THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE

by William H. Benson

January 12, 2012

     Alexander Hamilton was born 257 years ago yesterday, on January 11, 1755. He was a bright and articulate young man, who had served in George Washington’s cabinet as the new government’s first Secretary of Treasury. But at the age of forty-nine, he agreed to a duel with Thomas Jefferson’s vice-president, Aaron Burr. Honor bade Hamilton meet Burr’s challenge. At the duel Burr shot Alexander Hamilton, and the next day he died, a tragic loss to our country. He would have made a great President.

     Steve Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology, published last fall a most interesting book, The Better Angels of our Nature, in which he examines the reasons that underlay the steep decline in levels of violence over the millennium that humanity has ruled our planet. In his book, Pinker describes Hamilton’s decision. “Yet in 1804 this brilliant man did something that by today’s standards was astonishingly stupid.”

     Dueling was by then on the way out. Because New York state had recently outlawed dueling, Burr and Hamilton rowed across the Hudson River to New Jersey to conduct their business. As a means of dispensing with quarrels, dueling was by then considered an act of violence, and so the government had stepped in and made it illegal.

     The state’s assumption of power was one of the reasons that Pinker identified to explain the decline in humankind’s level of violence, and he calls this exchange of power—that from individuals to a governing body—“Leviathan,” a word he borrowed from the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Before there was government, human beings lived in a state of anarchy in which people lashed out at each other constantly. Angry words were said, and murder, rape, pillage, arson, and theft resulted.

     “Human history,” according to Pinker, “is a cavalcade of bloodshed.” Life in the natural state was according to Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

     Pinker writes: “The Leviathan [is] a monarchy or other government authority that embodies the will of the people and has a monopoly on the use of force.” Acts of violence by individuals are now illegal.

     The Roman writer Tacitus noted this renouncement of violence when he wrote, “Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.”

     As all psychologists are wont to do, Pinker quantifies violence. He produces convincing graphs that show that the murder rate in the twenty-first century stands now at 1 per 100,000 people. That is below the 45 in Detroit in 1980, and far below the 250 among the Aztecs prior to Cortes’ arrival. It is also a significant distance below the 500 to 600 average across 27 societies at various times in the past.

     According to Pinker, we live in one of the safest times in human history. “This discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present.”

     Was this “Pacification Process” caused by religion. No way, Pinker argues. The sacred books of religion of ages past contain chapters filled to the brim with revenge, warfare, murder, and exploitation. Just read a few pages of the Old Testament, or especially Homer’s Illiad, and you will be repulsed.

     In Pinker’s third chapter, he looks at the work of the twentieth century writer Norbert Elias, whom Pinker calls “the most important thinker you have never heard of.” In 1969 Elias published a book he entitled The Civilizing Process. Elias was most curious to know why and how people civilized themselves. Because he did not have access to the statistics that Pinker has, he read materials that people of past generations wrote, specifically books on manners and etiquette.

     Elias concluded that people living in the Middle Ages must have been vulgar, uncouth, even gross, because the etiquette books that they wrote insisted that people should display better manners: “Control your appetites; Delay gratification; Consider the sensibilities of others; Don’t act like a peasant; Distance yourself from your animal nature. And the penalty for these infractions was assumed to be internal: a sense of shame.”

     Because government has assumed the right to use judiciously deeds of violence and people have developed that sense of shame due to poor manners, humankind has civilized itself. According to Elias it was always within our nature to act this way, but that the people of the Middle Ages had “underused” it. “There is no zero point,” he insisted.

     Pinker concludes that lurking within each of us are those “inner demons” that goad us on to commit murder and mayhem, and at the same time there exist those wiser thoughts, “the better angels of our nature,” that caution and guide us towards peacefulness, self-control, restraint, and cooperativeness.

     I find Pinker’s arguments most persuasive, and for a Harvard professor, he writes well.

     The next time someone treats you shabbily, my dear reader, pick up a ten-dollar bill, stare at Alexander Hamilton’s picture, and count to ten. Self-restraint will always be well rewarded.

STEVE JOBS

by William H. Benson

December 29, 2011

     “Steve Jobs was a genius at connecting art to technology, of making leaps based on intuition and imagination. He knew how to make emotional connections with those around him and with his customers.” Walter Isaacson recently wrote and published a biography on Steve Jobs after approximately forty interviews with him, shortly before his untimely passing on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.

     On “60 Minutes” and in articles appearing in The New York Times, Isaacson explained that Steve Jobs was “admired for his consummate skill at persuasion and salesmanship,” and that “he wanted to position each of his businesses and products at the forefront of the information technology for forseeing and setting trends.” He succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams, earning for himself and those who stuck with him incredible wealth and the adulation of millions.

     However, Isaacson admits that there was a dark side to Steve Jobs. He was “considered one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs.” “His employees described him as an erratic and temperamental manager.” He would scream at them. He would size them up, play good guy versus bad guy with them, and then the next day reverse their roles.

     Quickly they understood that Steve Jobs was explosive, prickly, brittle, emotional, brash, arrogant, and aggressive, and that they were on his emotional roller coaster. Callous, cantankerous, and ungenerous, he rebelled at most forms of authority: he refused to drive a car with a license plate.

     Isaacson once asked him why he acted that way, and he replied, “I am a demanding perfectionist.”

     So many of his employees could not take the verbal punches he threw at them, the bruises and wounds they would feel, that he inflicted, and so they would quit, but those who remained, those who withstood the emotional whipsaw, were his team, the best. He insisted that he would only surround himself with the strongest of personalities, and so he urged managers “not to be too nice.”

     All those who dared to stick with him later admitted that “without Steve Jobs demanding, and pushing, and challenging them to discover their best, they would never have achieved all that they did.” One employee stated it well, “The highs were unbelievable. . . . But the lows were unimaginable.”

     The prime question emerging from the book is, “Could Steve Jobs have achieved what he did without the histrionics, the raw rage, the paroxysms of anger that resulted from his own personal fear of failure?” Possible answers are, “of course he could have,” or “probably not,” and there are arguments for each, but I prefer a third answer “who knows?” We cannot know. Steve Jobs was what he was.

     Niceness, some would argue, is not always the most appropriate tactic when trying to motivate others to perform at their highest level. Have you ever heard of a tender-hearted army general? In certain arenas of live, people should expect to be emotionally punched, and told off. Policemen, judges, coaches, surgeons, teachers, and parents, each, on occasion, must be tough if they are to do their jobs.

      One could argue that Steve Jobs’ gadgets, his tools, were vastly superior to what he was as a person, as a human being. The color and sharpness of the icons, the touch screen, and the seamless integration of numerous functions, invariably produces a couple of descriptive words: “Cool!” and “Neat!” Where he was mean and bullying, his machines were life-enhancing, eye-popping, and rewarding. Isaacson said that “Steve Jobs was a bundle of contradictions.”

     How is it that the designs were greater than the designer? That is a question to ponder. Exceptional larger-than-life people, since the earliest days of the human species, have created imaginative tools. Consider the Clovis spear point. A fair number of millennium ago it was the thing of artistry, carefully crafted, beautiful in its own way, but it offered to those who possessed it a technological advantage, a better tool for procuring food, and for defending oneself from predators and enemies. It too stood midway between art and technology.

     Human beings are, have been, and always will be emotional beings, capable of wounding and of being wounded. We constantly grab spears to make our point—literally sometimes and not so literally other times. The Steve Jobs of the world are very good at delivering messages of what they want. Others are not so keen to receive them. Emotions cloud the transmission. “He knew how to make emotional connections with those around him,” Isaacson wrote. True, but those connections were not the usual pleasantries.

     Christmas is over, and we know now who was naughty and who was nice. The new year 2012 beckons us, and we can resolve this year to be mean or kind, rude or considerate, aggressive or passive. Our choice depends upon what type of relationships we want.

TOOLS OF RHETORIC

by William H. Benson

December 15, 2011

     Benjamin Franklin explained in his autobiography that at a young age he desired to learn and master the best literary techniques. “But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them.” So, he obtained the best literary magazine of the day, the Spectator, transformed one of its essays into poetry, and then he said, “after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.” “This,” he said, “was to teach me method in the arrangement of my thoughts.”

     These exercises he completed at night after he had finished his day’s work, so, he said, “that I might in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.” We judge he achieved his ambition.

     Last week, I came across a most interesting lecture by an English professor at Purdue University named Dorsey Armstrong, who listed and explained a series of rhetorical strategies.

      A commonplace is that which is widely known and recognized, an obvious and trite observation that is taken for granted, and which an audience would agree as true. People of yesteryear would write down their simplest thoughts into a commonplace book: observations of the weather, of people, the local events, and the arguments. Instead, people of today “journal” their thoughts.

     Armstrong gives examples of a commonplace: “the pursuit of happiness,” and “hiding in plain sight.” She explains that the ancient rhetoric of Aristotle and Cicero is woven into the very fabric of our thought patterns, but even though rhetoric is not taught today, “it is nowhere, and yet it is everywhere.”

     Stasis is related to commonplace in that “both hinge upon the need for agreement.” But stasis is the balance achieved after an argument or a dispute ceases. It is the peace that breaks out after the war has ended, when warring parties sign a peace treaty. Stasis is a process, and normally is ushered in after opposing factions find agreement upon definitions of ideas, and continues when one side yields.

     By invention a writer generates new ideas or enhances and transforms old ones and thus presents fresh thoughts and mind-jiggling considerations to a bored, dull, and weary audience.

     Arrangement is the recognition that a writer must heed conventions, prescribed patterns, and formulas when listing his or her ideas. If the arrangement veers too far from the accepted patterns, the reader will not follow. Good writers use inductive or deductive reasoning, or a combination of the two.

     Correct reasoning requires the skill of distinguishing between fact and opinion, plus a dose of deliberation and judgment, and the art of collecting and sorting evidence. “Assertion is not evidence!”

     Kairos is a Greek word that means time, but it refers to that supreme moment, when conditions are right. Armstrong says that, “It is saying and writing the right thing in the right way in the right time.” Great writers and public speakers are masters of kairos. Ronald Reagan appeared one day in Berlin and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” That was a kairos moment.

     Kronos was the other Greek word for time, but it referred to the steady march of time, its quantitative feature. Kairos, instead, contains a qualitative aspect. Timing is everything. Ideas are in flux. They are elusive. Grab them before they flee. The window is closing, so pay attention to the commonplace, “strike when the iron is hot.” Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg was also a kairos moment.

     The New Testament authors wrote in Koine Greek; that is, the common dialect of the Greek-speaking people, and because they recognized kairos, they included the strategy in their texts. So they wrote, “And it came to pass in those days,” “in the fullness of time,” “straightaway,” and “they came with haste.” The Romans renamed kairos “Carpe diem,” which means seize and capture the day.

     Like Benjamin Franklin, we can shape our thoughts and enhance our writing with certain rhetorical tools until they stand out as something meaningful and worthy of an audience’s deepest consideration. Such a writer can take hold of the commonplace and seek agreement and stasis with an overpowering argument and solid incontrovertible evidence. He or she can invent new ideas, arrange them into logical patterns, and do this quickly, at the opportune moment, before the window drops and the door closes.

     One New Testament writer wrote a lengthy letter to a friend in which he began with a sentence that, when translated from Koine Greek into King James I’s English of 1611, captures certain of these rhetorical strategies: the commonplace, stasis, invention, arrangement, and kairos. “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word.” The friend’s name was Theophilus, and the writer was Luke.

     Have for yourself a very merry Christmas.

STEPHEN KING & JFK

by William H. Benson

December 1, 2011

     Stephen King is not one of my favorite authors, not even close. I have yet to finish anything he has written, mainly because he restricts himself to two genres that fail to satisfy me—horror and science-fiction. And yet I bought his new book, 11/22/1963, after reading a positive review in The New York Times Book Review. It is a work of fiction, but historical, with a pleasant-feeling romance, and a measure of science-fiction mixed in. A promising setup, even exciting.

     The book’s main character, Jake Epping, is divorced and teaching English composition in a small school in Maine, when Al, the proprietor of the local diner, explains privately to Jake that there is a spot in the back of his diner where, if he walks into that spot, he can travel back to a single point in time, “11:58 A.M. On the morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is the first trip.” Whenever Al returns from this hole into the past, for however long, he has only been gone two minutes.

     Because Al is dying of lung cancer from too many cigarettes, he asks Jake to go back to 1958, stay there for five years, and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy. “You can change history, Jake,” Al tells him. “Do you understand that? John Kennedy can live.”

     Jake agrees, gets himself to Dallas, locates Lee and Marina Oswald, rents the room underneath the Oswald’s room at 214 West Neely Street in Dallas, spies on them, falls in love with a Texas beauty named Sadie Dunhill, and struggles with all his might to stop Oswald. There is the setup.

     In 11/22/1963 Stephen King splices together two shop-worn subjects: time travel and Kennedy’s assassination. Time travel, as a literary topic, began with H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It was advanced, according to King in his “Afterword,” by Jack Finney in his wonderful story Time and Again. For a good story, Hollywood loves time travel, either back or forward. Consider Frank Kapra’s It’s A Wonderful Life or Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait.

     Kennedy’s assassination is a nest of ideas that can be neatly divided into two: those who subscribe to the conspiracy theory and those who point only to Lee Harvey Oswald. A host of books will describe in vivid detail the trajectory of the third bullet, the shooter on the grassy knoll, and that the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the Soviet Union, or Fidel Castro were working in conjunction with Oswald.

     One would tend to believe that after considering what Oswald did in his twenty-four years: he joined the Marines, but then defected to Russia; married Marina Prusakova, a Russian girl with whom he had two daughters; returned to  the U.S., but took a bus to Mexico City where he appealed for a visa to Cuba; and handed out pro-Marxist pamphlets on New Orleans’s streets, urging Fair Play for Cuba.  

     Then, there is The Warren Commission Report—all twenty-six volumes of it, William Manchester’s Death of a President, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, and Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, and each concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. They consider it coincidental that on October 20, 1963 he found the job at Dallas’ Texas Book Depository, which just happened to be on the route of Kennedy’s motorcade, and that he had purchased the previous March by mail-order a Carcano rifle.

     Norman Mailer began his book convinced that there was a conspiracy, but after thoroughly examining the evidence, he wisely concluded that Oswald acted alone. Mailer said, “It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security.” Yet he did, and Stephen King agrees.

     “It is very, very difficult,” he wrote, “for a reasonable person to believe otherwise. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one.” The assassination is “the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in just the right place to get lucky.”

     Simple it may be, but complexity is what the human mind craves and automatically resorts to it when seeking better explanations. Oswald’s last words were, “I’m a patsy,” words that have sent countless people on a frenzied pursuit to name those who they believe pulled Oswald’s strings.

     The wound our nation suffered that Friday, November 22, 1963, on a street in Dallas, Texas has not ever completely healed. I still remember the day. I was ten years old. I was in the fourth grade. Our teacher told us the sad news after our lunch break that our young President was most certainly dead, that someone had shot him while he was riding in a car. A mean thing to do, I thought then and still do.

     On a note of horror, Stephen King’s supreme area of expertise, he ends his book, and so he gives the reader his opinion on gun control, on the necessity of keeping guns out of the zealots’ hands, and on the danger of holding too tight to crazed opinions: “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head explodes.”

JUMPING THE SHARK

by William H. Benson

November 24, 2011

     The expression “jumping the shark” refers to that Happy Days‘ episode that aired on September 20, 1977 when Fonzie, on water-skis and dressed in trunks and his trademark leather jacket, jumped over a penned-up shark. All television series seem to run through a cycle, beginning with a set of fresh ideas, imaginative characters, and entertaining plots, but then, over time as the writers lose their edge, they begin to grasp at silly plots that fail to make any sense, resorting to “jumping the shark” scenes.

     The idiom has subsequently broadened beyond television and now refers to “any enterprise whose best ideas are behind it,” to that “moment when brand, design, or creative effort moves beyond the essential qualities that initially defined its success, beyond relevance.” In a word, to the “absurd.”

     An audience, or a group of voters, citizens, readers, or members belonging to any organization can reach that moment of “jumping the shark,” when the absurd stands up and stares at all those fools who are watching. People suddenly feel exhausted by the trite, disappointed in the poor quality, bored with the commonplace, and annoyed by the hackneyed, the banal, and the routine. They are jaded.

     Speaking of Sports commentator, Howard Cosell, arrived at that point in 1983 after thirteen years on Monday Night Football. If I remember the quote correctly, he announced that professional football to him had become “an incredible bore.” As for college sports, we witnessed last week an absurd, even tragic, moment when the news broke from Penn State. Buzz Bissinger writing in Newsweek stated it best, “Too many universities are sports factories posing as academic institutions.”

     By their very definition, political campaigns bore even the most excitable people. The Iowa Caucuses are set for January 12, 2012, seven weeks from today, and Rick Perry cannot recall “the third of three federal departments he proposes to shut down” if elected. Paul Begala, also writing in Newsweek, labeled the Republicans “The Stupid Party,” for they know “they can earn applause by denouncing science,” especially evolution. They too have resorted to “jumping the shark.”

     The New York Times writer, Ross Douthat, said, “It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent. In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings. We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution.” In other words, people who will not “jump the shark.”

     Now we hear rumors of a potential attack upon Iran, for that country, now we are told, has weapons of mass destruction. Did we not watch that show once before? I cannot imagine that few Americans would want to watch a repeat of that White House episode, and I fail to see any reason we should ever jump that shark again. Ron Paul, the Texas Congressman now running for President, argues that fears about Iran’s nuclear program have been “blown out of proportion,” and that “tough penalties are a mistake because they only hurt the local people and still pave a path to war.”

     The Christmas shopping season arrives this week. The basic faith and love in an eternal and divine being has been dwarfed by a frenzied adherence to obligations, want-satisfaction, duties, and a truckload of extensions that reside in a world a fair distance from the basic faith from which it all originated. In the season, we dare not lose Christmas, the best holiday of the year.

     Certain human values rarely go out of style or lose their freshness, and, like a magnet, they attract others. Values, such as graciousness, an appreciation of others’ efforts, patience, loyalty, dedication, determination, and yes thankfulness; those values still shine bright. But can they be pushed to the point that they too are absurd? Of course! Consider Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep and his insincere “humbleness.” What a boring world it would be indeed, if everyone was just nice.

     President Lyndon Baines Johnson used to say that “where flattery is necessary, there is no excess.” But then he was a master of manipulation: he jumped the shark daily. Simple appreciation of others he lacked, and those Congressmen he approached knew he wanted one thing: their vote.

     In a list of human traits, gratitude and thankfulness do not rank as high as say, ambition or trustworthiness, and perhaps for that reason it is wise that we celebrate Thanksgiving only once a year. More often, and it too would transform into an absurdity. The rest of the days of the year, we, the hearty members of the American workforce, are expected to go to work, an expectation that can cause us to feel like an absurdity, as if we are jumping the shark every day.

     A rabbi named Tarphon used to say, “It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” We work five days a week, enjoy our weekends, and then in late November every year, we stop work one day and give thanks. Nothing absurd about that. No “jumping the shark.” Have a great Thanksgiving!

THE HUNDRED MOST

by William H. Benson

November 10, 2011

     Last Monday the British Museum published in the United States its book The History of the World in 100 Objects. Over a four-year stretch a hundred curators at the London museum selected a hundred objects from their expansive collection, objects they believed were representative of the world’s history.

     Number one is an odd one—the mummified body of Hornedjitef, an Egyptian priest, which was placed in an inner and outer coffin in preparation for his travel to the next world. Two and three make more sense: an Olduvai stone chopping tool from Tanzania, the oldest artifact in the collection, and an Olduvai hand axe. Five is a Clovis spear point, “the first evidence of human activity in North America,” and was used for hunting large game, such as mammoths, to the point of extinction.

     Six was a bird-shaped pestle found in New Guinea and was dated to as far back as 6000 B.C. The museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, wrote, “The history of our most modern cereals and vegetables begin around 10,000 years ago. It was a time of newly domesticated animals, powerful gods, dangerous weather, and better food.”     

     Number ninety-five is a defaced penny. The suffragettes of the early twentieth century, those women who campaigned for the right to vote, would stamp a multitude of pennies with the words: “VOTES FOR WOMEN.” Ninety-eight is the “thrones of weapons,” a chair composed of assault rifles and ammunition. Ninety-nine is a plastic credit card, and the final one is a solar panel and lamp. 

     Eight hours in the bright sun will yield one hundred hours of lamplight, enough to light a single room. Today 1.6 billion people live without access to electricity, and this device “allows people to study, work, and socialize outside daylight hours, vastly improving the quality of many lives.”

     Others have pointed out that although objects are of crucial importance in the history of the world, so are individuals, and so are authors.

     In 1978 a writer named Michael Hart ranked the 100 most influential persons in history, according to his own criteria. Into the number one slot, he placed the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, “because he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels.”

     Into the number two position, he put Isaac Newton, quoting Voltaire who said of Newton, “It is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.” Three, four, five, and six were founders of the world’s other primary religions: Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and St. Paul.

     William Shakespeare is down the list a ways to number thirty-six. Hart argues, “I have ranked Shakespeare this low because of my belief that literary and artistic figures have had comparatively little influence on human history.” Huh? Really? I would disagree. Writers have always influenced those in positions of power and will continue to do so. Shakespeare ranks first among the world’s writers, which is where Daniel S. Burt ranked him in his book The Literary 100.

     Last week the movie Anonymous was released, and it supports the fallacious and oft-pandered idea that Shakespeare did not write his plays but that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, did. People who subscribe to this argument are called anti-Stratfordians. In my ranking of the 100 worst ideas of all time, I would put this idea in the top twenty, for the evidence is overwhelming that Shakespeare wrote the plays bearing his name.

     At the top of that same list, I would place, in order, Naziism, Communism, war, slavery, and racial segregation. Further down, I would put the idea that the American nation is washed up, soon to be relegated to the dust-bin of history. To that I say, “Never bet against the American people, their economy, their ingenuity, or their will to triumph over the worst difficulties.”

     Bad ideas continually surface. Stephen Marche wrote last week in The New York Times: Our politeness has actually led us to believe that everybody deserves a say. The problem is that not everybody does deserve a say. Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some people deserve to be marginalized and excluded.”

     As for the 100 best ideas of all time, I would place in the top ten the following: the domestication of plants and animals, self-government, written laws, the concept that humans possess rights and equality under law, the transmission of knowledge through written books, and the construction of libraries and museums.