The Captured Perspective

There are several interesting things that happen as people move from the college years to their professional 20s.

Let me start with the premise that college is the Mecca of idealism, and in many ways, idealism of a somewhat selfish variety. People dream big in learning environments that reward asking big questions with little in the way of personal set-backs. By saying selfish, I am not trying to say that people don’t have genuine dreams of wanting good things to happen (e.g. “I want international public health projects to flourish”), rather, I am arguing that such goals are often rooted in the self-reference (e.g. “I want a job at Partners in Health”). These pursuits give us meaning, and we’d like to think in our heart of hearts that their success is dependent on our involvement.

For example, while this might be a cynical way of looking at the following statistic, I have a hard time explaining the record enrollment in Teach for America from the 2009 graduating class (16+% of Yale’s 2009 graduating seniors for example) solely as a function of a massive increase in the number of people deeply concerned with education. Rather, I start by assuming people are interested in living a PERSONALLY meaningful life, and TFA has grown in exposure as a route that meets those criterion. This idealism is optimistic in college in that such needs can be partly fulfilled when one envisions one’s future life in these roles, apart from any actual involvement.

Fast forward a few years. Recent graduates are now neck-deep in their first or second job, and along with this often come some feeling of misalignment between reality with the past’s idealistic expectations. Not everyone will be the rock-star investment banker that they thought they would be… nor will everyone get to marry the cutest girl in their high school because that girl gets to choose only one spouse (usually)… and not everyone will have the salary or leadership opportunities they envisioned. Others feel a similar misalignment between their idealist goals (e.g. educational reform) and the resulting desired outcome. To use the previous example, TFA teachers, many of whom are my close friends (and family), begin to see the way in which the systems undergirding problems like educational inequality are difficult to move, and thus their individual pursuit of meaning/ purpose a bit blocked. At the very least, their agency in accomplishing this goal seems minimal.

So what happens to this group psychologically/ existentially, and how is this same world experienced differently? Though depressing for me to admit, I believe these experiences tend to push people from hopeful idealism to negative cynicism. To ease the tension between goals and outcomes, we lower expectations so our small contributions don’t feel so meager, or sometimes stop pursuing a goal all together. I can’t help but wonder if these reactions– let’s call them naïve optimism and negative realism– are the only ways forward, or if there might be a third way.

Let’s first consider if these two options are really that different at their core. I would argue that, though very different in behavioral manifestations, these ways of viewing the world share quite a bit in common in terms of motivation. Specifically, at the center of each impulse is a radical centering on one’s self, a radical sense of the necessity of finding PERSONAL meaning, achieving PERSONAL enlightenment, living with a tangible personal purpose. In his fascinating book “Saving God: Religion after idolatry,” Princeton philosoher Mark Johnson argues this self-oriented worldview emerges primarly from the structure of our consciousness:

Constantly finding oneself at the center, one finds oneself to be privileged– as something to be protected, as something to be prized. Thanks for our extended self-consciousness and our capacity to articulate what we find, what we in the higher animals merely an organizing form of animal self-protectiveness now becomes something more. It becomes a more or less explicit deliberative theme, a default starting point in one’s practical reasoning: one’s own interests just seem paramount (2009: 86)

When the self is radically important, optimism reigns when these goals seem achievable (college), and pessimism takes the stage when obstacles emerge (the professional 20s). I can almost hear Ernst Becker screaming out from the grave… “Can’t you see what I have been saying all along… your life is often a work in self-promotion, a project emerging out of your deep down fear of death, the death of all meaning.” The ancient sages roll over in their tombs, “Why didn’t you listen” asks the writer of Ecclesiastes, “when I said vanity of vanity, ALL is vanity!”

But hold up, before all seems lost. Might there be another way? Might there be a way to live between the tension of idealism and realism? Do we have to close our eyes to reality in order to dream? Johnson continues later in the book:

There is an experience– some would say it is a metaphysical experience; some would say it is inchoately religious- of being, as Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, absolutely safe. (Wittgenstein appears to have had experiences of this sort when, as a medical orderly in the trenches in WWI, he was in danger of being shot, gassed, or blown up. Marcus Aurelius, another man of the trenches, describes a similar experience in his Meditations). Part of the content of this experience, as opposed to the content of its subsequent interpretation, is that no matter what happens, everything that is fundamentally precious will remain intact (p. 110).

Is not this the way forward, between the false forced dichotomy of idealism and realism? Specifically, it is not by achieving everything we expect for ourselves that we break free of this tension, but rather we grow by a fading of the self from the forefront, where we can finally stumble upon this realization that ‘everything precious’ often includes things outside the self, and thus is worth pursuing apart from our potential personal gain.  Is it not only with this posture that the TFA teacher can sit back and passionately engage rigid structures of educational injustice, even though their role in that change might be small? Is not this the only way to have the mind of the realist, and the heart and soul of a romantic?

image from http://farm1.static.flickr.com/58/220279254_17c20cbec5.jpg

Consider the contrast of the following two quotes:

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” – e.e. cummings

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“Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.” – nikita khrushchev

Two quotes, and two very different view on the role of incentives (rewards as conditional on who we are) and unfaltering support (rewards as unconditional on who we are or what we do) in shaping behavior. Let’s consider the difference with regards to one common and important human emotion and behavior… love.

The Khrushchev quote is what underlies much of our market economic system (pay for performance, etc), and also often underlies much of the way we interact with others. Speak all we want about the joy of unconditional love, we are highly conditional with how we interact with each other. We love our spouse… if they take out the trash. We trust our friends… to the extent that they prove trust worthy. We seek out the companionship… of those who seem interesting. We seek people conditionally. We stay with people conditionally.

E.E. Cumming’s quote displays a different logic. We cannot fully be ourselves until we feel something unconditional. Until we feel full support, the logic goes, we can never be true friends, real lovers, great parents. In this way, our behavior is not fundamentally moved by constraint (you do this because you fear what happens if you do not), rather it is enabled by the fact that we feel unconstrained, and more free to be ourselves. In other words, two lovers approach “curiosity, wonder, spontaneously delight, or any other experience which reveals the human spirit” not because they are afraid failing doing so will result in punishment, but rather because something relationally allows them to pursue the behavior. This is not to say that relationships don’t have incentives and punishment, but that there is also something deeper at work in such situations.

* * *

But how does this develop? Take a relationship. Two people go on a first date. They posture, they pose, they wear their best clothes. The other person likes them, in part, because of such moves. Charmers are more likely to get second dates, as well as those who are physically beautiful. In this way, liking and eventually loving grow out of a structure of conditionality. The relationship grows in trust as each person proves trustable. Love emerges in some pattern of exchange.

But life changes, doesn’t it? Fast forward 30 years and you now have two individuals, not 21 and fluttery with feeling, but 50+ with many things changed through the years. What sustains them now? There love is still in some way conditional (if you cheat on me, I will leave), but in other ways, it extends beyond conditionality. Consider North Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson and his decision to forgive and stay with his wife after her public extramarital affair.  His speech, viewable here, is not one of his love being a result of her good behavior (it obviously was not), but something at least approaching unconditional love (i love you because i love you, because you are worth loving despite your mistake). Or what about an even more common example– the fact that as everyone ages, they look different, and often less “attractive” by normal standards of youth-centric beauty. While some couples obviously split for this reason, many couples obviously stay together. Yet, had they met looking their worst, its very likely the relationship wouldn’t have developed.

Two questions:

1. What is the process by which conditional liking changes to (more) unconditional love? Is there a clear tipping point? When does it tip back and why?
2. In a relationship, what are the ways in which conditional liking (incentives) and unconditional love enable or constrain behavior, respectively? In other words, why is cummings right, and in what ways is khrushchev on the ball?

Animal Collective’s record “Marriweather Post Pavillion”  is arguably one of the top albums of 2009 (listen here). According to Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson:

With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might “mean,” Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure.Merriweather Post Pavilion, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who’s been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that’s defined the band to this point– all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog– is refined and amplified here.

So, what is it about them as individuals that makes their work so effective? What allows them to create music that has a sense of ‘strands winding through their hugely diverse catalogue’? Let’s briefly consider one aspect of their biography:

In parallel with his environmental policy and marine biology studies, Weitz hosted a noise show at WKCR, Columbia’s college radio station. On weekends, he and Portner borrowed Avantgarde music records and listened to them all night at Weitz’ dorm room which rapidly broadened their musical horizon

In other words, it seems that it was not primarily their formal music education that enabled their musical creativity. While they needed musical knowledge/ training to be able to integrate what they learned, it seems that the learning that really enabled their unique sound took place in a more fluid/ random environment. To put it another way, their formal education was necessary but not sufficient to the development of their unique music stylings.

If this is indeed the case, it seems to suggest that there is in fact something emergent about the way our learning takes place in our stories. But do our university systems allow for this type of natural emergence? Do the carefully crafted educational paths we prepare for our selves/ children/ students (going from prepatory school, to top university, to top graduate programs, etc) really  facilitate this type of development?

In the following article, Louis Menand suggests that there is something antiquated about our educational systems with their primary focus on knowledge transfer. It is an approach which I would argue crowds out the potential fluid nature of learning, while simultaneously failing to teach the creativity necessary to solve the more interesting social problems, and/or to make the most interesting music:

The American university is a product of the nineteenth century, and it has changed very little structurally since the time of the First World War. It has changed in many other ways–demographically, intellectually, financially, technologically and in terms of its missions, its stakeholders, and its scale–and these changes have affected the substance of teaching and research.

But the system is still a late nineteenth-century system, put into place for late nineteenth-century reasons. The extraordinary series of transformations of higher education after 1945 have strained it. To the extent that that system still determines the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge, trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall.

If there is something emergent about the ways our minds learn, something non-linear about the development of authenticity in our own stylings (music or otherwise), might it be true that we don’t become true selves and unique in style through following a predefined path. Rather, might it not be possible that we could best develop authenticity in styling (music or otherwise) by following paths, in fits and starts, towards some gradually (but consistently) emerging personal mission.

So can this be built into educational systems, and specifically into classes that are to teach something about the creative/ entrepreneurial process? What if the best way to teach entrepreneruship is not the way we have tended to organize such courses (example here) but rather by providing a space to minimally guide the non-linear emergent learning situations, while also providing the theory and tools to harness such visions into successful businesses (or albums, or art pieces). It is the challenge of finding the right balance between chaos and structure.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”
—DANIEL BURNHAM, CHICAGO ARCHITECT. (1846-1912)