Rational Philosophy

On Barack Obama’s elitism and George Bush’s subversion of elitism.

Elitism (American Heritage Dictionary): “The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.”

It’s interesting that the definition of elitism doesn’t capture the idea of the criticism leveled at Barack Obama. Obama’s not accused of believing that certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment, but that some people are less enlightened, less inclined to see things as they really are. Specifically, in now infamous remarks in San Francisco, he has implied that working-class voters cling to religion and the right to bear arms out of a displaced resentment of their economic plight.

It seems important to distinguish Obama’s brand of elitism from the elitism that would favor the rights and privileges of a privileged group over those of the masses. One couldn’t say that Obama sets the concerns of the smart or wealthy over those of the average American. Obama’s elitism rests on the concept of “knowing better.”

But hasn’t Obama pursued political office and now higher office because he believes he has the insight, vision and personal resources to improve people’s lives? Without wanting to split hairs, anyone who seeks to put himself into a position of authority or power for the right reasons must be, to some degree and in this sense, an elitist.

George Bush (son of a president, connected, wealthy, ivy league educated) subverts elitism by presenting himself as a common man, at one in his world-view with working class Americans (and we have been given no reason to doubt the presentation). His unsophisticated approach to leadership and analysis seems to win him adherents with those who want to see the world as a place of simple absolutes — good against evil, right and against wrong, oppression versus freedom, free market versus regulation.

Two urgent questions arise:

1. What makes someone elitist (in the sense of “knowing better”)?

2. Do we went to be governed by an elitist or by someone who sees the world more concretely?

For conscious creatures, such as we are, the world has two distinct aspects — the concrete and the conceptual. Everyone understands and feels the weight of both aspects. But the degree to which we feel them differs from one person to another. Some people, such as Bush, tend to feel more comfortable with the physical, tangible aspect, and distrust concepts that require complex abstraction and sophisticated thinking. Other people (like Obama) tend to feel more comfortable and sure-footed with the conceptual aspect.

Plato and Aristotle may have approved of Obama’s unfortunate remarks, but as much as us elitists might want to impose our concepts on others, leadership and government can’t be successfully executed without an appreciation and respect for both. Too much of one or the other results in missteps.

Bush has screwed up because he’s eschewed the sophisticated analysis needed to anticipate problems and develop nuanced solutions. Obama, it seems, if he’s to be elected, will need to be careful to engage more with the tangibles of life and living, and, when necessary, keep his conceptual view of the world in perspective.

An elitist has the capacity to govern well if he or she can stay in touch with and not disdain or devalue the concrete aspects of life. A non-elitist can only govern well if he or she does not disdain or devalue the conceptual aspects of life. The flaws of a lop-sided approach to government have been only too clearly demonstrated over the past eight years.

The Democratic candidates’ remarks on religion.

William Kristol, in a disdainful, patronizing opinion, accuses Barack Obama of making disdainful, patronizing remarks about small-town America in his speech to a wealthy audience in San Francisco. “I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s,” Kristol begins… How much more elitist can you get than that? Kristol seizes on Obama’s words, and, despite presenting counter-examples, claims that Obama has let slip his mask. Sadly, Kristol is working too hard to find a reason for Obama’s somewhat pandering comments. If there’s one thing we’ve had reinforced for us during this intensely observed political odyssey it is that politicians say things to attract as many to their cause as possible, while alienating as few people as possible.

For me, Clinton and Obama speaking on faith at the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania has produced the worst of it yet.

Clinton: “You know, I have, ever since I’ve been a little girl, felt the presence of God in my life,” she said. “And it has been a gift of grace that has, for me, been incredibly sustaining.”

Obama: “I try as best I can to be an instrument of his work … to act in accordance with what I think are the precepts of my faith.”

Here we have the Democratic candidates touting their faith and its guidance as a means to votes. Whether we take their statements at face value or not (although they seem so carefully extruded that taking them at face value requires more faith than I, for one, possess) the trotting out of religious belief as a piece of voter fly-paper goes further than similar sticky sentiments on standard political, economic and social issues.

How far astray are these politicians, these Democrats, from the likes of Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson, in his time, when criticized for being faithless, didn’t even bother to rebut the intended insult. Jefferson also wrote the following:

“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

I’m not condemning Clinton and Obama for having faith, but condemning them for using faith as an implied qualification for office.

From a philosophical perspective, politics is the art and science of determining and implementing the operation of a society. Politicians take office by demonstrating an aptitude for sustaining, protecting and improving society. One could argue that the religious beliefs of American citizens play an important role in our society. And I suppose that would be a difficult argument to negate. But one wants leaders and administrators who can separate religious belief from the practical and pragmatic needs of society. We don’t elect presidents as spiritual guides. And we shouldn’t have to elect someone to the highest office who won’t say things just to win votes.

But back to Kristol for a moment. (Kristol, who hasn’t read much Marx since the early 1908s.) I looked up the preceding context of the Marx quote Kristol gives. It’s this: “[Religion] is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”

It is clear from this insight that Marx was a true philosopher. According to Kristol, it’s all very well for a German thinker to speak of such things, but not for a presidential candidate. But oh, for a leader who could think like this.

On the rules for being nice.

Today we brought our newborn son home from the hospital. It’s been a week of intense emotion, both joy and anxiety, and not a little tension as a result of stress: I had a run in with another driver (he wanted me to back up so he could park; I wanted him to pull forward so I could get by), a few uncivil words with a nurse (she scolded me because she found the baby uncovered; I felt affronted by her accusation and its tone), and an altercation with a traffic cop (I was sitting in the car when she came up and gave me a ticket; I asked her why she couldn’t have just moved me along).

I like to think of myself as, generally speaking, an easy-going guy, inclined to smooth over difficult situations and defer to others rather than engage. But I guess when I’m tense or pushed past a certain point I do engage.

The NY Times dedicates an editorial to the need for the courts to enforce civility. The Times laments that John Clifford, a commuter and frequent vigilante abuser of his fellow passengers, has once again been acquitted of “assault, disorderly conduct and other charges” after an ugly encounter on a train. The editorial makes a case for better enforcement of good etiquette , but finds Clifford’s bullying policing of his fellow passengers inexcusable.

And in the aftermath of the very public and unsightly divorce of Paul McCartney from Heather Mills, Mills seems to feel no need to apologize for pouring a jug of water over her exes lawyer in court. Mills argues that the lawyer muttered something insulting under her breath and that the dowsing probably did her good.

Society can be defined as a collection of people, but it is really a collection of rules that govern human interactions, some explicit, some implicit. One could say that the degree to which people comply with these rules determines whether the society is functional or dysfunctional, but I would argue otherwise. Rules are fluid, not fixed. A rule that is flouted by the majority or by a significant minority ceases to be absolute. Many commuters talk loudly on cell phones, for instance; they either don’t think about it, or somehow think that they’re not being obnoxious and annoying.

The degree to which a society is functional or dysfunctional depends rather on the quality of respect and empathy that infuses the working rules that govern the society. By working rules I mean the rules that people actually live by, not the ones that people officially agree to. (If a belligerent commuter gets away with abusing his fellow passengers, it matters not what the rule books say.)

New York presents an interesting case study. A place with millions thrust in upon one another, where just getting from A to B can raise the blood pressure and tax one’s patience, a place where people have a hundred opportunities in a day to feel imposed upon or delayed or hard done by in some way. And yet, cordiality tends, most of the time, to win out over rudeness even here. When I’m not stressed I enjoy doing things that New Yorkers don’t expect from their fellow citizens — letting someone pull into traffic, holding a door, offering change, stopping to give directions… I think many others do the same.

But how should we react when others don’t behave well? I’d agree with the Times that behaving rudely and aggressively doesn’t improve matters, but I’d also argue a firm rebuke of rude behavior can only serve to swing the pendulum back toward a more civil society.

The psychology and philosophy of familiarity.

My new baby was born last Friday. My four year old son was born on a Friday, too. And so was I. My mother noted the coincidence. I like coincidences even though rationally I don’t believe they signify anything.

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in the NY Times about an odd phenomenon — that people identify with people and things that remind them of themselves. Research has shown that, for instance, people with the name Virginia tend to be more likely to move to Virginia (36% more likely than those not named Virginia). “It’s what we call implicit egotism,” says Dr. Pelham, a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization. “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.” The same effect revealed itself in those who contributed to Bush versus Gore — more Bs for Bush, more Gs for Gore. (Maybe the Democrats should investigate whether more registered independents in the US have surnames that start with an O or with a C…)

This associative effect seems curious but ultimately uninteresting until we dig a little deeper. I wasn’t convinced by Pelham’s easy conclusion that we can chalk this up to implicit egotism. Evolution, it seems to me, wires us to make associations. Making associations helps us connect parallel or related ideas and concepts. If we weren’t wired to make associations, we’d have a much tougher time grappling with abstraction and comparison.

As a case in point, researchers have created a drug that seems to be able to block the lethal effects of radiation by mimicking the action of cancer cells. Andrei Gudkov, of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, led development of the drug (code-named CBLB502). Once Gudkov and his team realized that radiation kills because of an effect called apoptosis — by which reparable cells die off because they have been damaged — they made the association with the actions of cancer. Cancers block apoptosis so that they can replicate. Gukov’s team developed a drug that mimics the malignant trick of cancer cells to block apoptosis for those exposed to radiation, thereby protecting them from cell death.

As with many of the traits that evolution bestows, the mental process of association has pluses and minuses. We have the wonderful, valuable power of association that permits us to draw analogies, extrapolate new ideas, and investigate and solve problems. But we associate even when the association is purely coincidental and signifies nothing. (An extreme example may be obsessive compulsive disorder by which people associate sets of activities or combinations of signifiers with good or bad outcomes.) Looking for one’s Googleganger is a mild side effect, as is the self-satisfaction with the idea that one and one’s sons were all born on the same day of the week.

Let’s Make a Deal — Probability Insight.

Yesterday I posted about how our intuition can mislead us. I spent a good while pondering the mathematical problem related in the post — that in a Let’s Make a Deal situation, one will be twice as successful if one switches consistently.

I thought later, too, about the reason the correct answer isn’t intuitive. And, after a couple of thought experiments, I realized that one can generate an intuitive conclusion to a similar problem.

In the Let’s Make A Deal example, the host gives the contestant a choice of three doors, behind one a car, behind two, goats. The contestant chooses, the host then reveals a goat behind one of the doors the contestant didn’t pick and gives him the option of sticking or switching. Counter-intuitively, if he switches the contestant will be twice as likely to win the car.

The trick to this problem is that there are three doors, and in revealing what’s behind one of them, the game tricks us into thinking that the problem is a a simple fifty-fifty shot.

But think about a similar thought experiment: We have a hundred doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the other ninety-nine are goats. We pick a door out of the hundred. The host then opens 98 of the doors to reveal 98 goats. The chance that the car is behind our door is still one in a hundred, but the chance that the car is behind the other door is now 99 out of 100. We’d be foolish not to switch…

The three door game fools us because it’s just three doors. Our minds have trouble processing the likelihood because the probability differences are, relatively, small. But after revealing a goat the method of arriving at the actual probability is just the same as the example with 100 doors — the chance that the car is behind the door we picked originally is still one in three, but the chance that it is behind the other door is two in three.

Perhaps this tells us something about the mind’s approach to processing statistics and risk. In life, we need to process and discard a lot of information. Some choices in life have high probability outcomes. Some have low probability outcomes. For these, the mind needs to have a clear sense of what to expect. For everything else the outcome is a bit of a crap shoot, and we have a much better chance of improving our lot if we work on avoiding dire outcomes. The brain isn’t wired for nuanced probability questions, because, even if it were, this wouldn’t really help us survive. We’re much better at avoiding or mitigating risk by anticipating and avoiding problems. That’s where the high value exists in life.

On intuition and how it can fool us.

In pointing to the problems with what we think we deduce, Dan Ariely, (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions) points to a study showing that whether someone opts to donate his or her organs depends on whether the question asks them to opt-in or opt-out. People will tend to stick with the default presented to them. Not because they don’t care, but because they care deeply but don’t feel able to decide from fundamental principles.
Similarly, a mathematical analysis of the game show “Let’s Make A Deal” reveals that people aren’t very good at intuiting the correct answers to probability problems. When choosing between three options, knowing that one option is wrong affects the likelihood of one’s secondary choice. On Let’s Make A Deal, Monty allowed the contestant make an initial choice between three doors, behind one of which was a car, while behind the other two were goats. Monty would then reveal a goat behind one of the two doors that the contestant didn’t pick. Should the contestant switch or stick? Does it make a difference to his chances of winning? Counterintuitively, the answer is that he should switch. This seems wrong but is born out by the math. (The “reveal” is constrained, effectively tipping off the chooser; if you switch, you win two out of three times; if you don’t switch you win only one out of three times. When explained in this way — 2/3 plus 1/3 = 1, it makes sense, but that is not how it appears intuitively.)

How does this relate to sexism and misogyny? Nicholas Kristof asks whether the routinely brutal and discriminatory treatment of women in many societies is sexist or misogynistic. He gets a lot of comments on his post. But I think that Kristof and his responders maybe miss the point because it offends intuition. Kristof argues that perhaps ritual abuse and discrimination of women is sexist rather than misogynistic.

It seems to me that intuitively we look at the question from a neutral perspective — that women are routinely discriminated against and abused in a ritual fashion yields evidence of sexism or misogyny. But what if it were evidence of something else? Wouldn’t this change the question?

Throughout the natural world, the male and female of the various species exhibit different behaviors. In some species the females raise the young. in others this is the task of the males. In some species the female is multi-hued and splendid, in others it is the male. In mammals, typically, females protect and nurture the young, men protect and feed the group. These are not sexist behaviors, since sexism is a conscious concept; the animals simply behave as they’ve evolved to behave.

Sexism and misogyny begin from but distort the neutral, natural concepts that differentiate females and males of the human species. But why does this happen at all? Humans exaggerate and conceptualize differences in ways that make them feel less threatened, more in control. Men traditionally exploit and codify the differences between the sexes to reduce their fear and feed their self-esteem. Likewise women do the same, but for the most part with less dramatic and harmful results.

Intuitively, we connect the ill-judged and harmful behaviors of abuse, control and humiliation with the concepts of sexism and misogyny, but they are more closely connected with the concepts of fear and defense. We exaggerate and exploit gender differences to counter our fears and bolster our defenses; this happens more readily in societies that have fewer less harmful mechanisms to bring about the same outcome. These defenses then become codified as socially accepted or tolerated or rejected concepts. Enlightenment, insight, education and social change are the only remedies.

In a 1929 interview, Albert Einstein apparently said: “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge.”

In order to have an opinion on Einstein’s statement, we first need to decide what he means by “more important.” Einstein was speaking of his own process. He had been asked whether intuition or inspiration accounted for his theories. Certainly, when devising a new theory, imagination plays a very significant role, and without it a new theory can’t emerge.

Einstein’s contribution to science was creative. For him, then, imagination was more important that knowledge.

As my wife and I visited our newborn son in the ICU today we talked about the role of the nursing staff. So much of what they do is routine — they learn how to care for the newborns and follow the instructions they’ve been given. But the difference between a competent nurse and a nurse who contributes something important is the degree to which she is engaged with the baby and his parents.

The competent nurse follows the correct procedures, attends to her tasks with care and dedication. The engaged nurse does this too, but also sees things, listens, and reacts.

Artist Mark Rothko said this about art: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

Rothko could have been speaking about nursing. One looks at Rothko’s paintings and one could be forgiven for asking what they are about. But does this mean that they aren’t about something?

Rothko’s children are suing to have his remains unearthed and moved to a Jewish cemetery. I don’t know how Rothko would feel about this. Judged as a creative act, one imagines that he would find it rather obvious. Judged as an action in the world, one imagines he would find it somewhat depressing.

Another child of a famous person — Max Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley the notorious British Nazi — has been in trouble for exploring his imaginative world in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes in London. Apparently, shades of Nazism can be detected in the role-play. Mosley is the chief of the Formula One motor racing federation and has been asked to resign.

The thread that I’m trying to mine is the concept of engagement. A nurse engaged with her role as caregiver. A scientist engaged with his role as a pursuer of new ideas. A painter engaged with the direct communication of otherwise uncommunicable ideas. And a man engaged with his legacy and its demons.

But what does any of this have to do with Bacon? Stanley Fish writes about deconstruction and Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon predicted that rational thought would eventually win out; that we would one day have a consistent , complete understanding of the world we live in, but that we would go through tough times to get there. He predicted that language would get in the way. That the terms we use to talk about and define things would become recursively problematic.

Rothko sought to eliminate words. Bacon recognized their challenges. Einstein sought to subjugate knowledge.

There is a reason, I think, for such struggle. Rothko, Bacon and Einstein all felt painfully the distinction between ideas and reality. We experience reality, and we conceive of ideas.

Ideas can be consistent and whole and concrete. Reality must be felt and experienced and can never be pinned down. Einstein eluded language, Rothko avoided it, Mosley seeks to bend it, and Bacon wanted to wrestle with it, but found it stronger than him. Language, I would argue, can be accurate and complete when it expresses ideas, but not when it seeks to represent the world and our experience of it.

I was once involved in a philosophy discussion with someone who questioned whether we truly make progress through quantitative or rational analysis. Specifically, she questioned whether one could say that science has made progress. The perspective she argued took issue with the idea that progress can be defined and measured rationally. Or, put another way, that if you define progress rationally, you will inevitably end up with the conclusion that rational analysis leads to progress.

My wife gave birth to our second child this morning (my third). He was born at full term, but in some distress, having taken amniotic fluid into his lungs. The doctor also needed to cut the umbilical cord as it was wrapped around the baby’s neck. Later, as my new son recovered under the careful watch of the NICU doctors and nurses, my wife and I reflected on the way that modern medicine had affected our lives. The son who was born today may well not have made it without the supremely skilled and sophisticated medical care that the hospital provided. Similarly, my first son, at the same hospital, was saved from a life-threatening trachial infection two years ago, and my daughter, who has had an underdeveloped thyroid gland since birth, would have been plagued by poor development and ill-health if her condition had gone undiagnosed and untreated when she was a newborn.

As my wife pointed out, we’re not alone. Many children who thrive today would not have thrived a hundred or more years ago.

Is this progress?

Well, in one way I agree with the rebuke that this is progress only if you define progress as a relative success in one area over time. We’ve also slurried up rivers and lakes. We’ve depleted the fish in the oceans. We’ve unleashed terrible warfare and pollution. And we’ve changed the world’s climate so that species are threatened or wiped out and so that many millions of people and animals may be in danger in the future.

At the moment we’re very good at making specific, focused improvements. For the sake of our children and their children, I hope we get better at making general, far reaching and balanced improvements.

The Hotel New Yorker, Abu Ghraib, and surreptitious sampling.

Nikola Tesla, perhaps one of the most brilliant people of all time, spent the latter years of his life holed up in The Hotel New Yorker, Room 3327, a mental prisoner of sometimes odd thoughts. Tesla, who died in 1943, supported the idea of selective breeding: “A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit,” he said, “than to marry a habitual criminal.” “The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization.” Tesla clearly had a particular view of human rights.

Tesla also hoped to be able to capture and replay people’s thoughts by recording the impact of thoughts on the optic nerve, essentially photographing the mind through one’s eyes.

One thinks that perhaps Errol Morris has pondered on Tesla’s optical ideas. Writing for The New Yorker Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris explore the pathology behind the notorious photographs that exposed and compounded the wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. Gourevitch and Morris stitch together a careful and compelling perspective on the actions of the young MPs who debased, abused and documented their ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The structure of implicit and explicit endorsement by Military Intelligence, and, by association, the military chain of command, peels away the easy conclusion that the MPs were just bad people doing bad things. As one reads the article one begins to have the uneasy impression that one is somehow culpable, too.

And lawyers have begun to challenge the practice of “surreptitious sampling” of DNA by law enforcement agencies. Bypassing legislation that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure, law enforcement officers have been quietly and successfully collecting indirect DNA samples from suspects (from cigarette butts, coke bottles, drinking glasses, etc.). The lawyers claim that this violates the suspect’s right to privacy.

“Unlike garbage that can be withheld or destroyed before it is released into the world,” reads the motion to suppress the DNA evidence in one case, “we cannot do so with our biological tissues.”

“We conclude that under the circumstances, the expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his spittle,” the Mass Appeals court ruled in another case, “or in the DNA evidence derived therefrom.”

Does one have any particular right to the privacy of one’s DNA? How is a DNA sample different from a photograph or a mental picture? Could a suspect challenge a candid photograph or an eye-witness ID as an infringement of privacy?

I expect that most of us feel the emotional pull of the right to privacy. We live with ourselves, with our thoughts. We can withdraw into ourself. We can choose not to disclose. As we grow up we develop what we might call a sacred pact of privacy with ourselves. As Schopenhauer pointed out, we only know the world through our experience of it, and our only immediate experience is the experience of our self.

On the other hand, privacy is one wall of the mind’s prison. Just as Tesla locked himself into the habit of threes (he would only stay in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three) we lock ourselves into a prison of the mind that reveres privacy. As Gourevitch and Morris astutely draw out, the MPs in Abu Ghraib took photographs in part as an attempt to break down that wall of privacy, to reveal themselves, to deprive themselves of some responsibility for their actions.

To exist, we must act in the world; we cannot avoid it. Existence sentences us to participation, however reluctant, however minimal. And, as we act in the world, we create and leave behind traces of ourselves, whether they be ideas, influences, creations, physical remnants. These traces, I would argue, must be embraced as the residue of our existence, for good or ill. We have a right to them only in as much as a prisoner has a right to the bars of his cell.
“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene… His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.”

So said Nikola Tesla of Thomas Edison.

Changing the way we think.

Last week I wrote about the implications of what happens to an animal’s brain when you teach it to use a rake. I was fascinated and excited by the idea that the brain’s genetics may be changed by the way it is used. What might this tell us about our capacity to change the way we think and react?

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang write today about the brain’s limited capacity for governing self-discipline. Research going back several years has shown that if you exercise restraint or self-discipline in one activity or area of your life, you will deplete your “self-restraint” resources and find it more difficult to remain disciplined in another activity. Complete a cross-word puzzle and you won’t be able to resist dessert.

The studies implicate blood sugar as an important factor in restoring or maintaining self-restraint. Subjects performed better on disciplined tasks if they were allowed to replenish their blood sugar between those tasks. (If only Spitzer had had a glass of lemonade after a hard day in the legislature!)

But most fascinating for me the research has shown that one can increase one’s self-discipline over time by exercising it. This likely (the article says “must”) reflects “some biological change in the brain.” “Even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity.”

David Brooks uses insights from sports psychologist H. A. Dorfman’s book The Mental ABC’s of Pitching to argue that the prevailing American emphasis on self-awareness and self-discovery has begun to shift back toward self-discipline and the idea of transcending onesself in one’s work. Brooks, not unusually, doesn’t provide any kind of specific context for his assertion, but his unearthing of Dorfman’s ideas proves a fortuitous coincidence.

Brooks quotes from Dorfman’s book: “Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”

Combine this idea with the concept that we can, by exercising willpower and self-discipline, increase our capacity for it, and we have an even more powerful idea: we can choose to free ourselves from habits that inhibit our performance and self-satisfaction.

People, particularly young people, tend to rebel against the idea of excessive self-discipline. Too often the concept is fused with the idea of mindlessness or blind adherence to rules. Discipline can seem antithetical to freedom.

But we can distinguish between a reflexive adherence to habits, rules and regulations and the choice of adherence for the sake of improving self-discpline. One is passive and undirected, the other active and end-directed.

According to Dorfman, and supported by scientific research, it makes no difference whether we feel, in the moment, that we want to exercise self-discipline. If we act in a self-disciplined way we will increase our willpower. Just as we go to the gym to workout, whether we feel like it or not, we might be much more inclined to exercise self-discipline if we understand that it will make it easier for us to exercise more self-discipline in the future.

The same philosophy applies to other brain functions. If macaques and rodents in learning to use a rake exhibit changes in brain DNA, then we can postulate that people can experience changes in brain DNA by stretching the use of our minds.

(This theory comports with common sense (sophisticated mental tasks seem to make people more capable of performing sophisticated mental tasks) and studies that show brain exercise is linked with mental health in later life.)

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

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