Coffee house wimps: It was even worse than I suspected

Here's a lyric that Elizabeth kindly called my attention to in a comment:

Relationships I don't know why
They never work out and they make you cry
But the guy that says goodbye to you
Is out of his mind

You can read the whole song here. Like lots of pop songs, there is no context. The songwriter (his name is Griffin House) is speaking to someone but we don't know who. A single woman is a fair surmise; I don't think someone would say relationships never work out for you to someone you were in a relationship with.

As often is the case, Mr. House is telling us a lot more about this woman (and himself) than he perhaps realizes. He is telling us that this woman has repeatedly failed at relationships. Now, it's entirely possible that she's had the bad luck to be involved with a series of jerks. Then again, what does it say about her judgment that she hasn't learned to make better choices based on past experience?

The top-rated comment on the YouTube page for the song right now is, "This got to be the most lovely song in the world! <3" That's from Anna Teixeira who, if she looks anything like her photo, shouldn't have any trouble attracting relationship-minded guys. And then we get three or four very pathetic boys who wish they could be so eloquent, including Scott who hopes his ex will listen to the song and take him back. (Ooh, man of steel! If she happens to be reading this, Don't!) We finally get some healthy cynicism from Joseph Scott and Elizabeth Pound who think the song's lyrics are just a succession of pick up lines. Which they are.

I wish we could say they're bad pickup lines but House's success suggests otherwise.

Let's pick out the nice guy tropes

First up validating her feelings. That's what's going on in the verse above. Things have gone badly in all her relations, repeat, in ALL her relationships, but Griffin-boy is here to assure her that her feeling that it isn't her fault is valid. Why? Because she's "one of a kind", which, to be fair is also true of Karla Homolka and was true of Aileen Wuornos. Feeling better yet? Also because, according to Griffin, a guy would have to be crazy to dump her.

Second, is that old classic the covert contract. This support he's offering her isn't for free. There is a quid pro quo as the very next words out of his mouth are:

Well, I've been down and I need your help
I've been feelin' sorry for myself
Don't hesitate to boost my confidence

Does that sound like a guy a woman could count on? If you answered yes to that, you need to find a therapist right away.

Third, he offers his neediness. That's already clear from the previous verse but you have to keep reading to appreciate the appalling depths this man-boy sinks to:

Well, I've been lost and I need direction
I could use a little love protection
What do you say, honey? Come to my defense

Come to his defense? That was supposed to be what he was offering. Just words; that's all he has to offer.

Confession time

I mock now but there was a time in my life when I said things like that. I used to be a nice guy. I was very good at it. Women I had relationships told me I was very good at compliments. To be honest, I think I was a lot better than Griffin.

Of course, the compliments game is all a covert contract. Complements aren't complementary. They come with a price tag: You want more of this? Put out for it.

Why do we do things like that instead of working on ourselves? Why not develop real virtues and then let them speak for us?

Coffee House wimps

I picked up a rental car to go to my father's funeral this May. It came with Sirius xm. I worked my way around the dial listening to various stations.

At one point I landed on The Coffee House, which plays music by singer songwriters interspersed with acoustic covers of big pop hits. We were coming home at that point after what, as I'm sure you can imagine, was an emotional rollercoaster week back home. I found the station in the morning as we pulled out of our hotel to drive along the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, a bit of geography that has heavy associations with my father. For about 40 minutes, the station was perfect.

And then it began to grate. The problem was the, for lack of a better word, men. There was nothing new about them or the songs they were singing. It was hearing them all at the same time that hit me. They say that film noir was discovered by French film critics after the war when they were suddenly exposed to several years worth of American film after a long drought. They saw similarities in a group of films that caused them to recognize a new genre. I had a similar experience listening to this radio station.

I'm not sure how you'd classify the genre I heard that morning expect maybe as nice-guy music. These guys were obviously very appreciative of women but their praise came from a position of weakness. And it was all very sincere, sickeningly so. Some of it was music I'd heard before and some even stuff that I rather liked up until that morning. That is to say, I recognized the sentiments expressed as something I'd felt myself from time to time. It never struck me how utterly nauseating it was until I heard a whole bunch of it together.

The funny thing is that it's not terribly reverent music. It wasn't as pathetic as, for example, the horrible "She's so high (above me)". No, it was worse because it was all wrapped up in transgressive attitude like children acting out, as if these guys thought that women were going to want to be part of their little games. (The awful thing is they're probably right.)

I came home thinking it was time for a change.

Father figure

I know, here I just changed the name from "Studiously Uncool" and I'm writing about a show that ended two years ago.

Rewatching episodes, the thing that really jumps out is how few good ones there are. Compare Mad Men or Breaking Bad or any of the other boutique shows with The Good Wife and it will hit you in the face. There are no bad episodes of The Good Wife. They made twice as many episodes and there isn't a bad one in the lot. On average, there are three-to-five good episodes in a season of Mad Men. And some of the bad ones really really bad. "Tea Leaves" from Season 5 was so cringe-making that I gave up on it.

What's painfully obvious in retrospect is that the show succeeded in spite of itself. They had something but they didn't know what it was. What they had was a husband with a bad wife. Two bad wives as Megan is no step up. That's the real story.

Why they didn't realize it is also obvious. Our culture can't stand a real male figure.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking of all the examples where Don behaves like a jerk. I'd suggest two things. First, the show had it out for him and for masculinity in general so those things are exaggerated. But I'd also suggest that a lot of that stuff is just what comes with the package. We tolerate a certain amount of sheer cussedness from female characters but we've lost our tolerance for the same from male ones. Or, t be more accurate, we've been taught to hate them.

The bottom line, though, is that the only reason to watch the show was Don Draper.

Impostor syndrome

I occasionally go back and rewatch old episodes of Mad Men and I think about all that was said about the show here and elsewhere. With hindsight it seems increasingly obvious to me that the show was really about impostor syndrome. That is to say, it is about impostor syndrome to the extent that it was about anything. The only thing a show has to be about is a being a show. Once viewers have been convinced of that, the creators' work is done. Most episodes just filled space in the schedule but the show always came back to questions of impostor syndrome.

A TV show, any TV show, will have a lot of creators, each of whom will be busy pulling the blanket their way. Jon Hamm wanted it to be about alcoholism because Jon Hamm struggles with alcohol addiction. Other people, a lot of other people, wanted the show to be about feminism. Most critics wanted the show to be about an antihero but Matt Weiner, who had more say than anyone, insisted it wasn't.

The obvious objection to my claim that the show is really about impostor syndrome is to say that Don Draper really is an impostor. And you're not?

In any case, Don Draper is an odd sort of impostor. He may be a Dick pretending to be a Don but he isn't pretending to be the real Don Draper. That Don Draper was an engineer, a man who'd been to college and our Don Draper didn't pretend to be either of those things. He was shockingly honest about revealing who he really was. In the second episode he unhesitatingly tells Betty that his family were too poor to have a nanny.

To the extent he is pretending anything, he is pretending not to be Dick Whitman. He's pretending not to be the person his mother told him he was. Don't get tied up about the fact that his mother wasn't really his mother. The only evidence we have of this is Dick Whitman's flashbacks and those include events he couldn't possibly have experienced such as his conception.

That makes him no different from anyone else. We're all told we're the products of our parents. Even an adopted child is told something. We're all told stories about our childhood so often that we internalize them to the point that we think we remember having experienced them. I, as I suspect most people do, took these stories as a solid foundation until just a couple of years ago.

Don Draper shakes us because he says that, no matter where you came from, all that really matters in the end is your ability to perform. That's what it takes not to be an impostor.

Unfortunately, the show doesn't have much to say about this. Don Draper continues to survive because he continues to be able to pull-off creative masterpieces, the last of which is the famous Hilltop ad. Here, however, it breaks the rules for we know (or we can look up) how the Hilltop ad was created and it is nothing like the version represented in the show.

Weiner broke the Bugs Bunny/Christopher Columbus rule: when you put a fictional character at the heart of historical events, you must make sure he or she she never does anything that would require us to rewrite the history books. The Hilltop ad requires that.

Worse, though, it accomplishes nothing. What does Don do in that episode that "solves" his problems? The answer to that is nothing, unless you think a whole bunch of appalling narcissistic bullshit about "how does that make you feel" has enabled him to find himself.

In the end the show had nothing to offer except a fascinating character. A character whom a whole lot of people admired despite the show's creators' best efforts to make us sneer at him. Successfully being Don Draper was a major achievement. Stop being the person you hate by becoming someone you can admire.

Moral equality

I wanted to pick up on a line from my last post:

This runs against what we tell ourselves about truth telling. We want to believe that it is a simple matter to tell the truth. You just say what you believe to be true.

One thing we desperately want to believe about morality is that it is equally open to everyone to be moral. Anybody can be a moral person (or "ethical" if you want to be snooty about it). This seems for inclusive and democratic to us. I don't think it is either.

I'll probably come back to those issues in future posts but I want to make a blunt and possibly disturbing claim here and it necessarily follows from a correct understanding of virtue that is that some people are just better at being moral than others.

The ancient Greeks understood this and that is why they praised people we would not as virtuous. They understood that virtue is the ability to perform. 

We intellectualize virtue. We say things such as, "the right choice is the one that the virtuous person would make." That misses the point. Yes, there are times when morality consists of making complex decisions but, most of the time, we know the right thing to do. The challenge is actually doing it. We couldn't admire virtuous people if this weren't the case because we couldn't judge their actions. Virtue is the ability to perform and that's why you'd want Achilles on your side.

I'd prefer Hector on even if that meant losing because I'm a Christian and Jesus was not an egalitarian. He was firmly convinced that the poor would always be with us. More importantly, he said this:

Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him whom men commit much they will be given more. [Luke 12: 48]

We see hierarchical distinctions like that in the Gospel and we assume it is solely socio-economic hierarchy. I think Jesus meant much more than that. I think he meant virtue hierarchy as well. Indeed, the culture of the time didn't think of economic disparity in the narrow terms we do. They assumed that wealth reflected the blessing of God. The apostles are gobsmacked when Jesus tells them it will be difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. These people weren't stupid; they knew full well that some greedy people became wealthy. They also knew, however, that success tended to go to the good, that is to say, the virtuous.

One of the really subversive things that Jesus does is to remind us that this is not God's way. That human virtue is not the ultimate goal. He does not judge as we judge. The holy men and women we revere might be judged harshly in heaven and others we hold in low esteem will be praised. Tax collectors and prostitutes will enter heaven before you. 

This comes back to a favourite point of Benedict XVI's: morality is not the point. We are not called to be virtuous to earn our way into heaven. Instead, God has loved us and thereby ennobled us in ways we couldn't imagine and striving to be virtuous is the appropriate response to such an incredible gift.

Think of it on analogy to music. God has loved you and making music in response is an appropriate response to that. Some people, however, are much better singers than others. That doesn't mean their gratitude is better than that of poor singers.

Lying and memory

Somewhere the great historian Frederick William Maitland likened doing history to predicting the past. He couldn't have known but brain science has come to support that view. What our brain does is two things: it predicts a pattern and it watches for variances on that pattern. When you first open your eyes in the morning, your brain is already prepared for what it expects to see. It will calmly register nothing if nothing is unusual. If anything is out of place, it will focus on that and you will spend a few conscious moments determining that the dark blob in the middle of the floor is a sock and not a rat. And then you'll go back to normal.

Our entire memory of the past is what our brain expects to be there. That is to say, we only remember anything because our brain has been trained to be ready to respond to possible challenges. You remember your name, your birthplace and birth date, what schools you went to and whatever else you remember because you expect to be asked about these things and the only reason you expect to be asked is because you've been trained to expect to be asked by people asking you. It was important to remember who you had for math in Grade 10 and so your brain got good at storing that detail. And you might continue to remember it long after it ceases to be useful.

Most of the time, being able to answer "correctly" means being able to perform successfully. It means being able to give and sustain an answer. I'm asked who my teacher is and I give an answer that others will accept. We forget how scary that can be in Grades 1 and 2. You go to recess on the first day and kids you know ask you "Who you got?" If you can't pull up a credible answer, you'll be mocked and shunned. That's pure terror at that age.

A lie is a kind of performance. It's an attempt to sustain an answer. Forget about dictionary definitions about "false statements" because both "false" and "statement" very sophisticated notions that you learn years after you're expected to know what "lying" and "telling the truth" are.

From your brain's perspective lying has a lot more in common with telling the truth than we like to admit. Your brain predicts a pattern of response and most of the time you try to give the answer that will sustain that pattern. Very early on in life you will encounter bullies who will teach you in no uncertain terms that answering questions is a high-risk activity. For our brains, the "right answer" and the "safe answer" are just two ways of saying the same thing.

Lying is like picking your nose, masturbating or putting things in your mouth. That is to say, these are things that every child will naturally do unless and until they are taught not to. You do these things because they feel safe and good and the only way your parents and other authority figures have to make you stop is to make these things feel unsafe. Explaining to you why you shouldn't do these things isn't going to be enough. You have to think they are unsafe and the best way adults have of conveying that message is to actually make it unsafe for you to do them. At which point the difference between your mommy and the schoolyard bully can get a bit blurry.

There is a good reason why the theological virtues are faith, hope and love and not loyalty, trust and obedience. A good gang member can have all of the second set while being a drug dealer, pimp and murderer. And yet, mommy and all your elementary school teachers spent more time trying to teach you the latter three virtues.

Don't blame them for this. You can't really teach faith, hope and love. You can "model" them to a point but we only use ugly jargon like that when we're lying to ourselves.

Any time we answer a question, including questions about the past, our brain is scanning for signs that something is going wrong. This happens on two levels. The first level is to monitor responses from other people. We get tense during conversations that are going badly long before we are consciously aware that another person is challenging us. At the same time, our brains also monitor ourselves. But not by "looking inside". For our brain, our bodies are just another data source. Heart rate, sweating, hesitant voice patterns, these are just data that our brain monitors and then evaluates based on the context.

Once we start operating at a very sophisticated level—which is to say after years an years of social training—we get to the point where we start monitoring our answers not only to see if they are safe performances in this particular context but also to see what impact they might have on other predictable contexts. The girl in the schoolyard asks you a question and you consider not only what is safe to say right now but also whether that will continue to be safe if she goes straight to the teacher or her mother and repeats what she said. Included in that calculation will be an assessment of how likely she is to do that.

And part of that is considering what you've said in other contexts. When we learn the right answer we are also taught that the right answer will be consistent with other things we say. Again, bullies are some of our most important teachers in this regard.

It's often said that liars have to have good memories but that is nonsense. Everyone who answers questions has to have a good memory in order to figure out what performance to give in response. The only reason to develop a memory in the first place is to be able to perform successfully. When tiger kittens play with one another, they are developing memories of moves that will eventually help them pull down and kill prey.

Human beings accumulate and process memories on a very sophisticated level. It's odd that we attribute more sophistication in doing so to liars—for when we say "liars have to have good memories" we are really praising an odd figure we might call "a good liar". But stop a minute and consider when we use that expression. It's always when we've caught a liar. We're effectively telling them that they had better become better performers if they want to try pulling that off again.

What gets missed in all this is that truth-telling is actually a sophisticated performance of its own. It requires us to assess our answer-performance not just in terms of what will happen right now but also in terms of what might happen given a whole lot of of other possibilities.

This is why your girlfriend or wife will almost always lie to you about her some sexual issues. Stone-faced denials will almost always be the safest answer. She can easily imagine ways that telling you the truth will lead to disaster whereas the odds of your being able to determine what she really thinks or really has done are vanishingly small.

And that is important because she will, in other contexts, insist that it is important to tell the truth and perhaps even insist that being a truth teller is part of who she is. The second the man in her life asks certain questions, she is just like that scared little girl confronting the bully in grade school and the only answer that will ever come out of her mouth is what she judges to be the safest one.

This runs against what we tell ourselves about truth telling. We want to believe that it is a simple matter to tell the truth. You just say what you believe to be true.

It can't be to say what you know to be the truth. Think of our school kid on day one being asked who his teacher is. "I don't remember," is not a safe answer. You're supposed to know. The same is true during a math test. We're taught very early on that giving the right answer is not to say what you know and believe but to say what you are supposed to know and believe.

What kind of sadist looms over a small child and tells her that it's simple to tell the truth? It's far more effective to tell the child that its brave to tell the truth. That said, there is something manipulative about both these behaviours.

To lie is "to knowingly make a false statement". When is a child asked to make a statement? Statements are what you make to the police. No child is asked to make a statement to the teacher, principal or to mommy. She is asked to make a particular kind of performance in a particular context.

In order for a child to learn how to tell the truth, her parents need to know when it is acceptable to ask for the truth. You need a good reason to ask questions. Not just because it isn't fair to ask, although it sometimes isn't, but because the child needs to learn that there are good reasons to tell the truth in certain contexts. She needs to learn that telling the truth can be the loving thing to do. And she's not stupid, she's going to figure out early on that a lot of people will ask her for the truth because they want to hurt her and others.

Okay, but what about the title for this post. What does truth have to do with memory? Telling the truth reinforces memory. If we keep repeating the truth to others, we get better and better at remembering it. In some contexts that is a very good thing to do.

New name and look?

I've been thinking about changing the name and look of the blog. This post is here so that regular readers will know it might happen so that they won't be shaken if it does happen. Nothing else will change: just the appearance and name. I may do it in stages the way some gas stations rebranded when I was a kid.

UPDATE: The new name is up. Why? Because it's more assertive!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Changes completed. Why did I do this? I wanted something more assertive, more masculine.