Rational Philosophy

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.

On the universal criticality of April Fools Day.

The susceptible age of four seemed to me too young for our son to be introduced to the joys and miseries of April Fools Day. My wife thought otherwise. And so it was that this morning he gusted into our dreams bright and early with a panoply of pranks all aimed at making himself happy at our expense.

April Fools Day is clearly the oldest and most significant holiday of any season, predating any other religious or secular holidays, and resonating so deeply with the very fundamental core of our existence, nay the existence of anything, that it hardly bears talking about. That being said, one still doesn’t need to share its rituals with a four year old.

For those who may not have found time to research the long history of April Fools Day, or who have delved back only so far as to the time of Chaucer and his Nun’s Priest Tale (c. 1400) or to the French and Dutch references dating back to the 16th century, I’ll touch on the foundational aspects of the holiday.

The celebration of a prank is a reference to the creation of something out of nothing. The prankster begins with a fiction, something untrue or fabricated, and ends up with an event of significance — the fooling of someone. This ritual sequence evokes the appearance of something out of nothing, which in turn recalls the origin of existence as we know it. What scientists now call the Higgs Boson — the superheavy particle the appearance of which they believe precipitated the big bang — used to be referred to as the Grande Bufon or, roughly translated, the “Large Idiot.” (This was, of course, in pre-scientific times.)

Archimedes, or the Greek’s geek, as he was known, was fascinated by the idea of the biggest prank of all time, and spent much of his middle and later life trying to perfect a trick on humankind that would last well beyond his death. He finally succeeded by calculating more accurately than any before him the irrational number Pi that relates the radius of a circle to its circumference. Archimedes would have been thrilled to know that even today, thousands of years later, schoolboys and schoolgirls the world over still tie their brains in knots trying to recall Pi to a large number of decimal places.

It was Archimedes, too, who jumped out of his bathtub shouting “Eureka!” This was not because he’d had an epiphany about the displacement of water, which is the commonly held myth, but because he’d figured out how to fool the king into thinking that he’d made him a suit out of golden thread. Hence Archimedes subsequent naked romp through the streets to the king’s palace. Archimedes was a true prankster.

Sadly today very few people think about the original significance of April Fools Day. It’s been turned into a circus of silly jokes and goofy tricks. I see this as a reflection of the times we live in. We spend too much time chasing material possessions, success, love, wealth, redeemable coupons, and not enough time focused on the essential void of meaning that underscores existence. If only we could all take this day to prank one another with a heartfelt sense of life’s irony and insignificance the world would be a better place.

 

 

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Rattled by its plunging stock price and by threats from competitive coffee vendors, Starbucks has announced a renewed focus on its roots — brewing and serving good coffee. The gargantuan coffee-store chain plans to install Swiss Mastrena espresso machines at three quarters of its stores in the next couple of years. It’s also rolling out a new coffee blend, Pike Place Roast, and swallowing up the makers of the renowned Clover coffee machine so that it can install them at selected landmark stores. In the words of the NY Times’ reporter, these initiatives are aimed at restoring to Starbucks stores an “authentic coffeehouse experience.”

The use of the word “authentic” jarred me. Whatever its success in delivering the promise of great coffee, well made, it would be impossible for Starbucks to return to its stores the authenticity of a coffeehouse, or for MacDonald’s to restore the authenticity of a burger joint, or for Dunkin Donuts to restore to its stores the authenticity of donut shops. In any such chain or franchise the essentially authentic elements of irreproducibility and oneness with the fundamental aim have been removed.

This is not a criticism of Starbucks’ general aim. Better to have a semblance of authenticity, an attempt to brew wonderful coffee in an attractive environment, than no such attempt. But it got me wondering about authenticity as a concept.

Authenticity equates to the concept of being genuine. An authentic coffee house must be genuine. And in its being genuine it must conform to the essence of the idea of a coffeehouse.

Determining the authenticity of a coffeehouse or a burger joint or a donut shop becomes somewhat straightforward. If the establishment is what it presents itself to be, then it is genuine. When it comes to people, things get a little more tricky.

The National Archives and the William J. Clinton library has released Hillary Rodham Clinton’s schedule (11,000 pages) for the time that her husband was in office. As the world peruses this record of her appointments one necessarily asks the question: Has Clinton presented herself authentically in her campaigning, or does the schedule of her appointments reveal a different story? We want to know whether she has exaggerated or skewed her involvement in her husband’s administration.

Likewise, the salient question presented by Barack Obama’s recent speech on race and racism in America was whether he presented himself, his experience, and his views authentically. We sift through his words to try to determine whether he has stretched a point or shrunk from one.

Authenticity in a person does not equate to telling the truth. One can tell the truth without being authentic. Authenticity in a person requires that he or she act without altering his or her actions in order to present an impression of someone other than that which he or she believes him or herself to be.

This brings us to a very profound question: Does consciousness allow for authenticity, and if so how?

Consciousness requires some degree of awareness of self. Any awareness of self, it could be argued, brings with it an awareness of the impression we present. Any awareness of this impression inevitably affects us and, no matter how minutely, alters our presentation of ourselves.

Even the person who claims no affectation “I am what I am” has affected a particular persona — that of someone indifferent and unaffected — and the disclaimer confirms this.

Consciousness burdens us forever and always with the awareness that we cannot be completely unaware.

So, is it possible that we can we conscious and still authentic?

No… and yes.

And here is the twist. We invest the word “authentic” with a meaning that relates to the idea of an object (an authentic coffeehouse, for instance.) A coffeehouse can be authentic just by being. It is what it is. Since we’re conscious we cannot be like a coffee house. But we can be what we are, complete with apprehensions, egos, weaknesses, desires.

For a conscious being — a person — the concept of authenticity comes to mean something more nuanced. It requires a person to be as honest with themselves and others as they feel they can be. Authenticity becomes equivalent to the concept of humility — whether we are arrogant, egotistical, meek or savage, if we have the humility to embrace and recognize that we are one particular aspect or representation of existence then we can perhaps be said to retain our authenticity.

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.

How do imagination and logical thinking interelate, and what purpose does thinking serve?

Michio Kaku has spent some time thinking about which inventions of the imagination may be plausible in the forseeable future. He’s written a book on it called “The Physics of The Impossible.” But Kaku’s descriptions of the possible scientific implementations of invisibility mechanisms, force fields and lightsabers seem far less functional and intuitive than their fictional counterparts. This got me thinking about the power of the imagination. Which got me thinking about why we think.

After two years of study the National Mathematics Advisory Panel has issued a report on what to do about the poor state of math skills in late middle school. American students stumble in 25th in math competency out of 30 developed nations. The panel recommends streamlining math education, relying more on specialist math teachers rather than generalists, and ensuring that children memorize core math facts, a tactic that “frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving.” After working with my daughter on her middle school math for the past few years, I’d agree with the panel on these points. There’s a lot to learn in middle school math, and math as a discipline relies a great deal on adding and combining concepts.

As I consider the power of the imagination alongside the power of rational or logical processing I realize that the kind of thinking we do to survive combines these two elements. Thinking entails imagining scenarios or possibilities and calculating or predicting outcomes.

The more powerful our imagination, the more options we will have. The more adept of processing of facts and likelihoods the more likely we will be to make good choices.

This brings us closer to answering the question of why we think. Working backwards, since thinking gives us the power to manufacture and select options, thinking evolved as a good way of gaining advantage through anticipation.

All of which seems rather obvious now that I’ve set it out. But I don’t think I’d ever before considered that imagination had such a powerful and important role in rational thinking.

In an individual, a healthy dose of both capabilities seems advantageous. But if we think about society as a whole, we can all benefit from the imagination of others, as well as from the logical processing power of others. In society we have a collection of minds, some more disposed to imagination, some more disposed to logical processing. If we respect the value of both, society as a whole will benefit.

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.

Exploring faith’s role in everyday life.

On Saturday, NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” repeated an interview with poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, who passed away earlier this year. I was struck by O’Donohue’s very pragmatic views on faith and belief. He shared his view of god as beauty, which struck me as a very profound perspective on the concept of god. As an atheist, I am interested in the concept of god as one way that we make sense of existence. The idea of beauty conveys a sense of intrinsic wonder and appreciation that fits with the concept of god. And, as O’Donohue pointed out, beauty needn’t be confined to that which is not difficult or painful to confront.

If we start from this idea of god as beauty we can draw a conclusion about the concept of faith: Faith corresponds to a commitment to beauty. Having determined our points of reference for god or beauty, commiting to that conception becomes an act of faith.

With temperatures dipping sharply recently in many parts of the world, resulting in such phenomena as snow in Baghdad and ice reforming with a vengeance in the Antarctic, global warming skeptics have stepped up their cry against the science of human impact on climate change. Pointing to the recent cold snaps, the skeptics argue that the science of global warming is bunk. Even some who accept the underlying global warming trend say that the cold snap teaches us that we can’t base our deductions and predictions on a few years of data. The global warming trend only reveals itself after averaging out more dramatic and temporary climate swings.

To some degree perhaps this question is one of faith, too. I realize that rationally I believe and many believe that the data supporting global warming is strong enough to take on logic, but it’s not strong enough for everyone. I have cast my commitment behind the idea that burning fossil fuels in vast quantities must eventually have a negative effect on the planets eco-systems. Global warming and the evidence for it fits with that commitment. The skeptics, not stupid people, have committed to the idea that the planet’s eco-systems are unaffected or negligibly affected by burning fossil fuels. This is their faith and they interpret the evidence accordingly.

In another article we read about educators who have come to believe in the superior educational methodology of teaching in single-sex classrooms. Those who subscribe to the concept have committed to the idea and have faith in it. Those who don’t have faith in mixed-sex classrooms. Who is right? Reading the article, it’s not clear. I’m not even sure whether either side is necessarily right. If one accepts that boys and girls learn differently and respond differently to different environments and different stimuli, this still doesn’t tell you that single-sex classrooms will be superior to mixed-sex classrooms that acknowledge and respond to these differences.

Just one anecdote about an adherent to single-sex teaching styles was enough to make me very skeptical: “Sax credits Bender with helping focus a boy who was given a wrong diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder by telling him that his father, who had left the family, would be even less likely to return if all his mother had to report was the boy misbehaving in school.”

Yes, I imagine that would focus a child, but at what cost?

This brings us back to the core challenge of O’Donohue’s beautiful idea — that god is beauty. We can be deceived into thinking that we apprehend beauty when we simply apprehend our attraction to an idea. Without reflecting on the reason for our attraction, we can’t be sure that we’re committing to beauty or to folly.

It was Aristotle who said: “One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

Likewise, one appealing facet of an idea — be it single-sex classrooms, global warming or god — does not make it worthy of our full commitment.

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.

On the function and power of creativity, and the particular value of music as an artistic medium.

Art Schop is a name I’ve been recording under for material that’s more spontaneous, philosophical and odd. This is the second year I’ve entered the RPM Challenge to record an album in the month of February. With a whole bunch going on this year and my wife pregnant (and therefore needing sleep when I wanted to record) I thought I wasn’t going to make it. But today, with her encouragement, I knuckled down and hid myself away and finished up. (This entailed writing or editing lyrics for several songs, recording vocals for nine of ten songs, and mixing all ten.)

Creativity is a funny thing. When you least expect it, something lovely happens. I wasn’t thrilled by much of what I had to work with this morning when I started, fragments of lyrics isolated from the music, and with the pressure of time thought that I’d perhaps get my album done, not much more. But in the course of a few short hours some beautiful moments (or so I hope) found their way out of my subconscious.

Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams had a house a couple of miles from where I live in Brooklyn. I saw Heath around a few times and our kids circled one another once at a local coffee shop. Apart from his talent and charisma, he seemed like a wonderful, warm, nice guy. I was very sad when he died. One of the songs I recorded today is in memory of Heath…

from here to there (song for Heath Ledger)

(A few of the other tunes are posted on my RPM profile.)

Where does the creative impulse originate? Why do people so love music, playing music and singing, listening to music, creating music?

When we create we translate a feeling or impression into some communicable form. Rationally then, the urge to create would seem to originate in the urge to communicate things that we feel otherwise unable to communicate fully. I could tell people I’m sorry that Heath Ledger died. But this wouldn’t quite capture the essence of my sorry, a whole mix of emotion and ideas. When I listen to the song, on the other hand, it expresses my feelings much more coherently, much more warmly, without the same archness or analysis that I’d wrap around them in conversation.

Art gets us closer to a raw form of communication, where the symbols of the art represent feelings that cannot otherwise be measured and processed for someone else to apprehend. It’s akin to a hug or a kiss or a touch.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about existence as having two aspects — our perception of it through our senses, which is an indirect representation, and the thing itself, which he called the “will.” Schopenhauer quite rightly stated that we can never directly apprehend the will. It will always and only be revealed to us through our immediate experience. For Schopenhauer, music came closer than anything else to revealing the nature of the will. Intuitively, Schopenhauer’s perspective on music has great weight. Just as music flows and never “is” so existence can’t ever be apprehended and stopped. Just as music follows forms and ideas, repeats patterns, so does existence.

(And we must remember that music originates from human perception via the subconscious. So any mirroring of the will in music is a mirroring of our perception of the will.)

People so enjoy art because it communicates to us on a non-verbal, emotional level; it is release and relief from our insularity of experience. And music has a particularly powerful aspect — it is immediate and transient, it flows. It cannot be frozen and held up to the eye. It forces us to submit to immediate, unstudied perception.

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.

On what people want to see and believe.
“Audiences don’t want to see realistic films about the war in Iraq. They want to escape all the bad news.” So says Howard Suber (UCLA Film and TV Producers Program founding chair and author of “The Power of Film,”) reacting to this year’s decidedly gloomy crop of Oscar nominees. I agree. And then, I disagree.

Since the nominated films haven’t done well, relatively speaking, at the box office, Suber’s claim holds water; people tend not to flock to downer movies. But those who enjoy provocative, thoughtful films made with great craft and artistic vision do go to see the kinds of movies on the Academy’s short-list. The Oscars aim to reward notable artistic achievements in film, not rampant popularity. They provide much-needed counterweight to the rather less lofty day-to-day goals of the film studios.

This confusion of box office success and artistic merit masks a positive phenomenon in the American film industry — artistry can make its furtive way into movies that have no purported artistic aim, and block busters can have great artistic merit without needing to be labeled “art” movies. The movies “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” for instance, both big draws in 2007, both pitched and consumed as “raunchy comedies,” accomplished their low, uncouth objectives while revealing flashes of superior, if uneven, comic artistry.

In the American film industry, art will out, it seems, despite the drive for popular appeal and profit. Movies can’t be divided into “art” and “popular” movies, because some popular movies involve incredible artistry and some purportedly artistic movies are mediocre imitations or approximations of art. (Big names can make seriously flawed movies and pass them of as serious.)
The Academy then has a tough job, rewarding artistic achievements where they see them, without there being any kind of reliable delineation between the serious and the silly.

Pastor Casimiro Roca also has a tough job persuading his flock to give credit where credit is due. The poor priest presides over a small church in Chimayo, New Mexico, where people come seeking to be cured. Roca despairs that many of those who come believe that the dirt in a pit in the middle of the church has miraculous powers. Roca believes it’s the Lord. (The dirt he replenishes regularly, having it trucked in.)

It seems odd that Roca enables the perpetuation of the myth by importing the dirt and keeping the shrine, as he does, as something of a destination. But perhaps, like the Academy, Roca does what he does not in support of the masses but in support of miracles that reveal themselves despite the masses.
Postscript: As a rationalist one can’t dismiss out of hand things that defy our current comprehension. Reason must allow for doubt. Science has revealed its own share of completely unexpected findings. Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry, for instance, all require us to move beyond everyday reason. The term miracle misleads, though, and perhaps when we come across evidence of events that defy reason, the term “unexplained phenomenon” is more appropriate.

How do we value things?

Armed robbers stole a Van Gogh, a Monet, a Degas and a Cezanne valued at $163 million from a private art collection in Zurich, Switzerland. In what was perhaps the biggest (in financial value) and boldest (in broad daylight) heists of its kind, the art thieves apparently selected the paintings because they had been hung next to one another, leaving behind more valuable works of art. Experts speculated that the added weight of glass frames dissuaded the thieves from taking more.

For Lukas Gloor, the museum’s director, it felt like losing “family.” For the collection’s owner, or his insurance company, one can surmise that apart from anything else it felt like losing $163 million. For the robbers, it no doubt felt like winning the lottery. But what of the potential, underground purchaser of the four paintings?

Any purchaser would have to be wealthy. I expect that he or she would also value the stolen paintings for their artistry (otherwise why purchase them?) And the purchaser, unable to put them on public display, would have to relish his or her ownership in relative obscurity.

This brings us to a point of some philosophic importance: Intrinsic and extrinsic value. When we have vast wealth, the intrinsic value of something becomes completely or almost completely untethered from its extrinsic value. If we can afford to pay $40 million for a painting, the pleasure and satisfaction we will derive from looking at the painting cannot be related to what we are prepared to pay for it. We instead begin to ascribe value by how much others would be willing to pay.

If the purchaser of a $40 million painting became suddenly poor, it would, one can imagine, become much more important for him to eat and stay sheltered than to look at his painting, but eating and staying sheltered would cost far less.

Only when a thing is more or less ubiquitous does its extrinsic value relate closely to its intrinsic value.

A great work of literature, easily mass-produced, can be had for a few bucks. So, too, a wonderful piece of music can be heard and played over and over on vinyl or compact disk for the cost of a modest lunch. Even a live performance by the best in their field won’t cost you more than a nice sweater. And a visit to a good art museum where you can see some of the most fabulous works of art on display is sometimes free. The artworks themselves are worth millions because they are rare and must be owned by one and only one person at a time.

When we get confused between intrinsic and extrinsic value we diminish our sense of life’s value. I think about this, oddly, in relation to the intended purchase of Yahoo! by Microsoft. Yahoo! has spurned Microsoft’s advance. But even though here we’re talking about companies that have intrinsic worth (by virtue of their assets and ability to make money) I cannot help but feel that here is a similar disconnect between intrinsic and extrinsic value. Microsoft is willing to pay a hefty premium for Yahoo! in the hopes of countering Google’s success by leveraging a joint presence. But Google’s value derives from something quite different from assets and relationships. Google has mastered the art of leveraging finite intrinsic worth to produce vast extrinsic worth. Google is the Picasso of the Internet search world. And to beat a Picasso you don’t merge the ideas of two second-rate artists counting on them complementing one another’s styles.

On senators, singers, and security officials. Or, judging books by their tables of contents.

With Mitt Romney’s last flip, his decision to take himself out of the presidential race, it seems a safe bet that we’ll have a senator in the White House (unless Bloomberg decides to run). Something of a phenomenon, this likely senate coup has people asking why senators, despite running often, haven’t often won their bids for the country’s highest office. A Times piece raises several possibilities — the baggage of voting records, the Washington-insider stigma, the lack of executive experience, the relative comfort of the senate. But, being forever on the lookout for an inherently rational explanation, I wonder whether something about wanting and winning a senate race doesn’t take significantly different qualifications from winning a presidential bid.

The senate is a buffer. The constitution encourages the senate to check the powers of other branches of the Federal Government (e.g., by ratifying presidential appointments).

Rationally then, those who seek a position in the senate (unless they have higher goals —Hillary Clinton, I think, viewed the senate as a stepping stone on her way back to the White House) seek to exert a moderating and deliberative influence. That’s very different from someone who sets his or her sights on leading a state as governor or leading the country as president.

But, as has been demonstrated in the current race, while being a senator doesn’t qualify you as a presidential contender, it doesn’t disqualify you either. Clinton may have ducked through the low gate of the senate on her way to a presidential bid, but voters have decided that senators Obama and McCain have qualifications for more than checking and balancing.

As for disqualifications, Grammy-nominated recording artist, Ledisi, reveals that she had about given up on her career after hearing repeatedly that she didn’t have the right look and the right sound to make it. It’s good to hear that in the music industry creating music that people want to listen to can still qualify one for success. (On a personal note, and if you’ll excuse the shameless plug, I was bouyed up yesterday to learn that nerdlitter, a music blog, selected a song of mine amongst its top thirty for 2007.)

And the story of government official Julie Myers who disciplined an employee for wearing an inappropriate, racially stereotyped costume had me scratching my head. The employee was counseled and forced out on leave while Julie Myers, who posed for a photograph with the man at the party after participating in awarding him the prize for the most creative costume, went on to nomination as a top ranking Homeland Security official. “I was not aware at the time of the contest that the employee disguised his skin color,” Myers wrote.

Either Myers is an idiot or a liar (or both). How she can be qualified to make decisions about immigration and deportation policy defies imagination.

Philosophically speaking, qualifications present an interesting set of concepts. A qualification begins by defining some essential skill or requirement for a given role. This immediately calls upon the concept of “that which is essential.” Very often we get into gray area over the difficulty of defining “essential.” This leads to ad hoc exceptions or exclusions.

Defining essential qualities for a leader, for instance, can be quite tricky. People lead in different ways. And people have many theories about what makes a good leader. Easier perhaps to define those qualities that disqualify a leader — like Myers being an idiot or a liar. But even being found out as a liar might not disqualify someone. Leaders lie all the time to gain strategic advantage. It’s not the lying so much as the “what” and “why” of the lying (as I explored in a post the other day).

And this perhaps brings us to the core difficulty of qualifications. When we define the essential attributes for success in a role, we find that they are necessarily recursive. To be a successful singer, the singer must be able to be successful as a singer. The singer need not necessarily even produce wonderful music (Celine Dione is a case in point).

To borrow from Beckett, ill seen, ill said, this then is the insight: Beware qualifications.

 

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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.