Reading Camus in Time of Covid

Reading Camus in time of Covid with my fifteen-year-old grandson has been one of the many unexpected twists of this past year. Somehow he became interested in the existentialists. I thought Camus’s book The Plague might be the easiest way in since it is a novel (rather than dense philosophy) and because of its timeliness.

Much in the story resonates with our times: the denial, uncertainty, and fear when the plague begins; the fixation on daily death tolls; the frustration and anger with the constraints of the quarantine; the “feeling of exile—the sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past” (65*); the relief when after a year the plague finally begins to abate.

Ultimately, the book remains a parable for all human existence. “What does that mean—‘plague’?” asks one character. “Just life, no more than that” (277). We are locked down in this life with the random threat of death hanging over us. How do we make sense of it all when death takes so many young and old, rich and poor, good and evildoers—yet arbitrarily allows so many in each group to remain?

Early on a priest says he can make sense of it (as God’s judgment) though at the end his theology fails when he sees a small child die after prolonged suffering. A conman makes sense of it by taking advantage of the hardships of others only to revert to depression when the plague lifts. A writer plows ahead with his novel, day by day and month by month, yet never gets beyond the first sentence. A doctor seeks meaning by doggedly helping others even when his efforts often have little effect.

In this doctor, Rieux, we find Camus’s best model for “becoming a saint without God” (230). He makes courageous choices that assert the meaning and value of human life in the face of crushing absurdity. He lives as if he has hope without evidence to support it.

Camus has done us a great service by focusing our attention on the most basic and profound questions we can face. Where do we find meaning when life can seem pointless? If God exists, what kind of God is he? What is doing good? How should we live when the plague of death has infected us all?

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*Page numbers refer to the Modern Library Edition, 1947. 1948.

Image: Conmongt Pixabay

Overboarding

The business world is one of the worst offenders when it comes to jargon. It is full of superficially hip insider language that lends a sense of currency to ideas that are (or should be) just common sense. If I hear metrics, optics, curating, ecosystem, and granular one more time I will stack up all my business books in my front yard and set them on fire.

To put it plainly, jargon masks meaning. It doesn’t make things clearer. It hides what you are saying.

I suppose it is inevitable. Consultants persist in fabricating such vocabulary to make it seem they are worth the big bucks you pay them. Max Mallet and friends pull back the curtain on the machinery of these “all-powerful wizards.” Here are two of forty-five terms that are worst offenders.

Buy-In. David Logan, professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business notes: “Asking for someone’s ‘buy-in’ says, ‘I have an idea. I didn’t involve you because I didn’t value you enough to discuss it with you. I want you to embrace it as if you were in on it from the beginning, because that would make me feel really good.’”

Core Competency. In business-speak, this means a fundamental strength even though the word competent means only having a needed skill. “Do people talk about peripheral competency?” asks Bruce Barry, professor of management at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Business. “Being competent is not the standard we’re seeking. It’s like core mediocrity.”

One that annoys me most is:

Onboarding. Integrating new employees is important. Making sure they feel welcome and a part of the team is important. Why not just say that? Besides sounding like waterboarding or overboarding, do we want to begin by telling people they are getting on a cruise ship? Sure, workplaces can be fun. But if you want committed, long-term employees, captivate them with meaningful, life-giving work.

What’s the business jargon you love to hate?

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image: Pixabay, mohamed_hassan

The Vaccine Hero

This week I am scheduled to receive my Covid-19 vaccine. To mark the occasion I am republishing here my blog from June 23, 2016.

My sister died because of a vaccine . . . a vaccine she never received. On a September morning in 1952, at the age of seven, Lucy Rae Le Peau contracted polio and died that afternoon. The vaccine that would have saved her life would not be developed for another year.

It was a vaccine my grieving mother prayed for desperately, especially because her three other children, including me, were still vulnerable to the terrifying disease. Every year thousands of children across the United States were struck with it, peaking the year my sister died with over 57,000 cases, of whom 3,145 died.

Jeffrey Kluger’s Splendid Solution tells the captivating story of how a determined Jonas Salk, despite his junior status in the field and controversial approach, skillfully pushed through his inactive or killed virus vaccine. His rivalry with the intimidating Albert Sabin, who opposed Salk at nearly every turn, provides even more drama to a tale that has plenty of its own.

Another important subplot interwoven with the main narrative is how Franklin Roosevelt, himself a polio survivor, established the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation in 1927 with his friend Basil O’Connor. In 1938 this fundraising juggernaut was transformed into the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) still under O’Connor’s direction. Later it became the well-known March of Dimes. The foundation was instrumental in funding Salk’s team and others. O’Connor also facilitated collaboration in a somewhat competitive and secretive field, bringing leading scientists together to share results and provide overall guidance.

As a side note, the wife of IVP author Kenneth Bailey, Ethel (née Milligan), was a microbiologist working under Salk in Pittsburgh. She and the rest of the research team were among the first to receive the vaccine before it was tested on others to assure its safety. Then followed carefully monitored tests on several hundred children in the area.

With those positive results in hand, in 1954 the NFIP set up perhaps the most extensive field tests in medical history involving almost two million school-aged children. On April 12, 1955, exactly ten years after Roosevelt died, the announcement was made public. It worked. The press conference, one of the most extensively covered media events of the decade, was held at the University of Michigan which was tasked with analyzing the field results. President Eisenhower announced the formula would be given away free to countries around the world.

Within ten years less than a hundred cases were reported in the United States. By 2015 there were less than a hundred worldwide. Salk didn’t think of himself as a hero, but this vaccine pioneer was a hero nonetheless, saving tens of thousands of lives and preventing disability for over ten times that many.

Still Amusing Ourselves to Death

After re-reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I thought about taking a 24-hour fast from media. No TV, no radio, no smart phone, no laptop–for a whole day. Then I remembered it’s winter here in Chicago and weather forecasts are nearly a prerequisite for citizenship. And I’m expecting important emails soon. And what about those text messages I’d miss? And . . .

And I realized that though I think I control my technology, maybe it controls me as much as the next guy.

When Postman wrote his book in 1985, Pac-Man was five years old. USA Today was three. The Mac computer was one. Cable TV was in its infancy. Google was twelve years into the future. Netflix wouldn’t open for business for fourteen years. We’d have to wait twenty-two years for the iPhone and Kindle. Despite this or perhaps because of this Amusing Ourselves to Death is a classic that remains as important as ever.

The problem is that such media have created an entertainment culture, and all the new technologies have only reinforced that. What have we lost? The substance of public discourse that a print culture offered us in the previous centuries. Thousands heard Lincoln and Douglas debate in three- and four-hour-long sessions. But it was the dominance of print that made it possible for listeners to be able to follow and to be interested in these events.

Our civic life has been consumed by sound bites and Twitter feeds, reducing millions to passive consumers of media instead of active citizens. Even those outlets that are supposed to provide substance are mostly focused on capturing audiences. MSNBC and FOX have more in common than we think for neither are in the news business. Rather both are trying to make as much money as possible in the entertainment business.

In the introduction for the twentieth-anniversary edition of book, Postman’s son points out that though we are not dominated by network television anymore, the underlying issues of our entertainment-saturated culture remain the same. Has media improved our democracy? Has it made our leaders more accountable? Are we better citizens or are we better consumers? Have our schools improved as a result?

Solutions? Postman admits he has few. Certainly recognizing our disease is a necessary step. Asking questions about media is also needed to break the spell technology has over us. So are periodic fasts such as technology-free family nights once a week or even once a month. We must start somewhere. And reading Postman’s book can be just the place to begin.

An Editor’s Work

I clearly remember my second day as an editor forty-five years ago.

The first day was mostly orientation. But the second day an author came in to discuss a contracted manuscript with Jim Sire, my boss. I sat in watching and listening as they discussed the editing Jim had done. That morning and afternoon, the two of them sat side by side at a table, flipping through the edited pages one at a time, often reading aloud long passages. Jim would make observations and raise issues about certain passages, about what the author intended and how to resolve various questions. The two would work together to come to an agreement on what do do and move on.

That day provided my whole career with a metaphor for the work of editing. I haven’t always had the privilege of sitting side by side with an author going over a manuscript. But when I have made comments on a manuscript (a manuscript I would originally send to the author my snail mail and later by email) or talked on the phone, I tried to keep the image in mind.

I wanted the author to know I was on his or her side. I’d look for the positive, and cheer great sentences, paragraphs, and sections. I tried to understand what was closest to the author’s heart and goals. Sometimes that meant pointing out where I thought things had gone astray in the manuscript. If I could, I would offer alternatives for how things could be worded or structured or presented.

The editor-author relationship is ideally one of mutual respect and mutual submission. Sometimes the editor accedes to the author’s obvious expertise in subject matter. Sometimes it is the other way around because many editors have not just published six or a dozen books but dozens or hundreds.

A colleague, Jim Hoover, often said, “An editor is the author’s advocate to the reader—and the reader’s advocate to the author.” The job of editors is not to shape manuscripts the way they would write them. Rather when alerting authors to potential problems, editors aim to show authors what questions people might raise the first time they read the text. That is just virtually impossible for authors to do who are overly familiar with what they’ve written. “Isn’t it obvious?” No. Not always.

Editors are on the author’s side, aiming to make what authors have to say as strong as possible–but as strong as possible for the intended audience (which means advocating for readers). Editors and authors need not have an adversarial relationship. Rather they are partners, allies who sit side by side, facing a common challenge.
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Images: James W. Sire (IVP); Twilight (Hypatie, Pixabay)

Two Visions of the Future

Two novels written decades ago have shaped the genre of dystopias–grim tales of the near future. From these have come The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Matrix, even Pixar’s WALL-E, and many more. What are the two landmark books?

George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) imagines a future dictatorship in which Big Brother knows everything that everyone does and thinks. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932) imagines a highly technological society in which humans are genetically bred, indoctrinated, and drugged into passive obedience.

I’ve been rereading Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, and was once again struck by his opening comparison of these two. He writes:

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, or there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

In short Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

What do you think? Was Postman right? Is our world closer to Brave New World than to 1984?

The Current Events Entertainment Industry

I stopped reading, watching, and listening to the news twelve years ago. Although I believe in the importance of an educated and informed electorate, the news just made me mad and agitated me. It was simply not good for my soul. In Stop Reading the News, Rolf Dobelli adds a myriad of other compelling reasons in a series of short chapters. Here are a few.

News is irrelevant. Since news operations are out to make money by capturing eyeballs and eardrums, they do not focus on what’s important but on what gets attention. Crashes, explosions, murders, earthquakes, however, matter little to our individual lives or even national life.

News distorts reality. What’s a bigger problem—terrorism or suicide? We are about 800 times more likely to die by our own hand than by terrorism. Yet what do we hear about more? Likewise we hear lots about shark attacks, politicians, banking collapses, the Kardashians. We hear little about nurses, teachers, diplomats, ocean acidification. And which of those two groups is more important?

News encourages terrorism. Before Gutenberg, before mass media, there was no terrorism. There were attacks, sabotage, and murder, but the intent was to inflict strategic damage, not manipulate public opinion.

Dobelli offers more including how it disrupts our peace of mind, leads us to wrong conclusions, and wastes our time when we could be doing something more productive.

Before giving his reasons, he provides practical suggestions for cutting out the news, including a “soft option” and one for going cold turkey. He also deals with objections: How will I find out when something important does happen? Won’t I feel embarrassed when people ask me what I think about a new event? Isn’t being informed important for democracy?

Are there alternatives? Yes, he says. Read long-form journalism and books. If we do we’ll be much better informed citizens. Another constructive suggestion is to start “news lunches”—meeting one to one or in larger groups where one or two people take 15 minutes to focus on one thing they are working on or thinking about. Then discuss.

The news enterprise (shouldn’t we really call it “the current events entertainment industry”?) is broken–exacerbated by social media, fake news, foreign subversion, the politics of outrage, the lost art of compromise, talk radio entertainment, and the loss of the fabric of community locally and nationally. Dobelli’s analysis does not have the depth or insight of Neil Postman’s prophetic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. But surely he is right when he says, “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetizing, easily digestible and extremely damaging” (p. 16).

It’s time to change our diet.

Upside Down Writing Strategies

One of the best writing strategies is to write a lot of bad stuff. Yes, the more bad stuff we write, the better. If that sounds counterintuitive, it is. Here’s how it works.

One reason Beethoven and Picasso produced so many great works was that they produced a lot of ordinary, unknown works. We might know a couple of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, the last of his five piano concertos, his one violin concerto, maybe his opera Fidelio, and probably “Für Elise.” But in his 45-year career, he wrote at least 722 pieces.

He produced twenty variations for piano, dozens of sonatas for piano, for violin, and for cello, chamber music including sixteen string quartets, and more. Yet only a few are in the standard canon of often-played pieces; only a few are considered masterpieces.

We know Picasso as the twentieth-century artistic genius who created Guernica, the sculpture in Chicago’s Daley Plaza, and stunning abstract portraits. But he produced “more than 1,800 painting, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, 12,000 drawings as well as prints, rugs and tapestries—only a fraction of which ever garnered acclaim.”*

We know creative geniuses for their few great works. What we don’t know is that in general they simply outproduced their peers. Creating so much increased their odds that a few would be landmark creations.

We shouldn’t be afraid to create junk or to write something that’s ordinary. For thirteen years I have been blogging at Andy Unedited. In that time I have produced over six hundred posts. I do my best but most of them are just OK. A few, I think, are very good. Yet I wouldn’t have written any good ones if I didn’t have the discipline of trying to produce something every week, including the commonplace ones.

A second upside down writing strategy is to do stuff besides write. Studies have shown that scientists are twelve times more likely to win a Nobel prize if they write poetry, plays, novels or other works, than if they don’t. And twenty-two times more likely if they perform as an amateur actor, dancer, or magician.** To be more creative with our writing we should branch out.

If you write mystery novels, experiment with poetry. If history is your field, try literary fiction. Take up a musical instrument, go to museums, do some painting, throw clay pots, immerse yourself in Japanese culture. As I say in chapter 11 of Write Better, when we have a wider range of new experiences and ideas that we are exposed to, the more we will make interesting connections that can inspire our writing.

A third strategy: Don’t start at the beginning. If you are writing a book, don’t start with the first chapter, start with the easiest chapter—the one you’ve thought about a lot already.

If you are writing a chapter or an article, don’t begin with the first paragraph. Start with the easiest thing for you to write, whatever comes to your mind. It doesn’t have to be great or even good. It just has to be there. You can (and should) always revise later.

I emphasize this strategy with writers because it is the one piece of writing advice that I give to myself most often. Every time I sit down to write, I pause. and tell myself, don’t worry about where to start. Just start . . . anywhere, with any related or semi-related idea or story, whether good or bad. Just start.

What writing strategies have you found helpful?

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*Adam Grant, Originals, p. 36.
**Adam Grant, Originals, p. 47.

Credits: Daley Plaza (www.chicago.gov); Guernica (Pixabay, Almudena Sanz Tabernero)

Why Do We Hate Each Other?

Tomorrow, January 20, the United States will inaugurate its 46th president, Joe Biden. Given the contentious political year it has been, I thought it appropriate to repost my blog from February 8, 2019, about an important book by Republican Senator Ben Sasse (Nebraska) regarding the non-political reasons for our divides.

Why are Americans so at odds with each other? Why have so many people entrenched themselves in opposing camps, viciously vilifying each other? What has turned us into a nation of Us vs. Them?

Is cable news responsible? Did the Russians do it? Does it go back to Newt Gingrich or the Robert Bork confirmation?

In his book, Them, Senator Ben Sasse has a very unpolitical answer. It’s because, he says, we are lonely. We have fewer friends. We are more disconnected from our communities. So we grasp for a group to feel part of, to identify with. More and more that manifests itself in our political and social identities.

Since World War II single-person households have tripled to 26 percent. Technology has also pushed us into self-reinforcing corners where we just don’t encounter people as people who might have differing views. Other significant factors are at work as well.

Yes, cable news and radio talk showmen and show women have taken advantage of our situation. And yes, the Russians have fanned the flames too with more than 50,000 Russian-linked Twitter accounts fueling outrage by sending automated messages on both sides of issues. But these only feed on a pre-existing condition.

What’s the cure for our illness? The last half of the book offers several worthwhile remedies, from setting tech limits in our personal lives to building into a neighborhood or community to re-educating ourselves on how democracy works and what it stands for.

Sasse regularly says the book is not political in the sense of party politics or hot-button issues. He is right. The book is social and personal. When he does touch on political examples, he is to be commended for being very evenhanded–criticizing and praising as appropriate both right and left, both politicians and journalists, both Republicans and Democrats. Sasse models how we can treat each other as human beings, as fellow Americans who deserve our listening ear and our respect.

Writer at Work

Robert Caro’s book on Robert Moses and four books on Lyndon Johnson are legendary for their length (a total of almost 5,000 pages) and the length between volumes (about a decade). In Working, a collection of interviews and articles, we learn something of the method in his madness.

His passion is not just to inform readers but to help them see the force of these men and feel their impact. To do so he goes to tremendous, time-consuming lengths to track down and interview incredibly hard to find people and page through tens of thousands of pages of documents.

Caro was, for example, intent on finding out how Johnson’s ambition showed itself even in college. Everyone told him, however, that one key fellow student, Vernon Whiteside, was dead. Then one person said Vernon was alive and planning to live in a mobile home north of Miami in a town with “Beach” in the name. Caro and his wife tracked down every mobile home court in those towns (using phone books!) and finally found him–but didn’t call. He flew there to talk in person.

Multiply that by hundreds and we get some idea of why his books are so long and took so long.

Caro’s other passion is explaining how political power works because it has a tremendous effect on our lives. Robert Moses was determined to reshape New York City with bridges, highways, parks, and other public works. To do so, during his forty years in power, Moses displaced a half million of New York’s fourteen million people—forcing them out of their homes, destroying communities. In a democracy, Caro wants us to know how that kind of power (of an unelected official) works.

His powerful interviewing techniques range from the common (use silence to get people to fill in the quiet) to the persistent (asking over and over, “What did you see?”) to the obsessive (moving to the Hill Country of Texas for three years) to knowing the importance of place (taking Johnson’s brother to the Johnson Boyhood Home after visiting hours to trigger hidden memories of difficult dinner conversations between his brother and their father).

The book is disjointed and a bit repetitive because of its nature as a collection. But the dozens of fascinating anecdotes and tidbits give us a window into the work a writer with keen instincts and tenacity.

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image: flyleaf of Working by Robert Caro (edited manuscript page by the author)