On Writer's Courage: Perplexing Reflection

Sunset over Lake Pejar, NSW. Photo by Dr Michael de Percy

 

No Matter Our Wreckage by Gemma Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've met the author a couple of times and we follow each other on twitter. I bought this memoire on Kindle recently and once I started, I couldn’t stop. I usually write notes on my blog about every book I read but this one made me double-check. It was only yesterday when talking to my students about developing a professional online presence and I mentioned how Gemma Carey had gone against the academic grain with her book that I realised how courageous she is in publishing this story. While it was far less courageous, B.F. Skinner took a similar approach decades ago and was admonished for writing a novel (Walden Two), despite its own type of brilliance.

I think the book is very courageous and has challenged my thinking on multiple levels. I don’t know where to go from here, but I suppose that is the importance of the book. After days of reflection, I am still at a loss as to “where to from here?” But I hope my perplexity honours the work sufficiently for now.

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On Narrative and Momentum; or, I just needed to write something about something right now

Mushrooms at the Gunning Golf Club [Photo © 2021 Eliza Markert]

Sometimes I just have to write something. If there is a single thing I love to do, so much so that I just have to do it, then that thing is writing. It is my world; my raison d'être. I make no apologies for it.

I've been trying to get myself back on track after a couple of years of alternately healthy and not-so-healthy distractions. I've been blogging for so long now it is part of my identity, but my reading and other scholarly pursuits have taken a back seat. Or so it seemed. 

It was merely a blip on my reading/writing radar. That is not to say that my life hasn't been better than ever before. It certainly has! But my scholarly life needed a revival.

The idea of momentum comes up time and again in my research into technologies such as transport and telecommunications. I find these topics interesting because - well - I found out that as an Aquarius I am interested in all things related to time and space. So logistics is key. And I do whatever I like as much as I can justify it! Anyway, I digress.

As a former artillery and later pay corps army officer, and having completed the Logistics Officers Intermediate Course at Bandiana (another lifetime ago), and more recently becoming a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, it all makes some sort of serendipitous sense.

My research focuses on the topics of these things: transport and telecommunications. But that is not key to my narrative, and I have become entangled in the "subject matter expert" divide before. But why is it that if I focus on multilateralism and foreign aid or refugees, for example, that I am outside of my expertise? Well, please let me explain.

The key theoretical thing I am interested in is how institutions change or don't change, and how policy instruments help or hinder the outcomes of policy goals as they relate to institutions. Effectively, I am interested in how governments can achieve what that want to achieve, and why they don't do these things. It is pretty straight forward!

But my approach is also relevant to international institutions such as the Word Trade Organisation and the World Bank. If I were to be asked, at a pinch my specialisation is government-business relations from a regulatory, industry policy, and an international political economy (IPE) perspective. None of these perspectives disrupt my personal narrative. They are related to subject; not specifically to theory.

So therein lies my narrative. What is my purpose? To understand what institutional factors help or hinder, from a policy perspective, governments' achievement of desired policy goals.

That's it for now. So what is your narrative?

Why won't my link previews work on Twitter?

 

Twitter Card Validator

Ever noticed how previews fail to materialise when sharing links on Twitter? It's because your website doesn't have "Twitter Cards" enabled.

I did what I always do and searched Google for "why won't my blogger links preview on twitter" and eventually found the "Twitter Card Validator" (pictured above).

Enter the link in the validator, and if it comes up with image above, then your website needs some code added to it.

I found the code for Blogger sites here.

<!--Twitter Card-->
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'> <!--homepage-->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:description" expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' />
<meta name="twitter:title" expr:content="data:blog.pageTitle" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@username" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="YOUR_LOGO_URL" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@username" />
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "static_page"'> <!--page-->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:description" expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' />
<meta name="twitter:title" expr:content="data:blog.pageTitle" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@username" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="YOUR_LOGO_URL" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@username" />
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <!--blog post-->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:description" expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' />
<meta name="twitter:title" expr:content="data:blog.pageName" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@username" />
<meta name="twitter:image" expr:content="data:blog.postImageUrl" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@username" />
</b:if>

<!--End Twitter Card-->  

Paste it immediately before the </head> tag. Replace all instances of @username with your Twitter username and all instances of YOUR_LOGO_URL with your actual URL. 

Although my Blogger site is actually at madepercy.blogspot.com, I used my alias address of politicalscience.com.au and it worked just fine.

I hope this is useful. All credit to https://jumiaafrica.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-to-add-twitter-cards-to-blogger-and.html - thanks for this, its been bugging me for years!

How I Journal Now...

 

My current journalling regimen incorporates two key approaches from Ryan Holiday and Benjamin Franklin [Photo by Dr Michael de Percy].

After much reflection, a little therapy, and much deliberation, I have arrived at a new journalling regimen that has given new life to my daily reflective habit. I document my current journalling process below.

It is almost three years ago since I blogged here about my daily journalling regimen. At the time, I had been journalling on a daily basis for over a year, and, despite some major life interruptions, I continue to journal on a daily basis. 

My daily habit has not always been efficacious; not because of my journalling, but because my process became stagnant and the challenges I faced had changed over time.

Originally, I took the opportunity to journal using Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic as a prompt but also to develop a routine that reinforced Stoic logic, in particular Epictetus's Enchiridion, which can be summed up in the first three sentences of his work:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Like the ritualised practices found in organised religions, journalling is a constant reminder to defer to the source: my sense of reason, and, in particular, to continually assess what is in my control and what is not. There is power in the daily reminder which I find similar to the concept of daily (or regular) prayer or meditation found in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. 

Interestingly, my reading of many theologically inspired works confirms the ubiquity of Stoic philosophy's basic premises in many major religions and ancient philosophies.

My previous process began with free writing, followed by reflection on the daily meditations in The Daily Stoic, The Daily Stoic Journal, and the three-monthly program in Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal. I also added the morning and evening reflections from James Allen's As A Man Thinketh. 

(These days I generally journal only once per day whereas from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2019 I journalled each morning and each evening.)

For the final parts of my journalling I referred to various texts and reflected on a number of short passages of these texts on a daily basis. These included (among other works) La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the Qur'an, the Tanakh, the Holy Bible (yet again!), Patience and Gratitude: An abridged translation of ʿUddat as-Sabirin wa dhakhirat ash-shakirin, and the Shiva Sutras, and soon I will finish the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Slowly digesting classic texts this way is useful as it allows time for each morsel to make its mark, rather than racing through a book and forgetting soon after.

Ryan Holiday advocates reading slowly. And the point is that we should give ourselves time to do things for ourselves. Emerson¹ said it best:

Eminently thoughtful men, from the time of Pythagoras down, have insisted on an hour of solitude every day, to meet their own mind and learn what oracle it has to impart.

While the paragraph by paragraph approach to reading worked over the last few years, I have started to lose interest in my old journalling process. Brett McKay from the Art of Manliness wrote about how he lost the journalling habit over time once his life settled down. I suspect this is part of what is happening for me, too.

But there is still this other part of me that needs to journal so that my monkey mind gets out of my way. Tim Ferriss says it best:

I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.

This is key for me and if my journalling process requires too much effort I tend to only get to it piecemeal during the day rather than using it for its monkey-caging benefits.

I also found that my recent experience with EMDR was great but "checking-in" with my different "parts" and getting them to communicate (rather than running off when my adult self is on autopilot) stopped happening when I wasn't regularly checking in with the therapist.

EMDR, parts therapy, and internal family systems are really interesting and it is best to work with qualified practitioners. But for my personal record, and drawing on Rolf Potts' travel journal philosophy of my journal being for me, "an author and audience of one", here is my own "parts map" from September last year:

Dr Michael de Percy, personal "parts map" developed during EMDR therapy

Once I would have been afraid of exposing my vulnerability, but fuck it, I am over 50 now and I will do whatever I want with my own stuff, just as I did recently. And if Alain de Botton advocates psychotherapy, then who the hell is anyone else to judge?

Now to my most recent process. Once a day, I do the following:

1. Daily Stoic reflections. I wanted to make sure I reinforced the logic of Stoic philosophy as the first thing, so I have moved the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Journal as a combined first item. I have hand-written the questions from the Daily Stoic Journal into the pages of my copy of the Daily Stoic.
2. Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal reflections.
3. Reflections on a "Quote of the Day" (that I like or I look to one of my Cabinet of Invisible Counsellors).²
4. Check-in with my "parts" (or what I am grateful for if I have nothing to discuss). 
5. Free writing to clear my monkey mind. This can be long or short depending on how I am feeling. Speaking of which, Mark Manson provides some helpful questions in this regard: What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I feeling? What the hell are my blind spots?

So that is my latest attempt to reignite my journalling. It is still a big part of my day but it allows me to spend less time thinking and more time doing. It reminds me of part of a Hemingway story that Fitzgerald told him to leave out because it was too clever:

Benny is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he’s boxing, he’s thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.

 I hope this article is useful for anyone keeping a Stoic journal.

Notes

1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Conrad, Charles; Books, Best Success. We Are the Builders of Our Fortunes: Success through Self-Reliance (p. 58). www.SuccessBooks.net. Kindle Edition.

2. I am still developing my "cabinet" but here is my go-to list for now:

• Work practices: Cal Newport
• Literature: Harold Bloom
• Political Science: Charles E. Merriam
• Teaching: Ryan Holiday
• Scholarly Tradition: John Wanna
• Virtues: Benjamin Franklin
• Individuality: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Existence: Albert Camus
• Blogging: Walter Benjamin
• Motivation: Kyle Eschenroeder
• Music: John Adams
• Writing: Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
• House and Garden: Dirk Bogarde
• Travel: Rolf Potts

My seminar attendance has increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic

Reflecting on my seminar attendance last week gave my writing a much-needed boost

The Covid-19 pandemic has made a vast array of online conferences, seminars, and webinars available, most of these for free. The professionalism of the online seminars has been exceptional, and I have found much inspiration and a new-found passion for my work by engaging more than I have for some time.

Conference attendance is usually reliant on my available disposable funds, especially when there is not much funding available for conference attendance. For many years I have paid for it myself until only recently.

But this year has been tremendous and I hope the energy that has gone into online seminars continues once the pandemic is over.

Here is a list of some the seminars I have participated in or attended since September this year.

• Dr Michael de Percy, Process Tracing in Comparative Politics: Operationalising Historical Institutionalism, presentation given to SchoPES via MS Teams, 28 September 2020.
• RegNet, Critical Junctures: Reimagining Regulatory Governance - Data, 6 October 2020. 
• CEDA, Federal Budget Address by Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, 12 October 2020.
• CEDA, Budget response by Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, 15 October 2020.
• National Museum of Australia, Teaching Indigenous History, 14 and 21 October 2020.
• Dr Craig Applegate, Pushing on a piece of string? The Commonwealth’s Fiscal Policy response to the pandemic, presentation given to SchoPES via MS Teams, 26 October 2020.
• Lowy Institute, Francis Fukuyama: On Liberalism and the US Presidential Election, 18 November 2020.
• CEDA, Sustainable Development Goals can be a blueprint for COVID-19 recovery, 19 November 2020.
• Professor Lelia Green, Winning an an ARC Grant, University of Canberra via Zoom, 23 November 2020.
• RegNet, Financing energy transitions and environmental restoration: Who pays the price?, 24 November 2020.
• IPAA ACT, Defence Transformation Strategy Launch, 27 November 2020.
• CEDA, Public Interest Technology Digital Forum, 30 November-1 December 2020.
• RegNet, Street level bureaucrats in a relational state, 1 December 2020.
• BDO Australia, An Economic Perspective on Australia's Manufacturing Strategy, 2 December 2020.
• Dr Michael de Percy, Process Tracing in Historical Institutionalism, ACSPRI 7th Biennial Social Science Methodology Conference, 2 December 2020
• Professor David Hensher, Working from Home, Covid-19 and Implications for Transport Systems, ACSPRI 7th Biennial Social Science Methodology Conference, 3 December 2020.
• David Wilson, Parramatta Light Rail: Two massive projects to the north of Parramatta Railway Station, CILTA NSW Lunchtime Legends Series #2, 

The seminars highlight the important work that is being done on multiple levels and by people in all sectors of the community.

One of the highlights was learning about local manufacturer, AMSL Aero, and their latest Australian manufacturing venture into the electric air taxi industry with the Vertiia eVTOL aircraft. 

It is impossible to keep up with everything, but attending so many seminars would have been impossible if I had to attend them all in person.

My only hope is that the online seminars/webinars will continue on, or at least in hybrid modes, from now on.

It is surprising how much online skills have increased in a very short time, and while I still wish to travel and attend overseas conferences, there is much to be said for the efficiency of attending conferences from my own home office!

Perception in Stoicism, Buddhism, and New Thought: Creating an inner life through imagination

Drinking tea and reading books and enjoying the life of the mind. Photo by Dr Michael de Percy.

Mastering Your Inner World Neville Goddard Explained: Manifesting with Ease by Rita Faith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be no more academic snobbishness from here on in. Reading this book, it hit me like a thunderbolt, bringing back a bunch of lessons from earlier readings and confirming so many life experiences. I've noticed the difference already with some simple techniques that make life so much better. Is it the book, the techniques, the confirmation of naturally acquired skills? I don't know. But here is my attempt to explain.

I am at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in early 1993. The ropes test. 6 metres up and down then up and down again in patrol order (rifle and webbing). Not my greatest strength and I am on "sluggers" or remedial physical training until I pass. I am talking with a colleague about it, that last "bite" on the rope that we struggle to make. We decide that we should just do it. Take that last bite. The body won't let us down. Wrong. And the blisters are worse than the thump on the ground from 6 metres up. No shame though, I gutted it out.

That  night, I dream about the ropes. While everyone else is eating dinner tomorrow night, I (along with the other sluggers), will get another crack at the tests we haven't passed. All night I toss and turn and I am up the rope and then down and then up again and then down and it all flows. The dream repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats... zzzzzz.

The next day I pass and I never fail the ropes test again. It was a purely mental issue from an earlier experience with the rope obstacle on an obstacle course and an arsehole I have since cursed and forgiven and now whatever. I was just a boy. A feeling of cowardice and not good enough and immorality in that sense of the bayonet as a moral weapon and I was immoral. So much conservative crap that did more for that arsehole's ego than my motivation. Life experiences have proven the opposite and I have learnt to be much kinder to myself.

Recent experiences with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) have revealed a bunch of parts of me that I wasn't aware of. I have learnt to recognise the various parts of me, the good, the bad, the evil, the off with the daisies naive kid, the arsehole dirty fighter, the whole shebang. They are all part of me and they won't go away. But my imagination has been fired up to see the Council of Me, the various parts that run riot if the conscious me doesn't acknowledge them and keep them under control.

It all sounds hokey. I felt this recently when I decided that I needed to find my inner compass. I found the website Wanderlust and an exercise by Melissa Colleret to do just that. It felt hokey, but I came up with three of my core values that echo past exercises I have done. Love, Freedom, and Learning: Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina.

I realised that I have been manifesting my entire life. Be an army officer; be a theologian; be a politician (oh no, not for me! Well saved!); be a political scientist; live the life of the mind; live in the country but work in Canberra (my favourite city in Australia); live in a federation house (and other things too personal to mention). I remember after graduating from Duntroon how it struck me: Now what? It makes me think of a quote attributed to the actor, Lily Tomlin:

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific.

I've been trying to practice Stoicism for the last four years, and along with every other endeavour of my idealism, I have trashed my ideals. My enthusiasm for Stoicism has not been able to overcome its shortcomings. Are we really to resign ourselves to our circumstances? Imagine if I'd done that when I was stuck in a job that was so bad, I contemplated the main problem concerning philosophy, a la Albert Camus.

Often, when teaching leadership classes, I get to re-live my shortcomings. For example, James Clawson's work separates the "what do I want to be" from the "how do I want to feel" (the Internal Life's Dream - LDint - versus the External Life's Dream - LDext - otherwise known as "Resonance").

I have found my calling and I am living in accordance with my inner compass (even when I felt I wasn't).  Nothing hokey about any of that.

But the Stoics don't feel too much. And, like Buddhists, they focus on managing their perceptions or impressions. And here is the common ground I have found with Goddard's ideas:

Imagination is God and God is imagination.

And finally I arrive at Rita Faith's book. It isn't hokey. Neville Goddard was an inspiration to Wayne Dyer. So you don't like Hay House? Well Dyer's PhD supervisor was Abraham Maslow. You know, the first theory you learnt at uni and the theory you tried to fit into all your first year essays because it was the only one that made sense? Yeah, him.

As I finished reading Faith's work on Goddard, I was half way through Jack Kerouac's Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha. I've been thinking a lot about Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. (I am still trying to work out whether Hesse was writing about Buddha or a parallel to Buddha. I suppose it doesn't matter.)

The Britannica entry on Herman Hesse's Siddhartha reads as follows:

Despairing of finding fulfillment, he goes to the river and learns to simply listen. He discovers within himself a spirit of love and learns to accept human separateness... As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief.

There was my connection. The aptly named Rita Faith tells me that Goddard says I have to die to my former state of mind. I have to imagine not how I will achieve what I want to achieve, but how I will feel (there's that Clawson again) when I have achieved it.

The Law of Attraction and other New Thought self-help books go back to the 19th century. The latest iteration by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, has some major issues. For starters, Wayne Dyer wanted nothing to do with it. Second, Neville Goddard didn't think it was a secret at all and (apparently) he taught for some forty years never charging for his lectures, only asking for a contribution to his travelling expenses.

And more recently, Mark Manson has called "bullshit" on The Secret. And then it takes an interesting turn:

Call me crazy, but I believe that changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

Call me crazy, but isn't that what Goddard said? Isn't that what Rita Faith says, too? You have to actually DIE to your former self, not think it positively away with other positive delusionals!

Here is the key takeaway from Faith's short book. We can manage our impressions (or perceptions). For the Stoics, events are facts neither good nor bad, only our reaction to our impressions of these events is good or bad. To the Buddhists, as far as my reading takes me, our impressions of the world are the cause of our suffering. What if there was another way? And what if it wasn't a secret?

The Stoics leave out the how of managing our impressions. I still use Stoic philosophy, but as Seneca would have said, if Epicurus tells me something good I should use it. Rita Faith is telling me something good and I'm using it.

For all the times I have dwelt upon negative thoughts, becoming jaded at being overworked or overworking myself out of some sort of fear or self-doubt, or been afraid to be happy about something in case I jinx it, I can finally call bullshit.

There is no single way, religion, or philosophy. Human separateness (from Hesse), and individualism as a reaction to my senses (from Kerouac), versus re-programming my senses, or dying to my former state of mind, has provided me with a way to use my imagination to control my inner world. The Stoics tell me to do this, but they don't tell me how.

It's not the kind of delusional positive thinking that I abhor. It's like the law of attraction but it is also more like the experiences I have had when all of my mind and energies were focused and brought to bear on some purpose. And it can be done with memories, too. The idea of revision is to go back and reimagine the past. Not the events per se but the feelings.

It struck me that during one of my EMDR sessions, I recall an event as a kid in Western Sydney. I am in a fight with another kid. The mother of the kid I am fighting and her friend are standing by, telling the other kid how best to hurt me. 

I had mostly forgotten about the experience, but I remember a moment of clarity that makes me laugh. The mother's friend had mini-fox terriers. I looked at them and thought "wow they are cool dogs!" I have two of my own mini-foxies now! And so the memory is revised. No longer crapping on about a crappy situation, but grateful for my mutts and the revised memory.

And every day I think about how I will feel when I accomplish the things I aim to accomplish. Not how I will accomplish them. And much like giving myself time to think really works, giving myself time to feel works remarkably well, too. I am delighted that this book fills some gaps in my knowledge. Or, in the words of my sister:

Learning is cyclic, not linear. There are never any gaps, just the right timing and prior knowledge to build upon.

And all this from a 46-page page quick-read at AUD$3.99 via Kindle!

View all my reviews

Converse Comfort: Old, New, No Hassel

Virtual Scuff on Converse, Gunning NSW 8 April 2020

The 'virtual scuff' - isolation has created new ways of expressing envy, it seems.

Can I help it I look this cool when wearing Converse?

Desi on the catwalk in country flannelette and denim

I've had numerous pairs of Chuck Taylor Hi-Top Converse, but always in black. My Converse have met some awesome people.

Converse with the Hoff, Berlin, November 2019

I've learnt a lot from my Converse. My Converse taught me how to greet people while social distancing.

The Hoffshake

I try not to Hassel the Hoff but my Converse keep leading me to him.

Don't Hassel the Hoff, Berlin November 2020

Sometimes I need a little more than just my Converse for support. I recently turned to the catwalk for assistance with my home office WHS compliance.

Desi, WHS consultant, Keswick, March 2020

My old Converse started to get really comfortable in Germany. They enjoy the life of the mind.

Hannah Arendt Street, Berlin, November 2020.

When one's Converse start to feel really comfortable, however, they are on their last legs.

Converse@Keswick, March 2020

When Converse get old, they feel too comfortable.

Lenny@Keswick, March 2020.

So now I have new Converse.

New Converse at Keswick, Day 1 (today).

They are comfortable in a different way.

Valentine@Keswick, April 2020.

Alas, a virtual scuff from envy. But new Converse bring the perfect mix of glamour and grunge.

Desi@Keswick, March 2020.

Reflections on CeBIT 2019; or, WTF is an electric H-D good for?

Harley-Davidson LiveWire. Um, no thanks! 

Seeing an electric H-D LiveWire in the flesh at CeBIT today really set me off. WTF is that about? 

The first time I went to CeBIT the event was huge. This year, it was significantly smaller. The original CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, ended last year but Australia decided to push on with the branded local event. I'm not sure if I will go again.

Steve Wozniak was a keynote speaker. This year the keynote speakers in the sideshows provided an open-plan version of the restricted audience by using headphones for those with paid tickets.

There was an interesting budget hologram display at the British Industry stand and lots of virtual reality and AI displays. But it was clear the major exhibitors have moved on.

Some displays reminded me of Expo '88 in Brisbane where what was then the latest technology is now somewhat laughable in the manner of watching early aviation enthusiasts.

The saddest display was Harley-Davidson's e-bike, the LiveWire. A review in the AFR in June suggested the bike had some positives but two weeks ago H-D "pulled the plug" on sales and production due to some problems with the bike.

There is something just not right about an electric H-D. Sure, times are changing. But the "progress" thesis is running out of steam in my view.

The idea of human progress as a linear, inevitable improvement in the lot of humans has some validity, but it also tends to be uneven if you are starving in sub-Saharan Africa. And whether the Middle Ages were an improvement on the glory days of the Roman Empire is arguable.

What I saw at CeBIT was the tired leftovers of earlier technological advances. Much like the Millennium Falcon, things are looking a bit shabby chic. Not that the technology hasn't improved or that things haven't advanced, but to what end?

The H-D LiveWire had me thinking, "what's the point?" Granted, it is better for the environment and die hard H-D fans are no longer turning a profit for the company that is over 100 years old. But a H-D that makes that annoying Formula E zing zing sound? Progress, really?

It would seem that when we talk about the future of work, there is less and less work to be done. And when speakers talk about technology and leadership, what's so new about it all?

Two key things emerged for me at CeBIT. First, technology is replacing humans in everyday life. Who needs to speak to wait-staff or a cashier when you can order and pay for food on your phone? I used me&u for the first time today.

Second, the other technologies that featured heavily at CeBIT were meeting and corroboration tools. But meeting and collaborating to do what, exactly?  With production and manual labour roles now taken care of by technology, what exactly are people discussing in all these meetings?

It is becoming obvious that  it is all a con-job. Meetings are about saying, "see, I'm here!" and ticking off the attendance box. Skype is the same thing except it's, "see, even though I'm not there, I'm still working!"

The use of tech in healthcare and for first responders is important, but it made we wonder: Just how important is all this other work that we do?

I fear that, like the electric H-D, we've lost the point. We are meeting about things that we don't produce, to lead people who don't produce anything. If this is the case, why are there so many meetings?

Cal Newport has shown the way for the future of work. In the meantime, the noise of the H-D has been replaced by the noise of bureaucrats meeting. My key lesson from CeBIT? Don't believe the hype.

Rilke: Is it better to choose one's career carefully, or to know oneself through trial and error?

Monument to the poet Rainer M. Rilke in the city of Ronda, Spain. In the gardens of hotel Reina Victoria.
Photo by Wwal [Public domain] via Wikimedia

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rilke wrote a series of letters to the young poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, beginning in 1902. Kappus was reading Rilke's poetry under the chestnut tress at the Military Academy in Wiener Nuestadt when his teacher, Horaček, noticed the volume. Rilke had been a pupil at the Military Lower School in Sankt Pölten when Horaček was a chaplain there, and Horaček had known Rilke personally. 

The military proved not to be for Rilke, and he continued his studies in Prague. Kappus, however, felt that his own choice to pursue a military career was "directly opposed to my own inclinations", yet would continue his military career for years after. In the meantime, Kappus decided to write to Rilke to ask for feedback on his own poetry, and Rilke maintained their correspondence despite his constant travels. 

By Rilke's tone in the letters, it is obvious that he enjoyed his correspondence with Kappus, and often told Kappus that if he wished to be a poet, he would need to change careers, or, at worst, he might find time in barracks life to keep at his poetry. The book provides Rilke's correspondence to Kappus, beginning with his return letter of 1903 and continuing until 1908. 

The book also includes a second work, The Letter from the Young Worker, which adopts a letter format to "a polemic against Christianity". This style recalls the dialogues of Plato and others, but in this case is one side of a potential written conversation. In many ways, the style mirrors the way we read Rilke's correspondence with Kappus, only having (mostly) one side of the narrative. In his first response, Rilke provides some important feedback. He suggests that Kappus' poetry lacks an identity. He suggests that Kappus is looking to the outside, but the answer is (pp. 6-7):

Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night's quietest hour: must I write? Dig down deep into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple "I must', then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a witness to this urge... A work of art is good if it has risen out of necessity... Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist... Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside.

Imagine having such a mentor? Rilke was patient, kind, and wise. His connection with Kappus has, perhaps, something to do with being a poet while in the military system, something I identify with personally (having found that the military was, once I neared the tell-tale signs of the evening of my youth, "directly opposed to my own inclinations"). 

There is so much in such a short work, with Rilke's advice becoming "Candidean" - "take refuge in [subjects] offered by your own day-to-day life" - and focused on the individual rather than the work (and not in a mean-spirited way but as a mentor). 

Given that Kappus continues his military career and does not become a poet of any note, and that Rilke was the opposite in springing from the military's well, it makes me wonder: should we take care in choosing our careers so we do not waste time in the wrong station? Or should we learn what really floats our boat through trial and error? I suspect, based on Rilke's care for Kappus' work, that Rilke really knew himself as a result, while I felt that, perhaps, Kappus had taken the easy option.

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What does it mean to have self-respect?

The Weighing of the Heart from the Book of the Dead of Ani (circa 1300BCE).
British Museum [Public domain] via Wikimedia.

Kitty Flanagan's recent comedy skit on The Weekly got me thinking about the idea of the "residue" we accumulate from our interactions with others, and how to deal with it. For example, checkout staff have been copping abuse from consumers as a result of the self-imposed ban on free plastic shopping bags at Woolworths and Coles stores in New South Wales.

In the skit, Flanagan pokes fun at angry consumers:

I don't believe that anyone is really that angry about plastic bags; I think people are angry about their lives.

While effective approaches to dealing with "high conflict individuals" are accessible, there is an assumed level of calmness and patience of those dealing with angry people. It does not explain, however, why even self-reflective individuals might feel the after-effects of dealing with these angry people.

The same residue might also remain from those who are hyper-critical, judgemental, or just plain rude. No matter how much we exercise pity or compassion, the residue doesn't remove itself. It requires practice, and, I believe, the practise of self-respect.

One of the major issues I have with terms like self-respect is the lack of a definition. I have found the same with self-esteem.

Self-esteem is often regarded as "the way we think about ourselves and the value we place on ourselves". I take issue with this definition as it assumes that we can perceive that value accurately.

So what if our evaluation is wrong?

In my leadership classes, I ask students to consider self-esteem from a different perspective: our self-esteem is greater the closer our self-image is to our actual self.

So, self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem. Indeed, it is possible to be over-confident while suffering from low self-esteem, or even to appear confident while being incompetent.

And self-esteem is not the same thing as self-respect. To simplify, self-esteem is evaluative, while self-respect is a matter of liking oneself.

Again, the problem with this definition is the presupposition that we can simply like ourselves.

Joan Didion, in an essay on self-respect that appeared in Vogue magazine in 1961, provided a clearer definition. (Her essay was added at the last moment as a previous author had failed to deliver on the same topic. To fit the space available, Didion wrote her essay to a precise character count.)

Didion wrote that self-respect is not a mythical charm that protects us from harm, it "concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation". This reconciliation enables us to deal with the residue of high conflict individuals:

To do without self-respect,... is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Didion does not assume that we can simply like ourselves. Rather, we develop self-respect through practice - deliberately - and forever. It is:

...a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

Self-respect, then, is part of our character:

[C]haracter - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Much like experience, self-respect does not come without its cost: 

...it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price.

So why bother? For Didion, it is the price we pay for a peaceful life:

Without [self-respect], one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

And self-respect is not just something for the present moment. It has a clear temporal dimension. Didion makes this clear in her essay, On Keeping a Notebook:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

But how does one develop and practise self-respect?

I have found it requires daily reflection through journalling. I notice others' emotional residue most first thing in the morning. Without the practice of journalling, I know my mood would spiral out of control if left to its own devices. Journalling, then, is a process of emotional self-cleansing.

But journalling has its own dangers. For Virginia Woolf, we tend to censure our own private writing. Woolf also wrote about her past and present self to her future self, so there is also a temporal aspect to the journalling process.

Woolf wrote that her journal was a private affair:

The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

At the same time, she was wary of her ability to bend the truth, even in her private reflection:

I want to appear a success even to myself.

Two lessons are clear. First, self-respect is more than just liking oneself, it is an active process of reconciling our inner selves to the society we experience on a daily basis. It is a habit of the mind, and not an innate ability.

Second, self-respect doesn't just materialise. It requires a desire to have self-respect, and the price to be paid is to be self-aware, and act in accordance with our sense of virtues. (Note that Didion did not approve of Aristotles' golden mean of virtue.)

Morning Coffee - Wake Up is a Spotify playlist I have been listening to each morning. The first piece is Mt Wolf's Burgs. Over time, the lyrics have grown on me:

I, I think if I could get you to do one thing
I would say that when you get to the point that you...
Really feel, highly motivated, to, just, towards keeping your virtue...
Then you'll you'll discover quite quickly how extraordinary a life was meant to be, could be
And it's, it's just we get so messy, it's not that we are doing lots of wrong things, our mind is so messy
We don't keep it simple
And we end up making the life that we are living, so in-ordinarily complicated
Completely unnecessarily, and it's such a shame to end up feeling, in a real muddle, while actually, you ought to be having the time of your lives.

This reminds me of the Delphic maxim, Know Thyself. It would appear that self-respect begins with living the virtuous life.

We can never be perfect, but it is the striving that counts. And while Rousseau thought experience was "dearly bought and hardly worth the cost", I daresay the cost of self-respect is worth every penny.

Wright Brothers: Origins of my fascination with flight

Wright Flyer , first powered flight. By John T. Daniels [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a boy, I loved to read. Every so often at school, the Scholastic "book club" brochure would be sent home, and we were allowed to choose a few books from the catalogue. Two books I remember fondly, Robert Westall's (1975) The Machine Gunners and Quentin Reynolds' (1950) The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of American Aviation. 

McCullough had a lot of competition to win me over (when I think about it). McCullough's book was a gift from my sister. Just before my birthday, I (un)ashamedly posted my Book Depository wishlist on Facebook. Each of my sisters bought me some of the books from the list for my birthday, except the elder of my sisters. She remembered my fascination with Reynolds' book in the 1970s and bought McCullough's book for me instead.

And there it was, just like when I was a child, except the stories of the Wright's mother weren't as forthcoming, and my early education in things like "friction" and "wind resistance" and Orville winning the bicycle race, hunched over, and my burning desire to study "aeronautics" and become a fighter pilot crashed as a nostalgic tidal wave. We call them tsunamis these days, but not in the 70s. I couldn't put McCullough's book down, to the point of staying up far too late to finish it before I left some four hours later to fly to Shanghai. Not as a pilot, regrettably, but that is another, longer story.

I found McCullough's style much like Simon Winchester, but with an urgent sense of drama. Very entertaining. I also felt a bit put out that it didn't cover some parts of Reynolds' children's book, except the few times I read "wind resistance" and a shudder of pleasure rippled through my memories. Yet this is a fine book, and it fills out so much of the Wright brothers' story, more of their sister Katharine, and more of their time in Europe.

And every time I saw that replica of a 1910 Farman at Hong Kong Airport I could have sworn it was a modified Wright Flyer. I didn't know that it was actually Glen Curtiss, along with Alexander Graham Bell, who did a little more of the aeronautical plagiarism, and that the Wrights spent considerable energy in protecting their legacy. Their moral uprightness is evident in McCullough's writing, and the shy, standing on the shoulders of giants for the good of humankind genius of the Brothers Wright rather than greedy profit shines through probably a little too heroically, even for someone who still thinks of the Wright brothers the way he did in the 1970s.

Part of me wanted the book to be more academic, but at the same time it was riveting. It didn't make me regret reading it like part of me still regrets Simon Winchester's Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean. (Although, recently when I gave away a bunch of books to a second-hand bookstore, I rescued Atlantic from the pile because I think I liked it more than I let on.) And how academic could it be? There are pages and pages of references and notes at the back of the book; it is clearly well-researched and the record of the research is detailed enough for any scholar.

It is just that the popular genre leaves me with a sense of the unauthentic. And then I remember my sister remembering me and my fascination with the Wright brothers and I wonder how far one could be objective about these two heroes who did what every boy in history wished he could do, and how the early days of cycling and flying and racing cars were romantic to the point where one could still win the Grand Prix while smoking a cigar and now you can't even buy cigars without breaking the bank because you are not allowed to but the Wrights did it and even though others tried to take it away from them they couldn't and what else could I possibly want in a book?

The more I think about it, the more stars I keep giving it and I shall have to admit that I loved it, just as I did Reynolds' book over forty years ago, and I am reminded of what it is like to work hard and achieve the impossible so why wouldn't it be romantic and nostalgic? It was, it is, and the only thing that upsets me is that Orville neglected his sister Katharine, but thankfully saw her at the last moment and was with her at the end. But that wasn't McCullough's fault. I think it just bothered me more than I can admit, and from what I can remember, Reynolds' never mentioned it. Come to think of it, neither would I to a seven year old boy.

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