Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

On God and Integrity

When I was a kid I watched my team, the NY Giants, hold on to a short lead in the closing minutes of Superbowl XXV back in 1991. They were up by 1 point, and with 8 seconds left the Bills had a chance to win the game by kicking a field goal. It’s an awful feeling to have your fate, or your team’s, so clearly in the hands of your competitor.

Those long moments waiting for the kick were horrible – but something happened that made it much worse.  In the seconds before the Bills kicked the ball, the TV showed the Giants sidelines. A circle of players huddled together in prayer.  Praying for what? I wondered.  For the kicker to miss? Yes, indeed.

At the time, despite my youth and lack of understanding of matters of theology, I found this extremely troubling. What kind of god would honor a prayer not only as selfish as this, but clearly at the expense of someone else, someone who would likely never live this down among his fans? To be hated forever for losing a game (e.g. Bill Buckner) which the kicker would be if he missed, is much worse than anything the Giant’s would feel, watching from the sidelines, as he kicked in the winning points and sealed their fate.

And I wondered while waiting for the kick, what would happen if a similiar number of equally faithful Bill’s players were praying just as piously on the other side of the field. Can you out pray someone? Is that really how prayer works? Or how an intelligent, attentive, loving god would make decisions about our fates? By counting prayers? And wouldn’t you have to consider, if this is prayer warfare, about what the other team’s prayer strategy was before kneeling down to pray for yours? A drop of logic makes all of this fade away into foolishness, as the machinery by which these specific acts effects life defies any reasonable person’s imagination (I’m not questioning all prayer here, just this specific use).

As it turned out, Norwood, the Bill’s kicker, missed the kick. And as predicted, despite a great career he is best known for one kick that he missed. My Giants won the Superbowl.  I was happy, for sure, but as much as I’d wanted this outcome all season, I felt there was something wrong. A win is not quite the same as the other team losing. Sometimes I’d rather have a solid loss than a rotten tasting win. But clearly I’m a weirdo – and Giant’s fans everywhere may disown me (watch this video of the missed kick to see what I mean). This game makes highlight reels as an amazing game, but it’s not for me. I put myself in the kicker’s shoes ever time.

I don’t have a major problem with the idea of God, or faith in God. I have an open mind and am open to many different kinds of ideas. But I do have a problem where the name of God is used to justify behavior that runs against ordinary natural human integrity.

Take for instance, the Golden Rule.

I like the Golden Rule. It’s a core idea in nearly every religion, nation, culture or tribe, and I see it as a kind of integrity and basic ethics. I will treat others in the same way I wish to be treated (or as I understand they want to be treated). Many of the ten commandments and similiar moral codes in other cultures are specific implementations of the core theme of the Golden Rule.

But to pray for victory, without considering that the people on the other side might also be fans of your flavor of god, or even if not fans of your flavor they are still people worthy of your respect, can not be a high integrity act. No one would want a competitor with God’s ear to ask for their failure. The whole idea makes God a possession – MY GOD. A god who is listening to help me and my needs. Rather than shared, OUR GOD. A god that has the collective interest of all life, or human life, in mind. I know from history when anyone starts claiming sole dominion over spiritual territory and believes in VIP access to the deities the only place it’s sure to send us all is straight to hell (metaphoric or literal depending on what you believe).

The only high integrity prayer, or act, I can imagine is to hope that the team that plays best, wins. To wish that everyone plays well. And that no one gets hurt. And like the Klingons and their wish for a noble death (they don’t mind losing their lives provided it happens in the right way), that in the end everyone can walk off the field proud that they played well, and hard, and gave it their best. That even if they lost they feel there’s nothing else they could have done – there is nobility in that. That to me, as a competitor, is the most noble outcome of all: everyone played well and was at their best. A part of me would rather play well and lose, than embarrass myself with incompetence, and win anyway. To put the game winning shot in the hands of your opponent is, strictly speaking, a failure on it’s own.

I have similiar questions of integrity when I see an athlete or award winning star point up the sky when they win, or score a touchdown.  What exactly is this intended to mean? I’m a big fan of humility, and giving thanks to people, life, the universe at large, or anything really, but it’s not clear at all to me this is what’s happening. Would they point to the sky if they lost? Isn’t god, or whatever they’re pointing to, up there in all cases, regardless of the outcome? If they catch a winning touchdown pass, shouldn’t they point at least a little bit to the guy who threw them the ball? Or the coach who put them on the field?

It seems a better demonstration of devotion, or faith, or humility, is what you do when there is no spotlight on you. Or, as is often in life, you are not the center of attention for a big reward, and instead are in the muck with the rest of us, with plenty around you worth complaining and feeling disappointed about. What do you choose to do then? Who do you point to and what does that pointing mean? Or more precisely, how generous and humble are you in your treatment of others in and below your station then?

It’s out of the spotlights and the glory where the real essence of people, whether you call it their spirit, soul or integrity, is found, and that’s the only place worth looking for it. When I’m able to remember this I can find heroes and saints worthy of emulation without needing someone else to point them out for me, or draw attention to themselves by pointing up to the sky.

(Just a reminder on the comments policy in hopes this stays interesting and respectful)

Buy nothing for Christmas

I rarely follow it 100%, but I do believe what people want for Christmas, or as gifts in general, are not consumer objects, but experiences and acts that require the giving of our time, not our money.

Here’s my post from last year about some rules I made up for gifts:

So this year I made two rules:

  1. To buy only experiences. Tickets to plays, events, massages, meals, things that they’ll experience and own as a memory instead of as a thing. Perhaps I can baby or pet sit for friends, gifts that really could be useful to them. This also has the benefit of low environmental impact if you’re into that sort of thing.
  2. To make things for people. If I make it with my own hands then it’s impossible to get at the GAP, or at their local mall and as ugly or fragile as it might be, it will be personal. It will will represent more of the the most precious thing i have, my time, than anything I could buy.

I’m actually thinking this year to write a letter – not an email, but a letter, to various folks I care about.  Will be more personal than anything else I suspect they’ll get this year.

Full post here.

Stephen Colbert fights the closeminded

I don’t watch either that often, but while I do prefer the Daily show to Colbert, the later is a fascinating show both for it’s absurd level of satire, but also its deconstruction of punditry. In this recent interview in Rolling Stone magazine, I found this point particularly interesting:

Rolling Stone: A lot of people view what you do as liberal vs. conservative. But what you’re saying is that the show is really about people who are flexible in their beliefs vs. people who are fixed in their beliefs?

Colbert: If there’s a target in our present society, it’s people not willing to change their minds. If you’re not willing to change your mind about anything, given how much is changing and how the sands are shifting underneath our feet, then that dishonesty is certainly worth a joke or too.

Wow. Talk about satire aimed at high minded purpose.  At least as he describes it, it’s a show that mocks the inflexible. Socrates would be proud.

The issue with the full interview isn’t online yet (TOC only here), but there’s a separate online interview with Colbert here that covers similiar territory.

  • By Scott Berkun on September 28th, 2009
  • 32 Comments »
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How to keep your mouth shut

I have a genetic disorder known as “can not keep my mouth shut”. If I think someone is full of it, my arm raises, and my mouth engages, well before my brain can calculate the possible damage.

I have been in recovery for years and am here to share what I’ve learned.

As a rule, if you insist on speaking your mind, you will inevitably find yourself in an environment where everyone hates you.  Most people can not handle the truth. And the more you shove it in their face, the easier it is for them to ignore you. You simply become the person who always complains, rendering any good ideas you have entirely impotent. Your ideas will be shot down simply because of the reputation of the mouth they come from.

The trick to keeping your mouth shut is to hold the desire to effect change above your desire to tell people how wrong and bad they are. The later almost never leads to the former.

Back in my early days at Microsoft I worked on strong, confident teams where you were expected to have opinions. If you saw something stupid happening you were obligated to raise your hand, say “I think this is stupid and here’s why”.  If you were right, you were applauded no matter how senior the people in the room were. I argued with group managers, VPs, and many other scary, tough, smart people more senior than I, and in the culture this was fine, provided I had a point and made it well. If I was wrong, I’d be dismissed, but not roasted. I might even have gotten a small pat on the back later for at least not being afraid. I thrived in this environment and assumed this was how the world worked.

But then later on, in a new job at Microsoft in a group known as MSTE, I discovered a world of dysfunction, despair and passive/aggression. No one spoke their mind in public. Few people worked hard or asked tough questions. Quality of work, and morale, was low. So I soon felt obligated to mention these facts as often and as loudly as possible to leadership. I even expected to be rewarded for telling people how bad things were. Why wouldn’t they want to hear this? I thought.

Before I knew it, I was that guy.  The guy who always complains.

In my egocentric view, the work around me was well beneath the bar. And from previous experience i felt obligated to help raise the level of work. I expected to be applauded for pointing these things out. It was a kind of leadership action in my mind. But I didn’t stop to think the group had its own bar, and it was not my job to set it.

It took months of misery to sort out I was in a different culture with different expectations.  Hell, it blew my mind to realize there were other cultures at all. To achieve the same positive effects my opinionated nature had on the earlier group, I’d have to adopt a very different approach.

I also realized in the past, in other groups, progress happened not simply because I was right and took a stand (as much as my ego wished it to be true). It happened because my boss, or his/her boss, listened to my points and took action, or granted me the power to do so.  Having an idea changes nothing unless someone with sufficient power, and genuine interest, does something about it. The idea alone is never enough. Nor is saying it out loud.

In the movie Glengarry Glenn Ross, Blake (played by Alec Baldwin) gives perhaps the meanest lecture of all time to a bunch of salesmen. Why is this lecture possible? Why didn’t they ignore him or beat him up? Is it Alec’s strong chin and trim physique? No, it’s because the owners of the company asked him to do it. He’s allowed to open his mouth, and speak a certain kind of truth, however unnecessarily mean and adversarial it is, because he has the support of the people in power (You can watch this amazing scene here – NSFW). You could never successfully behave this way unless someone with more power then you allowed you to.

There’s another scene in Glengarry Glen Ross, where a salesman (played in the movie by Al Pacino) yells at the sale manager (played by Kevin Spacey), never to open your mouth until you know the shot.  If you don’t know the angle being played, anything you say might ruin the plan.

This is a great rule to follow before you raise objections or offer big ideas. No matter how right you are, if you care about effecting change, you should never open your mouth without some sense of who will agree with you and who won’t.  If you can anticipate the angles and responses, and judge, even by guessing, if there is a 80%, 20% or 0% percent chance anyone in good standing will follow your lead in support of what you say, you know whether it’s worth opening your mouth. It’s a world of difference of perception when someone respected says, after you speak, “he might be right” and when there’s only silence. And of course, in most cases your percentages go up if you raise your objections in private, rather than in a large meeting where egos are at stake.

These days, as an independent, I’m invited to visit and speak to different groups every week, in different cities and countries around the world. I depend on my ability to evaluate the culture I’m in each and every time.

Of course there are times when the BS has piled up too high and you have to speak the truth no matter the consequences. Forcing an issue can be the only way to get it the attention it deserves. But pick your battles. If a year goes by and you haven’t taken a single stand, I’d likely call you a coward (Nothing in 12 months was worth making a stink over? You have to draw your sword now and then to remind people you have one).  But if you’re taking a stand every day, you’re either a glutton for punishment, an egomaniac,  or too stupid to realize you’re working for the wrong people.

How to say things well, including the tough stuff, is another matter entirely and one I’ll save for another post.

Meanwhile, to help with my own recovery: how do you decide when to open your mouth, and when to keep it shut? At work or at home?

The new serendipity?

One old argument in the history of tech progress is the tragic loss of a side effect of an old technology, and that it will be lost forever with the new technology. But we can be sentimental about anything, even stupid things, things no one liked before they were on their way out. Thanks to Nick Hornby, we all bemoan the end of mix-tapes on cassettes, something I admit I miss. But does anyone remember rewinding those fuckers? Or when the tape got caught in the tape deck, and you had to pray with a pencil in hand that you can rewind it back inside without breaking it?

The flavor of the internet age version of this retroactive argument involves the limits of web browsing. People who go to malls or bookstores and like it say there’s something magical about how you see unexpected things when you browse in physical stores and that computers, websites and search engines take this wonderful serendipity away. Oh, The Horror.

This recent NYT article, called the digital age is stamping out serendipity, takes the predictable angle that we lose when the old serendipity and sense of chance is taken away from us.

The article offers a wimpy survey of the new kinds of serendipity. He doesn’t mention Hypertext, perhaps the greatest form of chance and change we’ve had in ages. With a single click we move, somewhat blindly, from one website and one point of view to another, and to a new page with dozens of unexpected opinions, images or ideas. There is a kind of gamble in every click. Some kind of surprise lurks on the other side, which explains how easily you can forget what it was you went online to do in the first place. There’s a good argument for the web being too serendipitous.

The sidebars of many blogs are our modern equivalent of shelves, with pictures of books and CDs we like and want to share with people we mostly don’t know.  As I write this within a room surrounded by bookshelves, I know these virtual ones are much smaller and less interesting. The first thing I do in someone’s office or home is look at their books, but I rarely do this online. However for music some folks list what’s currently playing on their i-pod, or the last songs they downloaded, a more random form of endorsement than any static bookshelf, of perhaps mostly unread books, can offer. Twitter can seem near random as non-sequiturs are everywhere, and often tempt with an ambiguous link hidden behind a url-trimmer, and links are often described so poorly they approximate a random jump into hyperspace.

Seredipity is in abundance online. But so is trash. Perhaps these facts are related, I’m not sure.

The more interesting and defensible argument is that the new serendipity is less interesting than the old. This is a matter of taste, as it depends on what kinds of serendipity you like.

Personally, I like physical things. I know my brain and senses are designed to enjoy things in the full three dimensions of a bookstore or outdoor market, whereas computerized serendipity is confined to what can fit inside the 2D of a monitor. There is more for our bodies and minds to enjoy in 3D, end of story. More than anything physical places like urban streets or an interesting shop are filled with real people, and watching, talking to, and flirting with real people while walking around looking at things is, in a passive way, a chance to feel connected to the human race. I can randomly meet a hundred people online or browse a thousand books, but never smell their scent, touch their shoulders or pages, or hold them in my hands, and for books and people I like, that’s much less interesting.

But serendipity, ironically, can be found just about anywhere if you’re looking for it.  You can make an interesting experience boring, or a boring experience interesting, purely through your state of mind and by paying attention.

Damon Darlin, author of the NYT piece, offers this misguided thought:

And there is just too much information. We can have thousands of people sending us suggestions each day — some useful, some not. We have to read them, sort them and act upon them.

Every piece of software can be turned off. Every email deleted. Every mailing list can be abandoned. The choice to feel committed to things people send you is an insane thought, as you might as well religiously read every piece of junk mail that arrives at your door or spend hours talking to telemarketers. If you feel obligated to do anything you didn’t promise, whose responsible? It’s not the technology’s fault, it’s yours.

If you look outside your window, and do it with generous attention, there is ‘too much information’ there too. Every tree has a thousand leaves, every leaf millions of different colored cells, each divided into parts and pools of chemicals and microscopic organisms and natural machines. Open your ears and you’ll hear the calls of animals, or neighbors, looking for food or love. Look to the sky and you’ll see patterns and forms never seen before by your eyes, shifting in endless cycles, never resting, for all time. Look too closely at anything and you can go mad as you realize the infinity of information inside. If anything our brains filter things out – that’s how you survive, or thrive, by knowing what to pay attention to and when.

The real story is most people, most of the time, choose not to see. Choose not to take the road less traveled, whether it’s online or in town. Any lack of serendipity or excitement in life, a complaint people have had in the western world for centuries, falls firmly on our own shoulders and not in the designs of man made things of any age. And of course nothing in this is a binary choice. You can always turn things off, or turn them on, and re-experience the thing you’ve forgotten.  We often overlook the odd, surprising joy of doing something you used to love:  is it how you remember it? Was, like the cassette tape, it ever as good as you remember to be? Their can be serendipity in returning to things from your own past, and bringing your open mind along for the ride.

Hating vs. Loving: a personal note

A book that changed my life in 2002 is Living, Loving and Learning, by Leo Buscaglia, which taught my hard-ass, repressed tough guy soul that I was doing many things that made me, and those around me, unhappy. And one of the big crimes was being more comfortable hating than loving.

Any time you hate something there is a choice. You can focus on the hate, and outrage, and self-righteousness, or you can find the opposite of the thing you hate, and focus on loving that more.

If you betray me as a friend, I can fixate on how much I hate you, or I can think about all the friends I have who have never betrayed me, and go thank and honor them. Why focus on how much you hate a book, when you can just as easily go back and remember and share other books that you love? If the friend or book disappointed you so much, why are aren’t using that as fuel to go back and appreciate the good you now realize you’re lucky to have? (As a gripe on amazon.com reviews, it’s fine if you hate my book, but please at least mention a better one so people can get what they were looking for).

Hate is easy. Destroying things takes much less work than making them, always has and always will. Hate is also less fulfilling and isolating than love, since all it says is what someone or something is not, instead of what it is or could be. Boycotting and banning are attempts to stop something, and stopping bad things is good – but these activities always make me think why not use that energy to go support and promote something good that deserves move love?

In many cultures hate, and angry criticism, is safer to express than love (e.g. American men prove we’re close friends by finding funny/mean insults for each other, rarely ever saying how much we care about each other). It’s common in repressed, dysfunctional families or organizations for hate and criticism to be confused with love when it’s the only thing that the parents or leaders provide – Hating is still a kind of attention. Kids are genetically programmed to believe their parents love them, so if all they get is hate when young, they equate that hate with what should have been love (and often wander through life confused as to what it is a healthy relationship looks and feels like). In some workplaces the dynamics are not that different. If all you know is hate, that’s all you express even when you’re trying to love, and on it goes.

What I got from Leo’s book, which I’d never believed before, was that people who can love more openly, especially in the face of those quick and strong with anger like snarky cynics like myself, are the bravest and most positive forces our species probably has. You’ll always find many people happy to hate in the open, but you can’t negate hate with hate. But every now and then you can turn it around, or slow hate down, with the genuine non-saccharin expression of positive love. Only when hate is out of the way can progress start to happen.

I’m not saying not to express hate. I’m still a hateful bastard now and then. It’s therapeutic, it’s fun and can be a way to bond with someone for the first time – but I’m careful not to let myself off the hook with hate alone. If I hate something, once I’m done tearing it to shreds, I force myself to look for something with the opposite traits of the thing I hated and show it some love. I can’t express how profoundly this has changed my life for the better.

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