake, how they assessed matters, and how the debate was taking shape.  Having had now six months to reflect on things, here is some of what I gleaned.

Deterioration of Discourse

Peggy Noonan has a thought-provoking column in today's Wall Street Journal:  "America's Real War on Women" (login may be required).  Her material subject is the discriminatory language used in public life about women.  Her formal subject is the devolution of discourse in American public life.


Whether one agrees with her on the material issue and her suggestion about the role of relatively new media like the internet, she seems dead-on with respect to the formal issue:  public discourse on many fronts has deteriorated and is deteriorating in the United States.  It is difficult to cultivate virtue individually and in society when reasonable discourse with others is a handicap.

Leviathan & Liberty

Whatever one's ultimate opinion about any number of contemporary topics -- from the Affordable Care Act to the limits of executive power, from government regulation of health care to the promotion of individual and religious liberty -- The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer made some keen observations about ten days ago with which everyone should wrestle.