The media is wallowing in the Tiger Woods affair. The idea seems to be that he deserves special opprobrium because he seemed so good before. Schadenfreuden always take pleasure in anybody’s trouble, but it goes deeper than that. Many people seem almost to resent goodness as an affront to their own imperfections and they think they can pull themselves up by pulling others down.
One of their most effective tools of character destruction is setting an impossibly high standard. When nobody can reach the standard, the losers can say that we are all equal – equally craven.
Two types of standards are useless: stupidly low standards that include virtually everything and impossibly high standards that are almost impossible to attain. Mark Phelps is a better swimmer than I am, but if we make the test the ability to swim 50 yards in less than five minutes, we both equally qualified as swimmers. On the other hand, if we make the test the capacity to swim from California to Hawaii, we are both equally unqualified as swimmers.
It is fairly easy to identify and argue against absurdly low standards. It is harder to get at the absurdly high ones. Proponents can accuse you of being against excellence or not caring about improvement. The fact that nobody can achieve the standard just proves that we have a long way to go before we get where we should be. The challenge is that these arguments can be valid to improve motivation and performance. It is just that they are easily misused.
So we just have to recognize that everybody is a sinner; everybody makes mistakes; everybody should strive to do better and some do better than others, i.e. we are not all equally good or bad. I told the kids that saying you are sorry means you will not do it again. That means you have to do better and if you can do better it implies that not everything is the same. Just because we cannot achieve perfection doesn’t mean we have the option of slouching into decadence. Just because you cannot do everything doesn’t mean you have to do nothing.
I take no pleasure in Tiger Wood’s fall. It is none of my business. I do not have the “right to know” and neither do the hack-journalists covering the affair. The fact that another human is not perfect doesn’t absolve any of us of the responsibility to be better. It is a challenge we face every day and it is a challenge that nobody can face for us. We should be judged on how well we fight the good fight, aware that we will never achieve the ultimate success.
People who delight in the misfortunes of others are assholes, but I feel a bit sorry for them. How bad must your life be if your outlook can be brightened by someone else’s sorrow?
Alex and I went to a lecture at the Smithsonian about the Byzantine Empire by Lars Brownworth. It was a good lecture and the guy had very good humor timing but he also made some excellent points.
One of the key points is how the Byzantines have been disrespected for centuries. Even the name “Byzantine” is pejorative. The Byzantines referred to themselves as Romans, which made sense since they were indeed the heirs to the Roman Empire in an unbroken line of history. Some of it is the responsibly of one man – Edward Gibbon, whose monumental book “the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has set the concept of Rome for more than 200 years. But in many ways he was merely reflecting a general Western prejudice against the East.
It seems to make sense that we could call the end of the Roman Empire when the city of Rome fell, but this is not the case. By the time the actual city of Rome fell to Barbarians in 476 it had no longer really been the capital of the Empire for some times. The Western Empire was ruled from the more defensible Ravenna. The more important Eastern part of the Empire was ruled from Constantinople. By that time also the Roman Empire had occupied the Mediterranean world for more than 600 years. It had become a single cultural entity a lot like the U.S. in North America. California or Nebraska is not less American than Virginia or Massachusetts because.
Take that back in terms of our own history and we are back to 1409, almost a century before the European discovery of America. Henry V had not yet become king of England and – BTW – the Eastern Roman Empire was still in existence. That was a long time ago, so you can imagine that a citizen of the Roman Empire had no real concept of anything before Rome, or maybe had about the same feeling as we would about Henry IV (for most people i.e. none).
Anyway it was one cultural region and the Mediterranean united the region, not divided it. North Africa was as much part of this Roman world as Italy. We forget about that today because we think in terms of East and West and we think of the Muslims in the Middle East as natural and native. BTW, many mosques are pattered after Byzantine churches (especially Hagia Sophia, that you see in the picture) and the Muslim world owes a lot to the Eastern Roman Empire in general, as we do.
If you read other parts of my blog, you know I am a fan of the great empire of Rome. The Byzantines preserved and transmitted the ancient heritage to us. Byzantine texts and scholars helped spark the renaissance. We should pay more attention to their history.
I think it is great that Smithsonian sponsors these lectures and that hundreds of people come to listen to them.
America has most of the world’s top universities, but what really stands out about our country is the depth and breadth of opportunity on offer. You don’t have to be in a big city or an important capital to find a first-class education and you don’t even have to be in college to get started. Community colleges are increasingly filling roles as not only technical trainers but also launching pads for academic careers.
I am biased. Alex graduated from Northern Virginia Community College and will start as a junior at James Madison University next month. But that also gives me some special insights into the subject. I won’t say Alex is typical of all students, but let me tell a little about college and community college with him in mind.
Alex didn’t have a plan when he graduated from HS. He had not been an enthusiastic student and his mother and I made the hard decision NOT to push him right into college. I made that mistake myself long ago. All I did was drink beer (the drinking age was eighteen back then) and my 1.60 GPA in my first year at UWSP continues to haunt me to this day.
Alex avoided that. After HS, he went to work at the local Multiplex. It was a really crappy job, but he soon did better, moving to Home Depot, which treats its employees well. He has continued to work there and won the respect of his bosses and co-workers. This experience will serve him well in future. It disturbs me that many college students have never actually done any real work.
After a few months, he decided to start community college while continuing to work part time. Community college makes the transition from work to study easy. Tuition is cheap and students can take a few courses at a time. Alex eased in and started to get good grades.
Not everybody is ready to go to college at eighteen. I wasn’t, neither was Alex. I think this is especially true of boys. They tend to be less interested in academics and a little more rambunctious. They might need a little more time. It is certainly out of style to say, “Boys will be boys” and it is not true of all boys, but it is indeed generally true. They get clobbered when they are pushed too soon into some situations and sometimes they don’t recover. Alex matured and after passage of time, he was ready to do well. To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.” The old wisdom makes sense. Sometimes waiting is best, but it hard.
No size fits all. But I think we would be well served to rethink college entrance in general. I don’t think it is possible to make a good admissions decisions when a kid is eighteen years old. An eighteen-year-old is largely the product of his/her parents. A couple years later you get a better look at the adult. AND the kids make better choices. A couple years make a big difference at this time.
It might be better to start most kids in community colleges and then let them move on to university as their demonstrated talents and now better informed choices indicate.
Alex also saved me the big bucks. Community college is about half the cost of State schools and Alex lived at home.
Now let me shift to the other side. I am glad that Alex is going away to school. I think it is important that kids NOT live at home the whole time. They learn a lot from living with other young people and being away from home. And as I wrote a few paragraphs above, one size does not fit all. Mariza and Espen went right to college after HS and Mariza was only seventeen (she skipped second grade).
So I am glad that we have options. America is the land of opportunity because it is also the land of second and third chances. There are many roads to success and lots of time to take them.
People say that like it is a bad thing. In fact, the ability to put a price on most things is the basis of most of our prosperity. It also reduces or even eliminates many conflicts and just makes everything work smoother. A lot of blood has been shed over “priceless” things, but any problem you can buy your way out of is not longer a problem; it is just an expense.
People have a strange way of disparaging thing they want the most and talk obliquely about them. For example, when somebody says, “you cannot put a price on that” he usually means that the price offered is too low. When he says, “Nobody should have to pay for that” he usually means that he wants somebody else to pay for it for him.
Something for Nothing
Everybody likes to get something for nothing (or at least for not too much.) We wince when we think about the venality of some of our interactions, but it is just part of human nature. Actually, it is part of nature in general. Animals implicitly calculate the amount of effort expended for a particular payoff. Lions go after the zebras or wildebeests that are easiest to catch and they chase their prey only so far. After that, it is not worth the effort. And the king of beasts is happiest when he can find a fresh carcass that he doesn’t have to chase at all, i.e. get something for nothing. That’s nature.
What is it Worth?
The most important part of a price is the information it contains. The price tells you whether it is worth the effort. It also tells you how much effort others would put in making or getting this thing. It allows you to compare and make choices about disparate things and forms a judgment on the relative effectiveness of various producers. All this is Econ 101, but it bears repeating since we often forgot why prices are good.
BTW – I have been watching a good show called “Pawn Stars.” I recommend watching that when thinking about the “true price” of anything.
Price’s role in conflict resolution is something we talk about less often but it is one of its most important functions. Price can accomplish so much because it contains all that stuff mentioned in the paragraph above. W/o price, these are things you would have to fight about. To illustrate the role of price in conflict resolution, imagine a situation where two or more people want exactly the same thing and have determined it is priceless. Those are the conditions where people come to blow and nations go to war.
Think of the rare heirloom from grandpa that all the grandchildren want and think is theirs by prior right. They can all come up with endless credible arguments as to why it should be theirs. Put a reasonable price on the thing and the conflict usually drains away, as most of the heirs decide they really didn’t want it that much and/or something else is more valuable to them.
Something Beyond Price, or Just a Price Range
Of course, there are some things we really would not put a price on, but fewer than we like to admit. I am telling the truth when I tell people that I don’t want to sell my forest land, but my statement is valid only within an implicit price range. I am not exactly sure what that range is. I know a price I would accept is currently significantly more than I am likely to be offered, which I why I can make my “not selling” statements with such moral certainty. But I think if someone offered me $1 million an acre, I would take it.
There is joke (I think it is from Groucho Marx) that illustrates the price dilemma: This guy asks a woman if she would sleep with him for $1 million. After a little thought, she says she would. He says, “How about $10?” To which she indignantly replies, “Sir, what do you think I am?” The guy says, “We have established what you are; now we are haggling over the price.”
You Can’t Sell That
It is precisely our human “price flexibility” that makes it necessary to have some laws about things that cannot be sold. No matter what the price, you cannot self yourself into slavery, for example. Society does this not only because slavery is odious or even to protect the person selling, but rather defends the whole concept of freedom and takes it out of the negotiation/price world. I think most people support this kind of limit on choice, but we need to be careful not to go far in proclaiming too many things off limits. Things w/o a price often tend to get abused.
I recently read a series of articles about the art world. Art is one of those places where you have a lot of price confusion. Much of the price is based on fashion and capricious opinion. Artists put a lot of their personality into their works and usually pompously over-value it. And many people get positively indignant about prices that are too high, too low or anything else. But price may be more important in the art world than in many other places. Simply stated: price preserves both art and artists.
Price Preserves Art
One article talked about Chinese art. Now that some Chinese have piles of money and Western currencies to burn, Chinese art has risen in value. Some complain that it was undervalued in the past and that Western collectors were able to buy it up at a fraction of what it was worth. This is a fairly meaningless statement, BTW, because it is worth what somebody will pay for it. Today it is worth more. That’s it. But there is another permutation.
During the bad old days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, traditional Chinese art was often worse than worthless within China. The Communists made a special effort to denigrate and destroy what they considered symbols of decadence and oppression. Much of the Chinese art now being “repatriated” would have been lost of destroyed had it not been “plundered” by Western collectors at a time when the people on the ground didn’t value it.
Think of the terrible case of the Tailban destroying those giant Buddhas, because they were an offense to their fundamental interpretation of Islam. If the British had “plundered” them, they would still exist.
Unappreciated Ancient Civilizations
The same goes for a lot of the art of ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. I know this provokes strong emotions, accusations of insensitivity and even expressions of outrage, but if you look at the historical record, it was British, French and German archeologists who essentially brought the ancient world back to the places where it had been and had been forgotten. The current inhabitants didn’t know much and cared less about the world of antiquity and usually saw archeological sites merely as places to dig up valuables or convenient places to steal bricks or rocks for new construction.
There is a legitimate dispute whether those ancient artifacts now housed in museums in Berlin, Paris, London or New York were plundered or saved. I think it is clear that had those things not been preserved in those museums, most would have ended up lost, part of somebody’s retaining wall or – at best – in some rich guy’s private collection.
Anyway, it is a good thing that these things had a price and that somebody was willing to pay it. The Rosetta stone could have easily become pavement on the road to Cairo, which illustrates another benefit of price. It tends to put things into the hands of those who want or can use them the most. The Rosetta stone was laying around for more than two thousand years and nobody bothered to try a translation until it got into the hands of someone who cared.
