Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ann Friedman reviews Stephen Watts’s Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America, which investigates the man who gave us How to Win Friends and Influence People, the perennial bestseller first published in 1936. Carnegie’s main strategy for getting ahead? He argued that once you realized “people are mainly self-interested … by playing to those interests with unwavering enthusiasm, success [is] a given”:

Instead of judging people for what they want, Carnegie suggested, we should try to understand their cravings and cater to them. This line of thought, perhaps, explains such modern capitalist horrors as the Doritos Locos Tacos at Taco Bell—but it was clearly in harmony with the emergence of a mass consumer economy. In the early twentieth century, “a new ethos emerged that was preoccupied with personality development, personal happiness, interpersonal relations, and self-fulfillment,” Watts writes, describing it as “a form of individualism less concerned with religious salvation or overt economic profit than with emotional well-being.” Whereas Carnegie’s bootstrappy, individualist sensibility could be seen as libertarian, he was in fact decidedly apolitical—almost in the manner of a “Hey, I’m just doing me” Silicon Valley bro who can’t see the larger implications of his worldview.

Reviewing Watts’s book in November, Maureen Corrigan elaborated on the cultural shifts Carnegie’s work heralded:

Carnegie’s emphasis on projecting a sunny personality was part of a larger shift away from a Victorian concern with character and self-denial to a modern fascination with advertising, consumerism and self-promotion. Carnegie’s teaching promised to pay off in self-fulfillment and fat wallets. … Watts shows how particularly attuned Carnegie was to the psychological needs of Americans beaten down by the Great Depression, who needed to hear that positive thinking would garner positive results. It’s easy, of course, for we contemporary readers to dismiss Carnegie’s teaching as mere boosterism and Babbittry, but his self-help legacy has endured well beyond his own death in 1955, and flourishes in our own age.

The Economist released a new video interview with Watts here.

In the above TED talk, Benjamin Bratton questions the utility of the format itself. “TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design,” he says, adding, “I think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment.” He calls for “more Copernicus, less Tony Robbins”:

Let me tell you a story. I was at a presentation that a friend, an astrophysicist, gave to a potential donor. I thought the presentation was lucid and compelling…. After the talk the sponsor said to him, “you know what, I’m gonna pass because I just don’t feel inspired … you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.”

At this point I kind of lost it. Can you imagine? Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather this is one of our most frightening problems.

Heebie-Jeebie is unsympathetic, exclaiming, “TED talks are entertainment! The end.” Paul Fidalgo strikes a middle ground:

I suppose … there is a kind of “churchiness” about [TED talks], a gee-whiz awe-inducement about the Great Beyond which may or may not actually exist or come to pass. … In a way, it’s not entirely fair to TED-talkers. For one, they host plenty of talks grounded fully in reality and hard science. Other times, they host talks that genuinely spark new ways of looking at complex problems, or draw connections that deserve attention. But I suppose the point is that it’s hard to know which is which, and especially to the secular layperson, to decide requires a little too much faith.

Chad Orzel remains skeptical of TED naysayers, writing, “Sometimes, stuff that looks like speculative inspirational piffle in the moment turns out to be foundational for a whole new field.” He cites Richard Feynman’s 1959 speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” to illustrate his point:

What’s amusing about this is that Feynman’s famous speech is, essentially, a TED talk. Okay, he does a few more order-of-magnitude calculations than you would expect from a typical TED speaker, and it’s way too long for TED, but in spirit, it’s pretty much exactly the sort of thing TED promotes and Bratton is inveighing against. It’s pure gee-whiz techno-optimism– Feynman himself says “What would be the utility of such machines? Who knows?”– with only hazy ideas about what this would accomplish, or how you would do it. The few suggestions he makes about concrete ways to proceed are mostly wrong, or at least bear very little resemblance to what people actually doing nanotechnology research do these days.

And for a very long time, none of the stuff Feynman talks about went anywhere. You could easily argue that we still haven’t done most of it. If you’d pointed to this talk in, say, 1979 and said it would be one of Feynman’s most enduring legacies, most physicists would’ve said you were crazy. It had basically zero practical impact for decades, but now is trotted out as an example of the prescience of genius, and an inspiration for all sorts of amazing new science.

Meanwhile, Keith Humphreys points to this Onion parody as “the ultimate takedown of the format.”

Dan Shewan finds the 2006 film This Is England, which depicts young skinheads in the early ’80s, an especially resonant portrayal of racism in his home country:

The bleak, fractured Britain depicted in Shane Meadows’ 2006 film This Is England is not unlike the one in which I grew up. We moved around a lot when I was young, but eventually settled in a depressing coastal town not entirely dissimilar to the one in which Shaun, the movie’s protagonist, lives. Meadows’ semi-autobiographical film reveals to us a glimpse of a Britain divided by racism — a nation where intolerance masquerades as pride, and one in which young minds are molded by fear. Growing up in a working class town, racial slurs such as “Paki” and “wog” were inextricably interwoven into the vernacular of the public schoolyards in which I played. Some children used them cruelly. Others simply didn’t know any better.

Although racism in Britain can be traced back to the slave trade, the legacy of hatred portrayed in This Is England is enduring.

A recent survey by market research firm OnePoll revealed that one in three Britons admitted to making racist remarks on a regular basis, or engaging in conversations that could be considered racist. More than one in ten people confessed to having been called a racist by someone close to them. Lastly, around forty percent of Britons polled had prefaced a comment with the classic refrain of “I’m not racist, but…” at some point or another. Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that many of the two thousand adults surveyed by OnePoll claimed their feelings of racial prejudice had been passed down to them by older members of their family. In terms of demographics, individuals over the age of fifty-five were found to be the least racially tolerant, but young people aged between eighteen and twenty-four were close behind.

There’s a huge amount of tolerance in Britain, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for an absence of intolerance. And in this, as in many other things, London is not the same as England. Still, I’m shocked by the data on the youngest generation. It suggests a deep lack of real integration beyond the prosperous metropolis.

James Chastek, a Catholic writer, fears what it might look like:

Christians occasionally daydream about winning the culture over for Christ. But this would mean that belief in Christ would be policed and encouraged in the same way that our current cultural beliefs are: by manipulation of the levers of power to control spoils, intimidate dissent, and coin new taboo words and thoughtcrimes that can immediately condemn without argument and persuade without reason. Any teacher is impressed by the degree to which cultural doctrines are thoroughly and universally believed and flawlessly applied in all particular situations; and they are not merely mouthed by children who, though really skeptical of what they are saying, mouth the words anyway. They really believe all that stuff – they even see it as self-evident.  Is that how I want someone to believe in Christ? Would I feel better if I could just silence dissent with a taboo word or the confidence that the thoughtcriminal would lose his job?

Dreher extends the thought experiment to more than just Christians, adding that “you don’t have to be any sort of religious believer to be a self-righteous prick”:

A useful thing for all of us to think about, no matter where we are in the culture war: What would victory look like? How would we treat the defeated? Would we impose a Versailles-style peace, thus setting the stage for a terrible backlash and resumption of the war? And, what would victory — the achievement of cultural hegemony and commanding power over the defeated — do to us? Would we become that which we hate?

As I write this, I’m thinking about a secular liberal I used to know. We weren’t friends, but we moved in the same circles. He was a smart guy and a paragon of crusading righteousness. You couldn’t joke with him about anything; he was always looking for signs of deviation. He was the sort of person who, if ever he gained power, would be ruthless with his enemies. This sort of person recurs through history, in all guises…

[H]e really was, and is, someone to be feared. People like that always are. They tend to be effective culture warriors, because they are tireless and uncompromising. Their moral ardor is not compromised by a sense of tragedy, of their own fallibility, of basic humanity, or even something as trivial as a sense of humor. I’ve been around people on the conservative side of the culture war who are like that; in those instances, I would rather be having a drink at a gay bar. I’m serious about that.

Pico Iyer argues that Proust was an “accidental Buddhist,” quoting from Within a Budding Grove to illustrate his point:

“We do not receive wisdom,” [the painter] Elstir tells the narrator (who has just realized that “this man of genius, this sage” is a “foolish, corrupt little painter” in another context), “we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us.” Could the Buddha, enjoining his disciples to “Be a lamp unto yourselves,” have phrased it any better? Or: “If there were no such thing as habit, life might appear delightful to those of us who are constantly under the threat of death—that is to say, to all mankind.” I can’t think of a clearer formulation of the Western Buddhist’s teachings that habit is how we keep ourselves away from truth, imprisoned in our heads and not the world.

Iyer continues:

Proust’s genius, like that of his compatriot [Henri] Cartier-Bresson (who called himself “an accidental Buddhist”), is to register every detail of the surface and yet never get caught up in the superficial.

Here is the rare master who saw that surface was merely the way depth often expressed itself, the trifle in which truth was hidden thanks to mischievous circumstance (or, others would say, the logic of the universe). It takes stamina, bloody-mindedness, concentration, and a fanatic’s devotion to stare the mind down and see how rarely it sees the present, for all the alternative realities it can conjure out of memory or hope. Proust had the sense to belabor us with little theology, academic philosophy or overt epistemology; yet nearly every sentence in his epic work takes us into the complications, the false fronts, the self-betrayals of the heart and mind and so becomes what could almost be called an anatomy of the soul. I’m not sure sitting under a tree in Asia 2,500 years ago would have produced anything different.

Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, offers a “semi-technical definition”:

[S]omeone who fails to appropriately respect the individual perspectives of the people around him, treating them as tools or objects to be manipulated, or idiots to be dealt with, rather than as moral and epistemic peers with a variety of potentially valuable perspectives.

Perhaps the jerk’s greatest moral failing? A lack of mercy:

Mercy is, I think, near the heart of practical, lived morality. Virtually everything everyone does falls short of perfection. Her turn of phrase is less than perfect, she arrives a bit late, her clothes are tacky, her gesture irritable, her choice somewhat selfish, her coffee less than frugal, her melody trite — one can create quite a list! Practical mercy involves letting these quibbles pass forgiven or even better entirely unnoticed, even if a complaint, were it made, would be just. The jerk appreciates neither the other’s difficulties in attaining all the perfections he himself (imagines he) has nor the possibility that some portion of what he regards as flawed is in fact blameless. Hard moralizing principle comes naturally to the jerk, while it is alien to the jerk’s opposite, the sweetheart. The jerk will sometimes give mercy, but if he does, he does so unequally — the flaws and foibles that are forgiven are exactly the ones the jerk recognizes in himself or has other special reasons to be willing to forgive.