Bill's Notes

Okay, I'll share this. Both the reporters who cover the Jersey Shore beat for the largest newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are folks I know. Today, they're covering the same trial in my home town of Toms River.

FTR, MaryAnn's lead is better than Jackie's. But both had a tough story to write.

Have a good weekend.

Yesterday I introduced How I Think About Everything, or Why Smart People Can Be Dumb. In a way, I was getting at the idea that it's inevitable that smart people will be dumb unless they take very specific steps.

To sum up yesterday, I described three elements of how our thinking is constructed — psychological (or character), spiritual and rational.

Each of these can act on each other and can influence each other. Where most moderns go wrong is in ignoring spiritual practice — that leaves them thinking and acting within a binary opposition (reason/emotion) that is false. Both reason and emotion can be influenced by the spiritual realm. Similarly, our mysticism can be informed or misinformed by reason and emotion. And of course cognitive psychologists have long seen a connection between what we think and emotion — that is, you can reason yourself into major depression. That is, reason impacts emotion.

Perhaps an analogy would make it clear. Say your character is the hull of a boat, reason is the sail, and spiritual practice are your navigational charts. Let's say you are a well-educated person and impeccable in your use of reason. Now let's say you are an emotionally health person, stable, virtuous, and the like. You're a good person and you reason well. But you don't believe a word about spirituality. Chances are, you will put all sorts of bells and whistles on your hull — hey, maybe make it a catamaran, and you'll get a great, colorful sail and really get that boat moving.

You may go from island to island, coast to coast, river to river, and have one adventure after another. You may learn new languages, make love to beautiful women (or men), discover hidden treasures, battle great sea monsters, and wonder at the lightning in the sky. It sounds great.

Yet, eventually, it's not enough. You run out of wind, or the boat gets wrecked in a storm, or you may have seen enough and are content to tell stories, and park the ship in a harbor, and stay there until you sink or salvaged for spare parts.

Now let's say you believe all the right things, and engage in the right spiritual practices, and you have a degree of mental stability, but you have no reason. You'll look at the navigational charts, point the boat in the right direction, and sit there while the wind whistles past your boat. Eventually, someone on the same journey may give you a tow or show you where the sail is. Or, you have the right charts, you just read them wrong, and end up hung up on this or that rock.

Now, imagine you are a rational person, and engaged in the right spiritual practices, but you have serious character or psychological problems. In that case, you are on the right course, and the sail is up and catching the wind, but the hull keeps taking on water. You end up having to keep stopping to repair the hull, or going into drydock.

Finally, imagine your character is fine, you rationalize well, but you've got the wrong spiritual practices. You are now confidently following the wrong course, and could end up just about anywhere.

And note one more thing with this metaphor — you're still dependent on the wind. That is, grace. You have ride grace to adventure, or to heaven and have adventures on the way, or just squander it altogether.

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One thing in AA I learned is that there are many very rational things you can say and do that will keep you drunk. One is the substitution of lower-alcohol beverages or even mixer for higher-alcohol beverages. It makes sense, right? Less alcohol means less drunkenness. A perfectly reasonable idea.

Except for this: The issue of control. People who don't have a problem usually don't spend a lot of time thinking of ways to prevent themselves from getting drunk. Social drinkers may think, "Oh, I should switch to mixer now," but they're not doing so as a way of controlling their drinking; they're already in control. They're doing so because they've had enough, thank you. This is an example of emotions' using reason.

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I'd like to talk a little about mysticism. What mystical experiences usually do is either reveal something about God, or reveal something about you. In AA, I had a lot of mystical experiences, almost all of which revealed that my thinking, while rational within its own context, could not withstand a broader context. Perhaps that's what mysticism is — the pulling back of the camera lens to a wider angle, even to the point of removing your self from your own thinking. I dunno. I just thought of that this second. But the rest of this stuff I've been thinking about for about 20 years.

What are some mystical experiences?

I think the first one is the fear of God. Some call this the experience of the numinous, but if fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, it is also the beginning of mysticism. It is an experience, perhaps of the imagination, that there is a Being out there that cannot be deceived and cannot be dealt with except on His own terms. That no matter what you think, no matter what you do, you don't get to pick the terms of dealing with this Being. That whatever is, is — and your perception doesn't equal His reality. And then there's this sense that He's not playing around. You just may face Judgement and Eternal Perdition; you may face forgiveness, acceptance and love — but whatever you face from God, you face from God. There's no denying whatever it will be, and God decides, not you.

Fear of God is a good first step down the mystical path. The No. 1 reason I hear bullshit from people is they don't fear God. We're not talking about a groveling sense of "God don't kill us." It's more like a profound knowledge of and respect for the differences in love, knowledge and being, and that the thing out of God's mouth will be The Truth. But this mystical experience is not a thought, it is something experienced in mystical terms, and thus known in an entirely different way than an argument-in-language. It is written on your very soul.

More later.

Yesterday, after posting on the prisonhouse of primary school, I got to thinking about another subject that I also rarely post on: Why are some of the smartest people some of the dumbest people?

I have a theory, but to get to it, we need to take a step back to Hermann Hesse for a moment. In Hesse's Magister Ludi, young Joseph Knecht, a prodigy, loses his cool for a moment before his teacher, the Music Master. What is the point?--Knecht cries. Why all this study when we know we can never find the answers we want? What's the point of it all?

Now, as someone who had been asking himself the same question for some time, I was eager for the answer, and I was prepared to be disappointed. I expected the Music Master's answer to be some fatuous, sentimental response or an exercise in abstract rhetoric or something so friggin' abstruse that I wouldn't get it. But the answer was none of these. It was a direct, concrete, and, well, true. The Music Master responded by asking Knecht this: Have you been neglecting your meditation? And Knecht responded, yes, in fact, he had.

That answer, in the vernacular of the 60s, blew my mind. Hesse was saying that thinking and study unhinged from mysticism means futility, inevitably. Spiritual practices ultimately change how we think.

With that, I began to investigate mysticism. Which leads you naturally into two other areas — religion and psychology.

So when I investigate my own or others' thinking, I look at not only at the reasoning, but the spiritual practice and the psychological angle. But with this caveat — I take a dim view of armchair psychoanalyzing people, especially people I've never met. Instead, I look for what I'll look at symptoms, specifically, thought distortions and emotional distortions.

People's thinking is not so much based on reason as we think, mine own included. Reason unhinged from a mystical base has a major problem. And emotion can easily grab reason and use it as a tool for its own ends. The answer to why smart people can be dumb is in there — smart people ask questions and pursue reason into places that others don't bother. But without a solid spiritual place, or if they are susceptible to self-deception or rationalization for emotional reasons, then they fall into one trap after another.

FWIW. More on this tomorrow.

My last post seems to have a hit a nerve among some of my commenters. Almost everyone chimed in or sent me an e-mail. Seems IndustrialBlog readers tend toward the smart side of spectrum -- but we all already knew that :)

New York Magazine has a terrific article on praise. Could be bullshit.

But it gels with my experience.

In the 3rd Grade, two things happened:

One, our teacher put on the blackboard a list of all work students had failed to turn in. For example, Eric might owe the assignments in page 35 and 37 of the math textbook. Jean might owe a spelling assignment, two math assignments and a social studies paper. Guess who had the longest list of uncompleted assignments on the board, by a long way? I mean, it was like I'd done nothing.

Two, our class took the Iowa standardized tests. At which point I was identified as a total freak. I didn't quite pin the scale in each academic area, but came pretty close, hitting the 99th percentile overall and in most subject areas.

At which point every subsequent academic achievement was greeted with one of two reactions: (1) "See what happens when you apply yourself?" (2) "This doesn't mean anything; you have natural ability."

Many years later, one of the kindest things anyone ever said to me was an offhand remark by J., when she said, "You worked really hard" on a computer class. I had worked hard a lot in my life — and no one ever gave me credit for it. If I put the effort, it could've been better. If not, I was skating by.

Anyway, I've long since come to accept that my grammar-school years were a horrific human rights violation committed against me :) and any other freaks like me. I'm half-serious. One day in first or second grade, I was struggling with my math homework; I think I was having trouble with subtraction.

I asked my father for help at dinner. Sitting at the kitchen table after the dishes were done, he proceeded to teach me addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, including fractions and decimals, over the next several nights. He just kept pushing me until I got it. It took, oh, about four nights. Maybe five.

Do you know what this meant? I spent the next six years bored out of my skull during math lessons while this material was presented excruciatingly slow, all of it review for me, and all of it so boring and so old hat that I would simply doze off. Of course, on top of this, I was ridiculed for actually knowing how to do this stuff. And oh yes, I didn't do it exactly as the teacher explained it (I did it as my father taught me, which often involved shortcuts), so my classmates would give me a hard time when I was called on and did math differently. They'd laugh and say, "That's not what the teacher said — idiot." And then the teacher would back me up, which would just alienate people more. By sixth grade, I always answered, "I don't know" to any question the teacher asked me, even though I knew the answer. By the time we started to do something new in eighth grade I was so accustomed to sleeping through math that I couldn't break the habit.

Anyway, it wasn't just math. I was essentially home-schooled, often quickly, and then placed in the equivalent of jail for years while this material was spoon fed to my classmates. By high school, I was so depressed at having been forced into this long march that I'd actually fallen behind academically.

But back to this New York article — I think perhaps having been told I was "smart" as opposed to having made a "real effort" was deeply counterproductive. Truth is, I liked the standardized tests because they were a real challenge and I always made a real effort. I wanted to make a real effort otherwise in class, but the material was presented so slowly that I couldn't pay attention. And besides, any attempt to show academic interest, to push the envelope, to explore implications, would result in ridicule later. We were in fucking lockstep, and there was no breaking out of step. Public school lessons are designed for the 40th percentile. No wonder I went nuts as a young man. It was like being subjected to Barney reruns for eight years.

I've been reluctant to talk about this stuff, even on this blog. For one thing, people may think I'm bragging or think I think I'm smarter than I am. It's a little like talking about the perils of having a penis that's too large, or complaining about being too thin, too rich or too popular. Maybe it's true, but no one wants to hear about it. But it's my blog and this is what I'm thinking about, so there it is.

Still, I know I'm not that smart. In the ensuing years, my intellectual feet have been held to the fire, and I know my very considerable limits. But I also no longer despise my intellect, and recognize that my intellect is both a gift and a resource, and that one interpretation of my life's story is being able to draw on that resource at times when my character had failed.

For what it's worth ...

CalTechGirl has some choice words.

Here are some people after my own heart. I used to want to write things like this on my math tests, but never did.

(Drink warning.)

UPDATE: Now I remember why I didn't become an engineer, even though my father owned his own engineering firm (well, he owned half the firm, and his name was second on the front door) and it would have been MINE MINE ALL MINE BWAHAHAHA by the time I was 30 had I actually gone into engineering. Betcha didn't know that about me.

I could be living in a refurbished farmhouse in Cranbury, N.J., commuting a few miles each day in my refurbished 1970 El Dorado convertible to my own engineering firm on Alexander Road in Princeton, and living large the American Dream. I had the math scores to study engineering.

And it's not like my father's firm was in a difficult field — it was a civil engineering firm, the wet-mopping of engineering. I practically picked it up working as a draftsman for the firm in college. (Shit runs downhill, as does water ... materials come down to tensile, compression and sheer strength, and check the charts for any actual design work. The rest is fairly intuitive.)

Example: One night, I was forced to go to a township committee meeting. A question was put to the township engineer (my father's partner). He was the expert, you see. All the councilmen turned to him. And what was the question requiring such brilliance, such education, such expertise to answer?

A store owner wanted to build a new parking lot, but the lot would be at a higher elevation than the road leading to it. NOW WHAT WAS TO BE DONE? My God, you need five years of civil engineering school for this one. Well, my father's partner gave a brilliant answer ... he gave 'em their money's worth, he discussed the importance of the question, the potential consequences, and that there were many options, and then, at the end of his little talk, slyly gave up the game. He said, "We will find a way to bring the parking lot down, or the road up." That is, a FUCKING RAMP. Something a FUCKING CAVEMAN could've figured out by dragging a bleeding anteater carcass over the area enough times! And yes, you can look up the ramp's slope in a book of tables.

But I couldn't stand the math, so that's why I didn't become an engineer. Plus, I always wanted to be a writer, which is funny, because both of my parents wanted to be writers, but neither were, and neither ever told me that until they were much older. Perhaps I subconsciously sought to fulfill their dreams, but I doubt it. I think it's because YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THE MATH. Not that I can't do it, you see. I just don't want to.

News: Talk of the union of the Anglican and Roman Churches. Dr. Mabuse nails it here. LOL.

Wow. David Warren's on a roll.

Commentary: The bad news about excessive alarmism is it encourages people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are many environmental goals that we all should share -- use of clean-burning fuels, finding cheap, replenishable fuels, protecting open space, clean water/clean air, and the like. I am no big fan of air pollution, water pollution and suburban sprawl, for example.

I agree with those who say environmentalism has become a religion for some people. The old knock on leftists is that they've lost their faith in God, so they put their faith in government. And there's some truth to it -- there is a religious zeal to the Global Warming movement, complete with the condemnation of infidels, apostates, heretics and schismatics.

Via Instapundit comes this link at Investor's Business Daily entitled "Unparalled Perfidy."

I would only add this is not unparalled perfidy. To name just one, the Dems' campaign in 1864 was based on a negotiating peace with the South (including reversing the Emancipation Proclamation).

UPDATE: Robert Novak notes the parallel with the Civil War here.