I'm delighted to share my recent interview with Peggy Liu, for Scope Magazine: "If rampant consumerism is a cultural — not just economic — phenomenon, can a culture be deliberately changed to minimize its effects? Peggy Liu leads China Dream, a project that aims to achieve nothing less with the world's most populous nation and oldest civilization. SCOPE asks her how she plans to succeed."
You may view the latest post at http://www.scope-mag.com/2013/07/telling-stories-for-a-better-china/
In 1916, my great-grandfather Harry was one of thousands of men in the trenches in France. Their suffering is legendary. But it’s also hard to imagine. Novels, photos, poetry, movies…it’s as close as most of us can get. You might feel something of their fear, camaraderie and revulsion, but it’s usually guided by some sort of interpreter’s hand and veiled by time. But last year my uncle gave me an extraordinary gift. My great-grandfather had written dozens of letters to his wife and daughters from France in WWI, and over the course of one summer, my uncle and my cousin set about transcribing them. It was hard work. They were faded with age and my great-grandfather’s writing was often unclear. But they eventually got through them and my uncle compiled them in a bound volume and gave a copy to everyone in our family.
The letters begin in Camp Bramshott in England, on what I like to imagine was a fair day in early June 1916, and end just before his death, in France, in October that year. As my uncle notes in his preface, the letters are extraordinary because they tell a great love story between Harry and his wife Edith, but also describe appalling suffering. They’re also matter-of-fact – astonishingly so. There as yet existed no narrative frame or meaning to the war, so he was just describing the experience as he lived it.
While the letters as a whole are gripping, there are a few things that stand out to me. The first is that fear wasn’t necessarily the men’s worst enemy. Some did fall to pieces. Harry writes of one man, W. Craig, who wound up directing traffic as his nerves had “gone completely”. But Harry himself was comparatively sanguine. In one letter, just two weeks before he was killed, he was in the middle of musing about what post-war life would be life when he had to break off due to German bombardment. Catching up later, he wrote:
Just as I was writing the above, the Germans started dropping shells right on our street, and blew down a house. The bricks flew in all directions. They dropped one close to our billets about 30 yards away. There was some excitement I can tell you.
On the other hand, Harry hated the filth and degradation. His letters are peppered with references to the difficulties of keeping clean. He hated the lice (which he called “livestock”) and the mud was no friend either (if “part of the game”, as he put it). In one stint in the trenches, he couldn’t take the same set of clothes off for a month, even at night. On occasion, he was also tormented by self-doubt, in particular, whether he should have enlisted, and how he was possibly helping the war effort doing what he was doing.
But what’s more moving, and I think, instructive, is what kept Harry going. In some ways, it’s the same old human story. Passionate love for his wife, love and affection for his daughters, memories of home and faith in God: these were the shining things that helped him face each day.
However, it wasn’t just the abstract idea of his family, or even the well of his emotions for them, that kept him going. Rather, Harry drew his strength from thinking about specific things that he actually did with his family, like going for walks, working in the garden, or having big Sunday dinners. His love for his family was bound up in their shared experiences; simple family practices that build and sustained their relationships, even when they were separated and he was living amidst horror and suffering.
Of all the things that sustained Harry, the most important seemed to be music. He refers to it often in his letters. For example:
June 16, 1916
I can just picture you all in Saskatoon today. The girls will be good [piano] players now, and I am pleased Louie is learning to play Offenbach’s Barcarolle. It is one of my favourite pieces, and I am sure you will enjoy it. Bells at Eventide will always be one of my favourite pieces dear. It has so many associations attached to it. You will always be able to have good music on Sunday. I think of the many Sundays we had together dear, and how we used to have music after supper, and wonder how soon we shall have the pleasure of having them again.
September 3, 1916
I miss the singing more than anything, after singing so long in the choir. Nearly all the mean from the choir are out here now, and I can quite understand there being only five men singing there [that is, remaining back at home]. However, after the war Charlie will, I hope, take the choir over again, and we shall have the great pleasure of once again singing there. I wish we could all be back to sing the Te Deum when peace is declared.
The last letter he wrote was to his daughters, on October 2, 1916. It’s brief – just four short paragraphs – but in it he says:
I am so pleased to hear that you are doing well with your music. You know how much I would love to hear you both playing. I am looking forward to it very much.
Reading the letters is a pretty overwhelming experience. They are a voice across time, a chance to know a little about the great-grandfather I could never meet, and the formative years of my grandmother, whom I adored. And of course, they’re an incredible reminder of just how brutal war is, and how incredibly lucky we are if we don’t have to go through it. But, more than that, they’re a reminder that you make a family through doing: working together in the garden, going for walks, making music. I remind myself of this now when I have to nag my daughter to practice her piano, or when my son wants to help cook but I know it will take twice the time. All those things are so much more than the moment.
Trench Mortar Image Courtesy of Great War Primary Document Archive: Photos of the Great War - www.gwpda.org/photos
Canadian Soldiers in a Trench Image Courtesy of Great War Primary Document Archive: Photos of the Great War - www.gwpda.org/photos
Mira practicing piano at home
Monsoon rain is like nothing else. It hammers down from the sky like something solid, not water at all. When you’re outside, you either run like crazy to get out of it or give up entirely and let yourself get soaked. It’s loud too. In fact it’s so loud that I did a double take when our hostess, Phyu Phyu Tin, owner of Yangon’s (aptly named) Monsoon restaurant told us that the building was haunted. “What?” I whispered to the woman next to me. “Did Phyu Phyu say it was ‘swamped’?” “No, haunted,” she whispered back. Phyu Phyu carried on, her voice raised over the din of the rain and the gentle swoosh of the ceiling fan, “It’s the ghost of a woman. We don’t know who she is. But we tend not to work late alone.”
Phyu Phyu was speaking to twenty-five or so delegates and spouses attending the Young Global Leaders (YGL) meetings at the World Economic Forum’s East Asia Summit earlier this month. It was the second day of the summit and the 300 or so YGL delegates had scattered across Yangon to attend “Impact Journeys” – full day immersions into different facets of Myanmar business, life and culture, from urban infrastructure to healthcare to the arts.
Our group had signed up for a full day immersion into the subject of Myanmar cuisine, with a focus on the potential relationship between Slow Food and economic growth. “Slow Food” refers, of course, to the movement founded by Carlo Petrini. Given that its roots are in Italy, “Slow Food” tends to conjure images of la dolce vita: picnics under olive trees, hand cured meats, artisanal cheeses, earthy wines sipped in the afternoon sun. It can also bring to mind uncomfortable images of food elitism, Tom Wolfe-like scenarios of over-privileged yuppies braying on about the merits of one particular Tuscan olive oil over another.
If you’ve been to (or read up on) Myanmar, which is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, both of those scenarios could actually sound quite grotesque. People in Myanmar, especially in rural areas, don’t always get enough to eat: rice, a staple, can simply be too expensive. Malnutrition makes children vulnerable to childhood illnesses and dysentery. The food transport system is virtually non-existent.
So, why did it make sense for us to be in Phyu Phyu’s humid and elegant restaurant, learning about Burmese cuisine and thinking about Slow Food, while the power dipped in and out and the rains fell outside?
The answer is that Slow Food is more than a gastronomic movement. It’s a political one. Conviviality, nurturing local knowledge and traditions, environmental sustainability, celebrating particular customs in an era of globalized production and consumption…. These aren’t frivolous, or even neutral, values. They are a statement about the importance of human social life and tradition, and about the right of everyone, not just to eat, but to eat in a human, healthy and connected way.
These values are starkly relevant at this moment in Myanmar’s history. For decades, the well-being of the population of Myanmar was subject to the whim of a series of authoritarian generals. Tax rice, devalue the currency, close off trade – it’s going to have a big impact on how and what people eat. But now, under Thein Sein’s leadership, and with Aung San Suu Kyi out of prison at last, Myanmar is on the threshold of change.
This defining moment is precisely why the World Economic Forum was meeting in Myanmar. Should development be allowed to happen pell-mell, or at the dictates of the market? Or should the people of Myanmar – not just its leaders – be empowered to engage in development in a way that fosters the health and well-being of the people of Myanmar as they see it?
The people of Myanmar whom we met, like Phyu Phyu, definitely want things to improve economically, but they also want development that’s human, sustainable and consistent with local values. Phyu Phyu herself described her shock when she visited the US and saw rampant obesity and streets colonized by fast food chains. That wasn’t her vision for prosperity in Myanmar. And that vision is knocking hard at the window: a Korean fast food chicken chain was just about to open a block from our hotel.
Slow Food is also an ideological framework for thinking about how development could unfold in Myanmar. There are concrete expressions of its implications, like the idea of creating a local food festival that celebrates Myanmar cuisine the way the Mistura Festival celebrates Peruvian cuisine. But Slow Food could also frame how other aspects of development go forward, for example, by ensuring that small farmers are included in decision making, by bringing global food brands into conversation with local food producers, and by keeping food justice squarely in the public debate.
Phyu Phyu and her team taught us how to make Burmese lentil soup, “bachelor” chicken curry (so-named as bachelors might make it after a big night out, with a pinch of marijuana if they’re extremely naughty), spicy fish curry, tea leaf salad and Burmese-style spring rolls (based on a Chinese recipe, but jazzed up with tamarind in the dipping sauce). They also taught us a thing or two about the excitement and anxiety of being part of a culture poised on the edge of drastic change. And they reminded us that certain patterns don’t have to be inevitable. Models for the good life exist. They’re there, ready to be adapted for what’s needed. Myanmar can turn on the lights and banish the ghosts – be they of the past or unwanted futures.
My contribution!
Mortar and Pestle for pounding chilis
Downtown Yangon
The Sule Pagoda: a focal point of Yangon's spiritual and political life
A lot of jokes about happiness are mean. For example, an anonymous post on an Internet joke site says, “What 's the difference between a Dementor and marriage? One will suck out every good feeling, every happy memory and drain the remaining peace, hope, and happiness left inside you. The other is a dark creature from a children’s fantasy novel.”
And that’s one of the less cringe-inducing ones.
There’s irony in operation here because many of the subjects that get mocked most – male/female relations, marriage, child-rearing, social participation – are elements of life that have been proven to promote happiness and well-being.
Perhaps “happiness” is an obvious victim for this sort of thing because it sounds so kittens and rainbows. Plus, we might live in a self-help culture, but many of us still feel a little squeamish when it comes to talking about emotional topics. It’s awfully earnest. And, even if you get past that, it can still seem uncomfortably narcissistic. I’ve worried about that very thing in an earlier blog.
But there’s an interesting organization called Action for Happiness that’s trying to change this perspective. AFH is ambitious. Their goal is to create happier societies. Practically this means achieving a whole number of secondary goals: shifting the tone of public discourse, overturning our assumption that we should measure citizens’ progress and well-being by GDP, sifting through insights from fields as diverse as economics and psychology to put together broad patterns of understanding, disseminating information about happiness, and nudging public policy in directions that have been proven to promote happiness and well-being.
The people behind AFH are no self-styled prophets or happy-clappy, bead-wearing hippies. The movement was founded in 2010 by Richard Layard, a Labour peer and professor of economics at the LSE, Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of The Young Foundation, and Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, an independent boarding and day school in the UK. Each is a leader in their field, well-poised to influence public debate. If you will, they are the Establishment, albeit a progressive side of it.
The ethos on the AFH website is that we can cultivate happiness through action. Indeed, at several points on the site, the quote the Dalai Lama saying, “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” To that end, the website features resources designed to motivate people to do things to boost their happiness. For example, visitors can download a “Happiness Action Pack” created to put “the science of well-being into practice.” This action pack condenses insights from positive psychology into ten areas in our lives in which we can do things to boost our happiness. The first five relate to how we engage with our bodies and the world. It includes things like giving, connecting to other people and exercising. The second five relate more to managing our outlook and emotions, which includes setting goals, being positive and accepting oneself.
Perhaps because of the apparent simplicity of these messages, combined with the fact that one could imagine seeing this sort of thing in some of the fluffier women’s magazines, critics have suggested that AFH’s approach is facile. Writing in The Guardian last year, David Harper, a Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, said that AFH’s approach is “based on two flawed assumptions: that the source of unhappiness lies in people’s heads – in how they see the world, and that the solution lies in change at the level of the individual.”
To be sure, this line of thinking exists in AFH and in the wider world. It’s even got quite a pedigree. The Stoics said something along these lines. Buddhism does too. WB Yeats wrote that the soul is “self-delighting, self-appeasing and self-affrighting.” And, thanks to YouTube, we’ve recently seen a surge in attention for David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” in which he urges graduates to take the opportunity to choose what they think about in order to transcend the boring, crushing or soulless moments of our lives.
This perspective probably has endured for some thousands of years because there’s some truth in it.
But it’s not the whole truth. For, while we do have remarkable abilities to school our minds, hearts and bodies to cultivate behaviors that help us cope with suffering and embrace happiness, of course the external world has an impact on us.
And this is where AFH’s critics aren’t quite being fair. In fact, AFH’s work is so interesting precisely because they acknowledge both sides of the coin. They seem a lot less interested in pushing all the responsibility either to society or the individual, and a lot more focused on simply seeing how the science of happiness tallies up and what we can actually do about it.
Some of the action does need to come from industry and government: no question. People are happier when they’re valued, so dehumanizing work processes are going to foment unhappiness. People feel happier when they live in clean and secure environments, so public policy that allows environmental degradation is going to spread misery. But even here we’re theoretically not entirely subject to the whims of state, at least, not in democracies. We can vote. We can create campaigns. We can create art. We can write stories. We can find ways to enter the public debate and try to influence happiness-promoting practices and policies.
But perhaps one of the most interesting spheres for action that AFH talks about is that which lies right at the meeting point of the individual and his or her community. It’s not policy, it’s not just positive thinking…it’s the stuff we do daily as we interact with the people around us. In an interview for the digital commons site openDemocracy, Geoff Mulgan alludes to the idea that engagement spurs well-being.* And the actions that AFH’s website encourage include examples of these small-scale but meaningful points of engagement: between parents and children, people and their workplaces and people and their communities. Just to take one example, they suggest volunteering. They cite the science that shows how volunteering boosts happiness and they provide a whole heap of resources to get people going. It’s not that sexy, but it’s right.
Mean humour, alas, might provoke a wry smile, but it doesn’t promote happiness. But connection and engagement do. And if Action for Happiness is as successful as they deserve to be, we’ll all be feeling the positive effects of their efforts.
images
* I am taking a few liberties with Mulgan's extremely interesting interview here, but I think this is very much in the spirit of what he says.
Dan Buettner is the New York Times best-selling author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest (with a terrific second edition just out) and Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way. He is one of those rare people who is simultaneously a reflective thinker and a super-charged ball of positive energy. A National Geographic Fellow, he’s thought hard about, and traveled the world to explore, questions that matter to all of us. Are there genuine secrets to living longer, healthier lives? And can we foster happiness and well-being? He’s sought to answer these questions by examining the behaviors and lifeways of people in “Blue Zones”, that is, exceptional pockets of the world where, statistically, people live the longest or report greater life satisfaction than the average.
Recently, Dan was good enough to speak with me about his work, and the lessons we can extract from it to think about what really matters in creating a good life. While the whole conversation was fascinating, I thought I’d post one of the segments that I found most compelling, where Dan talks about the choices we can make to promote well-being in our own lives, and the importance of cultivating belonging.
LMR: What do you see as the fundamental relationship between health and happiness?
DB: Happiness is worth about 8 years of additional life expectancy. There are a few behaviors that contribute to both. For example, we know that the happiest Americans are socializing six hours a day. We also know that loneliness takes years off your life. Loneliness is as bad for you as a smoking habit. So by proactively going out and surrounding yourself with healthy friends, it’s not only going to make you healthier – because health is a positive contagion – it’s also likely to make you happier.
And also physical fitness. Going out and taking a walk. It triggers endorphins. It makes you feel good. But we also know that walking is associated with anywhere from 4-6 extra years of life expectancy.
I didn’t set out to find these things, but both books were kind of worldwide meta-analyses of populations who are the paragons of happiness and longevity. So I tried to get all the data in the world and find the best. And then distill down what they do. And if you boil down longevity, and you boil down happiness, and you overlay them, you see about an 80% overlap.
LMR: Do you feel, when you see that overlap, you’re seeing something about what it means to be human?
DB: I see the overlap of what it takes to have a rich life. What it means to be human is to procreate, from a strictly evolutionary point of view.
LMR: So when I hear your stories, I wonder if they’re telling us something about the nature of our humanity. The kinds of things are so deeply or necessary to us they tell us something about our nature or being?
DB: One easy answer is socializing. We’ve succeeded as a species because somewhere along the evolutionary arc, we’ve figured out that collaborating increases our chance of survival. And, like so many things, when you satisfy that thing that increases our chances of survival, our bodies are hardwired to reward us. When you’re thirsty and we drink, it feels good. When you’re hungry and you eat, it feels good. When you’re horny and you have sex, it feels good. And these are all things that make it more likely that we’ll have kids. I think it’s this reward loop. Well, the same thing with socializing. We cooperate. When you look at the Blue Zones around the world, they typically are in pretty harsh environments. And the reason they survived is because they cooperate. You look at the Sardinian shepherds, for example. They don’t even all own their own parcel of land. But they live in tiny villages and they get together. So, when it comes to our humanity where…it’s realizing that there is a genetic satisfaction that comes from good social connections. And we should always favour that over consumption.
LMR: When you were in doing research…this is primarily directed at the longevity populations, did the people you were talking to ever have an articulation of the good life the way we would use it? Was there a sense of what life was all about that they collectively shared?
DB: Yeah, I think it’s a profound sense of belonging to where they came from. And if you look at the Sardinians, life is about my kids. I work, not to get ahead in the world, not to buy a second vacation home, not to have a nicer car. I don’t…if I have free time, it’s never at the expense of my family. And we heard this over and over. I don’t have massive data, other than…I have an N of about 50 people. And you saw the emphasis of the family among those populations.
LMR: Interesting. The sense of…going back to what you said about having a profound sense of belonging to where they came from…do you mean from within a familial lineage, or also within a cultural or even an environmental, like a connection to place?
DB: The latter. In other words, they weren’t just rebels without a cause. They’re not the type of people who bounce through life, move around. They’re planted.
LMR: I also wondered if you think that not having an icki gai [a purpose in life] can cause people pain? And I ask that because clearly having one is the presence of a positive, so is not having one just the absence of that positive, or is it the presence of a negative? Do people wind up feeling…I mean, I guess this is just going into hypothesis-land, but more lost, or feeling like there’s something absent in their life that causes them pain?
DB: Yeah, I think there’s an existential pain in that unrootedness.
LMR: And, with the work that you’re doing with the Blue Zones communities [“a systems approach that brings together the citizens, businesses and institutions of a given community to foster well-being”], are you saying that we can self-consciously create some of these things?
DB: Yes. First of all, you can choose where you move and I think that’s…people dismiss that. “Oh…I’m not going to move.” Well, the average American, and probably the average Canadian, moves ten times in a lifetime. So you can choose to live out in some culturally barren suburb, or you can find a neighborhood where neighbors know each other and there are parks and playgrounds full of people. And a place where you’re going to be nudged into social…you can walk down to a café, or a store…. That’s going to have a bigger impact on your happiness, and I argue your longevity, than just about anything else you can do. So, OK, well, what else? All right, your husband lives in a suburb and he ain’t moving. The next line of proactivity you can pursue is finding…build your own social network. You don’t have to hang out with the toxic woman who bitches about her life, or the friend that sits and watches reruns of Gossip Girls all day long and drinks Diet Coke. We can all create our own social networks and support that give energy to the positive.
After watching my four year old son attack his great-uncle the other day, then play tag on the lawn with his twenty-something cousin, I thought about writing a short blog on why connecting across different generations might be part of the new good life. But then there was the episode with the flamingoes.
And I realized that I was observing something in the children that was equally true for all of us.
We were at Jungle Gardens in Sarasota. Jungle Gardens is a sort of glorified petting zoo for alligators and the like. They have this shtick going where you can buy food for the flock of flamingos that live by a pond on site. Up close, flamingoes are really rather wonderful creatures. They’re a gorgeous shade of pink, with black feathers underneath their wings like some sort of haute couture inspired fashion accent. They have long, bendy necks that they contort into improbable twists and loops when they tuck their heads into their wings to sleep. But they’re also kind of goofy: they have big beaks, beady eyes and they honk when they call.
We did a first pass round to feed the flamingoes (going past, I might add, the religiously-inspired “Garden of Christ”… “Well,” my daughter Mira said when we’d passed it, “that was unexpected”) but the flamingoes were arranged around their pond, fast asleep. Despite Jamie’s enthusiastic calling (he’s four), they just ignored us and snoozed on. We admired them for a while, including their ability to sleep whilst standing on one foot, then gave up and went to see the reptile show.
Half an hour later, we returned and found the flamingoes just waking up. At least their leader was, and his cross-sounding honks roused them all. Whether it was too early, or that they were simply overfed, they didn’t seem interested in our food. But Jamie was unwilling to give up and, quivering with excitement, he stood there with his hand outstretched. Finally, a haughty looking flamingo strutted (there’s no other word for it) over, turned his head, and peered at Jamie out of one eye. Jamie cooed at it, and it finally disdained to nibble some of the food from his hand. The bird, which easily bigger than he was, was surprisingly gentle as it picked at its little pellets. Jamie almost levitated with delight. I don’t know if the flamingo got much out of it, but for Jamie, it was clearly meant a lot to be touching (or rather touched by) something so wonderful and alien.
It would be reasonable to wonder what playing with extended family and feeding flamingoes have in common.
I think it’s the sense of being fully in one’s body and connecting to other things through one’s body. Florida was beautiful, and it was fun to be on spring break. But it was also striking that we were all so physical. Not just active, but moving through the world in a way that connected us to other things, especially each other and the natural world. We walked at the shoreline, put our hands and feet in the same water in which we’d seen dolphins swimming, played with each other, fed the flamingoes and dug in the sand. By contrast, in our normal life, we spend an awful lot of time in cars and at desks and computers.
For sure there’s a “what I did on holiday” aspect to this observation. But the holiday was really just the opportunity to see the larger point. Our bodies are the fundamental vehicle through which we connect with the world. The people, animals and things we touch; the elements in which we immerse ourselves; the food we eat…these are the things that reveal the world to us. And through the plain and fundamental action of touch, we understand – in the truest way possible – that we’re connected to the world.
I’ve never really understood the compulsion to climb a mountain just because “it’s there”, but I’ve always had a soft spot for explorers. The drive to discover, sometimes at great risk, is a phenomenal human trait. We might now cringe at the colonial implications of early European exploration, but there’s no denying the awesome human spirit at work in someone like a Captain Cook, or a Burton and Speke. Which is precisely why I love pianist Dotan Negrin’s work. Negrin is not just a musician, and a fine one at that. He’s an explorer in the truest sense of the word. His goal is to explore the power music has to connect people. And his means for doing so isn’t just a jam session in his basement or his local bar, or in the comparative safety of a conservatory classroom. Like so many great explorers before him, he’s taken his quest on the road.
His first project was Piano Across America, in 2011. Negrin emptied his savings account, bought a sturdy upright piano and a sturdier truck, and took off across America with his piano - and his dog, Brando, who has a habit of perching on top of the piano like a furry masthead, and is unfortunately occasionally prone to motion sickness. Negrin traveled over 15,000 miles and played on the streets of 32 cities and 8 National Parks. His website chronicles his adventures: the wild beauty of playing in the parks, impromptu dance parties on the streets of New Mexico, jamming with – and getting robbed by – an Oxycontin addict. But it wasn’t for the sheer wild ride of it all, or for some journey of self-discovery. It was to show that, in the words of famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, music “quickens” people. It brings them to life. And it can knit them together in a shared experience.
You can feel this power if you listen to some of the music he’s posted on his website. Go to his website and listen to him teasing out the blues from his piano, or creating impromptu jazz sessions with friends and strangers, or inspiring a bunch of Hasidic men to dance in circle around his piano in New York City. And listen to him absorbing the arrival of an entire marching band led by a bridal couple on the streets of New Orleans. If you can watch that clip without smiling, well, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.
Negrin’s latest project, which just got funding through Kickstarter earlier this week, is Language of the Universe. His plan is to drive from New York City to Panama with his piano and Brando in order to document the importance of music in peoples’ lives. I’m not quite sure what it would be like to drive a piano through Central America…in fact, I don’t think anyone could be. As far as anyone knows, it’s never been done before.
The project’s title sums up Negrin’s feeling about why music is such a great connector. As he put it to me, music connects because it’s in many ways a “universal language”. While he hastily added that he’s not the first person to say that, he’s actually seen what that means when he’s played on the streets of America:
“Everyone can feel a piece of music. You see how people react every time they walk by, even just for a second. Almost every person has a smile on their face. They brighten up a little, even if it’s just a little bit.
"I think when I play piano on the street, it becomes this ice breaker. Like there was this one time I was playing and I had this nice little crowd of seven or eight people surrounding me, and five or six of them were there for something like two hours. Just hanging out and talking and listening to music. And I would tell them how I practice and play.
"And what’s interesting is that I talk to people I’ve never met before. Total strangers. As if I’ve known them for years. And one thing that I’ve noticed is that I never have that opportunity unless I’m playing piano on the street. Like if I’m walking in New York on the street, I would never meet these people. I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t get that same opportunity without having the piano there. Without playing the piano.”
There are some fascinating studies (Negrin’s read them, I look forward to doing so) about how our brain processes music and why it affects us so strongly. And, as Negrin says, performing piano on the street (especially with a dog perched beside you) is a heck of a conversation starter. But I was lucky enough to have Negrin over for dinner last summer. We talked about music over gumbo and wine, and afterwards he played our piano and gave our daughter Mira a lesson in playing the blues scale.
I saw what the philosopher Albert Borgmann has written come to life in front of me. A skilled musician playing his instrument commands attention. A musical instrument is a wonderful thing in and of itself, something beautiful and redolent of human tradition. But in the hands of a good musician it reveals itself. Negrin made the playing look effortless, though I know from Mira’s own hours of beginner’s practice, it’s anything but. When Negrin played, the piano became something. Mira, playing alongside him, blossomed. And the rest of us were caught up too…we laughed, taped our feet any my three year old son jumped up and danced.
And one can see how Negrin’s power really would come to the fore in the public sphere. Borgmann writes about the power of street music – especially jazz – to create communities of celebration. His words might have been written directly for Negrin. While Borgmann notes that a “community” in this context as often as not is anonymous, and tends to form and dissolve quickly, it doesn’t need to be anything more than that to create something meaningful. “The bodily presence, the skill, the engagement, and the goodwill of the musicians radiate into the listeners and transform them to some degree.” And Borgmann adds that “Music as a celebration that is real all the way down will also sink its roots into the reality of the public space where it takes place. Celebration and place will inform one another.”
Piano Across America and The Language of the Universe are fantastic projects. It’s important for psychologists and neuroscientists to continue to study our relationship to music. But it’s equally important to have old fashioned explorers who hit the road in pursuit of a quest. Negrin’s mission, to explore the role of music in our lives and how it can connect one, is as emblematic of the new good life as anything I’ve seen. And by playing in the streets of North and South America, he’s not just studying the good life – he’s creating it.
Last week, Shena Hardin, a woman in Cleveland, Ohio, was convicted for dangerous driving after she was caught zooming up on to the sidewalk to avoid having to wait behind a school bus that was dropping off small children. Each aspect of this case, at least as it’s been reported on the news, is more astonishing than the last. First, the school bus driver caught the whole thing on video – you can actually see Hardin jump the curb and race along the sidewalk right where the children would get out. Second, Hardin apparently did this routinely - so routinely, the police were able to set up a sting operation to catch her in the act. Third, upon sentencing her, the municipal judge, apparently exasperated with conventional slap-on-the-wrist punishments of a short license suspension and $250 fine, also demanded that Hardin spend two mornings standing on the road wearing a sign on her that read, “Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus.” Less than a week after reading about this case, I found myself in a surreal Harden-esque scenario. Yes, Virginia, these things can happen right on one’s own doorstep.
November 11th was not only Remembrance Day, it was also St. Martin’s Day. In many countries in Europe, St. Martin is honored for his kindness to the poor. According to Wikipedia, “the most famous legend of St. Martin’s life is that he once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save the beggar from dying of the cold.” Celebrations in his honor share a lot in common with other autumnal festivals: St. Martin’s Day also marks the end of the harvest, Thanksgiving and readiness for the long, dark, cold winter ahead.
To celebrate St. Martin’s Day, children traditionally bundle up in warm clothes and take to the streets with pretty paper lanterns, which, like the Samhain bonfires or light as a symbol of Christ, represent the triumph of the human spirit over the powers of darkness. In a little parade, the children sing about the beauty of their lanterns and the beliefs they encapsulate.
My children’s school traditionally celebrates St. Martin’s Day. It’s a bit unusual given that we’re in Canada, but there’s a lot to like in this simple and spirit-affirming ritual, so I’m all for it. This past Sunday, pupils, parents and teachers collected on the street outside the school. The children were excited because they’d all made their own lanterns and there were sweets to look forward to after their walk. Plus – and best of all – we had a magnificent escort: two mounted police with big, glossy horses that the children could take turns patting.
The route we were taking was short, off the main roads, and all the neighbors on the street had been told about the walk in advance. Indeed, many of them came to their doors to watch us go by and wave and smile at us on our way.
Except for one woman. About 10 minutes into the walk, I became aware that a large Lincoln SUV was trying to nudge its way through the children. At first I thought nothing of it. I thought that perhaps the driver didn’t understand what was going on, had perhaps turned on to the street and was confused by all the people on the street. I waited for a moment to see if she would pull over, but she didn’t. In fact, she seemed to be trying to scatter the children out of her way, and she’d lunge forward whenever there was a little break in the collection of small figures in front of her.
Perplexed, I walked over the passenger side of the car so I could speak to her without being right in her face. “Excuse me,” I said. “Can you see there are children here? Perhaps you could pull over until everyone is out of the way.”
Instead of the light going on in her eyes (“Ah, yes. Children! That’s what these small creatures are!), she said, with no small degree of venom, “I live on this street. I need to get home.”
“Yes,” I said. “But right now there are all these children on the road. They’ll be turning on to another street in a moment.”
“No one told me about this,” she spat, as if that were reason to go plowing through children. “I need to get home. My husband has to go out.”
“The neighborhood was informed,” I said, now getting testy myself. “You’re really being very dangerous. Please pull over.”
At which point, things degenerated a bit. She told me (language warning!) to fuck off, another parent got quite angry at her, etc. We were at an impasse. Our police escort was too far ahead of us to reach easily, we couldn’t get her to pull over, so each parent just tried to keep the children out of her way until we did turn the corner and she was free to speed home to her waiting husband.
We all calmed down pretty quickly…it’s hard to stay angry when you’re with a bunch of sweet, bundled children singing, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine!”. But the image of that woman’s big SUV and angry face stayed with me, merging into the seemingly unrepentant features of Shena Hardin.
I think there’s a lesson about the relationship between entitlement and the good life in all of this.
It’s best articulated by a question that a reporter threw at Hardin when she was in court. I only caught it quickly in the news coverage, but it was something like, “Why is your time more important than other peoples’ safety?”
Indeed. There’s a sense in both Hardin and Lincoln-woman’s exploits that their needs and wants are somehow more important than other peoples’, even if that actually endangers other people. It’s a pretty stark example of entitlement. We squawk a lot about “entitled” children these days, but I’m not sure that our kids have much on us when it comes to entitlement. We live in a world that encourages us to satisfy virtually all of our desires. Indeed, the ability to do so is pretty much how we’ve come to view the good life.
But that doesn’t necessarily lead us to the good life, to say the least. Though there no doubt always will be people who put their own wants first, to do so hardly creates the communities in which most of us want to live. Kindness, courtesy, reciprocity, and, yes, even patience, surely this is more of an articulation of the good life than shoving a Lincoln through a group of children, or jumping a sidewalk to pass a school bus?
I recognize that there’s a danger in sounding preachy in all of this. So, full disclosure, I’m a grumpy and impatient driver myself. My children have learned all sorts of awful words from me on our regular commutes. But the point is not that we need to strive to be saints and angels, so much as it is the small daily choices we make can grow our communities – and our own lives – in one direction or another.
Me, I’d like to sign up for a good life where no one has to be told that children are more important than cars.
One day after school when I was seven, I snuck the largest umbrella I could find out of our house and walked down to the beach. It was very windy. The tide was out, exposing the long stretch of wet, unruffled sand so characteristic of Crescent Beach. Beyond the tidal flat though, whitecaps chopped up the ocean farther out. I leant into the wind. It was strong enough to stop me from toppling over. Excellent! It seemed perfect for my plans. I climbed up onto one of the wooden pillars that stuck up out of the sand (at the time I didn’t question why they were there…they were just a normal part of the landscape. In hindsight, I suspect they were part of a groyne to prevent erosion). Strong gusts of wind threatened to topple me over while I wrestled with the umbrella. Finally, I got it open and immediately felt the wind tug at it. Another promising sign. Heart pounding, wind rushing in my ears, I closed my eyes, counted to three and jumped.
And landed in a heap on the sand, of course.
I’d really thought I might fly. I’d never seen Mary Poppins (no DVDs in those days) but I was familiar with her iconic flying umbrella. It’s not that I thought I’d conjure magic exactly (although I might have hoped). Rather that I thought a skinny kid, a wide umbrella and a big wind might add up to success.
This story came to mind as I was reading Madeline Levine’s fascinating new book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. I’d picked it up on the strength of a New York Times book review. Judith Warner’s insightful review described it thus:
“Levine’s latest book is a cri de coeur from a clinician on the front lines of the battle between our better natures — parents’ deep and true love and concern for their kids — and our culture’s worst competitive and materialistic influences, all of which she sees played out, day after day, in her private psychology practice in affluent Marin County, Calif. Levine works with teenagers who are depleted, angry and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges, and with parents who can’t steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment and connection. “Our current version of success is a failure,” she writes. It’s a damning, and altogether accurate, clinical diagnosis.”
Levine makes the case that we need to reframe success so that it’s less about impressive scores on standardized tests and more about developing character, integrity, problem-solving skills, empathy and kindness. Children equipped with these qualities, Levine argues, will have the real tools they need for engaged adult lives.
Levine’s perspective, developed (as Judith Warner points out) through her clinical and maternal experience, is an expression of our collective need to reinvent the good life. We’ll probably always strive for an ideal, but the character of that striving will be very different if we’re focusing on “connection and contentment” rather than material success.
But what’s so provocative about Levine’s book is the urgency of the task. Lest we think this is a purely philosophical quest, Levine provides case stories and statistics demonstrating the ways in which children’s lives have changed appreciably in the last couple of decades, and the impact this is having on them. For example, Levine reports that “…over the last twenty years, kids have lost close to two hours of play every day, most of that unstructured play.” That playtime has been replaced by extracurricular activities, tutoring, additional homework and screen time. Or it’s getting interfered with by anxious parents who fret about the harm children might come to if they’re not kept under constant supervision. And the impact, in Levine’s experience, is stressed out, exhausted, and perhaps worst of all, disenchanted kids.
Happily, Levine provides some practical strategies for creating alternatives. One of these (one dear to my own heart) is to ensure that children have more time to play and reflect. She suggests five simple things to foster play:
1) Unplug their gazillions of devices
2) Encourage them to play outside
3) Avoid so-called “educational” toys
4) Don’t over-program them
5) Role-model the importance of play by playing ourselves (which has the added bonus of being good for us too)
Levine closes the book with the reminder that the “very things that promote your child’s well-being and happiness are the same things that will promote his or her success in the world.” It will take “courage” to change the status quo, she acknowledges, but not do so is “inexcusable”.
If I were eight-years-old now, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t make it out to the beach with that umbrella. I’d be at judo or playing Angry Birds or studying. Or perhaps an anxious caregiver would stop me from heading out the door, even if I’d been so inclined. What would the cost of that missed experience be? Perhaps nothing, or at least, only a girl’s memory of a beach, a windy day and a bit of folly. But maybe that day, and all the crazy adventures like it, taught me subtle things I’ll never be able to put my finger on. And maybe by not studying or earnestly developing myself or “killing” time, I also learned something about the value of time, enquiry and experience. Something about the good life. And something about, simply, being.
Over oysters on a Sunday morning in Manhattan, my friend “C” implores me to read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: “you have to look at the idea of a calling and how it relates to the good life and there is no better meditation on having a calling than Kierkegaard’s work” he said. I downed my nice little dry sherry, trembled indeed at the thought of reading Kierkegaard, and agreed with “C” that he was on to something. C’s and my conversation about having a calling put me in mind of an interview I did a few months ago with my friend, the English writer Sarah Moss. Sarah is a successful academic, travel writer and novelist. Her books are fantastic. They’re page turners that are rich with observations and ideas. Her characters are intensely relatable, no matter how far-flung and extreme their circumstances. She creates cauldrons of suspense and emotion, but manages the tension with humor and a deft touch. Which is all to say that if you haven’t yet read them, you should do so forthwith.
Sarah is in the enviable position of having found her calling and it was illuminating, and more than a little inspiring, to get a sense of the experience of having – and yielding to – a calling.
A number of aspects of her experience jumped out at me:
1. When you are driven by a sense of calling, there’s a degree of delight – if not downright wonderment - that you actually get to do the thing you want to do. For Sarah, this feeling started dawning when a friend of hers (“someone who lived in the same post code, who went to the same shops!”) became a successful novelist. Inspired by her friend’s success, Sarah herself made the leap to novelist. In doing so, she closed the gap between the kind of life she wanted and the kind of life she had. Now, research trips, hours in her study, editing galleys…they’re all a reflection that she’s made the mythic real.
2. When one’s doing what one’s called to do, there really is a sense of “rightness” about one’s work. Sarah expressed this as a feeling of engaging in “the real thing”. When I asked her to tell me what she meant by that she hesitated, then said, “The thing that I’m meant to be doing I suppose. The thing that justifies my being here.”
What’s interesting is that Sarah knows that it’s the real thing because she’s willing to give the creative writing whatever it asks. She’s listening to the signals from her own engagement with her work. She puts it this way, “That’s how I know this kind of writing is the real thing for me, where academic writing isn’t. Because with academic writing I just do it and then I want it to go away. And I can just about drag myself to revisit and redraft if that’s a condition of publication, but I don’t want to. I would much rather write a first draft and then just sort of it despatch it into the ether and never have to look at it again. Where, with what for me is the real writing, the fiction and the travel writing, I’ll go back to it as often as it takes. And I will rewrite it as often as it needs rewriting. There’s a real joy for me in erasing 3,000 words because actually it’s not very good. And being able to recognize that it’s not very good and writing it again better.”
3. The third thing that struck me is that having a calling gives one a sense of having a unique role and voice in the world. For Sarah, this emerges through the experience of pulling together disparate topics and themes into a coherent whole: she the connections others might not. In her experience, it’s a process of discovery. Subjects call to her, and it’s up to her to dwell on them long enough to see the pattern that is, in essence, already there. This is how she describes the experience:
“I was in the Victoria and Albert Museum, kind of vaguely prowling because I was thinking about a late-19th Century setting for another novel. And I ended up spending the entire afternoon in the Japanese room, which isn’t very big. But I really wanting to read every word about everything in there and look at things properly. And remember them. And then I went off to the library and read about them. And I don’t know why. But they really spoke to me…
"So, last summer, I had a pile of books about nineteenth century Japanese history, more about post-war British psychoanalysis, and quite a lot about Victorian prostitution – and a couple of my colleagues came and looked at these and said to me, “What on earth are you doing?” And I thought, “I don’t really know, but when I’ve done it, I will know.” And I’m beginning to see now why I was reading those three strands of things. And I’m still reading them, still with absolute certainty that something’s going to come together out of them.
"It’s very odd. I mean, honestly, I have no more doubt that something coherent will emerge from this than I doubt the alarm clock will go off at 6:00 o’clock tomorrow morning, or that I’ll have to get breakfast. I’m quite sure it will happen, but I have no idea why, or how, or even really quite when
"It’s seeing a new road in front of you that you didn’t know was there. And not being able to see where it goes, but knowing that you’re going to go along it and find out. “Ah, there it is! That’s the thing!” The thing you didn’t know you were looking for, but you’ve recognized it now."
4. Following one’s calling requires defiance. This doesn’t necessarily look flamboyant (Virginia Woolf’s retreat to a room of one’s own, Picasso’s many mistresses), but it requires considered negotiation about what the world expects of you based on your identity (“wife”, “mother”, “feminist”) and what you need to do to fulfil your calling. Sarah didn’t make a production of this defiance, but I heard it loud and clear in our conversation.
Just to take one example, she defies the implicit norms of the intellectual feminist because she bakes, knits and even crochets. She acknowledges that sometimes this “feels that a betrayal of feminism. It’s expending energy on my own immediate domestic surroundings, and therefore not on any kind of wider political/intellectual world.” But she does it because it helps with her more “abstract” work, like her writing. It’s also a lesson for her writing, “Even if it’s going wrong, and that’s always a good object lesson as well, at least half of what I make I undo and remake several times along the way because it’s not coming out as planned.”
This is a subtle example of defiance to be sure, but the point is that Sarah reflects on what she needs to do to foster the time, energy and creativity to write.
5. Finally, to live with one’s calling is to live a life of emotional intensity. Throughout our interview, Sarah used words like “scary”, “exhilarating”, “fully alive”, “fun”, and “pleasure” (including the “transgressive pleasure” of creating characters who misbehave, which sounded particularly fun). This isn’t to say it’s easy: Sarah also made multiple references to the sheer labor involved in her work – the research, multiple drafts, dwelling with an idea, integrating different spheres of work and late nights. But, if a key part of the good life is feeling alive, following one’s calling is a good way to get there.
The rise in coaching suggests that many of us are longing to find and live our true passions. We yearn for purpose and to feel that our lives have meaning. Sarah’s experience illustrates that having a calling can be a sure path to this. It also suggests that “callings” themselves emerge from engagement with the world, not from fashionable introspection. In other words, while a lucky few might hear their calling, the rest of us can seek it. We can, to borrow my friend C’s term, take a stance on our being. It’s to be in the world and to understand how you see, hear and feel differently. And to dwell on this and think what it asks you to do.
Last week Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente attacked locavorism as “the most wasteful, inefficient way to feed the human race you can possibly imagine.” She said it was, “bad for the environment” and perplexingly, claimed that the purported “core beliefs of locavores – that organic is best, chemicals are bad, and genetically modified crops are evil – are responsible for keeping large parts of Africa mired in poverty and food deprivation.” I’m not quite sure how to respond to her comments about Africa. I would like to think she’s joking, but just in case she’s not I’ll point to the more conventional arguments about that continent’s intractable problems with food: drought, desertification, distribution and food security issues, and politics and corruption on both sides of the north south divide. Enough said.
As for the rest of the column, Wente’s arguments seem more ideological than data or even common sense driven. For example, she asserts that “modern, mass-produced food (not junk food, real food) is cheaper, more nutritious, safer, higher-quality, more reliably available and far less wasteful than the local kind.”
Wente is right when she says that industrially-produced food is more reliably available. Global distribution networks are amazing. If the strawberries in California fail, we can get them from Mexico or Israel. This is a luxury of the modern world that many of us wouldn’t want to do without as part of an overall eating strategy.
And I will grant you that industrial food can be appear to be cheaper. But this is where Wente’s points start to become less persuasive. Industrially produced food seems cheaper because we’re not calculating or paying its full cost. For example, who’s picking the cheap food on which we gorge ourselves? It’s often migrant or easily exploited workers. And we often ignore the environmental cost of intensive food production, including its transport, because we haven’t formally introduced any systems that force us to account for it.
To this point, farmer Joel Salatin, speaking in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, argues that with his [local] food , “All of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water – of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.”
And the rest of Wente’s arguments are also a stretch. Industrially-produced food isn’t higher-quality or more nutritious. It’s usually picked before it’s ripe. It’s often stored and always transported, which gives its nutritional value lots of time and opportunity to degrade.
And I’d be curious to see how Wente arrived at the idea that industrially-produced food is safer, especially when our government is so intent on cutting back on food safety inspections. Those same glorious food distribution networks that bring us Israeli strawberries in February are the ones that can ship E Coli round the world in just a few days.
But let’s set aside the point and counter-point here. Read Michael Pollan’s books, or, if you’re policy-minded, the European Commission’s report “Opinion of the Committee of the Regions on ‘Local food systems’", published in January 2011. After having studied food production and distribution extensively, the Commission has come out strongly in favor of what they call ““short supply chain” food distribution because, pace Wente, they’ve identified many social, cultural, economic and environmental benefits. Naturally, they don’t prescribe local eating as the only way to eat. But I’ve not heard “locavores” say that either. The point is to make local eating part of an overall approach to eating.
To me, one of the most critical points about local eating is actually one that Wente raises in the context of a dismissive aside. Perhaps facetiously, she asks why it’s become “the rage to look in the eye of the people who grow your vegetables?”
She answers it in part by theorizing that we romanticize the land because we live at such a distance from it. And because we long for the personal, and artisanal, and for connectedness.”
Well, yes.
The thing to bear in mind hear is that connectedness isn’t just some upper-middle class indulgence.* Connectedness is price of entry to being human. And food is, and has always been, one of the most fundamental mechanisms to connect us. Producing food connects us to nature, tradition, the seasons, a local ecology and even our own bodies. Producing food also connects us to our human vulnerabilities. There’s a reason we give thanks at mealtimes, or at least, we used to when we were more attuned to the significance of food in our lives.
When I buy at the Farmer’s Market at the Evergreen Brickworks, I experience all of these connections more strongly than when I shop at the local grocery store. They are in the foreground, rather than some invisible background. The food there is connected to my own place, experience and time, not a commodity produced by parts and in places unknown. In other words, a zucchini is more than a zucchini. It is something that draws me deeper into place, time and relationships. This has always been as much a part of food’s job as providing calories on which to run, like so much gas in a car.
Buying food at the Brickworks is exciting, not because I’m getting some validation of yuppie values, but because connectedness in engaging and enriching. That itself is a kind of pleasure. A nourishment beyond the cheapest possible calories. And, as Albert Borgmann says, “pleasures embedded in engagement will not betray us.”
* Joel Salatin says his customer aren’t “elites”, “We sell to all kinds of people.”
As the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy makes itself comfortable on the New York Times bestseller list, feminists and cultural critics are asking why. Plenty of books offer up heady cocktails of wealth and sex, so why the particular appeal of 50 Shades right here, right now? The answer might just lie in the books’ tantalizing renderings of a world of maximum power with minimum responsibility.
Power is sexy. Thrilling. Hot, as Anastasia would say. In a radio interview, Russell Smith, author of the erotic novels Girl Crazy and Diana: A Diary in the Second Person, pointed out power is a part of all sex, no matter how “vanilla”. B&D merely forces that power out into the open and makes it the plot-point of an erotic encounter.
What’s interesting is that the power at work in 50 Shades isn’t the power of a dominant man over a submissive female, or at least, it’s not only that. We learn early on that Christian’s first relationship was with a much older woman with whom he was the submissive. From the outset, this orients us to think of power as something fluid, malleable, less about gender than about experience. It’s a position one takes, rather than a blunt force. Notwithstanding Christian’s relative sophistication and real economic power, this creates an exciting tension in the book. In any act in which Christian is dominating Anastasia, we can imagine Christian himself being dominated. This sort of instability is fun. And sexy.
But the true appeal of the way power is wielded in 50 Shades might actually lie in the narrow delineation of responsibility attached to it.
When Christian has Anastasia utterly in his power, he has only two responsibilities: her pleasure and safety. This model of maximum power with minimum responsibility is the obverse of the way many of us experience life in the early 21st Century. Scholars say that we live in an era of “responsibilization”. Practically, this means that, since the 1980s, governments and institutions have shifted responsibility for the well-being of individuals and societies away from themselves and on to individuals.
For example, in the 1990s, the UK introduced a law making parents responsible for their children’s school attendance. By 2009, a parent was jailed every two weeks for a child’s truancy. As pension programs are cut across the developed world, governments are warning people that they’re going to be responsible for their own retirement. In the USA, where food industry lobbyists have fought to label pizza a vegetable, healthcare “consumers” are increasingly expected to take charge of their own health management. Regulators all too often serve other interests.
This has created real practical pressures on people. It’s also created an ethos of burden from which the average person might reasonably wish to escape.
The vexing thing about these greater responsibilities is that they are arguably occurring at a time when many of us perceive ourselves to have decreasing power. As every good manager knows, to give responsibility and power is to have a happy employee. But to assign responsibility without power is a recipe for frustration and anxiety.
Yet this is precisely what seems to be happening in society writ large. It’s hard to feel like an effective agent in the world when so much feels out of one’s control. The economy, global warming, constant busyness – often we feel like we’re simply on survival mode rather than getting out there and shaping our lives and communities.
Hence the delicious appeal of 50 Shades. It’s the perfect 21st Century fantasy. The normal burdens of workaday life are magicked away by Christian’s billions, leaving the requirement only to obey. Responsibilities shrink to pleasure and immediate safety, something comfortably within Christian’s considerable sexual toolkit. And power, ah, power is absolute and intoxicating, however it’s configured and reconfigured between the two of them.
With 50 Shades, the default analysis seems to be that it’s simply a new version of an age-old trope about the erotic – even redemptive - potential of female submissiveness. As Maureen Dowd said in the New York Times, we’ve seen this script before in The Story of O, 9 ½ Weeks and Exit to Eden. Dowd and others see the modern twist that makes this book red hot right now is that, with women actually wielding more power than ever, it’s a relief to fantasize about setting aside work, childcare and decision making to imagine ourselves submissive objects of pleasure. Didn’t make the Board meeting, pick up the dry cleaning and get the shopping done? So sorry, I was tied up by my naughty billionaire.
This perspective makes sense. But we also have to consider that 50 Shades is alluring because it reverses a power-responsibility ratio that’s sometimes hard to swallow. And as readers thrill to Christian – and Anastasia’s – power, maybe it offers a glimpse of individual agency that could be just as pleasurable in the real world.
What can road trips tell us about the good life? They’re a North American icon, after all. Most of us have some tale to tell about a great road trip. Every generation seems to produce at least one classic movie about them, from Thelma & Louise to The Hangover. What is it about the open road that’s so appealing?
Albert is a thirty year old contractor with his own business. He used to race bikes semi-professionally, and he’s traveled all over the world for training and competitions. He’s at once a sound guy and rather roguish: in his wilder years, you’d have trusted him with your firstborn but maybe not your sister. Now he’s married with a baby of his own and he’s a little more sedate, although there’s still mischief in his eyes. I asked him to tell me about a really great time in his life and he told me about a road trip.
“One of the best times I ever had was driving across the country by myself. I’d never spent that kind of time alone. I bought dozens of CDs, thinking I’d have listen to them non-stop to keep me going. But as it was, I gave them all away at a gas station only twelve hours into the trip. I was having too much fun just driving and thinking.”
I asked him why it was fun.
“I guess you’d call it soul-searching fun. I’d been partying pretty hard on the West Coast, and I realized that it was turning a little negative for me. I decided to drive all the way back home. Two thousand miles. I knew it was going to be hard. It was winter. There were places that were dangerous. But I wound up planning my whole future over those four and a half days. It was like a rite of passage.”
Now Albert loves travel and adventure, so it’s not all that surprising that he loved his trip, even if it was in the dead of winter. But then I ran into someone else who also said that a road trip represented one of the best times in his life. And this was someone unlikely. This was my father.
When I was last home, I asked my father to tell me about times in his life that he’s really had fun. Knowing him, I figured it was a slam dunk he’d talk about the fun he has investigating and buying new gadgets, I mean, technologies. My father has always been the quintessential early adopter. He has subscriptions to technology magazines so arcane, most engineers haven’t heard of them. He’s the guy who shows the cool twenty year olds how to use the functionality on their iPhones. Indeed, one fateful year, he upstaged one of my best friends at her own wedding by showing up with the first digital camera anyone had ever seen. (She has since forgiven me: he took wonderful pictures, and she thought the camera was cool too.)
But my father surprised me. Instead of describing the joys of shiny new devices, he told me about a road trip.
In the mid-1960s, my Dad needed to get from Vancouver to Toronto to take up a training position in public health at the University of Toronto. He and my mother owned a silver 1960 Sunbeam convertible, an excellent specimen of the genus “beloved but temperamental English sports car”, and they decided to see if they could coax it across the thousands of miles they’d need to cover between the two cities. They set off in the middle of summer: my Dad drove, my mother rode shotgun, and John, my then two-year-old brother, sat in the back with Fred, our large and extremely vocal Siamese cat. They ambled across the country over three weeks, stopping wherever their fancy took them. They explored national parks, small towns and interesting attractions, and, since they didn’t have much money, they ate a lot of picnics. To look at a picture of the car, which was minute, it scarcely seems credible: a toddler and a cat? In an English convertible? Three weeks?
I told my father that it sounded like a recipe for hell.
“On the contrary,” he said. “I think it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. We had a real sense of adventure, of exploring the unknown. And sharing the experience with your mother was a lot of fun. I really liked it because it felt like we were partners in this adventure. I look back on it as one of the happiest times of my life.”
By this point in the story, I thought my father was pulling my leg. He’s not much of a traveler, and my mother frankly hated it. Case in point: we had never gone anywhere as a family when I was growing up. I helpfully pointed this out to him.
“That’s true,” my father acknowledged. “But, you see, there was necessity involved. We had to get from Vancouver to Toronto. And once we realized that we had to do it, we got right into it. We went for it and we loved it.”
Setting aside the fact that one of the happiest times of my father’s life was before I was born, I was struck by the fact that both Albert and my father described a cross-country road trip as the most fun they ever had.
It seems to come down two things. The first is exploration. Exploration is a powerful kind of fun. Road trips are gripping metaphors for discovery precisely because they overlay literal, geographic exploration with interior journeys. In Albert’s case, he was exploring himself vis-à-vis his past and desired future. In my father’s story, he was exploring a new side of himself and my mother, and indeed of their relationship. We instinctively recognize that exploration is fun, whatever the guises in which it comes: a child exploring his or her neighborhood, a reader exploring a bookstore, or a lover exploring the body of a beloved.
The second theme is connection. In my conversations with my father and Albert, both said that they loved the sense of experiencing and somehow connecting to Canada as they drove across it. The country is so big, it’s difficult to hold one sense of it in one’s imagination. But crossing a big chunk of it connects you to the reality of it. Suddenly, you’ve logged those miles, seen what it’s all about. As Albert said, it’s like a rite of passage. And crossing those miles with someone, as my father did with my mother (and John, and Fred), connected them powerfully too.
The things that excite - or worry us – about our homes are favorite subjects for Toronto Star journalist Elvira Cordileone. Space. Neighborhood. Design. Green tech. Last week, she came to me with a question: “Why are so many of us susceptible to the “lifestyle marketing” proffered by condo developers?”
There’s an easy answer here, of course. We’re suckers for condo lifestyle marketing because we’re suckers for lifestyle marketing period. In the triumph of seduction over experience, we’re not immune to the flicker of hope that a sleek new Chanel lipstick or saucy little red sports car will somehow make us more popular, glamorous or happy. When it comes to condos, the promise to provide a fully-fledged lifestyle is even more tantalizing: after all, a condo is actually a place to live – isn’t it tempting to believe it really can provide a whole lifestyle?
And, come to think of it, why stop at condos? Many homes currently on sale in Toronto have been staged to suggest, if not an outright brand, then at least a perfect lifestyle. Jonathan Kay described this phenomenon in a hilarious National Post column last year. Walls aren’t enough: we hunger for beautiful ideas about ourselves.
But if seduction is part of the picture, I think there are also other things working to make lifestyle marketing in condos and houses effective.
What are our homes about? They are our dwelling places, sure. They’re investments, yes. But they’re more besides: as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said, our homes represent a microcosm of the whole social world in which we live. My house is thus a mini-North America. There are dedicated spaces for work (my office, the children’s crafts table), because work is important. Everyone has their own bedroom, because space and privacy are essential. At the same time, the children are invited to decorate their bedrooms as they see fit, because individuality matters. These qualities of a home are normal to us. Natural even. Except they’re not: they’re expressions of cultural values we’ve absorbed with our mother’s milk (or formula, pace Elizabeth Badinter).
Our homes are also settings in which we can interpret and personalize the social norms that govern our lives. For example, there’s a social norm that says that, as a mother, it is my “job” to preserve my family’s memories. My home is my canvass to do that the way I see fit. So, for example, we keep and display shells that my children have brought home from the beach, rather than, say, the plastic alligator that we bought at the airport. My home is my means to understand who I am in relation to the larger world, to create the me, and the family, that I want.
And yet, as I said in my last post, we’re in a cultural trend of outsourcing. Once upon a time, our home was the site in which we did many of the tasks that centered our lives, like cooking and sharing food, caring for children, marking rituals and holidays. One of the fascinating things about the way in which the condo market now advertises “lifestyles” is that they are taking on the role of creating a sense of what our home is all about. We are outsourcing our “homemaking” to them. Through tangible elements, such as location and design, and also less tangible things like communication messages, they tell us what our home means – and therefore who we are, or more to the point, who we can imagine ourselves to be.
In some respects, this is kind of fun. Consumers aren’t stupid, and we know we’re buying into a fantasy. But there is an attendant danger – we don’t want to be left with a hollow core, a world of messages about ourselves rather than actualities.
So is it possible to transform a fantasy lifestyle into a real life? A good life? Of course. Here are three ideas for new condo dwellers – or people who’ve bought that perfectly staged home - that Elvira Cordileone and I talked about:
This in from France: this weekend the Globe & Mail, published an interview with “noted French feminist and intellectual Elisabeth Badinter”, who railed against the cultural pressure on women to be perfect mothers. Notionally, I think this is an important argument to make, so I dove into the article with great interest. I suppose I was hoping to hear new insight about, say, the challenges women face being “good” mothers given the fact that most workplaces still struggle to accommodate the reality of parenting-roles alongside work-roles. However, to my dismay, the focus of Badinter’s attack was on child-centered childrearing practices, such as breastfeeding and co-sleeping, which she referred to, jaw-droppingly, as “ancestral practices”. She argued that these rob women of time and freedom and (by implication) dignity. It's great Badinter is opening up the discourse on mothering, and I get her point that time-intensive childrearing practices do create pressure on parents (theoretically, not just women, although statistically, women still carry the larger load). But there’s a fundamental reality here: children must be cared for. They are needy. Badinter’s turn of phrase, “despotism of the insatiable child” makes it sound like the child intentionally tortures his/her mother, but it’s not like that: they’re born dependent on us.
How we try to meet those dependencies is a fundamental part of who we are and what we believe in. And we have to recognize that if we don’t meet those dependencies ourselves, we have to outsource them. This raises important questions: to whom do we outsource - and to what effect? And where does caring for children, and family life in general, fit into the good life?
The sociologist Juliet B. Schor has written brilliantly that, in effect, a lot of this outsourcing is going to corporations. The marketplace is already trying to “colonize” family life: Schor writes that “corporations increasingly have been acting as parents…they shape children’s desires and values, keep them company for many hours, and teach them.” Further, through media…“they structure the symbolic environment in which children live.” This has real, practical consequences. For example, it makes it easier for corporations to position junk foods as “cool”. Schor adds that “the influence of advertising on deep symbolic structures has also been powerful in the areas of gender, sexuality, violence, material desire, and body image.”
Although, at first blush, Shor’s argument about the perils of outsourcing parenting to corporations sounds more relevant for older children as opposed to the despotic infants on Badinter’s radar, the relevance of her point lies in her idea of “colonization”. Two of the typical strategies corporations use to maximize the value of their customers include forging a relationship with them as early as possible, and providing a range of products to “keep” them for a longer period of time. Thus, for example, we now have “Similac Mom” – a supplement for mothers-to-be (first two ingredients: water and sugar), and Similac formulas for children up to two years, even though doctors say children can be on plain old cow’s milk by the time they’re one. It’s all about training us to look for “solutions” and “convenience”. The earlier we let corporations into our caregiving, the stronger they’ll be – and the more money they’ll eventually make.
To be fair, I’ve seen in my own work in marketing that brands may strategically try to align themselves with parental values rather than undermine them. I’ve also never met a marketer who didn’t fundamentally believe there was something important and redemptive in their product, even when those products were candies and chips. God knows, they loved their own children and wouldn’t dream of intentionally harming someone else’s.
But we have to remember that ultimately, their bottom line goals are different: they want to make their growth targets for the quarter; parents want to raise healthy and well-adjusted children.
Parenting is messy, time consuming, fraying and frazzling. It’s also the ultimate experience of embodiment. Children come from our bodies and they need our bodies to thrive. Of course there are situations were formula is a godsend, but even without breastfeeding, our little ones need our caring hands, our warm skin, our breath on their bodies. It’s not degrading to change a diaper; it’s life, pure and simple. And, while Badinter is scathing about women who embrace pain in the context of natural childbirth (and while I had two C-sections with all the painkillers I could wheedle), I ask: is it so wrong to want to live in our bodies so intensely at that primal moment and beyond?
Every parent needs to learn to rediscover and manage his or her separate and individual self after the arrival of a child, and this is arguably particularly acute for women whose bodies have literally been at one with their child’s throughout pregnancy. But as we figure our way through that thorny path, we have to ask whether the good life is about being fully independent and able to rise any constraining ties? Or is the new good life one about inter-dependence, one where people – not corporations – are at the heart of relationships and families?
As Earth Day celebrations kick off in earnest today, it seems like the perfect time to share this short video: Volunteering Leads to Good Health. It’s one man’s story of going from anxiety attacks, exhaustion and a fast food addiction to health and feeling alive. Al characterizes his journey as beginning with the need to “reduce stress”, which is something we can all relate to, but which is also, I think, a catch-all way for describing a profound disconnection from so many of the things that make life life: nature, good food, community. It’s a disconnection that’s devastating for our physical and mental well-being. This video isn’t slick, no one is trying to sell you anything, or to build their personal brand, but it’s all the more powerful for that. This is a man with a story to tell about the power of connection, one he found by volunteering at the Evergreen Brickworks.
Thrilled to say that my new article, "Who Stole Fun?" is now out in the new edition of Scope magazine. You can find it at <http://www.scope-mag.com/issues/2012-1>. I'm honoured that the article is laid out alongside the stunning artwork of Isabelle Menin. You can get it as a free download, although I would really encourage you to check out the whole magazine. It also features fascinating articles such as Sonia Katyal and Thierry Lenain's piece on the future of the idea of intellectual property, Stephanie Anderson's moving narrative on Haiti and Douglas Allen's piece on the ways in which measurement helped to create the Industrial Revolution and the modern world, as well as artwork by Mark Chadwick, Kirsty O'Leary-Leeson, Peter Olschinsky, Verena Weiss and others.
The irony: I’m in my paper gown, waiting for my physical. To while away the time, I’m re-reading Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. The doctor comes into the room, and I slide the book back into my purse, my mind still on Louv’s argument that spending time in nature makes us healthier. In fact, in the last sentence I read before putting the book Louv points out that, in 1699, “the book the English Gardener advised the reader to spend ‘spare time in the garden, either digging, setting out, or weeding; there is no better way to preserve your health.’” Then my physical begins. My regular doctor is off on maternity leave, so I see the locum. She’s a warm, respectful woman with a ready smile. She shows she cares by answering questions thoughtfully. We review the blood work that I had done the previous week. Triglycerides good, blood sugar good, cholesterol fabulous, iron a little low. We review the nurse’s exam: weight good, BP good. In other words, it’s all about the numbers, and my numbers are fine.
Other than asking after my children, she doesn’t ask me any personal questions, and, after years of experience doing health-related ethnographies, I don’t really expect her to. I’m aware that she may well be doing some sort of assessment of my overall demeanor, but if she is, I “pass” without any further exploration of my thoughts, feelings, experiences or lifestyle. We part, and I agree to watch my iron, and to update my tetanus shot in a few years.
All in all, it was a perfectly normal physical, one that I was lucky to have in a world of unequal access to health care. But it also highlighted that, officially anyway, we still have a narrow vision about what matters when it comes to health and wellness. We know things other than cholesterol etc. matter, but they’re time-consuming for physicians to take on in the clinical encounter, and more to the point, they don’t fit comfortably into the prevailing scientific discourse.
Here are 10 questions I would have loved to hear my doctor ask:
The vision of health that lies behind these is completely different than the one captured in blood tests and weight measurements. Health here isn’t just about risk minimization and calibrating the chemistry of the body to mitigate the crappy things we do to ourselves. These are important, but shouldn't a vision of health also be about living? These questions would have asked me whether I’m connected to people, to the natural environment, to what I put in my body, to a spirit of life.
This isn’t just some Romantic sentiment: there’s no shortage of evidence that the behaviors interrogated by the questions above contribute to better mental and physical health. We don’t always know why they do. Sometimes it’s straightforward: if you put healthy, unprocessed food into your system, your body will be better off. Sometimes it’s harder to pinpoint: for example, we know spending time in nature can reduce cortisol (stress hormone) levels - elevated levels of which are linked to any numbers of chronic illnesses - and improve feelings of well-being, but we don’t know why that happens.
My doctor probably won’t be asking me those questions any time soon. But I can ask them of myself, and raise them more broadly, along with one of the most important questions overall: what’s the culture of health that we want to create?
There’s an old joke that you know you’re in London because any conversation opener starts with a complaint about the horrors of London transit. If we have a North American equivalent of a ritualized greeting, it has to be some sort of statement about how busy we are. I’m certainly guilty of moaning about how busy I am. And last Sunday night, after a weekend that included solo-parenting (which itself included taking my children out to dinner, the Art Gallery, the Science Centre and to swimming lessons, not to mention meals, dishes, etc.), six loads of laundry, baking muffins (yes, really), frequent email exchanges with a friend weighing out some big life decisions, powering through the Hunger Games to see if it would be OK for my seven-year-old to read (nope!), and, oh yes, working on an article, I felt fully entitled to describe myself as busy. Even if I hadn’t, the half-bottle of red I’d consumed all on my lonesome Sunday night would have been testament to my deep need to slow down after all that busyness.
Of course, there was a lot of choice involved in that busyness. Pint-sized nagging notwithstanding, I didn’t have to take my children to the Art Gallery and the Science Centre. I could have made myself a coffee, cracked the Sunday New York Times and sent the children out to play. I don’t even begin to fashion myself as a super-mom, so it’s not like I would have been letting down my self-image.
Or was there a choice? Many say that we live in an era that celebrates busyness and equates it with success. We’re measured by how busy we are and by how much we get done. Sometimes, this is literal, as in the case with performance evaluations at work. Sometimes it’s more symbolic, like receiving admiring social kudos for seamlessly managing multiple spheres of life, such as family, career, marriage, fitness etc. By this logic, I’m a worthier person for having had such a busy weekend (although maybe not if you count nocturnal descent into the Barbera), and, given our hunger to see ourselves as worthy, maybe I didn’t really have so much choice after all. We have to play along with our times.
Except what if this busy ethic, as it’s been called, isn’t something unique to our times, but more a prevailing human trope? What if the feeling that there’s always something to attend to is deeply entrenched in most cultures? I can’t really imagine a Medieval farming family feeling like they had a lot of time to sit around and watch Jersey Shore. Imagine managing a farm, house, laundry and family with only a pair of oxen and a couple of kids to help. Except that maybe it didn’t feel “busy” because it was normal: there wasn’t an image of leisure against which to compare it.
“Busyness” has actually been a prevailing theme in Western culture since at least the Industrial Revolution. Recall Wordsworth’s great sonnet, The World Is Too Much with Us:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
According to Wikipedia and their sources, Wordsworth wrote this around 1802 as an angry lament about “the decadent material cynicism of the time”. While not a direct volley at busyness per se, the “busy ethic” is clearly part of his gripe. We’re moving too fast, and focusing on the wrong things, thus sacrificing our human birthright of engagement with the natural world. It’s all pretty familiar, isn’t it?
Naturally, there are meaningful distinctions between Wordsworth’s time and our own that make our lives truly fast-paced: globalization, instant communications, messages pouring at us constantly from every conceivable medium. And, in their book Busier than Ever!: Why American Families Can't Slow Down, social scientists Charles N. Darrah, James M. Freman, and J.A. English-Lueck have pinpointed specific ways in which North American families are busy in a different way than in previous generations. For example, we set high expectations for our involvement with our children, and we have to race around between many different locations.
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s great paper Through the Crack of the Time Bind: From Market Management to Family Management reveals that people adopt different strategies to manage chronic busyness. Some endure it with little hope of change, some defer their play and leisure, some thrive on it, some delegate certain tasks (e.g. childrearing) so they can take on more (e.g. paid work) and some resist.
I find this idea of “resistance” tantalizing. Hochschild’s resisters are people who “downshift” professionally, say by working 80%, in order to make more time for meaningful activities in their lives, like going on field trips with their children. The term also makes me think of the infamous Ikea ad, where the man leaves his office at 3:00 pm, garnering applause from his colleagues.
Now, in real life, I should think that someone who left at 3:00 pm would be loathed by his colleagues because it leaves them stuck there to hold the bag. And in an era of job insecurity, well, let’s just say leaving at 3:00 pm is a high risk option. The reality is that many of us don’t have – or at least don’t feel we have – the means to resist busyness by working less. No doubt there’s a political issue here, one worth fighting at a social level. In the meantime, though, I want to share three strategies for coping with chronic busyness. These are simple things I’ve seen people doing in the context of my research, and they seem to be surprisingly effective:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
slow
Dropping from the veils on the morning to where the cricked
sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
By the way...just a bit of housekeeping. I'm now publishing this blog under my maiden name, Lisa Meekison.
Anthropology News published an article of mine today as part of their series on health, well-being and happiness. It argues that the dominant, consumption-based vision for the good life in North America is making us sick and that, moreover, our individualist model for understanding health and well-being all too often compounds rather than helps the problem. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s a new way of thinking about the good life that actually sets us on to a much better path for health and well-being. We can see it in the work of writers like Mark Bittman and Laurie David, and articulated brilliantly by the philosopher Albert Borgmann. Theirs is a vision of a good life characterized by activities that engage and connect us to each other and the world around us.
The article is publicly available at this link http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/03/15/towards-a-new-model-of-health-and-well-being/ if you’d like to read more!