Saturday, August 26, 2023
In bed at 8:40, awake on onto brr at 3:53, hoping for some more sleep but bait bucket minnows interfering so up at 4:33 to let Lilly out. 67°, high of 70°. Beach Hazard: waves of 3 to 6 feet and dangerous currents all day.AQI=27. N wind at 9 mp, 2-18/27. DPs 56-66. Sunrise at 5:39, sunset at 7:37, 13+28.
The Well-Lived Life. David Brooks has an essay in The Atlantic online "THE NEW OLD AGE: What a new life stage can teach the rest of us about how to find meaning and purpose—before it’s too late." I am not among his fans for reasons I can't quite identify, but I found this essay very interesting because it addresses thoughts I deal with with some frequency in what one of his subjects calls "the third trimester of life," 'playing the back nine,' i.e., post-retirement and old age. More particularly, he deals with 3 year-long post-retirement educational program at Stanford, Notrre Dame, and Harvard, focused on living the time available between retirement from a career and incapacity and death, the period some people think of as 'waiting around to die' and others find liberating, exciting, and rewarding. These are programs for the highly-privileged elites, persons who are able to afford the high tuition and costs required and who can spend a year in Palo Alto, South Bend, or Cambridge. The University of Chicago is launching its own post-career program this fall, one at which Brooks and his wife will teach. These programs are not designed for Joe Lunchbucket and Betty Babushka but Brooks suggests "[T]he lessons the super-elite learn there apply more broadly than just to them. People at all income levels derive some of their identity from how they contribute to the world and provide for those they love, and people at all income levels feel a crisis of identity, and get thrown back on existential questions, when those roles change or fade away."
"In the 21st century, another new phase [of life] is developing, between the career phase and senescence. People are living longer lives. If you are 60 right now, you have a roughly 50 percent chance of reaching 90. In other words, if you retire in your early or mid-60s, you can expect to have another 20 years before your mind and body begin their steepest decline."
"“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning,” Carl Jung observed. “For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” As they leave their corner-office jobs, these erstwhile masters of the universe are smashing into this blunt reality."
"But how on earth did we end up with a society in which 65-year-olds have to take courses to figure out who they are, what they really want, and what they should do next? How did we wind up with a culture in which people’s veins pop out in their neck when they are forced to confront their inner lives? The answer is that we live in a culture that has become wildly imbalanced, like a bodybuilder who has pumped his right side up to excessive proportion while allowing his left side to shrivel away. To put it another way, a well-formed life is governed by two different logics. The first is the straightforward, utilitarian logic that guides us through our careers: Input leads to output; effort leads to reward; pursue self-interest; respond to incentives; think strategically; climb the ladder; impress the world. This is the logic that business schools teach you. But there is a second and deeper logic to life, gift logic, which guides us as we form important relationships, serve those around us, and cultivate our full humanity. This is a logic of contribution, not acquisition; surrender, not domination. It’s a moral logic, not an instrumental one, and it’s full of paradox: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself to find yourself. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself."
"A well-lived life, at any stage, is lived within the tension between these two logics. The problem is that we have managed to build a world in which utilitarian logic massively eclipses moral logic. The brutal meritocracy has become such an all-embracing cosmos, many of us have trouble thinking outside of it. From an early age, the pressure is always on to win gold stars, to advance, optimize, impress. That endless quest for success can come at the expense of true learning. Many of the students I’ve taught over the years don’t have time for intellectual curiosity or spiritual growth—a condition that only worsens through adulthood as their obligations proliferate."
Brooks concludes: "These programs should not just be for rich people; they are in urgent need of democratization. Tens of millions of people transition to their Encore phase every year. Attending less rarified versions of these programs, if only for a couple of weeks or sporadically throughout the year, should be a rite of passage leading up to retirement. . . . I’m not an entrepreneur, but while working on this story, a fantasy kept popping into my head: Somebody should start a company called Transition Teams. This would be a firm that helps people organize into cohorts during life’s crucial transitions—after college, after divorce, after a professional setback, after the death of a spouse, after retirement. These are pivotal moments when the most humane learning takes place, and yet America today lacks the sort of programs or institutions that could gentle the transitions and maximize the learning through mutual support. (In the old days, the Elks Club or the Ladies Auxiliary or the VFW hall or your worship community might have helped, but they’ve receded in recent decades, as has been well documented.)"
Some thoughts: (1) At UofC, Brooks will be an ultra-elite teaching (if that's the right word) other ultra-elites. He's a UofC grad himself who worked for a time at William F. Buckley's National Review and other conservative and neo-con pubs, a secular Jew who converted to Christianity, which has me scratching my head and rubbing my chin. (2) I'm sure I'm overstating this, but his wish that there were broadly available programs for transitioning life major changes (a) seems a bit Pollyannaish, and (b) also a bit noblesse oblige coming after his description of the mollycoddling provided to the elites in the programs at Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, et al. With all of the needs and challenges facing American society today, might there be something a little bit obscene in these fabulously wealthy institutions devoting resources to helping elite CEOs, managers, and other professionals navigate the transition between 'the career phase and senescence'? Some of folks transitiion to work broadly benefitting society and the less-privileges, but others transitiion to playwriting, paintingl (like me), or other satisfying but purely personal pursuits. (3) On a personal note, I confess to wrestling with the same existential questions addressed by the participants in these programs: Who am I? What's my purpose? What do I really want? and Do I matter? They are all questions of personal meaning, how to justify living, being alive after a productive, working life ends. The questions become only more difficult once one reaches, as Brooks puts it, the "years [when] your mind and body begin their steepest decline."
I Have a Dream - 60 years later. From my memoir:
I turned 22 on Saturday, August 24, 1963. Two historically significant events were occurring on that birthday, one very public, the other very secret.
The public occurrence was that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of buses and cars and trucks in caravans from Florida and Georgia, from Alabama and Mississippi, from the Carolinas and Virginia were starting to drive north to pass our little apartment on US 1 for the civil rights “March on Washington.” On the 28th, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as about 200,000 listened on the Mall. Less than three weeks later, a bomb killed four young girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Three months before the speech, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, had been shot dead in front of his home. Our country was deeply torn by racial divisions.
King’s dream was a long way from realization. The South was still almost completely segregated by law and custom; the North was almost equally segregated, witness Msgr. Malloy’s campaign to “keep the undesirables out of St. Leo parish.” The Marine Corps and the Navy remained highly segregated, though not by force of law. In 1949, before the start of the Korean War, there were only 1,525 blacks in the Marines, half of them serving as ‘stewards’ or mess hall workers, the others in all black units
The last all black unit was not disbanded until December,1951. It wasn’t until 1962 that the Marine Corps stopped the practice of never assigning black Marines to certain billets and certain duty stations, e.g., as recruiters or reserve instructors in the racially segregated areas. In 1950, there were only two black officers on active duty in the Marines; in, 1955, only 19, most of them reservists serving out tours of duty begun during the Korean War. By 1962, there were 13,351 black enlisted men in the Corps but still only 34 black officers, all of whom were “company grade,” i.e., captain (7), lieutenants (25) and warrant officers (2). There were no ‘field grade’ officers, majors and colonels, and no general officers . Though I’m sure that some black second lieutenants went through Basic School in 1963, I do not recall seeing any. There is some irony in the nickname of my Basic School. platoon commander, Capt. Cliff “Whitey” Johnson, a salty Korean War vet.
I am reminded that in 1963 interracial marriage was a felony in Virginia where I lived. It wasn't until 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, that the Supreme Court struck down 'miscegenation' laws.
I am also reminded of how much and how little progress the country has made in racial equity since MLK's "I have a dream" speech. Two poems comes to mind. Emily Dickinson's couplet: In this short life / that only lasts an hour / How much - / how little / Is within our power. and William Blake's Every Morn and every Night / Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night
I am also reminded that in November of that year, JFK was assassinated in Dallas and Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in Saigon, with American government comlicity. And that MLK himself and later RFK were assassinatin in 1968. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Or have we seen the worst of times?
[The private occurrence on that 22nd birthday was that, as we watched the parade of vehicles heading north to D.C., President Kennedy authorized a State Department cable to be sent to U. S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Vietnam backing a military coup against the regime of Ngo Ðinh Ðiem (and his brother Ngo Ðinh Nhu and his notorious sister-in-law, Madame Nhu).]
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