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The New Narcissism
Have we finally reached the point where narcissism is no longer an epidemic but an institution? Is this the legacy of the “Me Generation” of the ’70s, bequeathing a cultural norm of such enormous self-absorption that self-absorption has itself become a virtue?
Joe Holleman asks the question. I fear that the answer is self-evident. The mantra of our generation has become:
Ask not what you can do for others; ask what you can demand that others must do for you.
Paradoxical Truths to Embrace for a Meaningful Life
I’ve been telling my students for years that to live a successful life one has to be a little bit schizophrenic. We live in a world filled with contradictions that we have to acknowledge, attempt to reconcile, and sometimes accept as irreconcilable.
This article does a wonderful job of spelling it out. Definitely worth reading.
Courage
Doing what’s right instead of what’s popular;
doing what’s important instead of what’s convenient;
doing what’s necessary instead of what feels good;
doing what’s risky instead of what’s comfortable;
doing what’s challenging instead of what’s easy;
doing what’s best for everyone instead of what’s best for yourself;
doing what others will condemn instead of what others will applaud;
following the heart when the mind is misguided;
following the mind when the heart is seduced;
persevering when others tell you to turn back;
turning back when it’s clear you’ve taken the wrong path;
speaking out against evil;
keeping silent in the face of insult;
telling those you love how much they mean to you.
Visionaries and Ideology: a study in contrasts
Who knew a trip to New York could be so emotional?
I didn’t want to go in the first place. As my 92-year-old student likes to quote: Travelling is for peasants.
But my wife convinced me with simple arithmetic. Four tickets to bring three kids and son-in-law home or two tickets to visit them. No-brainer.
So I went grudgingly, confirming in the end the truism that some of life’s most profound moments come not only unexpected but against our will.
Our first stop was the 9/11 museum. I marveled at the artistic vision that had conceived the memorial pools, the water channeling down in rivulets that mirrored the face of the fallen towers, the continuous downward rush balanced by the redemptive feeling of water — the source of life — returning to the heart of the world. Here there was solace, closure, and consolation.
But a very different feeling accosted me inside. Almost upon entering the doors a single word brandished itself across my mind’s eye: Holocaust.
Let me explain.
Read the whole article here.
The Grateful Whale
Swimmers worked an hour to free this humpback whale tangled in fishing net. To see the whale’s reaction, skip to 6:40 on the video. Perhaps the display was one of sheer elation at being freed, or perhaps an unbridled expression of gratitude.
This whale knows something too many of us have forgotten. Our society has embraced the culture of convenience, entitlement, and victimization to the point where we barely feel appreciation anymore. In a world where everything is supposed to be available and instantaneous, we’ve responded with the attitude that everything takes too long, takes too much thought, takes too much effort. Our expectations are so high that we are forever frustrated and disgruntled.
In biblical Hebrew, the term for gratitude is hakoras hatov — literally, “recognizing the good.” Before we can appreciate, we have to look for the good in our lives, see it as good, recognize how we have benefited from it as good; once we have that recognition, not only can we experience true appreciation but we inevitably will feel appreciative. How can we not, with that which has benefited us so clear before our eyes?
“The wise man’s eyes are in his head,” says King Solomon in Proverbs. Only if we see through the lens of our minds’ eye can we truly perceive, truly understand, and truly achieve the lofty human reactions that should be uniquely ours, but which sometimes we have to learn from the creatures with which we share our world.
How sad for us if they get it and we don’t.
Just who are “we”?
Tonto: What is wrong, Kimosabe?
Lone Ranger: We’re surrounded by bloodthirsty indians, Tonto. What are we going to do?
Tonto: What you mean, “we,” white man?
Thanks to Jay Livingston for this post on behalf of the Montclair State Sociology Department. He paints a compelling picture of how the collective language of “we” has been increasingly conscripted by modern politicians to create — or fabricate — an impression of common purpose and common allegiance.
With politics dividing us more deeply than ever, it might seem beneficial to employ rhetoric designed to bridge the ideology gap. In practice, however, disingenuous expressions of harmony and unified vision can do a lot more harm than good.
For one, when a demonstrably divisive leader — a U. S. president, for example — claims that he is the leading advocate of unity and cooperation, he makes himself a lightning rod for accusations of hypocrisy and manipulation that breed cynicism in place of optimism. For another, by claiming the high ground, he implicitly vilifies all who oppose him, even if they do so from positions of principle. Either way, the ideological rift grows wider, not narrower.
Perhaps worst of all, the collective “we” diffuses responsibility from the individual onto the collective: since all of us are responsible, none of us is responsible. This produces the effective equivalent of such politicalisms as “Mistakes were made.” Somewhere, someone did something wrong. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but nowhere for it to stick.
In short, fake unity achieves the opposite of unification.
But when there really is cohesion, whether within a team, a business, a community, or a society, the collective “we” becomes a priceless asset, including the lowly with the high, the rank and file with the leaders, the grunts with the visionaries. Like it or not, we’re all in it together. And the more we try to shoulder our collective burdens with one mind and one heart, the more we will succeed.
The Way we Talk
Speak softly. Speak with a smile. Speak clearly. Use vocabulary. Be firm, fair, and friendly. Be consistent. Speak and then listen. Listen before you speak. Speak descriptively. Speak with refinement. Speak about important things. Find something important to you in what’s important to them.
Church vs. State
Here’s a quiz question: When was the phrase “separation of church and state” first introduced into American jurisprudence?
a) 1789; b) 1800;
c) 1840; d) 1947
Most of us would answer 1789, with the ratification of the United States Constitution and the First Amendment, guaranteeing religious freedom.
Guess again.
According to Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger (cited by Eytan Kobre in Mishpacha Magazine), the first use of the phrase was during the presidential election of 1800, when defenders of Thomas Jefferson responded to attacks that their candidate was anti-religious by invoking the “need to separate religion from politics.” Jefferson himself used the phrase in a letter in support of Connecticut Baptists who feared political oppression. Jefferson’s overture was ignored by religionists who could not imagine the absence of religion from public life, even in their own defense.
Around 1840, when Catholics in New York City began claiming access to funding for religious schooling, Protestants responded by asserting church and state separation, eventually seeking a new constitutional amendment to that effect in the 1870s. When that effort failed, reinterpretation of the First Amendment became their next strategy.
But it was only in 1947 in Everson vs. Board of Education that, despite a 5-4 split in the Supreme court ruling, the justices agreed unanimously that a “wall of separation between church and state” was implicit in the First Amendment. The majority opinion was authored by Justice Hugo Black, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
Thus, the origins of a tradition that everyone thinks believes goes back to the framers — most of whom would be horrified by the popular outlook that has come to define the First Amendment, in the words of Joseph Lieberman, as protecting not freedom of religion but freedom from religion. The “wall of separation” has been critiqued by Justice Clarence Thomas as “born in bigotry,” by Justice Potter Stewart as “nowhere to be found in the Constitution,” and by former Chief Justice William Rehnquist as “a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
Writes American University law professor Daniel Dreisbach: “Indeed, this wall has done what walls frequently do — it has obstructed the view. It has obfuscated our understanding of constitutional principles…”
It’s not always wise to look to the skies
Just ask the bar-headed goose, famous for traversing the Himalayan Mountains on its annual migration from the Indian subcontinent to central Asia. According to NPR, researchers have now determined that the migrant birds, although once believed to soar at heights near the peak of Everest, keep much lower to the ground, rising over obstacles and then settling back into a tighter, more earth-bound trajectory.
It’s worth considering the lesson for those of us who aspire to lives of spiritual elevation. Man is a creature of contradictions, a divinely inspired being whose ethereal soul is nevertheless trapped in a body of flesh and blood and sentenced to live his life amidst the material attractions of the physical world. We long for the heavens but, like Icarus, we risk losing our bearings and plummeting into the abyss if we neglect the needs of our earthly selves.
And so, like the goose, we rise up, we drop down, we endure the peaks and valleys of personal challenge as we try to chart our course through the uncertain terrain that is life in this world.
Yonason Goldson 