Human Behavior

Self-Esteem vs Self-Respect

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An interesting essay by Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychologist who has worked extensively in prisons. Via psychiatrist Dr Sanity, who adds thoughts of her own.

My sense is that the self-esteem movement started benignly enough, with the sensible idea that it is usually better to focus on praising people for things they do right rather than on condemning them for their inadequacies. But it soon fell into the hands of various airheads, many of them professors in “education” schools, who too frequently have been hostile to the whole notion of individual achievement and individual accountability.

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Happy Warriors & Not-so-Happy Ones

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Long before I returned to my conservative roots, I loved the humor of a Buckley – the right seemed to have more fun with ideas. Great satire points out the foibles of the disproportionate. Jane Austen understood that. It is the sharp recognition of a truth about human nature that makes us smile, albeit ruefully. Even with the rather meager set of social values Seinfeld embodied, his friends, in their superficiality and greed and general laziness, made us laugh. We laughed because they didn’t recognize what we owe to others, what living with others requires of us say, not sleeping under the desk or sharing bathroom tissue. The writer’s sense of the variety & density of our cultural restraints and our own impulses permeated that series.

We enjoyed Seinfeld and his friends because they loved words but also because we took a certain pleasure in their violation of good manners that restrained us: we wouldn’t make their choices, but we would be tempted. We restrained those impulses (or hid them) because we understood they violated not just gentility but morality. The last episode made that clear to us: in the real world, we would have felt contempt (or guilt) – but watching them, we could laugh. That wasn’t a funny episode; it was an arresting conclusion.

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An odd and jittery performance on Charlie Rose

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By the Speaker of the House of Representatives, that is. Did you see the interview with the good Speaker Pelosi? The normally placid environment (that solid wooden table!) is not so placid with said guest visiting. Petty to note, perhaps, but I felt as if I were watching a performance, and the performer was a nervous and jittery one.

Anyway, judge the quality of the interview for yourselves. Here are a few choice excerpts from the transcript at Real Clear Politics:

Pelosi: “People are more optimistic outside of Washington D.C. than they are inside of Washington. They want to — they want to be sure that we stick to our path which is to take us out of this economic challenge and not be afraid to do so” – What?

Pelosi: “When the president began and he said that he called for swift, bold action now. And the public responded to it in a very positive way. And he said in a very shall we say professorial way, but also inspirational way, we will harness the sun and the wind and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories, and we’ll invest in science, have better healthcare innovation and schools for the 21st century.” – What?

Pelosi: “Universal healthcare. It’s a place where we are recognizing the damage to our planet by decision that said we have made that we need to reverse. It’s a place where we have to go — we had the industrial revolution, we have the technological revolution. Now we have to have a green revolution.” – What?

Pelosi: “I think there is a realization among all people that all the things we want to do, we need to think in public private — public, public, all different kinds of different combinations on how we get them done, so we can leverage our dollars in a safe way, but leverage our dollars so we get more than just the appropriate dollars.” – What does that even mean?

I could go on and on. What do you suppose she’s saying?

SUPER-DUPER MASSIVE AND IMPORTANT UPDATE: I screwed up – the link is to the 2010 Rose interview that I recently watched, while the excerpts are from the 2009 interview. I honestly did not pick up on that while reading the transcript, obviously. In my defense, here’s an excerpt from the correct transcript:

“It’s so historic. It’s so exhilarating to be part of
history that each one of us in the Congress is on the brink of making
history. This is Social Security, Medicare, health care for all Americans.
So it is its own — it has its own encouragement to it. ”

“It has its own encouragment to it.” Well, there you go. Make fun of me and my faulty memory, and her statement, in the comments. Or just me. Whatever.

Brown as Warning

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Looking back, I realize I didn’t begin with the positive, and I agree with Kennedy there appears to be plenty of positive: Brown, even under fire, remains honest, with a sense of humor and the apparent self-confidence and humility that comes with such humor, and he also appears, well, hot.

He’s helped though by a pent-up irritation: policies we thought unwise have deteriorated into policies we find foolish, the unseemly has slid into the mire of outright bribery, the short-sighted has so dominated that disaster lurks. On a not unrelated note, attitudes that rankled those of us in fly-over territory have become pervasive and bizarre. They are not the attitudes of those with a sense of humor nor apparent self-confidence, and, especially, without humility. (Arrogance is not self-confidence.)

Even citizens of a state that seemed to give pre-Revolutionary respect to family succession appear annoyed a candidate disses their sports heroes, shrinks from handshaking and winter politicking, and seems appalled by pick-ups. (Whatever Marie Antoinette actually said or actually meant, the inappropriateness of her response defined her – and beheaded her – even when such kingly rights were more widely accepted).

My husband’s uncle, far into retirement and deep into Texas, has proclaimed that he intends for the first time in years to “pull an all-nighter” – to see Brown triumph, he hopes. And, in the tradition of these parts, Ray Stevens disses Obamacare.

The Uncle of Science

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The King and the CrookHow do you make a tired and aging political system supple and flexible enough to adapt to a changing world? A recent Wired Magazine article offers this:

[M]ost scientific change isn’t abrupt and dramatic; revolutions are rare. Instead, the epiphanies of modern science tend to be subtle and obscure and often come from researchers safely ensconced on the inside. “These aren’t Einstein figures, working from the outside,” [Kevin] Dunbar says. “These are the guys with big NIH grants.”

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

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