Exercise 2.2: What do “doing good” and "living well" mean to me?

\Exercise 2.2. is a four-part exercise, and I will answer two parts of the exercise here as a single essay.  I will answer the third part tomorrow.

1.  What does “doing good” mean to me?

&

2.  What does “living well” mean to me?

I am a vast proponent of virtue ethics -- the system of ethics derived from Aristotelian ethics by Alasdair Macintyre.  From that perspective, the answer to this question set can be answered as a single question, because if I live well, I will do good.  I will do good if I live by my values, and I will live well if, in living by my values, the world becomes a better place.

In Macintyre's formulation, vastly oversimplified, if I live by arête (excellence or virtue), I will achieve eudaimonia (usually translated as happiness or flourishing). 

Doing Good (Living the Virtues)
Most of my decisions are about manifesting myself as a person of virtue.  I often tell people that my decisions are about the ethical self-constitution of myself as a subject (Foucault lingo).  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines virtue as:

arête (excellence or virtue)  a character trait—that is, a disposition... that “goes all the way down”, unlike a habit such as being a tea-drinker.

Virtue is not simple -- this is not George Washington and the Cherry Tree, being unable to tell a lie.

The disposition... is concerned with... emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, perceptions, attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset. 

Damn if I am not a person with a certain complex mindset.  

Anyway, the kid who cannot tell a lie is different from someone who holds honesty as a virtue in the following way:

An honest person's reasons and choices with respect to honest and dishonest actions reflect her views about honesty and truth—but of course such views manifest themselves with respect to other actions, and to emotional reactions as well. Valuing honesty as she does, she chooses, where possible to work with honest people, to have honest friends, to bring up her children to be honest. She disapproves of, dislikes, deplores dishonesty, is not amused by certain tales of chicanery, despises or pities those who succeed by dishonest means rather than thinking they have been clever, is unsurprised, or pleased (as appropriate) when honesty triumphs, is shocked or distressed when those near and dear to her do what is dishonest and so on.

Macintyre's work begins with honesty as a paradigmatic example of a virtue.  While I did not pick Macintyre for this reason, I will admit:  recently, someone I loved claimed that I had an issue with honesty, a willingness to avoid being honest to avoid conflict.  Because I loved that person, I have reflected on their insight. 

Most of my decisions, in some ways or another, are about demonstrating what kind of person I am, the values and virtues that constitute me.  We have covered some of those -- I am a person who values the ability to self-express in myself and in others, creating a world where we are all richer because no voice is silenced.  I am a person who values critical questioning of institutions that would seem to silence voices through policy or through indirect institutional practice.  I value people feeling comfortable being who they are.  That is who I am, those are the ways tha t I live Macintyrean virtues (honesty and justice are the ones that stick out here).  That is the way that I hold that complex mindset with emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, perceptions, attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities driven by my virtues.

Living Well (Living the World in which the Virtues are Practiced)

I enact the courage (one of the three Macintyrean virtues) to speak my values and to apply good, old fashioned work to make change happen.  That feels like a start.  If I live this way, I am both doing good and creating a world I want to live in, a world where I can be challenged and enriched.  I think this is where Macintyrean courage comes in.

As later works by Macintyre argue, we build social structures that enable our flourishing.

Collectively promoting the social structures we need in order to flourish as individuals enables us to escape from false dichotomies between self-interest and the common interest and between selfishness and altruism. In supporting the networks that are necessary if we are to flourish, I am promoting both my interest and everyone else's, and I am looking out for the common good as well as my own individual good. 

If I live in a way in which I know I am honest, but which does not cultivate a culture of honesty, I am not living my virtue and will not achieve happiness.  But if I live in a way that I am honest, that cultivates a world (or a town or a university) of honesty, I will live a happier life -- and so will others.  I am promoting both my interest and everyone else's, and I am looking out for the common good as well as my own individual good. 

...

I look back at this and think:  this is just a long way of saying, I will do good if I live by my values, and I will live well if, in living by my values, the world becomes a better place.

Exercise 1.2.b asks me to talk about a moment when I was going through the motions, dead to my work...

Exercise 1.2.b asks me to talk about a moment when I was going through the motions, dead to my work...

I think this moment hit me hard about six or seven years into my teaching career.  Students were dropping my class in the first week because I handed out a 27 page syllabus, with complete reading schedule and complete assignment sheets for the semester.

It was, at its core, an attempt to circumvent students complaints about my classes.  Every time they complained that something wasn't clear, I produced a document clarifying it.

The end result was threefold.

• Students were frightened and overwhelmed by what I was demanding in my classes.  
• I was losing enthusiasm for what was happening in my classes.  I had fallen under the sway of rubrics, but was finding that rubrics only told students what I wanted from them.  As a result, students gave me what I wanted before I met them.  There was no openness to what they brought to the class.
• So teaching became a process of learning more and more how to tell students what to do.

That third bit affronts me on so many levels, and it happened slowly, subtly.  I didn't really notice at the time.

...

When I write, only very, very rarely does someone hand me a rubric.  Most of my writing is an exercise in "applied psychology," in recognizing that there is another person (a reader), and that the reader has needs and expectations that shape what I can offer them.

In hyperdetailed assignment sheets, I robbed students of the possibility of being writers, instead turning them into imitators and direction followers.  And slowly, I stopped caring about the results of these directions.

That was several years ago.  I'm better now, I promise, though many, many students wish I gave out rubrics.  The best ones, though -- the best ones seize the opportunity to surprise, delight, impress me and themselves.

Interlude 1.1 Love in Light of My Great Life -- "Loving another for his own sake is integral to the exercise of self-love."

So one of the advantages of doing this reflective work publicly is that you get advice.  In this case, you get advice from a colleague about the nature of friendships.  This is a passage from a book by Simon May, Love: A History."

May's book looks to Aristotle to challenge some of the contemporary visions of love:  that love is "unconditional, spontaneous, selfless, affirming of the whole person, and, in its very nature, constant."  Love, in May's understanding of Aristotle, is no such thing.

I have lots of thoughts about this essay, but I want to push one here:  that Loving another for his own sake is integral to the exercise of self-love.  I have believed this for all of my adult life -- that the love of another person can be a form of my own flourishing.

 

The essay claims that "Everything we do, including in loving others, should be our own flourishing. Not in the sense that we look for a return from every good thing we do for another person. Rather in the sense that we flourish precisely by loving her for whom she is 'in herself'... Her flourishing is also my own flourishing. And so in caring for her life I care for mine."

I have lived long enough to know how impossible it is to live quite this way... That there are people who will need or want our care in ways that can be counter to our flourishing. That some people will want to care for others in a way that can be counter to their flourishing and our own.  The most obvious forms here are co-dependency, and May has particularly sharp things to say about avoiding co-dependency, in favor of self-dependency.

Love "flourishes only between two self-dependent individuals."   I love the fact that May avoids the use of "independent," which resonates with a particular myth about how people work.  May avoids the myth.  We need to be self-dependent (as opposed to co-dependent, needy, unable to stand on our own) as we enter into loving relationships.  And at the same time, those loving relationships are the basis of our individuality.  "Individuality is fundamentally relational."

May says:  "our idea of who we are is formed through intimate, sustained relations with other, based on a sense of deep affinity which has stood the test of time."

"Individuality is fundamentally relational."

This idea is worth more thought, and I will offer it...  Later.

The Peak Performing Professor reflections will be back tomorrow, but in the meantime, if you have something I should read, please let me know.

Exercise 1.2.a asks me to talk about a Peak Performance...

Exercise 1.2.a asks me to talk about a Peak Performance

A colleague of mine has suggested that the athletic metaphor at the core of this exercise is something I need to pay more attention to -- is athletics the right metaphor for this kind of work?  I will pick that critical question up later.

The best experience of a peak performance in my professional life was an event of about three years ago.  I had written a grant to plan an event to celebrate diversity in writing.  

• The keynote speaker was Terrance “Spider-Baby” Griep, a professional writer and a professional wrestler.  I found Terrance’s advice on writing and on establishing himself as a kind of border-crosser, a transgressor of norms, in both his professions to have been very helpful, and my interactions with Terrance framed my eventual publications on professional wrestling with John Heppen.  In this way, I cultivated my own work while I created an opportunity to celebrate Terrance's.

The event included a celebration of all of the writing of my friends and colleagues, and included a small presentation by and honorarium for local writer-editors I value:

• to the editors of Proof 
• and to the editors of Minerva.

These two local publications celebrate local creativity (and in Minerva’s case, feminism).  In this way, my work in this event celebrated a diversity of voices.

And, in a small way, it integrated my friends.  I mean this in my friends who were present among my UMD colleagues, and in Terrance, who would become a friend as well as the object of research, and in the presence of my friend E. and her two daughters.  I was sweet on E. at the time, though I probably wasn’t ready for a relationship (having been recently separated from my wife).  But she was present, and her daughters, usually quite shy around men, were very comfortable with Terrance -- something that made me very proud.  I bring the best people together.

I would later write a grant to bring several artist friends, including E., into a project on sustainability. music and art.  That grant has not yet been funded, but I will keep trying.  I want to bring those friends together.

That night, when it was all over, I was overwhelmed.  I was filled with what was as close to a runner' high as I could imagine.  Everything was clicking, and everything was clicking as I looked forward.

I created the space for a diverse array of people to tell their story and for their stories to be celebrated.  And I was at least setting the groundwork for my own storytelling, my own writing, in the future.  In creating a space to celebrate my friends the linguists, the journalists, the poets, the wrestler, the feminists, the musician, I was setting the groundwork for my own self-expression, because as we know from earlier posts, love of another is one of the foundational components of self-love.

Exercise 2.1: I entered the career of college teaching and research because…. and I now want to stay in the career of college teaching because…

Exercise 2.1:

I entered the career of college teaching and research because….

I was 22.  I wasn't entirely sure why I went to graduate school except:

1.  I was thoroughly disappointed by my taste of high school teaching.  I loved the students, but the other teachers were disconnected from the material, the students, or both.
2.  I was told by more than one faculty member in English at my undergraduate institution that the average GPA in the content area of English was 2.5 -- that I was "better" than an Education major.  I hated being told something like that, but I was (admittedly) frustrated by my Education classes.  This reaffirmed my desire for "something more."
3.  So, I went to graduate school, for the kind of colleagues (smart, engaged) I wanted in a teaching career.

I had no idea research was part of the gig in a professor, so that was not part of my choice.  I just knew I wanted to teach with the best possible colleagues.

I wasn't sure I liked research until, like, my second academic job. I intentionally avoided research-intensive jobs when I first went onto the market.  It wasn't until my second academic job that I realized that (a) being a good researcher makes me a better teacher and (b) I found writing rewarding.  "Research" (as a solitary library activity done to solve problems that only mattered to rarifed academics) wasn't all that thrilling to me, but writing -- the construction of arguments of use for readers -- that was rewarding.

I now want to stay in the career of college teaching because…

This career has the highest level of autonomy and security of any I can imagine short of independent wealth.  Every day, a significant portion of my work is self-directed.  (I am reading this book because I want that self-direction to be more effectively deployed.)

And I can use that autonomy to do good work for my students, for my community, and myself, through teaching, writing, and community work. 

 

Critical Discussion: Ego Depletion and the Peak Performing Professor

Critical Discussion:  Ego Depletion and the Peak Performing Professor

The Peak Performing Professor depends in part on research on “ego depletion,” a psychological construct that has recently been subject to intense criticism.  (See: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.html)

So when Robison talks about “people [being unable to] push themselves to act disciplined even if they value such actions… less ability to match our actions to our true values and therefore to poorer performance on our jobs” (3), she is grounding her claims in research that has been called into question. 

That said, I am more than willing to say that, ego depletion as a psychological construct aside, when I am exhausted, I make choices that do not always align to my true values.  That seems fair and real and accurate to my experience.  

So I am trying to say:  the point remains valid, even if the grounding for the point must shift from the psychological literature to my own assent to my own experience.

Exercise: Defining The Great Life (II)

In the first exercise in the workbook, I am asked to define:

1. Great work (doing "high impact work in a timely fashion")
2. How close I am to achieving great work (and what might complicate achieving great work)
3. Great life (achieving a moderate level of satisfaction in life in the short and long term)
4. How close I am to achieving great life (and what might complicate achieving great life)
5. What are my biggest concerns as I think about achieving these things?

3.  Great life (achieving a moderate level of satisfaction in life in the short and long term)

This is the question I am asking as I read this book, the reason I am reading this book, in tandem with many other forms of self-reflective work.  After a series of professional and life changes and challenges, I think I can say this:

• I will achieve a great life if I cultivate relationships with people who will always encourage me to become better than I am -- to see the limitations in myself that I cannot see, to share with me the stories that show me ways of experiencing life that are not part of my experience, who cultivate in me new practices of self-exploration and new experiences in the world, and who push me to become more than I am now, in a context that feels safe.
• I will achieve a great life if I do the same for others whom I love (from the love one feels for family through the love one feels for friends through the love one feels for a partner and children).
• I will achieve a great life if I take the insights from these relationships (as well as from the art, literature, media, and travel that I love) and from my own practices of self-reflection, and work to make myself and my community (professional, civic and family communities) better.

4.  How close I am to achieving great life (and what might complicate achieving great life)

I am closer to the wide array of friendships and family relationships like this than many people I know.  There are forms of these relationships (romantic, parental) that I have yet to make part of my life in this way.  

That said, working with the relationships I have -- I think I cultivate myself and others in the way I describe here, and I cultivate positive change in my communities in this way.  So close, but with growth ahead.

5.  What are my biggest concerns as I think about achieving these things?

My biggest concerns are always about what I don't see and what I don't understand, what I don't know.  What are the lacunae in my vision that keep me from moving forward?

Initial Diagnostics: Mathematizing My Satisfaction

So, before I complete the narrative self-assessment (because the bits about my personal happiness will be complicated), let me share the quantitative self-assessment.

The book asks me to rate my productivity from 1-6.

This is a tough one.  I'm way more productive than average in my college and profession, but I'm not entirely sure that's for healthy reasons.  But it doesn't ask whether I am sublimating other issues by being a successful researcher, writer, and administrator.  I will call it "5."

Then, the book asks me to rate my professional satisfaction from 1-6.

Until recently, I would have thought "6."  And I have weathered a lot, professionally -- but I wouldn't be doing this book if things were entirely satisfactory, right?  This year forced some rethinking.  "4."

Then, the book asks me to rate my personal satisfaction from 1-6.

Again, I wouldn't be doing this book if things were entirely satisfactory, right?  "4."

Then, the book asks me to rate my:

• Power Subscale, connecting “motivation” to “meaning and purpose”
• Align Subscale, connecting “activities, projects and tasks with power and purpose”
• Connect Subscale, about connections for “mutual support and benefit"
• Energize Subscale, about “self-care and wellness”

My quantitative ratings, based on a battery of thirty questions:

209 overall, average score 7 — “I can benefit from this book.”  Whew.  I guess ordering it from ILL was worthwhile.

• Power Subscale: 36 of 50  (72%)
• Align Subscale: 28 of 50 (56%)  -- This is why I am using this book.
• Connect Subscale: 34 of 40 (85%) -- This is why I should write a book about networking in academic communities.
• Energize Subscale: 24 of 30  (80%) -- Six months ago, this number would have been so much lower.

So my need for this book is affirmed by the author (wink) -- or, the problems I intuit in my life and career are converted into numbers.  

This section of Chapter Two isn't to my taste, but it might be to yours.

Exercise: Defining The Great Work (I)

Exercise:  Defining The Great Work

In the first exercise in the workbook, I am asked to define:

1. Great work (doing "high impact work in a timely fashion")
2. How close I am to achieving great work (and what might complicate achieving great work)
3. Great life (achieving a moderate level of satisfaction in life in the short and long term)
4. How close I am to achieving great life (and what might complicate achieving great life)
5. What are my biggest concerns as I think about achieving these things?

1.  Great work

I like doing work that creates space for new voices to find full expression within fundamentally closed or restrictive contexts.  

• As an undergraduate teacher of writing, I like working with students to develop their own voice, as writers and (through teaching practical writing classes, like grant writing) to teach the skills that give them the economic security that will enable them to use those voices.   
• As a graduate instructor, I try to create space within the academic community for students to write theses and to have co-curricular experiences that allow them to express the full range of their interests. 
• As a McNair advisor, I value cracking open the life of the university for the new voices of first generation and under-represented students.
• As a grant reviewer, I like advocating for nontraditional artists and outstate (non-metro) artists, ensuring a wide array of voices in the arts.
• I love attending conferences outside the norm, to hear voices outside the norm.  DOCAM, Widening the Circle Conference on Displaced Indigenous Communities, Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric, and so on.
• As a reader of scholarly work, I have always valued the alternative voices -- the independent publishers (like Parlor Press), the independent journals (JAC, Pre/Text), the online journals (Harlot, etc.).  
• As an editor, I value integrating new voices -- graduate students, junior faculty -- into my projects.
• As a writer, I value integrating new voices into disciplinary communities -- integrating very heterogeneous bodies of theory and integrating novel objects of study into disciplinary discourse.

What would it mean to make this goal more explicit in my intellectual work, in the classroom, in my service? 

2.  How close I am to achieving great work (and what might complicate achieving great work)

Each of these projects are integrated, in a certain way, under this broad objective.  But they are dispersed.  They don't cumulate.  Like the way I plated dinners at the nursing home, by placing parsley on every plate, but parsley was not the core of the work, I can find the parsley on the side of each of these projects, but the meat and potatoes is elsewhere...  But I am not there, yet, in a genuine integration.