A “Leaderless” World? Hmm... Leadership and Trust

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In a recent article in the New York Times, David Brooks puts forward the view that political opinion in the US regarding leadership has significantly changed.  This is hardly news, but Brooks is talking about a very specific kind of leadership: US leadership in international politics, and our participation in it.

In his article he cites a recent (2014-3-7)  Pew Center survey report (Milennials in Adulthood) which reveals that in contrast to the Baby Boomer generation, of whom 40% responded that ‘most people can be trusted’, of Millennials (the folks just approaching adulthood at present) less than 20% responded this way.  Brooks’s theory is that this makes the younger generation less comfortable with entrusting international affairs to high-stakes diplomacy, or military intervention.

You need to read the entire article to get the subtleties, all of which are fascinating, of Brooks’s op-ed, but it all seems to depend on exactly why the Millennials --anyway, young people, let’s say-- responded this way.

The actual statement --see at right-- was: ‘Most people can be trusted, vs. You can’t be too careful in dealing with people.’

This is an unfortunately vague statement, whose interpretation is almost too broad to be useful.  If you mean:  “Can you trust a counter clerk to return a wallet to the Lost and Found?” the mistrust of a person means one thing, while if you mean “Can you trust the Rebels to hold off hostilities until the Convention is over?” it means something entirely different.  In both cases, however, a Millennial is likely to be less trusting than a Baby Boomer.

Why?

Because Baby Boomers started out being naive about the world, and even a long cold war and the missteps of the Vietnam War only adjusted their habits of thinking in specific ways.  Their mistrust was saved for “people over 35”, or people in politics, or whatever, whereas Millennials —and I might be generalizing where angels fear to tread— have been brought up to mistrust even Uncle Ed.  Millennials might think that Mom’s cautioning is a little over the top, but the steady diet of a certain kind of news in the media has had its results: There are people out there who are very . . .  different.

How does that fit in with the increase in diversity, the rise of women in politics, the significant presence of Latinos, Chinese and Vietnamese and Japanese in American Colleges, even Canadians!  A far greater proportion of American citizens come into contact with people of different ethnicity, both US nationals, and visitors or immigrants, in ways that are positive, in this century than in the last.  This must support a young person’s belief that people are differenter than their parents thought.  But, I suggest, they are probably comfortable with differences.

One must wonder what it is, in the vast arrays of assumptions that support the thinking of an idealist such as David Brooks, that leads him to interpolate between what he sees in world affairs and US responses to them, and the Pew Report, and his knowledge of the people around him, to arrive at the conclusions he does.  Clearly some of his conclusions are straightforward: Millennials are probably suspicious of military action, certainly more suspicious than older Americans.  The causes could be many, but I suspect that among them is the huge suspicion that neither Congress nor the Pentagon can be trusted to oversee a military action of any sort.

Millennials are probably —and I’m alarmed at how smoothly the term Millennials slides off my fingers— cautious about whether political conversations between foreign leaders, especially those who are non-Western educated, and American diplomats, are understood correctly by Our Side.  It is not just that the foreign leaders are being deceitful; leaders are invariably deceitful, including our own.  It is that deceit is less well understood today than it has been in the past; and you know what?  I wouldn’t be surprised that brighter Millennials are well aware of that.

[And here’s something else to think about, completely unrelated to David Brooks’s article.  Whatever deceit is involved in international diplomacy, the intolerant Christian Conservative Right can be trusted to make a big fuss about it, further muddying the waters.  One wonders what the Millennials think about that.  A pox on the Christian Conservative Right: may rabid dogs . . .  Sorry.]

One thing is certain: it is fascinating to analyze how the younger generation will approach political leadership and its problems.  I still see energetic and enthusiastic young undergraduates rushing to declare double majors in Business and Political Science, and I shudder.  I sincerely doubt whether we can continue to be guided by the received wisdom of those pseudo-disciplines.

Appendix: A summary of Brooks’s Article

The main thrust of the article is that there appears to be a trend towards less engagement in world affairs: military, political, business and economic.  This is not isolationism, says Brooks; he argues that while the younger generation distrust big actions by individuals, large corporations, or star diplomats, they do look favorably on person-to-person conversation and persuasion.  “The power is in the swarm,” he quotes.

The conclusion is that individuals tend to be less comfortable delegating power to others, simply because they don’t “have enough trust” in political leaders.  (I wonder whether Mr. Brooks has lost trust in the President over the years? Hmm.)

Do please read the article yourself; it is worth reading, not least because of the additional information there which I have not passed on to you.  There are a few deplorable lapses in clarity due to unclear uses of tense; something about which I am hardly in a position to complain.

Arch

Marriage

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I never thought to write on this topic, because I have been divorced, and I had got into the habit of thinking that I had lost any right to comment knowledgeably on the subject.  But the divorce from my former wife was an amicable one, and I figure that one thing anyone getting married has to do is, if they ever get a divorce, do it amicably.  If you’re planning to marry, and you think that any possible divorce is going to be a contentious one, think hard.

Some people, I know, put so much trust in their partner that a divorce leaves them totally destroyed.  Should they not have put their total trust in their partner?  Some people seem to simply need that total trust, and divorcing from them is going to be  horrible.  Should you get married then, in the first place?  (I should be organizing this post a little better, with subheadings, but the whole subject is just too nerve-wracking.)  This is a subtle question, and I don’t have a good answer.  As far as marriage, and similar significant relationships are concerned, everyone is an exception.

A movie that I watched recently with my wife was, on the face of it, just a chick flick (a type that I really don’t mind), but seemed to have some really good insights: it was “He’s just not that into you,” which is a clumsy (but eye-catching) title for a quite sensitive movie.  The movie is all about girls making up rules of thumb to classify their relationships with romantic prospects (are they really interested vs. only slightly really interested, etc), and rules of thumbs as to how to signal your feelings to them, and how to signal the feelings you want to signal versus your true feelings, etc.  The subject was too complex for them (the movie-makers) to address with complete success (especially given their intended audience), but they did a surprisingly good job at delivering a useful message.

The girls from "He’s just not that into you."

The useful message that I got was this: everyone is different.  One character in the movie says that xyz is true for the vast majority of people, but of course you could be the exception.  (But chances are, he implied, you’re not.)  But, says the movie, in the end, you probably are.  Why is this?

Well, let’s look at it another way.  Suppose you’re considering how important it is to make a general rule about short, blond, blue-eyed, abusive men.  (There goes my short, blond, blue-eyed abusive audience, right there; but I guess I knew it was just a matter of time before it happened anyway! jk)  How important is it, considering that the proportion of short, B, B-E, A men compared to all men is probably very small? Probably not important.  But, it might be terribly important to anyone who tended to be attracted to short, B, B-E, A men.  So, while a certain circumstance might be rare among general relationships, it might be quite the opposite for a particular person.

[My dog Fuzzy just walked up and asked me to pet her!  It’s awesome that a dog can simply ask for a pat on the head, while people just don’t have the chutzpah to do it.  And, let’s admit it: I enjoyed doing it as much as she enjoyed getting it.  But it was a very short pet, so she grumbled before she walked off and lay down.]

Rules of thumb other people make up are likely to be useless in the world of romance.  But let me try and figure out what marriage can mean in this brave new world in which we’re deconstructing everything.

As far as I can tell, given that the word marriage means different things to different people, it is the following.  It is a partnership between two people (or more; who knows?) that involves a great deal of trust, and intimacy.

Because of the trust, the law permits a married couple to hold property in common, and have certain legal privileges, such as being parents, or having rights when one partner dies, e.g. to retirement or pension accounts, bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, and things of that nature.  And of course there are the hospital visiting rights, which were central to the whole argument for the meaning of marriage to be expanded in law.  All of this flows from the trust that each partner acknowledges in the other.  And from the rights and the trust, there also flows a great deal of responsibility for each other, and each other’s affairs.

Because of the intimacy, which is usually both emotional and physical (but need not be both), the law assumes that if the couple produce children, that both ‘parents’ have equal rights over, and responsibilities towards, the offspring.

So there it is.  A partnership that presumes some trust, and some intimacy, usually a lot of trust, and a lot of intimacy.  And it logically follows that there are rights, and responsibilities.  There are many sorts of legal partnerships that establish various sorts of rights and privileges and duties and responsibilities, but marriage is the one that assumes that there will be intimacy.

Just the other day, a close friend of ours was married for the first time.  We thought, my wife and I, that he embarked on the road to marriage with a good deal of trepidation, which oscillated between well-disguised peaks on some occasions, to other times at which he seemed almost maniacally delighted at the prospect.  On the whole, the couple seemed pleased to have successfully survived the nuptials, which too, on the whole, were conducted with legendary panache (except for the religious part, which seemed almost mythically awful).

I was seated at the reception with a young couple (friends of the bride and groom), the male member of which started off the meal tight-lipped, and evidently anticipating having to fraternize with someone with whom he expected to violently disagree.  But gradually I was able to draw him out, and it turned out that it was the second marriage for him, and he was somewhat embarrassed at the failure of his first.

Well, there were at least three failed first marriages at that table, and it seems to me that being embarrassed about failed first marriages was, all things considered, a total waste of time.

Should people marry young, since we’re all aware that marriages between very young people are often doomed to failure?  Well, if I had to do it over again, I absolutely would.  There is simply nothing compared to the mad love of a young couple, completely lost in each other.  I think the biggest problem that they face is the religious establishment that insists on their being married until death do them part.  A young couple is likely to swear to anything, in the heat of their passion.  Isn’t it a crime to make them swear to something that they are more than half likely to fail at?

On the other hand, it does seem silly to have a couple swear to love and cherish each other for at least 15 years, or whatever.  Maybe The Lord will stand by them, and help them stay faithful, but it seems to me that The Lord has more important things to do, and His time is probably better spent making sure that, while the couple is together, as long as they have young children in their care, that those children are raised carefully and considerately, and that the parents set good examples to them.  But, on reflection, a 15 year contract makes more sense every time I think about it.   We’re not forcing the couple apart after 15 years; no, we hope they will live together forever.  But to make them swear to something that will possibly make liars of them is silly, and weakens all vows they may take in anything.

It is usually religious extremists who insist of people taking oaths and making vows.  President John Quincy Adams, I recently learned, refused to take his oath of office on a bible.  I think it is an exemplary precedent, and I wish that more Presidents could choose different books on which to make the promise to serve the people with integrity.  (If the President were to consider becoming a traitor for some reason, the additional fear of becoming an oath-breaker is hardly going to dissuade him from such a course of action.)

I can recommend marriage to almost anybody.  The knowledge that there is a beloved friend at your back is amazingly liberating.  I told you about our friend who recently married.  Well, a little after he was engaged to his lady friend, the couple began to regularly visit both families together, and it was wonderful to see how much more relaxed they were than they had been, especially the half of the partnership that I had the opportunity of observing before.  I can absolutely believe that, in general, married couples live longer than singles.  I haven’t seen reliable statistics on the subject, but that’s what I would expect.

The couple need not share everything.  My wife knows most of what there is to know about me, and I know most of what there is to know about her, but part of the limit of the sharing is not knowing the extent of the not sharing.  But that’s how trust works: you don’t know everything, but you know enough to trust the other partner.  Some couples have a lot of intimacy outside of their marriage, most do not.  For a while, in the sixties and the seventies, there was a lot of experimenting with and about the institution of marriage.  But once it was established that people could live together long term without marrying right away, the mystique of "open marriages", or at least, their attractiveness to most people, seems to have declined.  But without the trust, the intimacy, and the partnership, there isn’t anything left.

If you were to agree with me that a marriage between, to begin with, two human beings, is simply a partnership based on trust and intimacy (which, as I tried to persuade you, leads to various rights and responsibilities towards each other, especially regarding children and property), it’s interesting to look at the entire marriage debate from this de-mythologized perspective.  Why not permit two men or two women to marry?  It is simply a matter of us getting used to the idea of two women looking at each other with love in their eyes, or two guys walking into a restaurant with a couple of kids in tow; you have to learn to imagine it with some degree of calmness.  Unfortunately because of the way our society has evolved, I find that I can imagine a couple of women more easily and with more comfort than a couple of men, but I recognize that it is more to do with me than to do with them.  Not all the decent couples in the world consist of one woman, and one man.

I think we should wait to expand the idea further, to permit an entire football team to get married to each other, for instance.  At this point, I would suspect larger groups insisting on marriage to have ulterior motives (such as to sabotage the rights of gays and lesbians to marry), but I don’t think it makes sense for us to categorically refuse to consider other sorts of groups being allowed to marry, provided the basic principle of trust and intimacy is present.  (I somehow can’t see how the word "intimacy" can be stretched to include very large groups, but I would shy away from being given a practical demonstration.)

A last tip for those thinking of getting married:  get married privately, by a judge somewhere, and make sure the judge leaves out religious references completely, but don’t freak out if they creep in; life’s too short for freaking out about everything.  Then, once you’re married, you can have a party, and don’t forget to encourage your friends to get to know each other, and don’t forget that your friends might not introduce themselves to everyone automatically.  It just might be the last time you have everyone together.  (Don’t try to get everyone together periodically; it’s going to be a logistical nightmare.)

It is interesting that being a couple does make it easier to relate to people!  You can just watch your partner doing his or her stuff, or you can jump in and make a complete fool out of yourself with relative impunity.  It is obviously up to the couple to make their own rules about how much to socialize, but I don’t think anyone should consider socializing as an obligation.  If you have kids, I suppose, it does make sense to allow the child or children to mediate a certain degree of fraternization with people you would otherwise leave alone; this is part of the magic of having kids.  If I have learned nothing else, one thing I have learned is that it is important to try to relate to and appreciate diverse people in your neighborhood, short of feeling obliged to do so.  Some people know everything about everyone in their neighborhood, others leave their neighbors strictly alone.  How your partner deals with neighbors is always a fascinating study, especially if you’re newly married, or if you’ve just moved in with a new partner.  (In my own case, for instance, it very much appeared as though my wife was the "I mind my business, and I’ll let them mind theirs," sort of person.  But pretty soon it emerged that she had chatted up the neighbors, and did know a lot more about them than I had ever dreamed of knowing.  So ... what can I say?  Either what she considered zero fraternizing with the neighbors was a lot higher than my own zero, or just being married made her a little more sociable.  She probably hates my discussing her like this...)

I’ll stop here for the time being.  I would like to add that we still look at each other sometimes, disbelieving that we could have fallen in together so perfectly.  I suppose I could have been very happy with someone that was a lot more of a closed book to me than my wife is, but it would not have been so much fun.  I hate the thought that she could have just as much fun with some other guy as she has with me, but I know it is probably true.  Age does teach one that one is not the only hope for all the women---or men--- in the world.  So my parting advice is: go forth, and get married, already!

Arch

Trust: A Recently Recognized Scarcity

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Why do I always stumble on these insights just a little too late?

I have been noticing for decades the waning of trust in different areas, but it is just now coming together in my mind: trust is hard to find in modern society.

The most noticeable realm in which trust is lacking is in government.  Our representatives have latched onto the fact that you do not really have to do what you promised at election time.  Heaven knows there are (1) enough people to blame if you abandon your agenda, and (2) your constituents are a lot less smart about really understanding what you did, so you can kind of snow them a little.  In any case, getting re-elected more than once is almost impossible, so get rich quick while you can, and walk away with that fabulous health insurance that all one-time congressmen are reputed to get to keep at government expense.  Is this true?

Trust is lacking in employment.  An employer is more likely to hire somebody in the family, or a kid of a trusted old buddy, than someone who walks in with a certificate, no matter how impressive.  They don't trust the certificates, and they don't trust the kids, who have become ever more adept at lying, and representing themselves as more efficient than they really are.  [Added later: another problem, I think, is that people are not confident in their own ability to assess how trustworthy someone is with any sophistication.  People who can judge character quickly and reliably tend to rise to the top; but sometimes that's the only think these people are good for.  But then, they have to surround themselves with --trusted-- people who can do the work, and as a result what used to be a one-man job is now a team job, and much more expensive.  This might not be the whole story with rising costs, but it is surely one piece of the puzzle.]

You can't trust your bank to keep your interests in mind.  You can't trust the manufacturers whose goods you've faithfully bought forever.  (You loved those solid items of hardware, but it seems they're making them out of plastic now, imported from China.)  You can't trust the labels on your food.  You can't trust the News, the papers, what you read on the Internet (though most of us are most gullible when getting information from the Internet).

Students in college are learning that a good hearty handshake, some snazzy threads, and Dad's support is more useful than really earning a strong degree.  A lot of self-made businessmen are suspicious of college fellows, anyway, because they've learned to be prejudiced against intellectuals.  They don't realize that there is absolutely no fear of getting an intellectual applying for a job with them.  All three intellectuals who graduated last year are now disgruntled postal workers.  (And these days, disgruntled postal workers are not a patch on the old ones.)

Some of my students are more focused on persuading me that their gaffes are excusable than on making sure they never make them again.

They also spend time cultivating their professors.  A good letter of recommendation is worth several poor letter grades.  It's not what you know, it's who will write a lying letter for you!  It's getting to be quite an art to communicate that a student is unreliable (in a letter of recommendation) without alarming the student.  The more honest thing to do is to tell him or her out front that you cannot bring yourself to write a letter on their behalf that is silent about their shortcomings.

In our personal lives, too,  trust is hard to give and receive.  Most people look with great consternation at their prospective life partners, and simply cannot figure out whether he or she can be trusted.  Hell, they figure, I'll just give it a try.  They're thinking that if things go wrong, it isn't that hard to end it.  Many younger people have friends they have not figured out completely, and they're totally stunned by the things their good friends do.  The fact of the matter is that they never knew them.  "I don't think I ever knew you, man."  The suggestion is that it is the friend's fault, not their own.  This sort of trust is very shallow.  It is mere acceptance, with very little evidence.

One of the most charming things I found about adults whom I knew was how willing they were to trust you based on very brief acquaintanceship.  Foreigners do not do this; you just know that you're on trial for a couple of years.  It isn't just suspicion, it's common sense.  Trust easily given isn't really worth very much, is it?

But the speed of life today requires quick judgements about whom you can trust.  Many managers and businessmen give trust quickly, and come down on their employees like a ton of bricks if their trust is betrayed.  This is a policy of massive retaliation.  Some parents follow the same policy with their children.  The Trust, but Verify policy is given lip-service, but not often followed carefully.

As a result, many people are in responsible positions not because they have the necessary skills for the position, but because they can project trustworthiness effectively.  Not surprisingly, young people cultivate projecting trustworthiness effectively rather than personal integrity.  Communication skills (or rather acting skills) are more important today than having something useful --and sincere-- to say.

If anyone has ideas as to how to deal with this crisis in trust, let us know!  Important questions are: how do you approach the matter of trust personally, assuming you deal with it at a conscious level?  How do you approach coaching your children (and nephews, grandchildren, students, whatever) in how to place their trust advisedly?  People have rules of thumb; e.g. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!" which is really an aphorism about trust.