This Is the View from Where I Am Now

This is what I am thinking through right now. It is sparked off by a Middle-School scavenger hunt atthe Library where one team did bad stuff to win. Most of the kids got pleasure and new knowledge from the exercise.  The group that cheated, however, was rewarded for their jerkdom. Not a good outcome.

The question is : What to do with the jerks? Do we even really know how jerks get that way?

How can jerkdom be lessened without harming the good qualities a partial jerk may posses, since to save the village by destroying the village is to be a more than partial jerk oneself.

Jerks come in many forms. Pure jerks are probably sociopaths or something even more deep set, and short of going the putative Inuit method where the elders push a young offender off the ice flow while hunting, society has no real way to restrict them as long as they are not caught and convicted of breaking the law. Isolating them from the harmless is our last resort.

But what of the partial jerk? What, in fact, of most of us? Lord knows I can be a jerk and I doubt you, dear reader, are blameless. So how am I a partial jerk and what can I learn from that?

As the child of rich New York Republicans I was raised to be competitive. Competition is the universal cure-all for Republicans, but, as the scavenger hunt showed, can reward the wrong people--the bullies who wins by cheating, intimidating and creating damage (and yes, that's what the winning kids did.) Now, I may have been the kid of rich Republicans, but I was also a child of the Eisenhower consensus. I was taught that it was rude to flaunt wealth. That everyone who worked deserved a decent living and that merit, which was virtue joined with ability, should be rewarded. That the purpose of sport was to learn sportsmanship and self-control. That to cheat, sneak or shave the rules was shameful and belittled one (and yes, I was taught to say 'one'.) That to cheat meant that you had lost. Ditto for being petty. That privilege begets responsibilities. That power inevitably corrupts and so governance is needed to restrain, temper and balance. That integrity matters and a handshake can seal a deal. Not to waste money as people have worked hard  to create the value in a dollar. That luck is always a factor in life, so if you do well, don't get too "full of yourself." I was taught that the essence of good manners is to make others feel comfortable. That joie de vivre, verve and flair enhance life for everyone, as does self-deprecating humor, openness, curiosity, educated taste and doing your duty to family and friends, country and God, and always, to your own conscious.  I was taught these values at home but even more so, at supporting institutions, at school, Scouts and Sunday school, at camp, and by the books I read and the movies I saw.

There were also things I was taught by the behaviour of those around me, things that weren't put into words because they so obviously jarred with the values listed above. First and foremost--achievement takes the day. Sportsmanship matters but you better damn well win. That outward appearances count, so keep up a good facade no matter what. Never let on that things might hurt or that you might be losing. Authenticity is either a weakness or does not exist at all, so snap out of it and put on your winner mask. Intelligence makes for power. But on no account be an egghead. Know how to win. Show your intelligence in conversation by crafting perfect put-downs.  Wit is its own excuse, cruelty and dehumanization perfectly acceptable as long as entertaining. Wit and intelligence wins. Win. 

For a complex (spirited, intelligent, brash, sensitive, introspective, creative, dyslexic, ADD, depressive,) young woman with nerdy interests, the contradictions were a little too much. I crashed in my early 20's and went Christian, affirming that hope, faith and love were the most important things. Since then, I have worked hard, strengthening what many would call outmoded, idealist values into actual behaviors and doing what I can to ameliorate my jerk behaviors without destroying the brave, blurting part of myself that can occasionally speak unpopular truth to power (not least of all, to my own ego.) I have noted that actions society excuses in a man it may then accuse in a woman, an unfairness I have had no stomach for. Still, because I value kindness as one of the highest goods, I have worked on softening the jerk in me. Some days, weeks, years, I am more successful than others. Some days I can be a bit of a jerk. Some days I might even be recognizable as a follower of Jesus Christ. If so, it is luck, or grace. Most days I am a strange mix of all the above. And often I am just plain grouchy.

Just about all of us have blind spots where we can be unknowing jerks, If power and choice doesn't isolate one in a narcissistic success bubble, age can slowly rub away at these blind spots. This is one of the great virtues of aging. Few talk about. But one aging pundit is-- though from another angle.  And he is getting a lot of good press for it from both Republican and Democratic. Since I share affectionate intellectual crushes with him, especially on  Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Francis Perkins and  others, I am not surprised by this turn. David Brook's new book talks about  a person's resume worth versus their eulogy worth--in short. how success values parse a person's achievements, and how more traditional values do. Material success versus a deeper success, the effect that you have really had on the world. All the stuff for which competition does not give points.

As a contemporary liberal with 1950's values, I am not quite at home in either party, though I often find myself supporting Left candidates, since I think they may do less damage. (I recognize that others think they have valid grounds to chose Right candidates for much the same reason.) I have empathy for the poor and for programs that can assist people in moving into the working and middle-class, however, I do not let that empathy ignore the damage of violence or other self-hurting behaviors. As a woman who has always been a bit too large for the small definitions of traditional femininity, my old-fashioned values luckily value reform (remember the afore-mentioned Burke.)  I recognize that patriarchy was perhaps essential at a certain point of human development, however, here in the West, we are now past that point. Our world is evolving out of it. Yes, there are certain innate differences that show up between the sexes due to biological differences. However, these biological effects produce a wide and often unpredictable range of human beings, and these humans are then subjected to a culture that so far has been structured to put multifaceted beings into one of two tiny boxes. Positive, meaningful reform takes time, generations even. This is a sea-change. It helps if we can be patient, disciplined, respectfully curious and kind while dealing (for me, hard to follow advice) Those on the extremes of both sides have reason to disagree with me, and since the extremes seem to get the most press--they noisily lead the parades going off two separate but equally steep cliffs. 

The reasonable middle, both left and right, does not go off cliffs, get press, or at this point, even have a political party, partially because we are too busy dealing with the ever-growing, complex duties of work and family. And, dear reader, this directly ties in with jerkdom.

Jerkdom is often a form of extremism. I think it is an extremism of self.  It's base is that I, and only I, am going to look out for myself because people are only capable of self-interest. No one else will help me so I'm not helping anyone else. A slightly less extreme version brings in those, a group, that I can identify with my I, "people like me ."   But--that is not all we are. No lone I can survive to be an I without the loving, nurturing, safe-making generosity of a different, often silent aspect of human nature. In this time of sea-change it behooves us to recognize how what were considered female virtues were and remain, unnoticed and undervalued. One good thing about this sea-change is that the boxes are breaking down. We can see how every human has within them what were once considered male and female virtues, and that both types, and all the ones in between, are of inestimable value. The privileging of an idealistic view of competition is no more realistic or adaptive than the privileging of any other one value. For it to have become the leading myth of our culture shows how deluded we have become.

As long as the myth of the virtue of competition is not properly tempered by a common sense moral realism that other values, values often belittled, typed as merely subjective, need to be affirmed, we are in trouble. As long as resume values are the goalposts, kids will be raised to be jerks and then schooled and rewarded for being jerks. Moral ideas such as sympathy, self-restraint and self-examination, a sense of what is seemly, sensitivity to what lies under the noise, a nose for nuance, these are unrewarded, unmetricized eulogy virtues that we could reward if we wanted. It is my inkling that this present sea-change will not be just about what jobs women and men do. It will also be be about why and how they do them. It will be about having a set a values less likely to encourage us to act like jerks. Can we create a culture that refuses to entertain at any moral cost, or a business model that refuses to exploit?

And, in case you are interested, that winning team for the scavenger hunt was female, led by an highly-capable Queen Bee who will probably be very successful. Or not--  Right now an art sale is going on. It's for a painting by Picasso that shows the outlines of dismembered, distorted, discarded female bodies. I gather it is set to become the most expensive piece of art on the planet. Really? Compared to this our own partial jerkdoms seem  almost negligible. Oh please, lets get our act together and make a slightly better world where jerkdom is not always so well rewarded.

For another opinion

Try The Atlantic,  June 2015

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/why-it-pays-to-be-a-jerk/392066/

or, this one

http://pres-outlook.org/2015/05/a-pr-problem/