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Tuesday 27 December 2016

Money Can Buy Happiness. The Question Is: “How Much Happiness Is Enough?”

How much money buys happiness?

Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell we can now say that increased wealth correlates with an increase in happiness up to an annual salary of $75,000 USD—that’s $100,000 Canadian  (See Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs).  After $100,000 CAD, more money produces less and less happiness, until wealth eventually causes more problems than pleasures.  

    = < $100,000 CAD



We are left with the question: “How much happiness is enough?”  Strange question?  I hope so.  



Being unhappy is not a mental illness

Listening to a lecture given by Thomas Szasz, the psychiatrist who denied the existence of anything that could be called a “mental illness” (see also Terrorism and Madness:  Between Sympathy and Understanding), I was struck by his description of people who came to him thinking that they were mentally ill because they were not happy.  As Szasz reported, being unhappy is a perfectly reasonable, sane response to some of life’s events and circumstances.  



The pressure to be happy causes depression

I take as exceptions to the rule the numerous stories we hear of parents making their children direly unhappy, pressuring them to the point of neurosis, break-down and alienation over every choice imaginable from friends to habits to lifestyles to marriage partners to careers and everything in between.  For the average parent, myself included, wanting the offspring to be happy—no matter what else—is the number one priority.  However, I have at times found myself wondering if wanting your progeny to be happy isn’t just another way of putting pressure on them. (Overthinking!?  It’s what I do.)



Sometimes being unhappy is healthy

How often do we put pressure on the average millennial by telling her/im s/he should be happy, convincing her/im to believe, like one of Dr. Szasz’s clients, that being unhappy is a sign of mental illness?  How often do we oblige him/er to put on an endless display of alacrity and to answer every “How are you?” with Pollyanna enthusiasm?   Underlying these prescriptions for required happiness is the worst of all proscriptions:  “Sammy Jane, you do not have the right to be unhappy!”  At some point, we all have to admit the obvious.  Being bored, irritated, frustrated and enraged are the normal, sane, appropriate responses to situations which are boring, irritating, frustrating and enraging—if you have not encountered these situations in your life, you are not from this planet.


Imposing our view of happiness

The real risk of parents insisting on their kids being happy is that the things we ancestors might imagine as the precursors and prerequisites to happiness might not actually be what will make our heirs happy.  The prerequisites we imagine might actually be the things that would make us happy—if only our kids would do them.  We parents might unwittingly be insisting that our kids make us happy under the guise of our wanting them to be happy.

"The child is father to the man"

Happiness is not just a parenting issue.  True Romantic that I am, I happen to believe Wordsworth’s claim that “the Child is father to the Man.”   In most cases, adults have a lot more to learn about happiness from children than the other way around.  (Ever notice how many adults worry about spoiling children but never about spoiling themselves.)  In the adult world, happiness and its prerequisites have become addictions.


Definition of addiction

I once heard a specialist in the field describe addiction this way:  “You’re not hungry, but when someone places a bowl of salty peanuts near you, you decide to have one.  The taste of the first peanut creates a craving for more.  That is the process of addiction.”  As I listened, I wasn’t sure if this was just an analogy or if he meant it was possible to become addicted to peanuts.  No doubt the obesity statistics make it obvious that food is a North American addiction.  The desire for food is not created by hunger, but by food itself.



Sometimes addiction is the norm

I have to admit I guffawed when I read that Tiger Woods was in rehab being treated for sex addiction.  The idea that sex can be an addiction makes sense, I guess, but we live in a society where sex addiction is the norm.  Men are advised to take little blue pills to maintain the addiction, and women are expected to support the cause with purchases from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.  I’ve heard that men think about sex every seven minutes (not sure who gathered these statistics—see Lies, Lies, Nothing but Lies ).  That sounds about right, not because men are naturally inclined to having sex every seven minutes, but because seven minutes is a typical interval between exposures to some sexual stimulus—ad, image, scene, smell, physical person or all of the above—in our society.  




The concept of enough

I am still fascinated by E.F. Schumacher’s concept of “enough” from Small is Beautiful.  (See Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs.) How much of each of the things that are supposed to make us happy is enough?  How much food, sex, comfort, attention, fame, power, status, beauty, knowledge, admiration or love is enough?  How can we answer this question when each of these pleasures and affects can become an addiction; in fact, already are addictions in our culture and society?






Happiness is the absence of pain

On a Mediterranean cruise recently, I was struck by how many passengers—myself included—were beginning to find the endless luxury and pampering oppressive.  The philosopher Schopenhauer argued that happiness was the temporary absence of pain.  According to Schopenhauer, the achievement of our desires makes us sated and bored causing the endless cycle of pain to begin again.



Why are the Danes the happiest people in the world?

Year after year, Denmark is identified as the happiest country in the world.  The Danes, however, do not seem like a smiley, joyous people.  Analysis reveals that the basis of their happiness is their low, and therefore achievable, expectations.  The key, then, to being happy is knowing how much is enough.





Wednesday 14 December 2016

Lies, Lies, Nothing but Lies! Oh, Wait a Minute, There’s a Bit of Truth There . . .

Analyzing Fiction

There has never been a better time to be a specialist in analyzing fiction.  Alvin Kernan’s The Death of Literature notwithstanding, there may still be hope for the study of “literature”; a.k.a., “the lies that tell the truth.”

Sarah Palin in a bikini! [click the link please!]



Fake News Is News

In the wake of the American presidential election, there has been a tidal wave of discussion online, on television and in the press about “fake news.”  One television news show I saw recently claimed that fake news stories outnumber “real” news stories (whatever “real” means) by a ratio of three to one, and fake news is viewed online tens times as frequently as its conservative cousin. Of course, the television news show in question was quoting online sources, raising the question “Is the news about ‘fake news’ fake?”






Fraudsters Target the Illiterate and Less Literate

Have you noticed that when you receive one of those fraudulent email messages trying to lure you to send money—you know, the ones that say my uncle in Nigeria has left me a multi-million-dollar inheritance, but I need your help to get it—those messages are full of grammar and spelling mistakes.  The mistakes are deliberate because the messages are designed to target people who are less educated, who cannot read well enough to detect the mistakes, and are therefore more susceptible to the fraud that the senders are attempting to perpetrate.

Understand What a Text Is Trying to Do to You

Other than going incommunicado and surrendering to the life of a recluse, the only defense against online frauds and fakes and misinformation in general is the ability to read.  Usually when people talk about reading they mean the ability to interpret alphabetic symbols marked on paper or a screen—and that’s what I mean most of the time when I talk about reading.  However, we also “read” images, numbers, people, situations, in fact, the entire world around us.  Anything we can read—which is just about everything—can be called “a text.”  

I would habitually tell university students that when you are reading a written text it is important to realize, at the outset, that someone is trying to do something to you.  The text might be designed to persuade, convince, enrage, shock, seduce, insult, confuse, convert, appease, hypnotize, pacify, inform, educate, or discourage you—and there are a thousand other possibilities.   As a practiced and skilled reader, you need to constantly consider what is being done (or attempted to be done) to you.  An educated reader begins her engagement with the text with an attitude of skepticism.  The attitude of an educated reader is to doubt, but if you are going to engage with or even enjoy a text to some degree you must consent, you must accept, as least provisionally to what is being done to you.  

Suspension of Disbelief

This process has long been recognized in literary studies.  It even has a name:  “suspension of disbelief.”  If you are going to enjoy a work of fiction, you must allow yourself to read as if it were all true—which, of course, invites the question of how to enjoy a postmodern novel where the author constantly intervenes to remind you that you are reading fiction.  The sophisticated reader is supposed to know how to believe in just the right degree.  There is even a threadbare old joke to make the point:  a country bumpkin announcing in a loud whisper as the ghost of King Hamlet appears behind Prince Hamlet:  “Ohh, he’s gonna shit when he sees that ghost!”

Resistant Reading


In contrast, postmodern feminism has given us the “resistant reading”  whereby unwary women are instructed to approach the slippery ideological seductions of Andre Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” and Leonard Cohen’s “As the Mist Leaves No Scar” with caution.



That’s the fun stuff—the situations where the possibility of salutary readings are at least possible to imagine.  How do we deal with a digital universe in which 40% of what we read are outright lies and another 49% are out-of-context fibs, shadings of the truth, conspiracy theories, sales pitches and spin-doctoring?  (Please don’t quote my made-up percentages, but note that I have left 11% of space for facts, intelligent discourse, captions about cats and vacuity.)   The only viable countermeasure to being lied to, fooled, misinformed and defrauded is the ability to read.  

The Antidote to Fake News Is Reading 

. . . which returns me to the information which I cited in a previous post (How Many Americans Believe that Planet Earth Is Only 6000 Years Old) that 14% of Americans are illiterate and 21% of adults in the USA read below a grade 5 level.   Even as I quoted the article I found myself wondering if I wasn’t promulgating bogus statistics.  If I am going to post on the malaise of “fake news” and the antidote of effective reading, I have to make some effort to ensure that I am not spreading “fake news.”  I take as a basic truth underlying claims about illiteracy rates in both the USA and Canada that the reading skills of the population as a whole are well below where they should be—even though definitions of “illiteracy” are much debated and the measurement of reading skills always in question.

Why Reading a Book Matters

I also take the ability to read a book as the true measure of the capacity to read.  Having the skills and acumen required to hold on to the coherence and pattern of a text over hundreds of pages is the ultimate test of reading.  This coherence might be the connection between a hypothesis and statistical evidence, or the ongoing inductive and deductive reasoning that supports an argument, or details of plot, character and setting.  Conversely, and perhaps more importantly, this level of reading ability also means being able to spot inconsistencies, incongruities, outright contradictions, lacunae, logical fallacies, flawed writing and rhetorical smoke 'n' mirrors. 


Fake News Is the News We Want to Believe

"Fake news" is news that is oddly familiar; moreover, it is typically news that we would like to believe.  Every conspiracy theory contains a spattering of irrefutable facts; every fiction large chunks of reality.  The ability to read is not just being able to identify words on a page; the key to reading is understanding how the words connect together, and how collections of words work together and beyond--or don't.  More than the words themselves, it is the space between words that matter.  Making connections is making meaning.  Making the right connections--and spotting the disconnections--is getting the meaning right.

Fragments of News Convince Us that We Are Right and Knowledgable

However, we live in the age of headlines and captions and twitter.  We are bombarded with fragments of information on the assumption that we cannot or will not read sufficiently to question the ersatz.  As a result, we are all becoming lesser readers every day, more entrenched in the dogma of whatever we happen to believe at the outset, convinced of whatever panders to our current convictions and outrage, and unwilling or unable to read further.

Addendum

I may think myself a pretty good reader, but this bit of "fake news" fooled me.  It fooled me for a few of the typical reasons.  I'd heard it a couple of times, then years later I got this image, which looks convincing, emailed to me.  It is fake,




Sunday 11 December 2016

When It Comes to Democracy, Who Are Canadians to Talk?



Trump, Trudeau and the popular vote  

When some of my Canadian Facebook friends seemed outraged that Donald Trump won the American presidency without winning the popular vote, I felt compelled to point out that the Trudeau Liberals only won 39.5% of the popular vote (Oct. 19, 2015) which translated into 54% of the parliamentary seats—which in Canada means 100% of the power.  


Trump tweets that he won a "rigged" election


Of course, being elected to the single most powerful position on the planet isn’t quite enough to satisfy Trump’s mega-ego, so his team has been pursuing claims that he did, in fact, win the popular vote, pursuant to Trump’s typical strategy of simply Tweeting that he, in fact, won the popular vote and that the voting was rigged.  Yes, he claims that the election which he won was rigged.  We live in dark comedic times.    


"There is a crack in everything"

As a Canadian, it’s difficult not to notice that Leonard Cohen died the day before Trump was elected.  In the past we could depend upon Cohen, with a single line or maybe two, to give the chaos some hint of meaning, raising us above it all.  On second thought, Leonard did leave us with the proper lines for this occasion:  “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”


Is Trump the stereotypical American?

Unfair as it is to individual Americans—dare I say, to the majority of individual Americans—the gaping cracks now showing in the USA will force Americans to see themselves as they have seen themselves but dimly in the past.  Donald Trump is a perfect representation of that stereotypical view of Americans as loud, brash, rude, egotistical, self-aggrandizing, arrogant, bullying, and under-educated but rich—and proud of it all.  Americans may now be forced to see themselves in the unflattering light in which much of the world has seen them.

Will he or won't he, and which is worse?

If you have been critical of American incongruity and hypocrisy in the past, get ready.  In the next four years, you will be able to compare hypocrisy with outright villainy . . . or maybe not.  What’s been happening lately is like that Woody Allen joke:  you know the one.  Two old ladies are eating in a restaurant, one turns to the other and says, “The food in this restaurant is just terrible.”  To which the second responded, “Yes, and they give such small portions, too!”

On the political scene, lefties and liberals like me used to complain “Gawd!  Aren’t the things that Trump is promising terrible!”  And now, “Isn’t it awful that Trump isn’t going to do the things he promised!”  Oddly enough, the latter is what Trump supporters had been saying since the beginning.

Canadian smuggery

We Canadians should not be smug.  Our diffidence better becomes us.  We are in the midst of our own dark comedy.  Hopefully, it is too early to say “I told you so,” but I did predict in an October post (Are Canadian Elections Democratic?) that the Liberal promise of electoral reform was unlikely to survive the combination of voter apathy and party interests.  According to various press reports, the opposition parties have been pushing to fulfill the Liberals’ election promises, while the Liberal party itself is struggling to delay implementation of its own promises.



Is Print more reliable than digital?

In a reversal of modern trends, election reform has been getting more play in the press than online or in social media.  In August of this year, Andrew Coyne published an excellent article countering dire predictions that “proportional representation” in Canada would lead to disaster:  "No, proportional representation would not make Canada a dystopian hellhole."

Proportional representation

As Coyne documents, all over the world where democratic countries have used proportional representation (that is, the party’s proportion of the popular vote determines how many seats the party gets in parliament), the end results have worked quite well.  However, as Coyne points out, the two examples which critics of proportional representation invariably cite, Italy and Israel, are not only anomalies, but the status-quo proponents exaggerate the difficulties these countries face and fail to acknowledge the very specific conditions in these two countries which do not apply to Canada.

The Conspiracy of online silence

At the risk of invoking a conspiracy theory, I have to point out that it was/is difficult to find this Coyne article online.  Not only was it necessary to use the exact wording of the headline but of the eight hits that came up seven of them were dead links leading a “404” message:  “file or directory not found.”  As I was about to share the one working link with you, dear Reader, I went to my bookmark to discover that the article has disappeared from there as well.  Consequently, if you want to read the article, you will have to visit your local library and check out the “National News” in your local paper for August 19, 2016. Paradoxically, what are accessible online are a few Coyne articles where he seems to be counter-punching against the election-reform process, if not electoral reform itself.

Is MyDemocracy deliberately just plain silly?

In an effort to create a bit of online buzz the government has launched MyDemocracy.ca which supposedly surveys Canadian attitudes toward electoral reform.  The government survey is a lot like those self-evaluation quizzes popular in days of yore in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ms and People, designed to answer questions like:  “Are you a good lover?”  “Are you a romantic or a realist?” and “How confident are you?”  (Fine, okay, you caught me.  I’ve done them all, and I’m a confident, romantic mediocre lover.)

Choosing between a fair democracy and getting things done

I found it hard to imagine how the government survey will in any way advance the cause of electoral reform.  Nor did the questionnaire quite live up to its promise of “being fun”; nonetheless, I would encourage you to try it out yourself.  What I found disconcerting about the survey was that I was being asked to decide if I wanted a parliament with many parties or one that got things done.  I don’t believe electoral reform forces me to choose one or the other; we can have both.  I think a fairer and more reasonable question—not to mention one directly to the point— would be: “Do you think it is fair that the Green Party got 3.5% of the votes in the last federal elections but less than 1% of the seats  (.29% to be exact, meaning one seat)?”



"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" (Churchhill).

The one issue that the survey raised for me, about which I remain torn, fell under the general theme of “making it easier to vote.”  In past American elections, it was always the Democrats who accused Republicans of making it hard to vote. However, in the last election, we heard Trumplicans accusing the Democrats of voter suppression.  Part of me wants everyone to vote, or at least that there be strong voter turnout, but another part of me wants people to vote who are informed and aware of the issues.  Also, I am doubtlessly out of step with the times in being leery of online voting, but a part of me (okay, I’m running out of parts) thinks that maybe it’s a good idea that voting takes a bit of effort.  Certainly, voting about voting (i.e., a referendum on electoral reform) is an issue we should all be willing to give time and effort to—if we care at all about democracy.


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