Rational Philosophy

On having fun.

Life can be oppressive at times. Several news stories today depressed me — in Baghdad, for instance, bombings killed dozens after terrorists strapped explosives to mentally disabled women, sent the women into crowds, and detonated the explosives remotely. On the personal front I’m having a low day trying to negotiate family tensions. But while it would be unnatural to be happy and have fun all the time, sometimes we could be having more fun than we are.

Giants’ Coach Tom Coughlin, not generally known for his levity, has surprised his team and observers this week by talking of ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment.‘ That’s surprising for a man who’s team is headed into the Superbowl against such a formiddable opponent as the Patriots who haven’t lost a game all season. Somehow Coughlin has found a way to stay relaxed and have some fun.

Another story describes the rambling handmade home in Arizona built over the course of two decades by artist Michael Kahn and his wife, Leda Livant. Answering a question about whether she and her husband had planned their work on their home ahead of time, Livant replies: “Michael had no definite plan except to work and see what the natural shape would be. If you stay with a preconceived notion of what you want, it could be too restrictive.”

In this, perhaps, is a clue to having fun. We do many things for fun, and we do many things that could be fun but aren’t. The things we do for fun typically fall into two categories:

1. Things that provide intrinsic pleasure from the release of chemicals that make us feel good (sex, exercise, watching humorous performances, consuming recreational drugs, for instance)

2. Things that engage us in opportunities for being satisfyingly surprised (games, reading, and, for some, work)

To have the first kind of fun requires that we find ways to engage in these and similar activities. To have the second kind requires us either to engage in activities that we find intrinsically satisfying, or to engage in other activities with the right mindset.

This brings us back to Leda Livant’s idea of avoiding preconceived notions. If we expect to find a task monotonous, stressful or unpleasant without looking for ways to approach it differently, we will naturally not have fun. But if we set aside our expectation that a task won’t be fun, we give ourselves the opportunity to make it fun.

These opportunities come up all the time. For many of us, most of what we do in a day can seem monotonous, stressful or unpleasant. Sometimes even the things we enjoy can seem daunting. But if we can catch ourselves in that moment of being daunted, we have the opportunity to find some pleasure in the task at hand.

To give a very pertinent example: Before I began this blog entry I was sitting with about fifteen news stories open on my computer screen, feeling less and less inspired to write anything. Livant’s concept of “preconceived notions” didn’t seem enough and I wasn’t even sure I had anything to say about it. But I knew and told myself that I would enjoy the process once I began, and that beginning was a matter of committing to finding something. It worked.

New studies provide evidence that young children entering school with behavioral problems don’t necessarily suffer poor academic performance in older grades, and that children exhibiting symptoms of attention deficit disorder may in fact just have slower development of certain areas of the brain, something that eventually will right itself.

On a different, but, I think, related subject the incredible scientific work that’s been done to decode the human genome brings with it the possibility that information about genetic differences will fuel racial stereotypes.

When my own daughter began having some problems keeping up in school a few years ago, I was concerned and surprised that several people quickly suggested she might have ADHD. At that time it already seemed to me that ADHD had become a reflex diagnosis, a ready explanation for too many real or perceived problems, and my own experience only served to help confirm that.

Of course, as a logical rebuttal to this line of reasoning one could say that many children have been helped by the diagnosis and treatment of behavioural problems and ADHD. But my question is how many have been harmed and whether there wouldn’t have been a better way to integrate the information then available into our understanding of child development.

As the article on genetic differences between races points out, we should be worried that the output of genetic research will be used selectively by those who have ulterior motives, and that by its nature it will give an incomplete picture of any genetic differences between races.

Both situations point to the human characteristic of leaping to conclusions. It’s a useful, sometimes extremely useful, mental tool to be able to abstract and apply a pattern from a set of data. In everyday life, the risks of abstraction tend to be low and the upside tends to be high. But when we’re talking about complex and farreaching abstractions which can affect the lives of thousands and millions of people, we need to be very cautious about the conclusions we draw.

When we draw conclusions from partial analysis we will inevitably draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions. I say that we will draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions rather than that we may draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions because a conclusion drawn on partial analysis will be, by its nature, incorrect or incomplete. (To show this by analogy, let’s say that we’re quickly shown a piece of paper on which are printed a large number of small circles. We’re asked to guess how many circles we’ve seen. Even if we guess the correct number of circles, our answer is still a guess. Likewise, if we diagnoze a child with ADHD and the child turns out to have ADHD, but our diagnosis was based on an incomlpete set of criteria, the diagnosis is still flawed even though the outcome is what it would have been had we had a complete set of criteria.)

The critical question though is one of how we should approach such situations in life. We’ll always be faced with life circumstances that provide us with the need to reach a conclusion without all the data. As a society we will inevitably face questions or policy or approach knowing that new studies will bring to light new information. We can’t avoid decisions just because we don’t have perfect analyses.

Which brings me to my point: It seems critical that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we have sufficient information to a draw a conclusion when we don’t in fact have sufficient information, whether or not we have to make a decision.

When earlier studies indicated that behavioural problems indicated reason to worry about later school performance or that ADHD symptoms indicated a need for ADHD drugs there should have been significant discussion of the likelihood that these studies were incomplete and may lead to overdiagnosis. Even a lay person could have raised skepticism about the rates of diagnosis. How did so many kids get through school just fine before ADHD was even heard of?

As a society we need to develop a process of reasonable skepticism.

Right now, with the research into genetic characteristics, we need to build skepticism into our findings. We need to recognize that the conclusions we draw will be incorrect and incomplete. If we don’t do that we know only too well that many will be quite happy to take the incomplete data and put them to work in the service of ill-conceived agendas.

In The Darjeeling Limited, Jason Schwartzman plays a writer who uses moments from his real life as the basis for his short stories, then insists to his brothers that the highly recognizable characters are fictional. The Darjeeling Limited is a gem-like movie, and this aspect of the story left me with a new insight, or the beginning of an insight into the relationship between art and life.

The actions of Schwartzman’s character create a text within the text. Schwartzman co-wrote the screenplay with Wes Anderson, the film’s director. So, we have the screen-writer playing the role of a writer who fictionalizes real moments in his life. The movie isn’t about art, Schwartzman’s fiction plays a minor role in the plot, but the film is about artificiality in life. The characters keep the world at arm’s length, rarely entering into events fully, yet believing that they do.

We use and appreciate art as a construct and technique to distance ourselves from reality. When it works, this distance provides a perspective that permits us to apprehend reality more fully, or to access a part of our perspective that would otherwise be hidden from us.

The artist takes a feeling or perspective, conscious or subconscious, and transfers it to some external medium (canvas, music, sculpture, text, etc.). After watching The Darjeeling Limited I was left with a new sense of life as unconscious art, or if not art then something akin to it.

Today is Halloween. Never in my recollection have I wanted to wear a Halloween costume nor enter into the spirit of the holiday, much to the disappointment of my wife and children. As I walked to the train this morning and reflected on this and on the premise of The Darjeeling Limited I felt a strong correlation between the two and the overlay of art in life.

If we think about distancing and abstraction as a critical construct of the artistic process, all of a sudden much of what we do in life starts to seem if not artistic then representational. Two days ago I got my hair cut, for instance, and felt disquieted by the relative neatness and attractiveness of my hair afterward. I now think that I was put out by the artificial construct of a haircut. We clothe ourselves partly for warmth, but the way we clothe ourselves is to a greater or lesser degree a representation of the image we seek to project to those around us. We are wearing an abstract perspective of ourselves.

The way we speak, the way we behave, the way we move, everything but the most automatic, innate impulse bears the impression of conceptual intervention. Focus on your breathing for a moment and all of a sudden you become conscious of how fast, how deep, how measured and the pattern of your breathing changes even if it doesn’t in fact become faster, deeper, more or less measured. The observation of your breathing makes it somehow different.

But whereas good art uses distance to bring us closer to something real, affectation in life distances us without achieving this ultimate closeness. Good art lets us feel or apprehend something more directly, more pertinently. A good haircut does nothing to bring us closer to reality. In fact, it takes us more deeply into the concept of ourselves as a person with attractive hair.

I’m not suggesting that we go about wearing sacks and with long, lank locks. But I am suggesting that being aware of the artificiality we invest in a good part of our waking life may actually be a step toward living more fully in the moment rather than in our minds.

In the wake of a hazing death, a fibbing (and possibly fight-fixing) grand master, and a what seems to have been an attempted assault on the all-male sanctity of the sumo ring (Japan Wrings Its Hands Over Sumos Latest Woes) change threatens Japan’s sumo tradition. As the NY Times piece points out, though, a little digging reveals that sumo doesn’t quite have a stronghold on tradition. Much newer than people believe, and with much more of a history of reinvention than the current purists want to acknowledge, sumo is no stranger to change.

On the global stage, the threat of climate change has caused many people to react by simply denying its possibility. It’s been interesting to see that as time has passed, more people have become prepared to accept the prospect that the world’s climate is changing. In the US this has happened more slowly than in other parts of the world.

Philosophically, the psychology of change has two primary components: Acceptance — coming to terms with the idea that change is possible, desirable, inevitable, real. And resistance — the idea that the status quo is possible, desirable, inevitable, real.

When change looms it tends to create a tension between acceptance and resistance. This tension can exist in one person, or between people. And it strikes me that such a tension is not just inevitable, but desirable. Acceptance of change not balanced by some resistance will lead to unproductive or harmful change as well as productive and beneficial change.

In society, however, people tend to polarize around positions of acceptance or resistance to particular changes. I’d go further and say that forces in society encourage people to polarize. The “you’re either for it or against it” demand.

Where did this come from? Why do certain aspects of the structure of some societies tend to divide on issues rather than encouraging reasoned debate?

A group, philosophically and logically speaking, requires that the members of the group have some common characteristic. I always remember my math friends at college discussing the question of whether the group that contains all groups contains itself. (A question I could never quite see the importance of.) In this I’m speaking of any group, not just groups in society. A group of marbles may be called a group because they’re all green, or because they’ve been put into the same bag, or because they’re all less than an inch in diameter…

For groups of people in a society, the common characteristic can be quite strong — all of the members of the group are blood relatives, for instance. Or it may be quite weak — they are all taking the same bus.

But people are extremely good at grouping themselves, at establishing groups and reinforcing those groups. It is a critical social function.

Take the example of the bus stop: All of you are waiting for the same bus. There is no particular allegiance, no great bonding force. But now if the bus is late, all of a sudden the members of this ad hoc group have something in common. They can rally around the disagreeability of the bus being late.

To take the example one step further, we can imagine what happens if, after an hour of waiting, a bus comes around the corner just as a newcomer shows up at the bus stop and sidles up to the front of the line. The “group” will be inclined to turn on the newcomer and tell him what’s what.

While philosophically speaking a group is not emotional, psychologically speaking the stronger the urge to form groups, the more likely the groups will be to defend the parameters of their existence.

This tendency to easily form strong groups has doubtless helped human beings survive and prosper. It causes us to work well together when we can establish a common goal. But it also causes us to take sides on issues, and to defend against a change to the group, just for the sake, sometimes, of defending against change.

In Japan, the people who feel most strongly about the parameters of sumo most actively resist any change to those parameters. They have associated themselves with the group that likes sumo to be traditional. Even though they don’t personally know many or perhaps any other members of this group, they wish to keep the group strong. Contrarily, those who feel that sumo should change have joined another group. They will fight just as vehemently for the idea that a change is good.

Acceptance of change and resistance to change confuse us then in part because they are the same thing behind a different mask.

(My computer erased my first attempt at this post. A circumstance I’m trying not to take to heart.)

In writing yesterday’s post (”The Joy of Sexual Reproduction“) I came across the work of Herbert Spencer, who apparently first coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” after reading about Darwin’s theory of “natural selection.” While Herbert Spencer’s ideas seem to have much soundness in some respects (that all organic and inorganic stuff must exist according to the principles of space and time, for instance) they are run through with an idealistic belief that evolution has an end point, at which life will have reached a state of perfect equilibrium. A thrust that comes across implicitly in his spin on Darwin’s theory of natural selection in his misleading use of the absolute term “fittest.”

(I love Wikipedia’s choice of this marvelously sinister-looking photograph of Spencer.)

I didn’t set out to write about Spencer. It occurred to me though that a parallel may exist between the Spencer-like utopia of a perfect evolutionary end point, and the common belief that markets should be left to freely find their form; that a theoretically perfectly free market (which is impossible) would ultimately most benefit society. I don’t want to get stuck in attacking or defending absolutes, just examine whether flawed idealism might be doing us a disservice.

It’s easy to pick on George Bush, but in this case (as in so many others) he serves as a great example of what may be wrong with freely advocating a free market. While it’s hard to imagine that he ever had anything to do with actually writing a book, he did put his name as Author to one called “A Charge to Keep.” Herein we find a quote that will be perfect for our discussion: “A free market promotes dreams and individuality.” (I must add that I found this quote elsewhere; I didn’t read the book. But I can readily imagine Bush subscribing to this perspective.)

It’s easy to point to failures in the market — for instance the recent shakiness caused by subprime loans. But it’s also easy for a free market proponent to point out that poor choices cause these problems and that they are actually examples that indicate that the market isn’t yet operating transparently or efficiently enough. As Alan Greenspan argued: “the securitization of home loans for people with poor credit - not the loans themselves - were to blame for the current global credit crisis.”

If we get into debates between free market advocacy and free market opposition, we’ll never get anywhere (that’s just politics as usual).

Instead, I’m wondering whether there may be a philosophical basis for understanding whether a free market is necessarily good or bad. I’ll try to explain what I mean. If we consider the free market as a concept it must rest on the two concepts of impulse and friction. Market changes require impulse or friction. An impulse initiates a market motion or activity based on an expectation of return or profit. A friction or counter-impulse provides inhibition to the momentum of the market in a particular direction. I’m being deliberately abstract. But we quickly determine that nowhere in the concepts for a free market do we come across any concept of virtue or goodness, other than the reflexive concept that freeness is virtue.

To be more specific. Let’s say a person engaging in commerce spies an opportunity for profit. He or she pursues that opportunity freely, responding to the impulse to benefit from the profit. And let’s say that in a perfectly free and transparent market, another person or group responds to that action by providing friction, thereby reducing or sharing in the profit, or generating an alternate profit for themselves.

A free and transparent market consists of a multitude of such transactions. Each person operates always according to impulse or friction. Never, in free market terms, does any subjective desire to act virtuously enter the equation.

Now, if we look again at Adam Smith (the father of the free market concept?) we find that he firmly believed that selfishness was immoral and that the individual would a act in accordance with the good of themselves and the good of all, since society is required for the market to exist.

But I go back to this idea of impulse and friction. People have coopted the concept of the free market as a virtuous mechanism. But a perfectly free market just “is.” People act and it responds, not according to any virtue, but according to its internal structure (which can never be perfect).

As the real market (synonymous in some ways with the stock market) becomes more abstract and more remote from the worldly barter and trade that Adam Smith witnessed, we lose the very connection to humanity that transforms a morally neutral market into a socially responsible market.

People love to tout the idea of the free market because it notionally frees them from worrying about the fiscal responsibility of the government in ensuring that markets operate responsibly and sensibly. Bush may be right in saying that a free market promotes dreams and individuality, but if we think that’s a good thing, we should perhaps think again.

In what was perhaps a slip-up, perhaps not, the picture that accompanies the NY Times article “House Panel Raises Furor on Armenian Genocide” comes with the caption “Survivors of the Armenian Genocide.”

Although perhaps the matter is not whether the Turks committed genocide, but whether America now officially uses the genocide label.

Parsing the furor I’m left wondering how to sift through the sea of conflicting emotions and motives to reach some kind of reasoned analysis. Modern Turkey seems attached to the idea that labeling the killings genocide offends Turkey. The motives of the house panel seem to be perhaps politically reactive (responding to the press from the Armenian community,) perhaps genuinely well-intentioned (aiming to let the world know that genocide won’t be swept under the mass killings rug,) perhaps a little of both. And the motives of the White House and other home-grown opponents of the genocide label seem to be strategic — to avoid risking the loss of Turkey’s support in Iraq.

On Tuesday, the Science Times section of the NY Times published a fascinating piece on the thinking processes of baboons. One aspect of the story pointed to the terrible statistic that more infant baboons die from infanticide than from anything else. The reason being that the dominant male in the troop changes every seven or eight months. The new alpha male (usually from another troop) kills the infant baboons in an effort to force the females back into a new reproductive cycle so that he can mate with them before he is ousted.

What do these two disjointed stories have to do with one another?

I expect that if one were to be able to ask a baboon whether killing rival offspring is infanticide, he would balk at the label. I think the Turks don’t want the genocide label in part because they are attached to the idea that the killing of Armenians necessarily furthered the Turkish cause. Just as America balks at the label of aggressor or warmonger in the invasion of Iraq.

Whether it is expedient for America to apply to events that began in 1915 the genocide label is mostly, if not entirely, a matter of politics. The furor over the issue has done more to raise consciousness about the events themselves than a quiet and emphatic resolution. But, ultimately, there is an excellent reason to worry about the label and to be sure that we apply the appropriate label.

The Times quotes Rep. Brad Sherman as saying “if we hope to stop future genocides we need to admit to those horrific acts of the past.”

The right label is important not for America, nor for the Armenian survivors, but for modern Turkey and for others who would cling to the idea that killing to secure ethnic goals contradicts human goals. Contrasting genocide in humans with infanticide in baboons, humans have a critically important conceptual capacity — to distill and apply abstract concepts such as genocide. Male alpha baboons have evolved to feel a natural impulse to kill the weaning offspring of their rivals. Human beings evolved to feel fear of and protectiveness against other groups and tribes — for as long as humans have existed, they have killed one another in alarming numbers. But, unlike baboons, we have the capacity to understand that ultimately we do not want to continue to kill one another en mass, and, with the right will, we have the capacity to stop it, and to prevent one another from committing such crimes. We can have the will to be human and respect the rights of all people to share the world. If we refuse to apply the concept and shape the will, we will fail.

(Charles Darwin, as the Science Times article mentions, wrote this in his notebook of 1838 - “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”)

Lou Dobbs’ strongly worded commentary on CNN.com today begins with the words “lunacy among our public figures.” He’s referring to the likes of Katie Couric, Barak Obama, and Bill Moyers who have all expressed discomfort with the prevailing symbolism of the American flag.

Barack Obama has stopped wearing his American flag lapel pin, for instance.

Lou’s thoughts on the subject (if you can call them that) are so coarsely grained that I would have been inclined to shake my head and move on, but his knee jerk patriotism must be widely felt, and that makes it worthy of some analysis. After all, which of us hasn’t felt the tug of a strong, arbitrary allegiance at some point in our lives?

Patriotism reflects an identification with the nation of one’s birth or adoption. The idea of patriotism expresses the impulse or feeling that our nation should prevail over or is better than others. By saying: “I am American” or “I am Iranian” or “I am [fill in the blank]” we are also saying: “I am not anything else.” It seems simple enough, but the feeling of patriotism emerges from a complex and overlapping set of responses:

Fear of other people and other cultures, fear of the unknown, fear of threats to the nation real or imagined. Pride in one’s nation, its culture, habits, principles, laws, history. Familiarity with one’s surroundings — the weather, the habitat, the geography.

If we parse out these various complexities we start to see a pattern. Some of the impulses for our sense of patriotism are completely arbitrary and subjective such that arguing about it becomes a ridiculous matter (weather or geography or success at a particular kind of sport, for instance). And some we may logically defend — the extent to which a country upholds basic human freedoms, for instance, is not a subjective matter, and has led more than one person to change his or her nationality.

So, patriotism can be divided into two distinct concepts — an identification with the idea of one’s nation, or an identification with the ideals of one’s nation.

Dobbs clearly argues for the idea of America, regardless of its record on matters of such grave importance as human rights, war-waging, and international diplomacy. Couric, Obama, and Moyers on the other hand clearly want to make a point about the ideals of the nation, and the degree to which they support the way that those ideals are being upheld by the current administration, or not.

I’m not happy today. I don’t know why. But perhaps this is a good place to begin in thinking about the philosophy of happiness. I was going to write about the philosophy of depression, but that seemed too, well, depressing.

Arthur Schopenhauer (by all accounts, generally not a happy man) had this to say on the subject: “Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.” Goethe expresses a similar idea, but more gently: “Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.”

Happiness of course is a mental construct or concept that we use to describe a set of complex feelings, and this concept forms part of a spectrum that spans all degrees of happiness and unhappiness. As Carl Yung put it: “The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

John Belushi said more or less the same thing as Jung — “I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time” — but he pushes back toward the pertinent question of happiness as something that may have a purpose.

The study of happiness has received a lot of attention recently. But, as with most matters of psychological interest, those doing the questioning tend to be psychologists. One such study from a few years ago brings focus to the eternally false expectation that things will make us happy; returning to Goethe, we like to chase the ball of happiness, but when we catch up to it, we kick it off again. 

(I had a striking example of this in my personal life just last week. When we were expecting our first child three years ago, my wife and I discovered that we both carry a gene mutation for cystic fibrosis. When we became pregnant again over the summer, we therefore knew that there was a one in four chance that the baby would have cystic fibrosis. The worry about this consumed us. Yet last week when the tests showed that the baby would be fine, the all-pervasive happiness of the relief was quite short-lived. Here I am again, already depressed about something else.)

The problem with the study of happiness from a psychological perspective is that it tends to reveal more about the symptoms of happiness than it does about the purpose of happiness. To understand that purpose, we need to consider the concept from first principles.

Back to Schopenhauer. His definition of happiness as freedom from pain is compelling, because it is neat. “[Pain] is the positive element of life,” he says. A thought we can happily unpack to mean that pain compells us to do things that help us survive.

This is certainly part of the puzzle. We evolved pain receptors to help us refrain from doing things that would damage the living organism. And psychological (emotional) pain is simply an extension of the same phenomenon. To the extent that we can anticipate painful situations we tend to try to avoid them.

But it is surely not the whole answer. What Schopenhauer sought to exises from our analysis by referring all of happiness back to pain, was the potential for a positive purpose for happiness.

Camus evoked the concept of harmony to describe happiness: “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

As life evolved, the more successful organisms would have been those that were able to effectively balance the functions within the living organism itself and between the organism and the outside world. Every evolutionary step or change succeeds or fails according to whether it brings about a more advantageous balance for the organism. This tendency toward balance reveals itself in all kinds of ways — the physical form of the organism (the giraffe’s long neck balanced with the height from the ground of its food), and the internal functioning of the organism (the short life span of the fruit fly, for instance, which allows it to mutate and adapt rapidly).

In human beings, the mental function takes this process of tending toward balance to a new place. Our mental functions, our processing of impulses and conscious decision making, tends to improve our ability to survive if it helps us to achieve balance. Happiness, however fleeting, is the evolutionary reward for achieving harmony and balance — a good meal, a pleasant experience, making love — all of these things produce the chemical reponse that we call happiness so that we will tend to want to do them again. Happiness is evolution’s form of positive feedback.

Why then have so many great minds decided that happiness is merely pain waiting to happen? Bertrand Russell perhaps can shed some light on this: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

 

 

�
�

Senator Larry Craig today reversed his promise to resign from the senate if he couldn’t retract his guilty plea on charges of disorderly conduct (after he allegedly propositioned a plain clothes officer in an airport bathroom). As CNN reports: “On the House side, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, said Friday that elected officials have a responsibility “to exhibit behavior that upholds the dignity of the office.”"

In the wake of David McSwane’s four word column: “Taser this: F**k Bush,” Colorado State University’s Board of Communications decided to admonish the editor-in-chief of its newspaper for unethical and unprofessional behavior rather than fire him. College conservatives, who had sought the editor’s ouster and called for advertisers to pull their ads, were disappointed.

And in the midst of the new furore (see yesterday’s post) about the administration’s legal machinations to allow the CIA to continue with severe interrogation of detainees, President Bush again reiterates his claim that “we do not torture.” Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, comments: “I suspect that former Deputy Attorney General Comey will again prove to be right in his prediction that the Department of Justice will be ashamed when we learn more about all that they have done.”

Elected officials, those in positions of influence and responsibility, and those with ethical obligations have been doing bad things for as long as such positions have existed. Craig’s alleged behavior wouldn’t have even made it as a footnote in the history of the senators of ancient Rome. It may sometimes seem as though there’s far more wrongdoing now than ever before, but I expect it’s just that we get to know about more of it.

But while at first it seems to be resonant and solid, the phrase “to exhibit behavior that upholds the dignity of the office” becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the more I think about it.

Surely nobody can always exhibit dignified behavior, whenever any of us visits the bathroom, even if not propositioning for sex, we are not at our most dignified. And it the phrase refers more to upholding appearances, then is it really an important benchmark for an elected official? It seems more important that our elected officials and those in positions of responsibility think and act responsibly as they carry out their responsibilities. The CSU editor, for instance, perhaps should have weighed his words a little longer before going to print. And the current president, perhaps, should have weighed his motives a little longer before running for office.

Dignity is an odd concept. I found this quote from John Stuart Blackie - On Self-culture 1874 - quite helpful: “The real dignity of a man lies not in what he has, but in what he is.” The OED defines dignity as the quality of being worthy or honorable. Which of course presents us with a question about the concept of worthiness and honor.

Taking these two ideas together, dignity lies in doing that which one feels is right. Dignity is not in the office because the office may stink. If Craig feels it is right for him to continue to work in the senate, because he can continue to be effective, more effective than a replacement, as he says, then his actions have dignity.

Likewise, a fellow editor at CSU’s paper praised his boss’s handling of the situation and his general leadership. Some dignity then rests with him. But what about the college republicans who called for the newspaper’s sponsors to pull their ads?

And what of our fearless leader, Mr. Bush? Does dignity rest with him? All indications are that Bush is doing one thing and saying another. He hides his actions behind his words. He would claim that he does this because what he is doing is right. But perhaps he does it because he knows that others would feel he is wrong.

 

�

Whenever emotion overpowers my reason, I realize anew just how deep and powerful our emotional selves can be. Last night I blew up at my mother-in-law, convinced that I had reason on my side, completely unapologetic. And this morning when I woke up I felt the shame of hurting her feelings, and bewilderment at my irrational overreaction to what had upset me.

Emotion like reason, has its roots in our evolution as a species. Emotion came prior to reason. It developed out of the key, immediate survival responses of the human organism. Fear (and the fight or flight response), anger, sadness, happiness, disgust. As we have evolved reason we have naturally retained these valuable emotional responses, although we often use reason to suppress or override our emotional impulses.

Psychotherapy and similar therapeutic methods aim to help us smooth out the bumps in our emotional responses. It’s still OK to be angry or afraid, of course, but when our responses follow a particular pattern, or seem systematically extreme, we can try to figure out why and work on the underlying cause of these overreactions.

Emotion and reason sit side by side. We can reconcile them (sometimes) and we can better understand our emotions resulting in a happier cohabitation. But since emotion is an automatic response to a stimulus (like the reflex jerk when the doctor taps our knee with his mallet) the emotional response, however valuable in the moment, should never be used as the basis for a conceptual framework.

What do I mean by this?

To take first the example of my disagreement with my mother-in-law, I used my emotional response, my anger, as the foundation of my side of the disagreement. I slathered my rationale on top like icing on a dry cup-cake.

To take a more important example, the furore around abortion laws is an emotional furore. Reason rarely enters into the equation. People’s perspectives on abortion tend to polarize around their emotional response to the matter. The same is true of capital punishment. There are many other examples.

Likewise racists create a false rational framework founded on emotions of fear and hatred. There are countless other examples.
We can’t eradicate or expunge our emotions. But as individuals and as a society we would be well served to beware of using emotion as a starting point for reason.