Values and Meaning Part 1 - Respect

There's still quite a bit to say about Franzen's Freedom, but will plan to get back to that when time permits. This is more topical for me at the moment...

Over a hundred years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote Drift and Mastery - exhorting the nation to use science and reason to improve society in the new industrial age that had transformed the country over the past 50 years. "Drift" was the path of letting the institutions and values that had been established in a pre-industrial age continue to dominate society, and "Mastery" the path of altering institutions and updating values to reflect the new realities that industrialization required.

As I look to ground the sense of values and meaning for myself and my family in a post-religious environment, I think it's important to start to be explicit in the sources of values and meaning that can help orient our priorities and decisions.

Implicit in the fact that I'm leading this "discussion" is that meaning and values are created or invented. Based on my experiences and reflection on what I have been taught, what I have observed and lived through, here are the principles that I think we can use as a foundation. But that foundation can be changed, expanded - it is an emergent creation.

This exercise can feel abstract and disconnected from everyday life, but I like to have a framework to understand and explicate the principles rather than just drift along...

So in one of my sources, a post-religious couple focuses their parenting principles on teaching their girls to respect themselves and others - both in attitude and and behavior. Pride and confidence - as elements of self respect - are explicitly raised as counter to some religious concerns about the dangers of pride. This tension between humility and confidence is an important one to discuss with our kids. We certainly want to encourage ourselves to be ambitious, to create and follow dreams, to share our thoughts and experiences with others, and to make a difference in their family, school, community, etc.

But the confidence and ambition that can drive our actions should also be tempered by openness and humility to new ideas and experiences that can disclose new and better ways of living. A framework for taking in new ideas and experiences and evaluating them would be a valuable tool or skill that we can help support in our children. Our schools should plan an important role in helping children develop critical thinking, judgment, decision making skills.

Freedom - Walter's Work

Walter Berglund is a striver. He has a deeply felt need to make the world a better place. Nice, sensitive, and intellectual, Walter was a lawyer who gravitated into the world of philanthropy, and non-profit, environmentally-oriented causes.

He has worked hard his entire life, growing up in rural Minnesota with an alcoholic father and an angelic mother who managed a small motel. He worked at the motel all year long, starred in school plays, had numerous childhood friends, loved nature, and graduated valedictorian.

As Walter slid into middle age, he put himself in a position to work on his passions life. First, preserving a beautiful warbler that nests in Appalachia; and second reviving the awareness of the world to the dangers of human overpopulation. To make progress on his causes, Walter has used his intelligence, affability, and passion to cultivate relationships with very rich benefactors who are happy to fund causes, but with quid pro quos that raise some questions about the ultimate accounting.

There is a deep burning within Walter to make a difference in the world. He is willing to make strategic calculations and sacrifices in order to achieve his visions. Where does this burning desire come from, and what are the sacrifices necessary to pursue these causes?

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen

I finished reading a novel for the first time in years. I read Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections about a year ago, and Freedom was his next effort. The combination of family dynamics mixed with contemporaneous political and social issues is where Franzen has staked out a brilliant and illuminating home turf.

In Freedom , he puts a Minnesota family under the microscope, bouncing for a time into the 1970s, but spending most of the time in the late 90s and the first decade of the 2000s. Patty Berglund is the main protagonist - and the "author" of a significant section of the book - an athletic woman who is committed to her family but unclear about some major issues in her life.

She is married to Walter Berglund - a native Minnesotan who met Patty at Univ of Minnesota and who is characterized by his "niceness". Walter is a lawyer who worked for 3M - ending up eventually in outreach and philanthropy due to his commitment to causes. He left 3M to become a development officer for the Nature Conservancy, allowing him to focus his commitment to nature on a full-time basis. `

Of all the interesting characters, I resonate most with Walter so would like to focus on his development in a couple of posts.

Energy, Passion, Drive, Determination

In a couple of articles over the weekend I saw references to passion. In a thoughtful tribute to his friend, Ian McEwan writes of the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens "His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade."

I'm a relatively reserved guy, so in some settings I can come across as a bit passive. It's interesting, first of all, that passive and passion both come from words meaning "to suffer or endure."

What I'd like to do here is capture observations of energy, passion, determination, drive,... As I see it or read about it or feel it or think about it, I hope that I can record some useful insights.

In Basel for Christmas

It's December now and the first snow of the season is on the ground. A lovely snow is falling now. The kids are out of school and we're getting ready for Christmas. Nancy has sent out our Christmas cards all over the world. We bought The Tree from a local farm and it is up and decorated now. Tara is feverishly cutting out paper chains, snowflakes, and all manner of decorations to cover her room in Christmas spirit. We've been to the Basel Christmas markets in Barfusserplatz and Munsterplatz. It's a wonderful way to celebrate

Switzerland is a beautiful country and is successfully stretching us out of our comfort zones. But for this holiday season we are not planning too many big trips or challenging objectives. Just enjoying the sights, sounds, smells (and a little stress) of the holidays. Well maybe we'll take a quick trip to Paris...

Here's some nice music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42ieABEY-A

Now we need to pick up a couple of gifts...

Book Notes: All Things Shining - Moods

Homer invokes the gods in order to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer's terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.

Dreyfus and Kelly argue that a "polytheistic" way of framing our existence was present during Homeric Greece and was lost for a couple of thousand years. Melville, writing in the early 1850s, begins to revive this mindset in Moby Dick.

In a disenchanted, secular world, how do we build a foundation for leading our lives? I am not sure how satisfied I am with a paradigm that establishes moods as a foundation for determining the best course of action. I suppose Heidegger might argue that I am approaching this too deliberatively, rather than letting the appropriateness of the moment dictate the "determination". This does seem so slippery that a wide range of actions can be explained and justified as appropriate to a certain mood that prevailed at a particular time with a particular actor (or set of actors). The idea of being prepared and then receptive to the demands of a given situation does strike me as a reasonable aspiration. But receptivity does imply a passivity that is quite counter to the culture that dominates today. Don't we value action, decisions, progress toward a goal? To what extent do we drive our environment in a direction and to what extent are we driven?

Basel Bound

On Friday, I received an offer to take a position in Basel, Switzerland for Roche. After being away from Europe for 20 years, Nancy and I will be returning for an extended adventure in the land of chocolate, cheese, and cuckoo clocks. We have many questions and some concerns, but we are very excited to transition into a new world with our family. What follows are a few of my hopes for our time in Switzerland:

• I hope that the children will warm to the place, and that the opportunities to experience Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy will spark a sense of curiousity and wonder about the languages and cultures that they will be seeing.


• I hope that we will have the resources and time to explore the new world, to understand more about that world, and appreciate the ideas and practices that help to shape the world.


• I hope that we can all learn German quickly so that we can get closer to the allegedly closed and cold Swiss.

I ordered an intellectual/cultural history titled Basel in the Age of Burckhardt by Lionel Gossman. The city has a rich cultural history, attracting some of the brighter lights of Europe over the last several centuries. I am so excited to be there!