David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Habits of Living

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To have been thrust, as we’ve been over the past seven days, onto the streets and into the neighborhoods of Boston, is to be reminded of the web of interconnections that make up a community. We all have that web, which we’ve taken from our earliest memories and experiences into the work we do and the lives we live. It’s the web we find ourselves leaning back into and relying upon during a week like this.

These “ways of seeing the world” or “habits of living” put startling events into a meaningful context so that we can begin to understand them. They tell us when we can count on the authorities trying to protect us. They bring us out to the street to applaud and cheer them because of our relief and their success.

These ways of seeing the world shaped our initial reactions to the carnage that turned a finish line into a triage unit. “Repugnance” a word that Leon Kass has used to describe this kind of disregard for life and community, springs from “a sort of deep moral intuition.” What is acceptable as well as what offends us at the most basic levels, comes from how we saw our parents and cousins, neighbors and teachers respond to what they thought the world should and shouldn’t look like all those years ago. We learned from what we saw them do.

It is where conscience and character first come alive.

So I paid attention to novelist Denis Lehane (who wrote so beautifully about Boston in Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone) when he spoke about how he was trapped at home while the streets outside his home were a blur of sirens and mobilzations. He talked about trying to protect his 4-year old daughter who was alarmed every time she heard the “pop, pop, pop” from that endlessly replayed gun battle from the night before. So while the storyteller in Lehane needed to know what was happening, he kept turning off the screens and squawk boxes to protect her. One of his habits of living was to guard his child from the realities of the world while he still could, despite all the things he so desperately needed to know.

Philadelphia Mural Arts

These habits were evident in those who went from on-lookers of the Boston Marathon to rushing towards the explosions to see if they could help. They were evident in the cups of coffee and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches thrust into the hands of responders who hadn’t taken a minute to think about how tired and hungry they were.

These habits were evident in the capabilities that were shared at the most critical moments (“he needs a tourniquet”) or from the journalism teacher who found himself tweeting in the middle of the Watertown shootout and later said “I kept stopping myself, because the world just didn’t need to know about that.”  These habits are about discretion and propriety too.

All of us are embarrassed by the smallness of the towns where we grew up, of the communities that looked out for us, or over our shoulders, back then. When we leave our nests thinking we’ve escaped, we bring the ways of making sense of the world and the role we need to play in it along with us. They help us to reach back to our most basic decencies in times that are troubling as well as in all those other times. These habits of living give rise to the responsibilities we all share for the world we inhabit.

As the cameras rolled past the row houses of Watertown, with all their green trash cans out and the trees beginning to bud, we found ourselves thrust into a web of mutual responsibilities. It is where what’s best and truest about life can usually be found.

 

Workers Who Understand What It Means

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We are collecting more data about our products, services and the reactions to them than ever. But how good are we at understanding what this information is saying? Who is interpreting it all? What training, what habits of mind do you need to “make the data speak” so that you and others can understand and learn something from it? Who is responsible for finding that meaning?

In their new book called Big Data, Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier argue that we no longer need to find the underlying motivations that were once suggested by limited information. Today, we can do almost all of our interpreting by looking at the vast reams of data themselves. In marketing, for example, this glut is removing the need to delve into customer psychology or analyze social pressures to understand why people are buying our product or service, or declining to do so.

In a big-data world…we won’t have to be fixated on causality; instead we can discover patterns and correlations in the data that offer us novel and invaluable insights…[D]ata is about what, not why.

While the question does seem to be changing from “why” to “what,” there is no question that human beings remain at the nexus between the data and its meaning. As Cukier noted in a recent interview:

[I]t’s really important that you take in as much information and come up, using your judgment and wisdom … come up with a decision based on that.

In the final half hours before sleep, I’ve been breezing my way through the collected works of popular writer David Baldacci.  All of them offer a dark perspective on the American intelligence establishment, with orphaned teenagers, fringe types and odd couples pulling us back from the catastrophic edge. In other words: his storytelling is perfect for my final moments of consciousness after a long day. I’m currently on my way to the final battle of good versus evil in The Sixth Man: a titanic chess match involving a pawn called “the Analyst.”

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All of the pre-processed and un-processed information from surveillance satellites, spies, informants, governmental and non-governmental agencies, security cameras at sensitive facilities—you get the idea—an unimaginable glut of information everyday, flashes across a single screen in a secret government facility. The Analyst sits in front of it, making connections and gathering meanings that elude individuals with much less information, on the one hand, or that any computer can crunch, on the other. His mind is wired to retain everything he’s ever seen and to find resonances within this vast trove of information to enable the defense establishment to protect America. His is a god-like role.

In a tough jobs climate for graduates (indeed for all workers) over the past 5 years, a lot of aspersion has been cast at the value of a liberal arts education. In essence, if you can’t make money from it, why study it? That’s where the lessons of an idea book and a work of popular fiction come in.

As I’ve said before, there is a quality of mind that is nurtured in English and History and Philosophy departments that is aimed at finding the meaning in our books, our past and our ideas. This may be today’s single most valuable skill. With our machines giving us more to chew on, we need the men and women who can tell us what the patterns and associations buried within all the information means.

Every company in America, from the smallest mom & pop to the global behemoth needs this capability. They all need workers who can dip into the information pool to pull out the expected and unexpected connections, and enable their products and services to meet real needs, deepening the value of their customer, supplier and community relationships.

As a worker in this knowledge economy, just as you needed to learn how to use a library at school, there are data gathering and analytics tools to master first.  But once you do, there is something of the godlike Analyst waiting to step to the fore in every humanities major.

Adjusting to the Speed of Time

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I’m thinking today about how quickly our lives seem to be moving thanks to all our devices, how much we’re adapting to this acceleration, and whether pulling ourselves onto the fast lane over and over again is a such a good thing.

Every day my internal clock collides with the digital clock that never sleeps. It’s like those days barreling down the entry ramp onto the highway with my poor Corolla struggling to accelerate fast enough. I always manage to inject myself into the stream of on-line traffic—but some days, just barely. It’s the torrent of email, video clips, photos, tweets, commentary, the latest news from North Korea. The speed and magnitude of incoming data is different than it was just a few years ago.  What’s happening when we try to adjust to its demands?

We know from Daniel Coyle that your brain puts down tracks as you learn something for the first time through regular practice. The mastery of new tasks involves building new neurological highways with an “asphalt” in you brain called myelin. So when you are striving to get in sync with that digital clock day after day, where exactly are you headed? What are you becoming, what am I becoming with this new kind of machine-enhanced capability?

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In terms of adaptation, researchers have just discovered microbes that have figured out how to live in a daunting environment called “the Challenger Deep.” It is the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, 6.8 miles below sea level, where all the biomaterials that haven’t already been consumed by the ocean of sea creatures above them eventually come to rest as food. It may have taken them millennia to adapt, but these feeding microbial creatures have shattered our presumptions about the temperatures, pressures, amount of light, and other factors that are necessary to sustain life.

Other deep dives have found jellyfish and tubeworms that have learned how to survive near underwater chimneys that boil the surrounding water to 635 degrees Fahrenheit. There is an unnerving sense that we too are beginning to adapt to the harsh environment of on-line all the time.  The question is: at what cost?

In a recent article discussing his new book Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff argues that we need to do a far better job of protecting ourselves as we jump between biological and digital time. Each of us already inhabits a body with intricate timing mechanisms that balance and adjust the rhythms of everyday life.

The body is based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different clocks, syncing to everything from the sun and moon to levels of violence and available water.

We can’t override the human clocks that maintain our equilibrium with the demands of today’s digital machine time without paying a price, but this is exactly what we are attempting to do.

[T]oo many of us aspire to be ‘on’ at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws requiring stores to close at least one day a week. We want all access, all the time, to everything—and to match this intensity and availability ourselves: citizens of the virtual city that never sleeps.

Among other things, Rushkoff recommends that you “reclaim” your time, by making your digital devices serve your most basic human needs and not just struggle to keep up with them.

You usually need to know something’s wrong before you do something about it. Given the slow but steady acceleration of the digital onslaught in recent years, we are a bit like that frog in water that is gradually being brought to a boil and doesn’t know he’s cooked until it’s too late.

Of course our machines need to be tamed, even shut off now and then, so that it’s clear who’s in charge. On the other hand, it’s also true that every new use of technology tends to herald our next form.

Be careful out there.

 

The Real Thing

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Part of our fascination with the election of a pope is the opportunity we all have to meet someone real. Not the creation of a marketing campaign or focus groups, but someone we’ve never met before who has committed his life to something larger than himself and is defined by the web of those commitments. We don’t get the chance to meet someone new like this everyday.

Pope-Francis 254x244As we were introduced to Francis, much of what we had been hearing about over the past couple of weeks seemed either wrong or irrelevant. It wasn’t about changes in doctrine, sex scandals, political intrigue or financial mismanagement. It turned out to be about somebody who seems to be wired completely differently.

Francis didn’t surge onto the balcony at St. Peters when he was introduced and make it about him. Instead he asked everyone assembled in the square for their prayers. After he was chosen, he didn’t take the throne above the other electors to accept their good wishes and fealty, but instead stood among them. When the cardinals toasted him at dinner he told them they might live to regret it.

He didn’t take the limo. He didn’t have someone pay his hotel bill for him in Rome, or book his own ticket home to Argentina: he did all those things himself. He cooks his own meals too. This is different, telling.

Prayerful. Humble. Inclusive. Identifying with the poor and weak more than with the powerful.

A branding campaign could have come up with those words for him, and scripted his rise—but it didn’t, and that’s part of what grabbed our attention.  In an age when we package and re-package ourselves to achieve our objectives, it was compelling to meet someone new who just may be authentic, the real thing—instead of someone who is merely trying to appear that way.

Much has been made of his naming himself after St. Francis of Assisi, whose commitment to the poor and weak was a rebuke to the rich and powerful of his own time.  By forging this connection, the new Francis has connected himself to something essential in the Church (it is the poor and the meek who shall inherit the earth after all). His own ministering to AIDs victims and prostitutes at the margins of society for more than 50 years also connects him.

In the end, we will know this new pope not only by what he does today and tomorrow, but also by what he has already done.  Not the marketing of a life, but the living of a life that is connected to a web of obligations and commitments that speak eloquently about who you are.

In this regard, as we meet Francis we should slso be wondering about his personal courage on behalf of two of his priests when they were fighting a repressive regime in Argentina several years ago.  Whether he spoke truth to power in the way that he needed to is also at the core of his personal authority and authenticity.  When the dust settles, he may need to find ways to have this conversation with us too. There are many ways he can put the issue behind him.

In the following weeks and months, I think we will also get to hear from him things we have not heard in a long time: the Church speaking about more than its own scandals and failings. By taking up the cause of social justice that extends from the first Francis through Ignatius (the founder of his Order) and now down to him, this new pope is committing himself, and hopefully the Church itself, to something deep and abiding that it is for.

We know only too well what the Church is against: married priests, women priests, homosexuality, the fallibility of the pope himself as teacher, and not against enough, namely some of its own failed priests.  Against this backdrop, hearing in a clear and authentic voice what the Church is for is important.

This is not just about Catholics.

The whole world needs the Church of Yes and not merely the Church of No.

Admiration Means You Must Be Doing Something Right

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What the Chinese are thinking about us is no laughing matter if we’re listening to experts talk about how they are holding America’s mortgage with one hand and stealing our most valuable secrets with the other. But our worries could become more realistic if we also considered just how much the Chinese admire us and the way of life they think we have going on here.

There is always something valuable to be learned when others are both coveting and admiring what you have. As La Rochefoucand famously said: “Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.”  Thinking about what we like and don’t like about how many of the Chinese people view America today has some interesting things to teach us about ourselves.

I had the chance to visit China a couple of years back.

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I’m glad I went when I did and probably wouldn’t recognize much of the place today. It was a few months before the Beijing Olympics, and the country was moving so fast you could almost feel the wind. But what I remember most was how excited regular folks—particularly young people—were that we had come all that way to see them.

They tried out their English on us and surrounded us for pictures. We were their chance to sample America, in the same way that they were already sampling KFC and Polo Ralph Lauren. At the time, analogizing their admiration to eating or wearing did not seem entirely misplaced.

This inkling got some support when I came upon a piece about “architectural mimicry” in China. While the copycat buildings that are springing up there aren’t always American buildings, easily the most duplicated structure in China today is the White House.

The building serves as the model for everything from seafood restaurants to single-family homes to government offices in Guangzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai, Wenling and Nanjing.

There are duplicate Chrysler Buildings and other Manhattan skyscrapers too.

That “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is certainly part of it. But it’s more than this, and has many antecedents in this ancient civilization. Emperors regularly built parks with an Epcot Center of facsimile structures from remote lands.  Both then & now, it is a pretty straightforward effort to enhance their legitimacy by demonstrating China’s de facto appropriation of the known universe.

Today, the Chinese are trying to swallow other aspects of the American way of life as well.

Much of the dynamism you can feel in China today results from a billion people embracing capitalism all at once. It was a forest of timeless bamboo scaffolding clinging to a mountain range of 21st century construction projects that really brought this home to me when I walked around Beijing.  Since almost everybody in China wants to become the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, it is hardly surprising that the American rags to riches fantasy has also been made available for mass consumption.

It’s been turned into the equivalent of a fortune cookie.

The Chinese love short motivational phrases even more than Americans do, if that’s possible. They have been a vehicle for transmitting community values from Confucius to Mao, and they are still in active use today. Only now it’s so-called American values that are being conveyed, and what’s being shared has a lot more to do with individual fortune than collective harmony.

Evidence of this comes from the apparently spontaneous rise of 20 or so “allocutions” or commandments that many people in China today believe are written on the walls of Harvard’s library. These commandments speak to the commitment, diligence and self-denial that are supposedly bolstering their counterparts’ remarkable performance here in the States.

One says, “Happiness will not be ranked, but success will—at the top,” while another envisions a slightly different, though related reward,  “If you study one more hour, you will have a better husband.” Struggling through exhaustion to get where you’re going is key in this messaging: “Nodding at the moment, you will dream. While studying at the moment you will come true,” and similarly, “Most great achievements happen while others are dozing.” Perhaps most succinct of all is this commandment: “Please enjoy the unavoidable suffering.”

Wherever it comes from, this distilled wisdom about American motivation clearly haunts the Chinese imagination. In an article about the phenomenon by Robert Darnton, Harvard’s university librarian, we learn that:

the allocutions took root in China’s educational system and were widely used in primary schools, in English courses, on exams, and even in interviews for admission to Beijing University.  They have appeared on bulletin boards, in newspapers, on telecasts, on a website of China’s Ministry of Commerce and on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Above all, they have reached millions through the Internet, thanks to endless transmission by blogs, including one that registered 67 million hits.

As a result, it should come as no surprise that the most numerous queries on Harvard’s “Ask the Librarian” web page are about these allocutions, with many of the questions originating in China. When informed that no such commandments appear on the walls in any of Harvard’s 73 libraries, Mr. Darnton records the following responses:  “Well my teacher has been using this fooling me,” and “Are you kidding? We grown up with these mottos.” Or even more interesting: “Thank you for liberating us” and “When I know the truth I can’t stop crying.”

Of course, there are both comforting and disquieting things about tokens of flattery like this, as well as the fact that Chinese people will probably be eating fried chicken in a mock-up of the White House later today.

For example, we may like it that the Chinese think we’re this successful, but disquieted by their distortion of us into sleep-deprived automatons.  It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt’s ambivalence about one of her tributes: “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

The good news about admiration is the often accurate perception that there is something about us worth admiring.

Even when it is somewhat alarmingly expressed, flattery indicates that somebody out there still thinks you’re ahead in the big game.

But there can be another message too.

Whenever there’s a gapping hole between what’s being hungered for and what is actually true, it may be time to torque up that big game of yours before it’s too late.

(On this last day of the Chinese New Year, great prosperity to all!)

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