Archives for the 'Human Nature' Category
Presidential Book Recommendations
The NYT Sunday Book Review editors asked a gaggle of writers and intellectuals to recommend books for the candidates (and, by extension, the next president). The only one that stood out to me as particularly useful was a recommendation by Steven Pinker. He offers Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), in which “renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong.” And that’s true–everyone else I know is exactly like that. Anyway, I thought I’d join others in blogland and offer my own recommendations.
It would be pompous to recommend my own book (which you’ll buy if you love America even a little bit). So instead I’ll offer a few in the spirit of the Pinker rec. These are books that influenced me a lot in writing my own. And there’s at least some chance they’d help anyone taking office to keep their bearings, assuming that person isn’t delusional, which is probably not a safe assumption because if so why are they running for president.
In any event, the first is Twilight of the Presidency by former LBJ aide George Reedy. Here’s what I wrote about it in my book:
In his 1970 book The Twilight of the Presidency, George Reedy warned that the environment surrounding the chief executive was enough to make even a well-grounded person delusional. Reedy arrived at that conclusion through close observation, having served as Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary from 1964-65 and later as special assistant to the president in 1968. It seems that Reedy did not entirely enjoy the experience. As a boss, Johnson was a “colossal son of a bitch,” oscillating unpredictably between sadistic abuse and kindness. Reedy has left us a painfully honest—and, at times, bitterly funny— depiction of the sociology of power. Former Nixon aide John Dean, who knows something about the darker side of the West Wing environment, calls Twilight “the best book on the presidency.”
As Reedy writes in Twilight:
There is no position in the United States in which the isolation from equals is so complete as the presidency. To be the absolute superior in status to everyone else encountered throughout the day is an effective form of isolation…. In many respects, it is an even more effective form of isolation than physical confinement. The prisoner doing a spell in solitary knows that he is cut off from other human beings. The president, however, is surrounded by large, adoring groups that give him the illusion of human contact when all they really do is act as an echo chamber for his thoughts.
Gerald Ford recognized that Groupthink and the Arrogance of Power were threats to a sanely administered presidency, and required that his top staffers read the book as a cautionary tale. Alas, given that two of his top staffers were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, it seems not to have worked.
My second recommendation is hard to find: Bruce Buchanan’s The Presidential Experience: What the Office Does to the Man (1978). The psychological analysis in it is dated, long-distance, and not performed by a psychiatrist. But it’s an interesting exploration into/speculation about, the various pathologies that can accompany becoming “the most powerful man in the world” and still finding yourself powerless to meet expectations.
Finally, Theodore J. Lowi’s The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (1985). I hadn’t read Lowi’s book until halfway through my own, and discovered that he’d said almost everything that needed to be said about the modern presidency. Luckily he’d said it over two decades ago. Here’s a good summary of Lowi’s thesis:
In his new book Mr. Lowi shrewdly describes the Presidency as an increasingly ”plebiscitary” office. Its occupant uses television and polls to commune directly with the masses, bypassing such mediating institutions as Congress and the political parties. Having given our Presidents big power, we expect big things of them - especially in terms of ‘’service delivery,” which, Mr. Lowi writes, has displaced representation as the test of democracy and legitimacy. Despite the aggrandizement of the executive branch at Congress’s expense, though, there are still ”built-in barriers to presidents’ delivering on their promises.” The result is a dangerous cycle - substantive failure, followed by frantic White House efforts to create false images of success, followed by adventurism abroad, followed by further public disillusion - all of which forces the next President to turn the rhetorical heat up even higher.
Is it really too much to ask the candidates to check out these three books? I don’t think so. After all, our current prez reads around 90 books a year!
One Thing at a Time
(Or none). In “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” Walter Kirn explains why the only time I really seem to get anything done anymore is when I’m crammed into a tiny coach seat, forbidden to use electronic devices, and faced with the choice between doing some work and watching a Katherine Heigl movie.
Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.
Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.
The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it.
This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly.
Speaking of flying/multitasking: about a week ago, I was in the bathroom at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, when a guy comes in quacking away on his bluetooth device, sidles right up next to me at the urinal, and continues talking (apparently to an assistant/employee) about an upcoming meeting, treating his associate to a cascading liquid symphony punctuated by autoflushes.
Wow. That’s Punk.
The New York Times reports that some months ago, a GOP political consultant had his lawyers inform the FBI about rumors of Eliot Spitzer’s trysts with high-priced hookers. I don’t care about that, but this detail about the consultant really leapt out at me:
Mr. Stone, who has referred to politics as “performance art,” is a longtime Republican consultant known for hardball politics and a cloak-and-dagger sensibility. He started out as a teenager in the campaign of Richard M. Nixon, and has a tattoo of the former president’s head on his back.
You Had Me at “Live Lobsters”
So my dad, who, like me, is a fan of pulpy noir detective novels and shows, sends me an email telling me to set my Tivo for this. I click the link and read:
In the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Edinburgh, corrupt cop Brendan McCabe is being drowned in a tank of live lobsters.
That is perhaps the best sentence I’ve ever read.
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