Is the freedom to think what you want "in your head" a freedom worth having

At first glance I would think not. Freedom of thought would appear to be of little value if you cannot actually express those thoughts in words and action. And yet, here we have someone insisting on the value of being free to think what you want "in your head".




"The freedom to think or believe what you want in your head. That's the first amendment to the US constitution."

Actually, no. Here is the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That's very much about stuff outside your head.

It would seem that I can believe whatever I want inside my head and no one need know. I can be polite to someone while thinking they are an idiot for whom I have no respect. For a while, anyway.

And therein lies the problem with this sort of freedom. Keeping it "inside my head" would require constant vigilance. At any moment a gesture or word could give away my real beliefs.

All this talk of freedom of thought is based on a philosophical mistake that takes it that our thoughts are private. I have a complete world of meaning inside my head and I share it with you by analogy. You've experienced pain so you can imagine my pain. In fact, no such thing goes on. Nothing is naturally hidden. We have to make an effort to hide our thoughts. Normally, it's quite easy to read our thoughts from our facial expressions and posture.

We put very little effort into reading people. One of the lessons I've learned in the last decade is that you can read someone else's thoughts quite easily. All you have to do is start trying.

It's quite frightening once you start. And here we can get some idea of the terror that comes when people try to control others' thinking; when simply doing what is hoped of you is no longer enough. But this is a terror we live with all the time. Anyone who has ever worked under someone who is determined to "change the corporate culture" will know how awful it can be.

As can anyone who has been a child. Parents, with the best of intentions, try to shape their children's thinking. And they'll keep doing it well into adulthood if you don't stop them.

That said, freedom is never inside your head.

Shut the door, have a seat

In rewatching Mad Men episodes on a random basis, I had hoped to force myself to rethink the whole series and not simply rewatch the shows I liked the most. My favourite episodes, after all, are the ones most likely to confirm rather than challenge my views. As a consequence, I felt a slight twinge of regret when the random number generator gave me one of my favourite episodes of the entire series for the second show to watch. It's not only great television, it's Don Draper at his best. What we see here is the stuff of heroism. But there's more! We also see the show making a deeply important point about politics and morality.

Because there are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves ... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.

The heart of conservatism is an understanding of loss. Conservatives understand that loss is inevitable and that it changes us and not just the circumstances of our lives. From the outside, conservatism can be seen as trying to retain all of the past but it's never that. That's simple traditionalism. Conservatives recognize that we will suffer loss and we will be changed by it and that understanding that is the key to moving forward. And you see that in the rather cryptic statement that Don makes to Peggy when recruiting her to move to the new agency with him.

It happens during an oddly quiet moment of an otherwise fast-paced episode.

The change of self that goes with loss helps explain Don's comment to Betty that "Mourning is just extended self pity," back in season 1. That sticks in a lot of people's craws. It is an overstatement. A more accurate version would be, "Mourning is often only extended self pity." That's certainly what we saw in the way many characters responded to the Kennedy assassination and to the death of Marylin Monroe. Nowadays, we see horrible displays of narcissism in response to every mass shooting.

It's certainly what's in the air today following the shooting of Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest. We wake up and see that our world has changed and it has changed in ugly ways such that we ourselves have lost something even though we don't know any of the people involved. And the way we saw ourselves ... is gone.

But how do we avoid mere narcissism?

The biggest danger is to feel we are entitled to get back what we lost. That is what drives men in the best neo-noir films. One of the things that makes Don Draper such a good role model (although he is rarely recognized as such) is his willingness to cut his losses. When something is gone, he lets it go. He doesn't come to these recognitions easily. That Betty is a bad wife takes him a long time to face and he can never fully shake the emotions that go with her, although his initial reaction is anger, an anger driven by the feeling that he should be able to control his life, he comes to recognize that he cannot control what happens to him and that she needs to be let go and, much more importantly, he acts on it.

At the same time, he looks to his past for ideals to uphold. Although we call the scenes where Don remembers "flashbacks" they aren't that. They are stories he tells himself, as we all do. The historical accuracy of such stories is less important than the fact that we tell them and keep telling them. It is the retelling of the story that confers value.

The particular story Don tells himself here is important not just for him but for all of us who grew up with distant fathers or with no father at all. Nostalgia is often a feeling for what we never had or only had brief glimpses of rather than for something we had fully and then lost. For many in my generation, that is the relationship we have with our fathers. As boys, we'd watch television shows in which fathers played catch with their sons and wondered what we did wrong because nothing like that ever happened to us. But we loved this distant man anyway and when he was gone we needed some continuity. We couldn't hold on to what we never really had but we needed to find something in him to carry on. Don does that this episode and its beautiful and good.

Okay, now for some disillusionment for those who think the series is historically accurate. Conrad Hilton did not hold the kinds of beliefs that the character with his name does in the series. But that's okay because he acts like a father figure for Don. There is a symmetry between Don finding Conrad and Betty finding Henry. Both are like magical father figures. As typically happens in the series, Don reveals himself to be an adult and Betty reveals herself to be a child. And it is through that interaction that Don evaluates his real father and decides where the continuity and disjunction should be.

You can't live your life reacting to your father. You have to become your own man and you'll nevr do that so long as you are angry at him. Don finds a value in his father that he can treasure. He doesn't become him or even try to.

Television doesn't get any better than this.

Overcoming shame

Shame is a good thing. It's not an unmitigated good thing but it is good. That's worth noting at the start for there is a school of psychology that translates emotions into good and bad and tells us that we should never feel emotions such as shame, resentment, jealousy, envy or hate. These emotions can, the theory goes, only do us harm.

There is some evidence for this view—there is some evidence for most bad theory. Negative emotions really do subject your body to stress and that stress can have negative health effects. But, as evolutionary psychologists remind us, if these emotions didn't also have positive benefits they wouldn't have survived thousands of years of evolution.

Without shame none of us would be able to learn moral behaviour. It is shame in reaction to your parents' disapproval that first taught you that there even is a distinction between right and wrong. Later, it was shame that helped you start developing the ability to make such distinctions and to talk about them with others. Even as adults, fear of shame plays an important role in keeping our behaviour in check.

But it's not all good. We can feel shame when we know we've done nothing wrong. And there are people who try to use shame to control us. Worse, you can internalize shame. Anyone who has ever had their mother say to them, "If you look deep inside yourself you'll realize that what you've done is wrong," will know how powerful internalized shame is.

That motherly argument, by the way, is pure bullshit and it's purely manipulative. Anyone who has a real moral argument to make will make it with factual claims and not by trying to make you feel shame and think that shame is guilt. There is an emotion that goes with guilt but it arises in response to moral claims and not some "looking deep inside". Here, as always, to "look inside" yourself is just a metaphor meaning to think hard about something. You can't actually look inside. You can only look outside at factual claims.

Which brings me to the most important lesson we need to learn if we are going to become mature moral beings: to develop a sense of guilt you have to be a moral realist. You have to believe there are verifiable moral truths that can be checked the same way you can check to see if the plums in the fridge are gone as William Carlos Williams has confessed.

The standards to determine guilt are the same for yourself as they are for anyone else. We can easily imagine that Williams feels no guilt and that his apology is bogus. What would establish his guilt, whether he is willing to feel it or not, is whether he was entitled to eat all the plums or if he should have saved some for his wife. Likewise, we can easily imagine a situation in which he feels guilty even though there is no reason he should not have eaten the plums. Why else would food be in the fridge except to be eaten?

We can't make shame go away. What we can do is train ourselves to feel according to verifiable standards if right and wrong.

Of course, if we live in a culture that increasingly says there are no such standards except in the very limited case where others are hurt, we will not be able to become morally mature. Eventually, there will be some in such a culture who will so deeply resent the feelings of shame that they do have that they will narcissistically insist that others treat their feelings as sacrosanct.

And that is hell we are currently living.

Incidentally, and this is relevant to the Irish experience in North America, there is a kind of pseudo-pride that is really just shame projected outward. Robert Glover describes this strategy that leads to this false pride well in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy,

I call this shame dumping. This unconscious strategy is based on the belief that if the Nice Guy can shift the focus to the other person’s badness, he can slip out of the spotlight. Typical shame dumping techniques include blame, bringing up the past, deflection, and pointing out the other person’s flaws.

This is a pretty common strategy and hardly unique to Irish Catholics descended from famine exiles. But it can, as I say, manifest itself as something that only looks like pride. Pride is often condemned but it is an essential and usually good emotion, however, for it has a tendency to elevate the person feeling it. It is a way of fighting off other people's attempts to shame us. (Those who would have you believe that pride is always bad cover their asses by coming up with different terms, such as "self respect" as if that were something completely different from pride.)

To really understand what is going on here, we need to contrast pseudo-pride with excessive pride. Excessive pride, which can also be called "hubris" or "vanity" tends to lure us into taking chances we should not. We learn that it is unwarranted when we discover we cannot actually perform at the level we convinced ourselves we could. The pseudo-pride that is just shame dumping, however, is the work of someone who does not take chances; it's a defensive strategy driven by shame and fear rather than excessive pride. They believe they will fail and cannot stomach that thought so they bluster. That bluster, however, will crumble at a challenge so they avoid such challenges.

They tend to do this not just to themselves but to others. Some parents, terrified at the thought of failure will undermine their children privately so that they will not try things they might fail at publicly.

If the central character isn't an anti hero then he's a ...?

The answer is that he's a hero. I'm going to argue that Don Draper is a hero and that we cannot understand him or appreciate his appeal if we don't recognize that. My big challenge in convincing anyone of this is going to be that a lot of people believe that he is an anti hero.

Don Draper is the apotheosis of the antihero. He’s a selfish, self-destructive womanizing drunk who stole another man’s identity, but the character’s elegance and eloquence — coupled with Hamm’s sleek good looks and subtle performance — made it all OK, and typically quite interesting to watch.

On the flip side we have Draper's primary creator Matt Weiner who insists he isn't.

If you watch the video of Matt Weiner at that link you'll come away wondering what exactly an anti hero is. The definition that comes up first when you Google "anti hero" is, "a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes". That's not much help for all heroes have flaws and some of them have a whole lot of flaws such that there are lots of heroes who at least start of lacking conventional heroic attributes. If Achilles isn't a hero then no one is and he spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent.

What makes a hero a hero is action. He's the guy you can depend on to act effectively when it really matters. That's what makes Achilles a hero despite all his negative qualities and the same is true of Don Draper. Often times, a story will open with someone who seems deeply unconvincing as a hero but whom we find heroic by the end.

Okay, but what is an anti hero then? I think an anti hero is someone whom we we continue to resist accepting as a hero even after the story is over.

But that isn't helping my case much. Lots of people, starting with Robert Rorke quoted above, resist very strongly the notion that Draper is credible as a hero and advance all sorts of reasons for that. In fact, there are no shortage of people who feel a need to dismiss the character completely. He becomes just a peg to hang social criticism on, and mostly male bashing at that.

What I want you to consider is what Weiner doesn't quite get around to saying: that Don Draper is a hero! That he's a man worth emulating.

This requires an esoteric reading of the series. That is to say, it requires us to see a meaning that is in the series that is not merely hidden, that isn't just a "deeper meaning" but is deliberately hidden by writing that appears to say the opposite while laying clues that make it possible to dig out a different meaning. Not da Vinci Code style with all sorts of mysterious symbols and secret codes. That sort of thing can happen, of course, but most esoteric writing is more mundane than that.

Teddy the Greek

To get a grasp on it, imagine that you meet a child who has a villain—a sports figure, a pop star or fictional character. This child asks you if you too fear and dislike their nemesis. Only a jerk would crush the child's worldview but you actually quite admire the character. So you find something affirming to say. Okay, but let's further complicate the problem. The child has a hot older sibling and you want this hot older sibling to know that you're cool; that you don't have any illusions. You need to find a way to say something that will feel genuine and sincere to the child but will be just enough off that the older sibling that they get it.

It's my contention that Mad Men did this all the time. It fed the childish illusions that many want to believe about who the heroes and villains of the 1960s were while making mistakes that more thoughtful people would notice and begin to wonder about. One of these illusions is central to the way we tend to think about the period and that is that any positive aspects we might see in the 1960s and the 1950s before are obliterated by the racism and sexism of the period. Nostalgia, for modern liberals is an illegitimate and distorting emotion to be resisted. This is especially true of any nostalgia for the period before the sexual revolution, the antiwar and civil rights movement and feminism. A show like Mad Men challenges that simply by exiting.

The show's writers face the problem squarely in the final episode of the first season.

There is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job. I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most idea in advertising is 'new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.  

He also talked about a deeper bond with the product, "nostalgia". It's delicate. But potent. 

Teddy told that , in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain from an old would."

Now, the interesting thing here is that Don reverses the way our era treats these things. For our era, nostalgia is the easy sell. It creates the itch and then you give the people La belle epoque, American Graffiti, Animal House, Happy Days, The Waltons or some other nostalgic entertainment as a sort of calamine lotion and everyone is happy. Everyone except the professor teaching popular culture at the local university. He/she wants you to know that there were problems with that era that should trouble us because she/he doesn't want anyone admiring any of the values of that era. The professor wants you to embrace "new".

And Don Draper represents the past. He never changes. He always embraces a set of old values. They aren't mainstream values of the period to be certain but they are old. They could be loosely described as 'the hobo code". And he creates a nostalgia for a certain kind of man; a man who is secretive, strong and independent; a man who can cut his losses and move on, not without pain but he can and will do it whenever necessary.

That Don represents this challenge is no problem. He can be dismissed. He is easy to hate. The problem is that he is also easy to love and millions did and do.

The hint that there might be something esoteric going on is in the last line where Don gives a definition of nostalgia. It's not just wrong, it's very wrong. "Nostalgia" uses Greek components but it was coined by A German speaker to describe a condition where people were incapacitated by a desire to return home. The Greek words combined to make it literally mean "aching to go home". As conceived by Johannes Hofer, nostalgia means the exact opposite of what Draper says it means: it means a desire to escape a new wound into a safer past.

But this is where it gets interesting. Right from the beginning, nostalgia has been very compelling. Hofer's definition, echoed by the many who criticize it today, makes nostalgia into a childish emotion, an escapist fantasy. Don Draper gives us a more interesting option: that nostalgia isn't about wanting to escape but a way of confronting loss. And the show appears to back this up by giving us to aspects of the man: Don who deals with situations masterfully and Dick who runs. Those who see Don as an anti hero take that "inner Dick" as the real man. Those of us who admire him take the teleological view, that the man Don wants to become is the real man.

If we take this second option, we'll see the way events spin out in the rest of the story different. The common interpretation of the ending of that first season was that Don did such a good job of selling the men from Kodak that he sold himself too and returned home hoping to find the very thing he'd sold others on.

It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone ... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again ... back home again, a place where we know we are loved.

But "a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone" isn't real so much as it is religious. "Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in thee."

Donald Draper did not, as Robert Rorke and many others claim, steal another man's identity. He used his dog tags to get out of the army and he kept up that deception to break ties with his past as Dick Whitman but he does not adapt the identity of the other man. Think of the man who pretends to a famous actor to get sex or who pretends to be someone else so as to apply for a credit card and then leave this other person stuck with the bill. That is what "stealing another man's identity" is. What Donald Draper does is more akin to giving a false name so as not to be arrested.

You may say, "So what, it's still illegal" and that it most certainly is. But it's still important to get a correct grasp on what is happening. Donald Draper is not a assuming another man's identity, he's a man running away from a shameful past. He's running away from "death". We might well say he is running away from sin.

The first man

Why does Adam commit suicide? "Because he finds his brother whom he thought was dead but his brother rejects him." Okay, but why would that dictate suicide? Adam has seen the loss of his mother and his stepfather. He's had to make it on his own and he has managed. Why would he kill himself? It doesn't make sense.

If I'm right, it doesn't make sense because it isn't supposed to make sense.

Adam, at least according to a flashback and I think we should treat these as mythology not history, was named so by his mother "after the first man". If you know your Saint Paul, however, you'll know that there is a second Adam who follows the first Adam and yet existed before him. I'll grant you that's an odd bit of mythology for a Jew such as Matt Weiner to seize upon and yet I think he does just that. Unlike a believer like myself, this mythology is just like any other mythology for Weiner. Adam is important, not as a real character, but for what he represents to Donald Draper, a past he flees but also a loss.

That's all for now.

Psychological reactance

An excerpt from a NYT article about the appeal of Donald Trump:

Haidt describes reactance as

the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

The theory, first developed in 1966 by Jack W. Brehm in “A Theory of Psychological Reactance,” is directly relevant to the 2016 election, according to Haidt. Here is Brehm’s original language:

Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy. This reaction is especially common when individuals feel obliged to adopt a particular opinion or engage in a specific behavior. Specifically, a perceived diminution in freedom ignites an emotional state, called psychological reactance, that elicits behaviors intended to restore this autonomy.

I thought of something I wrote myself a short while ago:

If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter.

Family does that to you.

I've been rereading Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur Melzer. He lists a number of reasons why someone might engage in esoteric writing. All these are either to avoid evil or to attain some good. On the avoidance end:

• We might write esoterically to protect ourselves from condemnation by the larger society.
• We might write esoterically to protect the larger society from truths it cannot bear.

We might also write esoterically:

• As a form of propaganda aimed at similarly minded people.
• As a way of teaching for the reader will be obliged to figure things out for themselves.

I think psychological reactance raises another possibility: that we might write, indeed live, esoterically in order to gain a private sphere for ourselves. We could get this, of course, simply by locking ourselves in our rooms alone for long periods of time. Indeed, just about every teen does this when puberty comes along and they are suddenly subject to needs and desires that would cause extreme shame if they were not kept private. Ultimately, however, this privacy will be empty. We need a private sphere that includes other people, a world we can share with others, that also excludes people who "try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you".

The word "perceive" carries a lot of weight here. You might simply be wrong in your perception and you can never completely shake the feeling of doubt that comes with that. Combine that with a family member who has authority because they are a parent, or who is self righteous in their anger and is threatening you with exclusion, or, and this is gruelling, is both of those things, and you will crack. Thus the need to carve out a sphere where you can express thoughts esoterically that others might suppress.

The good news is that everyone feels this need and you will find others playing the same game and it, like most games, is more fun to play with others. And, because all games have an implied teleology, that teleology will become the basis of your personal mythology. You will have a notion not of who you are, which is what your family bombards you with, but of who you should be trying to become.

That creates tensions within the family. Seeing you develop independence as a consequence of having this teleology, some family members will try and reign you in. Mothers are particularly prone to this, which is why I advocate that every man and woman intentionally blow up their relationship with their mother at some point. There is another danger, however, and that is enablers: these are family members who set themselves up as the unofficial police for the family mythology. They do this largely because of fears and insecurities of their own but that doesn't mean they won't make you hurt.

Another subject about which there will be more to say.

Why a personal mythology? Because it's liberating!

I think we all already have personal mythologies. And the word "mythology' shouldn't scare us for we know it isn't true in the same way that history is supposed to be true. If anything, the problem is that far too much of what we believe to be our "personal history" is actually mythology.

I've had much occasion to see this while doing family history. History tends to be either a story or a theory about particular people in particular times. The story or theory is constructed by making connections between a collected set of verifiable facts. Ideally, the facts are a limit on the story or theory. If my story or theory includes someone meeting Jane Jacobs last year that story needs to be corrected because Jane Jacobs died in 2006. What I've found doing family history is that it tends to go the other way around. In family history people have a theory about who and what "we" are and they have a series of stories that prop up this theory. When confronted with facts that are in conflict with the theory and stories, so much the worse for the facts.

Another way of putting this is that most family history is really family mythology. It's real purpose is to justify our beliefs about ourselves. Because it's unconscious mythology, it's easy to convince ourselves that it really is history and my advice to anyone doing family history is to not share it with members of your family. You will inevitably puncture a lot of egos if you insist in muddling the mythology up with verifiable facts.

Okay, but why do family history at all if you can't share it? Unless you're famous, no one outside your family will want to read it and now I'm telling you that no one inside your family will want to read it either. I'd recommend doing it because it's liberating. My great discovery was that my family was a much rougher lot than the family mythology made them out to be. It's only because two world wars and the Great Depression created opportunities for social mobility that my family was able to enter the middle class. That's generally true of the Irish in North America. All of our family "history" when I was growing up, was really mythology, consists of projecting the experience of the generation who grew up during the Depression and World War 2 back into history. It has little or nothing to do with what actually happened. The generation now growing up are, in turn, being saddled with a family "history" that is really a mythology that projects the values of a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s back into history.

Why is it liberating? Because family mythology creates a role for you and your family will be loath to let you out of that role. You will be told that you are a certain kind of person because you are part of this family and you will be told that continuing to be this sort of person is a moral obligation that is binding on you. Knowing that the story the family tells about itself is just a mythology frees you from that obligation.

It does this in large part because it frees you from the spell. Your family members can only saddle you with this mythology if you are willing to believe it. The mistake is thinking that your family history has anything particular to do with you. These people are just people who lived before you. You are not responsible for their sufferings and you deserve no credit for their achievements. Most importantly, you do not need to feel any shame for what they were and what they did. If, however, you believe that there is a connection, then you are going to find yourself in immediate conflict with others because you will all be fighting for a particular interpretation.

In my family, there have been intense battles over family history. Most of this has been a matter of memory rather than any actual written history. Who did what and when and what it meant? Which uncles were in military service and what action did they or did they not see? What were the challenges that women in the family faced and how did they face them. Most stories that do get repeated do so because they help make a moral point. And it's either a positive one or a negative one. But it's only useful to the degree to which it is family mythology. Each and every story makes one of two binary points: 1) You should be like this. 2) You should not be like that.

Once you know that facts destroy this binary division—that the real stories aren't black and white so much as shades of grey—you can stop arguing with others about it. And that is liberating.

The other thing about family history is that it is necessarily limiting. Even if your family history were glorious through and through, it defines you according to a fixed standard. It tells you what you are supposed to be according to an existing model. There is no teleology, no potential for development. All you have is a series of duties towards the family. That is why the Hobo Code is so liberating for Dick Whitman. It offers potential for development that his father and stepmother deny him.

An unexpected benefit that comes with this is insight into human behaviour. If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter. What's really at work is some bit of unconscious mythology. Being able to let go at a moment like that is tremendously liberating. But you can only do that if you have some alternative set of values of your own. And that is a subject for further development.

"More of an idea than a place"

Rachel Menken says that of Israel in the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men.

True story: the wife of a famous, and now deceased, Canadian broadcaster once told me the story of how her English ancestors' business had gone bankrupt. It was a wonderful story and I believed it. I wrote it up into a nice little piece and you might even find it if you're diligent enough about your research. (It's not online and it wasn't published under my name.) This was about 35 years ago now. Later, I discovered the identical story of a family business going bankrupt in a John Galsworthy novel. So how did that happen?

We all have a personal mythology. Over the years I've read a lot of biographies and I've written a few. There is a recurring problem with the narratives we all tell ourselves. They tend to feature turning points and when you look into these turning points there tend to be problems.

1. Sometimes, and this is awkward, the turning point never happened. The writer researching a biography goes looking for external evidence of the turning point and finds out that, it never happened, or it couldn't of happened or that it did happen only to someone else and not the person who told the story about the turning point.
2. Other times it comes way too early to be of any use. The person the writer is researching continued to express the opinions or do the things that this turning point is supposed to have altered forever for years after.
3. Finally, as you've probably already guessed, sometimes the turning point is way too late. The person who claims to have been changed forever by this experience already had the new attitudes or behaviours long before the claimed turning point. 

My friend Jeremiah calls the story we all tell about our lives the emotional narrative. It's a compelling story in which everything connects and everything makes sense. Psychologically, it tends to win out because the only alternative is a small set of data points that don't connect to anything. It's only when some serious researcher goes to work assembling a comprehensive chronology of a life that the emotional narrative falls apart.

I've written quite a few short bios myself and sometimes I find evidence that the story I've been asked to write is at odds with the verifiable chronology. That, as I say, is rather awkward. In a spirit of fair play, this Lent I did the same thing to myself. I assembled a detailed chronology of my own life. I chased down every verifiable detail. And I compared that with what I believed to be the narrative of my life. It was quite crushing. My personal mythology crumbled before my eyes.

I won't share the intimate details here but, suffice to say, some things I was ashamed of in my past turned out to be nothing to be ashamed of for these things either simply did not happen or happened much earlier than I remembered and were, therefore, not embarrassing. Other things that I hadn't bothered to be ashamed of, on the other hand, now trouble me.

Exiles on Main Street

"Babylon" is the first episode of Mad Men to feature a "flashback". I put that in scare quotes because I'm not sure it's true. When we watch a flashback on video or film we have a tendency to believe it's true. We're watching moving pictures and that makes it seem like it must have happened because, otherwise, "How could it be filmed?" This is different from reading or listening to someone tell us a story. Then we're skeptical.

When we watch Don Draper "remembering" his past it seems to me that we should treat these memories as just that. They aren't films of actual events. And the same is true for my memories and your memories. These are constructed things. Everyone, without realizing we have done so, has created a personal mythology.

That scares us. We think that because we created it—made it up—it has no value. But our personal mythology is not simply something that is not true. We lived with this mythology for years. It's part of us. It's not an accurate account of what we lived through but it is part of our experience. It's more of an idea than a place. We may never want to live there or visit there but it's terribly important that it exists.

This meditation was inspired by the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "Babylon". It is the second such meditation I do here and there will be more such meditations coming.

Relational beings with relations

It's always interesting when someone really intelligent makes a basic mistake. Here's an example:

Like Buber he was keen to emphasize the importance of relationality—that dimension of the person which makes him unique and unrepeatable. (Benedict XVI: A guide for the Perplexed by Tracey Rowland.

That's not completely off the point. There is something about relationality, when applied to human beings, that makes you you. But it misses the essential point by a wide mark. To be a relational being is to have being in relationship with others. Are you tall or short? If you are one of those things, you are that in relation to others. Relationality is not something that exists inside you. It is a set of qualities that exist in relation to others. By putting it the way she does, Rowland takes away everything that is special about relationality.

Why she does that I don't know but I think it has something to do with a belief in the metaphysical self. That is the belief that the real me is something apart from all my relations, a special being that exists inside me and is the standpoint from which I can make the really important moral decisions.

This inner being, which is believed to be the real and authentic me, is usually understood as difficult to access. I have to peel away all the outer layers and that calls for self-denial and prayer. But getting to it is taken as the most important moral task.

Bu what if this picture is completely wrong? What if you are your body, as the Catholic Church teaches us and not some inner soul dressed in a body? What if being authentic isn't a matter of looking inside but looking outside at the relationships that make you who you are? I'd put it to you that the key point to take from relationality is not that you are something unique and unrepeatable but that you cannot be anything at all unless you are connected to others.

The Japanese have a saying: "A man is whatever room he is in."

Imagine you are a young person away from home. It's not the first time. You have enough experience at this to have a  grasp of what it's like. You've had failures and successes. This time you are with a group of people and you are doing well. You are establishing a new and exciting identity. This identity is not the person you are so much as it is the person you want to be. You didn't sit down and work out who this better version of yourself is. It's just there because that's the way human beings are, especially adult human beings and you're pulling it off successfully ... so far anyway.

And these people you are with have, without realizing it, given you a tremendous freedom. By accepting you, they are allowing you to work at being this new person. This is exciting and scary. It's a high wire act. Everything these people know about you is what you've told them and what you've shown them. That last element is the most important of the two for that is what makes it authentic. You can tell outrageous lies about who you are but you can't fake performance. And it's scary because you could fail at any moment.

You're at a table in a public space. Perhaps it's a pub or a student lounge. And you look up and, some distance away is a sibling. They are coming towards you because they've recognized you. And you get a sinking feeling that this might ruin everything. You don't dislike this sibling and he or she doesn't dislike you. But you really don't want to see them because, just by showing up, they have taken away your freedom to become the person you want to be.

The problem is not that they know "the person you really are". You could think of it that way and you'd feel a little guilty when you saw them because you'd feel like a fraud. They're going to come over and meet your new friends and start treating you as a different person from the one you've been acting as until now. Maybe you'll be the only one to notice this but it won't matter because you will feel an intense shame at the gap between who you want to be and the person your family takes you to be.

Maybe you've never experienced anything like that. I suspect you have though. It's one of the things that makes up modernity. There have always been people who were able to leave the place they came from and go somewhere else and become someone else but it is only relatively recently that just about everyone could do this. You don't even have to leave town to do this if you already live in a  city. You can hop on a bus and head across town to school or work. You could make the move almost seamlessly. Or you might not. One of the points of tension will be your family.

Let's dramatize this

Let's imagine a dramatic setting that will help us isolate and identify this tension. Most stories are designed to get us over this hump by way of some dramatic intervention. David Balfour's parents have died and then he is kidnapped. Now he is free to become someone. It might not work like that in real life. He might just crumple up and die. Or he might succeed. But it's a terribly helpful scenario in a novel. A different set of relations is the opportunity to become a new person.

But suppose we wanted to dramatize the personal narrative I've been describing above? Then we might have a dramatic break that is in constant danger of failing. You're sitting at a boardroom table. You ran away from home and you've assumed a new identity, complete with a false name. Most of the time you get away with it but you worry about running into one of the people who can connect you with your old identity and thereby drag you back to it. A coworker knocks on the door, excuses herself and hands you a note. It's your nightmare come true. The note is from your little brother Adam Whitman. You haven't seen him for years, not since you first adopted your new identity, but now he's tracked you down and he's at the reception desk waiting to talk to you.

You see what we've done here? We've taken an ordinary human situation—wanting to escape the identity that comes from being in one set of relationships and get into a new environment so you can be someone new—and made it a high stakes game where external consequences, arrest for deserting the army, act as a marker for your internal shame.

Most stories put the risk and high stakes on the side you go to after being kidnapped, have been sprinkled by pixie dust, escaped through the back of the wardrobe or been orphaned. This story reverses that. The new world has its risks but the danger is all about being dragged back to your family.

"You want to be Don Draper? You already are."

For those of you who aren't part of the less than two percent of the population that watched the show, I didn't make up that dramatization. It's from Mad Men. Don Draper is terrified of reverting to the Dick he used to be. That's something fairly new in story telling. I doubt it's completely new, although I don't know of any other story quite like it. As a consequence, most people missed the point.

The quote that is the subheading above is from The Last Psychiatrist. He misses the point too but he comes very, very close to getting it. For you might already be Don Draper. Don Draper, as his creator Matt Weiner insists, is not an anti-hero like Walter White. He's much closer to home than that.

TLP argues that Draper is a narcissist and believes that is the premise of the show. Again, that is very close but he is actually a man raised by a narcissist mother and who keeps making the mistake of marrying women more or less like his mother.

Even in a world that pretends to embrace transgression in art, a character who hates his or her mother is pushing the limits. Weiner moves that very dangerous notion one step away by using the time-honoured trick of making her a stepmother but even that isn't quite enough to defuse the tension. But it's also the appeal—watching this show allows a man to work out tensions they have with their mother.

Resentment: indignant or bitter feelings you cannot act on.

You can't easily express anger at your mother. Even if you could, what would it accomplish? But you do feel it. Not everyone feels it intensely but even a little tends to get bottled up for, "How dare you be angry!"

This meditation was inspired by the fifth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "5G". There will be more such meditations coming.

Pietas

"Pietas" and its obvious English derivative "piety" is a challenging virtue for me.

Originally, virtue meant excellence and it was something worth pursuing as its own reward. For the Greeks and Romans moral law was relatively unimportant. Aristotle acknowledged that you had to have laws but they were of relatively minor importance.

That all had to change with Christianity for it was heir to a whole lot of scripture that said that moral law was very important. So what's the relationship between virtue and the law? For Aquinas, virtue seems to still be its own reward. Later, in the manualist period (17th to early 20th century) moral law became supreme. Virtue was worth pursuing because it made you better at obeying moral laws. Virtue by itself was nothing. And so a virtuous person became not someone who was good at doing something but a person who was good at not doing things. By the early 20th century, the expression "a virtuous woman" came to mean a woman who had not had sex if single and had had sex with only her husband if married. And it was generally taken that the when the married woman had sex she did so out of duty rather than enthusiasm on her part. (Men were held to the same standard in theory but not in practice.)

Sexual "virtue" in women was only the most extreme example. Morality came to mean our duty to follow the law both in Catholic and protestant teaching. Today, the reigning conception of ethics for most liberals remains deontology, that is, a morality of duty. To be sure, liberals have discarded many of the sexual duties as well as filial piety towards parents and state but duty remains the central concept and, as social justice warriors demonstrate daily, woe on the person who failed to recognize the reigning notions of duty and wore a sombrero on the Cinco de Mayo. Not surprisingly, some people rejected, and continue to reject, this sort of morality as duty as something cold and inhuman. Because it is cold and inhuman!

Pietas means many things but it definitely includes duties to other human beings and not just God. In a world where we define virtue not as a quality that a human being has, not as something they are, but as a matter of performance, we are going to tend to see the pious son as the one who always does what his parents want him to do. His virtue doesn't make him anything because he is only valued to the extent that he performs as desired.

HIGH PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value training and development.
• Value competitiveness and materialism.
• View formal feedback as necessary for performance improvement.
• Value what one does more than who one is.
• Expect direct, explicit communication. 

LOW PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value societal and family relationships.
• Value harmony with the environment.
• View formal feedback as judgmental and discomfiting.
• Value who one is more than what one does.
• Expect indirect, subtle communication.

Piety towards your parents is going to be a very different thing depending on which sort of environment you are operating in. Presumably, we will all travel between both. That is to say, our job will be a high performance orientation environment and our family and friends less so. It makes sense to fire someone because you think you can find someone who can perform better. It makes sense to value the high-performing employee above the low-performing one. It makes sense to value these people for what they do more than for what they are. In fact, we judge it a vice to hire friends and family over others. In this world, I and others will judge my piety as being indistinguishable from obediently conforming to the expectations my superiors have of me.

Someone might object that conforming seems not to match modern liberal society where rebellion and competition are valued. Yes they are valued but only to the degree that they serve a shared set of values. Our "rebels" all conform to a narrowly proscribed set of values. Try being a  conservative rebel and nonconformist on a university campus and you will be sneered at and maybe even brutally suppressed. You may only rebel according to accepted models.

The limit for liberal deontology is Kant's principle that we never treat others solely as means. So, while you will treat the hired hand—for instance, the barista who makes your coffee this morning—as a means, you will not treat them solely as such. Assuming an opportunity ever comes up for you to think of them as anything else but the means to get a  good cup of coffee but it probably won't. At the other end of the scale are the people who you see primarily as ends in themselves. But only primarily; there could be kinds of performance that would lead you to sever relations with them but there probably won't; most of the time, their performance will not affect your relationship for you value them for who they are (as ends in themselves) rather than what they do (as means).

Now, it may also seem that families will be low performance oriented environments where people are valued for what they are. Well, they should be but they tend not to be. My family certainly wasn't. A standard of performance according to expectations set down by management was very much the reigning morality. One of my mother's frequent admonishments to her children was "If you want to be part of this family." My mother wasn't a horrible person. She just didn't get what a family should be and she didn't because she grew up in a high-performance-orientation society that didn't (and still doesn't) get what a family is supposed to be. Her understanding, like that of many (perhaps most) mothers of her generation of filial piety was always that her children should do what she wanted and share her values. (See Betty Draper as the supreme example this.)

"Name don't blame," as therapists say. It's pointless to blame our parents for this. My mother was as much a victim of this as a perpetrator, which is to say she learned it all from a very ambitious Irish mother who had driven her children to success. (We blame WASPs for this mentality but there is nothing peculiarly white or protestant about the work ethic.)

So what can we do about all this now? The solution our liberal culture pretends to offer us is a rejection of piety but it does this by substituting one kind of piety for another. For example, we used to be puritanical hypocrites about sex and now we are puritanical hypocrites about food and the environment. Besides, I think piety, including filial piety, is a very important virtue that is essential for us to have a happy, healthy state and to pursue happy, healthy lives. "Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you." This is, St. Paul tells us, the first commandment with a promise. If all it means, however, is a requirement that we live up to our parents' expectations it is a cold and inhuman law and no virtue at all.

Annie Gertrude Costigan

Her early life

In 1901, the Costigan family was destitute. The census has them living at an unspecified address in Duke Ward. They may have moved so as to be closer to the home for incurables where Denis Costigan lay dying. Of what he was dying we cannot be certain. The given cause of death was rheumatism but that is not a fatal disease. It is, however, possible to die from complications arising from rheumatism. We have no way of knowing whether that is what killed him. All we know is that he was suffering from rheumatism when he died.

Things had gone very badly for Denis (pronounced Dennie) in recent years. His empire of sailor boarding houses had slowly collapsed with the replacement of sailing ships by steam. The last had been closed and had reverted to a family dwelling. He would shortly die and his wife Mary would follow him a year later, a victim of tuberculosis. His eldest son, James, was a “clerk", which was probably just a euphemism for a boy who hoped to be a hustler as his father had been. (Shocking as this is to us, none of the Costigan children could have had more than a Grade 5 education, if that.) John and Mary, both in their teens, were apprentices at a bottle-brush factory—if that sounds Dickensian, it’s because it was. Catherine (so baptized but known to us as Kathleen) was seven years old and Josephine was five. None of these was earning enough money to support the family. Annie, more about her later, was not living with the family in 1901. In the normal course of events, the soon to be orphaned children would have been put up for adoption and the family would have disappeared. That isn’t what happened.

What did happen is that the family held together. They would get set up in life and would have children who would rise to prominence. That rise is so impressive as to be inconceivable. Even in the good times, the Costigans had been ghetto dwellers far excluded from polite society. And yet the children of the youngest surviving daughter Kathleen would be friends with the Hazen family, who were from the very upper crust of Saint John. No one living in the Irish Catholic ghetto in Saint John in 1901 would have thought such a thing possible and most people in upper reaches of Saint John society would have done everything in their power to prevent it happening.

The heroine of this story lived at this address in 1901.

I can’t be certain it was that house because I don’t know when it was built. Streets also get renumbered. But the address we know for certain: 264 Germain Street. This was the home of John S Thomas. A ship’s pilot, he lived here with his wife, his brother, his sister in law a lodger and an Irish servant, Annie Gertrude Costigan.

As a maid of all work, Annie’s day started at six am, when she would have gotten up to light the fire. Then she would make breakfast and, while the family was eating, she’d make all the beds. Her day would continue like that until the family had all finished dinner and the dishes were cleaned and put away. That’s 13 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. She would have been allowed to leave the house to go to church on Sunday morning for mass and perhaps to attend a dance on Saturday night after her work was done.

In 1901, Annie Gertrude was thirteen years old!

We look down on domestic service now but her getting that job was a major achievement on her part. Domestic service was the best-paying job an Irish girl could get in those days. She was the principle breadwinner for her family. When her brother James died, Annie was the one who purchased a grave. She kept working as a domestic until all her brothers and sisters were set up in life. Only then, in her early thirties, does she gets married. Once married, she gets the heck out of Dodge, and who could blame her. Now, Annie Campbell, she moves first to Halifax and then to Boston. Her story after that is pretty well known in the family. I don’t know that she ever told anyone about her time in service.

Her name

In later years, Annie gave her name as “Anna” when filling out official documents, probably out of shame thinking that her parents had made a mistake in baptizing were with a diminutive. They had not. “Annie” is a good Irish name (one that would be good to bring back in the family). It is derived from “Nainsí” which is the Gaelic form of Agnes. That, in turn, is derived from the Greek hagios and Hebrew qâdosh. When applied to a person, it meant “hallowed, consecrated, set apart for a sacred purpose or office, made ‘holy to God’.” (It’s the feast of Saint Agnes today.)

Aunt Annie had a harder childhood that you can imagine. At home, she lived in conditions that you only find in third world countries today (the atmosphere on Germain would have, despite the hard work and long hours, been considerably more sanitary than the cholera- and tuberculosis-infested slum she grew up in and that may have saved her life). She saw her mother and father and nine of her twelve siblings die horrible, lingering deaths. She worked long, hard hours to support her family when no one else could and she put off her own happiness until everyone else was taken care of. If you are descended from her, her sister Kathleen, or her brother John, you owe her a huge debt.