America's Attic

  I've just finished a scavenger hunt in America's attic, looking for a very particular kind of treasure.  Before I describe my finds though, let me explain how I got there in the first place.

  The same hosts who held the reception that introduced me to the Crowden School hosted another last month, this time in honor of Richard Kurin, undersecretary for history, art and culture of the Smithsonian Institution.  Kurin, who oversees about half of the Smithsonian's activities, gave a talk about how the Institution is fulfilling the vision of its founding donor, James Smithson, a British scientist who died in 1829, willing his entire $500,000 estate to create “at Washington an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”  (It was an amazing gift, because Smithson had never set foot in the United States!)  Since that endowment, the Smithsonian has become the world’s largest complex of museums and research centers, encompassing 19 museums, the National Zoo and nine research facilities.  Kurin's overview of all that was eye-opening for me; I'd had no idea of the vastness of it all.

  As I left the reception, I reflected shamefully that I had almost never visited Smithsonian facilities during the dozens of times I visited Washington during my professional career.  For the few purloined hours when I was able to break away from meetings, my favorite destination was the National Gallery, which is not part of the Smithsonian.  Of the Smithsonian's complex, I remember visiting only the Hirshhorn Gallery and the Air and Space Museum.  So, of the Institution's 137 million artifacts, works of art and specimens (of course, never all on display at once, some never displayed), I probably saw substantially fewer than a thousand.

  Most of these items are small (they would have to be, since there are so many millions of them to store), but some are monumental, like the space shuttle Discovery and even Julia Child's kitchen!  Kurin's perspective is that each is a lens that brings into focus part of America's history—its wars, politics, popular movements, constantly changing social setting, racial and ethnic heritages, and technological drivers.

  A little over a year ago, Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, published A History of the World in 100 Objects.  The objects he selected were all man-made, all owned by the British Museum, and range from a two-million-year-old chopping tool to a modern credit card.  He used a picture of each as a companion for an essay on its surrounding times.  Now Kurin is writing a book on the history of America in 101 objects owned by the Smithsonian.  (How's that for one-upmanship?)  I have no idea how he will choose those objects from a haystack more than a million times that large, even allowing for the many duplicates in it.

  That's what brought me to my scavenger hunt: I was trying to guess what those 101 objects will be.  Here are fifteen possibilities, the result of a rambling on-line search through the Collections section of the Smithsonian's website.  I list them in the serendipitous order in which I came upon them:

• A piece of Plymouth Rock, representing the migration of Europeans to settle in America.

• Eli Whitney's cotton gin, which made slavery an economically viable and indispensable institution for the South.

• Any one of Thomas Edison's many inventions—say the light bulb or the phonograph—representing one of the pre-eminent inventors in American history and the vast impact of such inventors and inventions on our civilization.

• One of the early personal computers—a Commodore or an Apple—which augured the stunning shift to our now-webcentric lives.

• A Model-T Ford, the car that almost alone made Americans mobile.

• The Woolworth's "Whites Only" lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where in 1960 four African-American college students staged a sit-in, an event that helped ignite that decade's civil rights movement.

• The chairs and table from the Appomattox Court House that Generals Grant and Lee used when signing the documents ending the Civil War.

• The pen used by President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

• George Washington's Revolutionary War uniform.

• The Wright Flyer, which made the first heavier-than-air flight, an invention that further increased our mobility.

• The shuttle Discovery, representing the advent of the Space Age.

• The ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz," symbolizing both the power of the movies in our national culture and the advent of Technicolor.

• The original Star-Spangled Banner from Fort McHenry in 1814—an emblem of the fight to defend the young America from invasion and the inspiration for our National Anthem.

• A poster from the Longest Walk, a 1978 American Indian civil rights march from California to Washington, D.C., protesting the continuing devastation of reservations and violation of treaties and tribal rights that have characterized the fate of Native Americans.

• A barracks sign from one of the relocation centers in which Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.

Pictures of just those fifteen items, arranged in chronological order with essays attached, would illuminate significant portions of American history.  There would still be huge gaps (like the Depression, World War I and the Vietnam War), but I've left Kurin with 86 more objects to fill them in!

  You should try this game.  I think you'll find yourself in a delightful rummage through the nation's attic, without cobwebs, dust balls or strange odors to offend you! 

The Yeshiva and Mammon

  In the Pale of Settlement from which all my grandparents came—the broad swath of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania to which Jews in 19^th-century Imperial Russia were restricted—the brightest teen-age boys were sent to yeshivas for higher education.  There they mainly studied the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) and the Talmud (a voluminous commentary on the Torah and the codified Jewish law derived from it).   Often working in pairs, they diligently parsed and disputed these sources using a dialectic called pilpul.  It is a hair-splitting methodology, which may be the origin of the wisecrack, "Two Jews, three opinions."

  The most accomplished yeshiva buchers (yeshiva boys) were encouraged to continue their studies, some eventually becoming rabbis.  They were admired enough to be sought for bridegrooms, their future in-laws often committing in the marriage contract to underwrite their ongoing education for a given term, as part of the dowry.  That is not to say that secular vocations were frowned on.  The community accepted the talents of all upright men, but perhaps the yeshiva bucher got a little more esteem.

  My maternal grandfather was a yeshiva bucher, graduating from the famed Vilna and Slabodka yeshivas in Lithuania and going on to become a rabbi.  He came to America in 1896 at age 24, after seeing one pogrom too many in the old country.  Finding an excess of rabbis here, and anxious to earn enough money to bring his wife and son to join him in America, he went into business, eventually very successfully. 

  Had he ever read it, which I doubt, I believe my grandfather would have disputed Matthew 6:19-24,  "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth … You cannot serve both God and Mammon."  For one thing, he no doubt would have quarreled with the personification of money implied by the capitalized "Mammon," and also its pejorative connotation.  In the Mishnaic Hebrew of the Talmud, mammon simply means riches, without a disparaging undertone.  My grandfather remained a very observant Jew all his life, and had no difficulty reconciling the Godly strictures of Jewish law with being in business and accumulating his fortune.  (Sorry for putting thoughts in your mind a century after the fact, Grampa, but I think I've got you right.)  Through him, my family received the twin heritages of the intellectual and religious life on the one hand and the world of business on the other.

  In a sense, I myself was a yeshiva bucher until I was 26, although not in Talmudic studies.  I earnestly pursued my education nonstop until receiving my doctorate in electrical engineering in 1956.  On  graduation, I headed to Los Angeles to work at Hughes Aircraft Company.  Although my mother was unhappy that I was moving to the West Coast, she was proud that I was joining industry and earning the then-princely sum of $11,000 per year

  I was invited four years later to join the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley at a much lower salary.  Even though I had been teaching at night at USC and UCLA, I had missed full immersion in the academic and intellectually oriented life, and was excited by the appointment.  When I phoned my mother to announce my coming move, there was a long silence.  I thought the connection had been broken.  Finally, the verdict came:  "You always were a bit lazy!"  It was like being struck by a thunderbolt.

  I've heard this same story from a number of my Jewish friends: the tension between the yeshiva and mammon in the American Jewish world.  Our families wanted us to be intellectually brilliant, but expected us to be successful in the hurly-burly of the commercial world too.  As children, we were pressed for A grades, an achievement assumed to lead to a well-to-do later life in a profession.  Our parents' bragging was often prefaced by "My son, the doctor," or "My son, the CEO," rarely by "My son, the professor."  For an Easterner like my mother, it might have sufficed to say, "My son, the professor at MIT," but "My son, the professor at the University of California" wasn't enough.  (In 1960, her friends would have asked, "Where??")

  It was a remarkable reversal from the ethos of the old country.  There, the scholar was held in greater esteem than the businessman, even if the former may have been ingenuous and the latter worldly-wise.  In America, it's the reverse: we're more impressed by Bill Gates (or a century ago by Andrew Carnegie) than by any intellectual you might name.  The preference here for mammon quickly rubbed off onto Jewish and other immigrants.

  I guess I should have anticipated my mother's verdict.  She had been full of praise when I was a yeshiva bucher, but enough already!  Her frame of reference could not be other than the father she adored, the successful businessman who was still intellectual but no longer a yeshiva bucher.  Why was I sliding back into that status?

  My mother ultimately understood that I was happily following my intellectual star.  After all, throughout my youth she had drilled into me that I should retreat into my intellect whenever I needed sustenance.  "Don't worry about what you think other people think of you when you do so" was her constant refrain.  Although I always sought her approbation, I hadn't fretted about what her response would be before I decided to move to academia.  Intellectuality was one of my twin birthrights.  

  None the less, that "You always were a bit lazy!" rang in my ears for years.

Criteria for Philanthropy

  Here's a quotidian piece about resource allocation, a yawner, so perhaps you should click elsewhere before you read further.  The main excuse for posting it is my pronouncement when I started this blog that I would use it as "a diary.  But not the type of my youth, books with lock and key that said, 'These are my thoughts!  Hands off!'  Nowadays, one lets it all hang out."  Although what I've written below is fully worthy of the lock and key—not because it's so private, but because it's so dull—it might yet have some value compared to what is daily posted on Facebook.

  I start by saying how impressed and heartened I am that so many moguls do enormous good with their wealth.  Bill Gates is worth more than $50 billion.  (Imagine: that's a million times the median annual salary in the U.S., and its earnings alone are some 50,000 times that salary!)  He established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which he and his wife are devoting their full time, and through which they plan eventually to spend a substantial fraction of their fortune on charitable activities world wide.  Warren Buffett, currently worth slightly less than $50 billion, has pledged to give away 99% of his assets, choosing the Gates Foundation as his vehicle.  Michael Bloomberg, worth a mere $18 billion, has donated billions to his favorite causes.  Even the very nouveau riche Mark Zuckerberg, only 28 and clocking in at nearly $18 billion, just a few weeks ago gave away $500 million.

  What should those of us with scantier resources do?  Unlike the moguls, we can't by ourselves ameliorate the big problems in the world at large: eliminating major diseases, bringing sustenance to whole countries, or transforming education on a large scale.   We wonder how we can most effectively allocate our charitable contributions to more limited goals.  How can we get the most bang for our bucks?

  In years past, I've not been particularly organized in allocating charity dollars, often giving in the spirit of the moment and to causes that are at some remove from me, whose results I cannot easily gauge.  That nebulous approach now seems irrational to me.  Since contributions of a size I can afford are meaningless in addressing the big problems, I've switched to more-focused giving.  I've begun to concentrate on three tiers of organizations where I believe I can make a significant difference and/or to which I feel an important personal connection.  They are, in descending order of importance to me:

(1) Schools where I can help individual youngsters—particularly those from minority groups—get an education they would not be able to get otherwise.  I have already devoted entries in this blog to three such schools [1,2,3].  This tier is a targeted "pay forward" to future generations of the society in which I live, in return for what I have drawn from it.

(2) Institutions I can directly pay back for what they brought to my life, e.g., service organizations in my own community, where I have lived so pleasantly for a half century, and schools that were instrumental in my own education.

(3) Favorite charities of family and friends, at their request, often as memorial gifts in honor of their loved ones.

Like all of us, I get scores of solicitations by telephone and mail from other worthwhile charities (to say nothing of those I think are not) but, if they do not fit into one of these categories, I demur as gracefully as I can. 

  I apply one additional criterion to differentiate among charities: given their relative assets, how much difference can I make by the amount I am able to give?  On this basis, for example, in tier (2) I contribute more to my high school (The Bronx High School of Science), a struggling public school, than to my university (MIT), which already has billions in endowment. 

  I have just reviewed my 2012 giving to see how well I adhered last year to these new criteria.  I  found that I gave the following percentages:

•            79.8% to tier (1)

•            12.5% to tier (2)

•            4.2% to tier (3)

•            3.5% to assorted charities that don't fit into any tier, but are legacies from my previous regime.

Those percentages more or less reflect the relative importances I had mentally assigned to the categories.  This year, I will probably rebalance so that the fractions are more like 75%-20%-4%-1%—a little less giving forward, more giving back, and a further phasing out of legacies. 

  I somehow feel better, now that I am being as analytical in charitable giving as I try to be in handling my investments.  I hope my charitable dollars will thereby have more impact than previously.

  WAKE UP!!  You've been dozing in front of your computer screen! 

Introversion

  This book was written just for me: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.  It was published a year ago with some ballyhoo, so I'm surprised that I missed it.  I also missed Cain's marvelous TED talk of the time, one of the most viewed ever.  Pity, because she speaks straight to my heart.

  Why do I so respond to her?  Easy to say.  Those who have followed this blog know that I'm the quintessential introvert, a loner who much prefers reading and writing in solitude to small talk in a room full of people.  I wasn't surprised that I answered "Yes" to 18 of 20 questions early in the book, which placed me far toward the introvert end of the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

  Of course, all of us are mélanges of introversion and extroversion: sometimes we're withdrawn and risk-averse, other times we act boldly and throw ourselves into the fray.  However, truly dyed-in-the-wool introverts have a special onus to bear.  Cain compares their place in contemporary America to that of women in a men's world, discounted for the core of who they are.  They feel alienated from the glad-handing, back-slapping, group-joining, risk-taking affect that has dominated our history, mostly since the turn of the 20^th century.  The country changed radically at that time, Cain says, from a "culture of character," where what counted most was how one behaved in private (with seriousness, discipline, honor) to a "culture of personality," where what counts is an outgoing persona (gregariousness, charm, being a charismatic leader).

  Between a third and half of Americans tilt toward introversion, which is partially genetically based.  It finds its expression in the amygdala, the brain's "fight or flight" organ, which instinctively warns of potentially perilous situations. As babies introverts are "highly reactive," wailing when confronted with multiple new and/or scary objects.  As children they warily scrutinize a new social setting before joining it or fleeing.  As adults many painfully learn to act more extrovertedly, an adaptation that requires the brain's pre-frontal cortex, its analytic center, to override the amygdala by adducing from prior experience that a situation isn't so threatening as instinct first feared.

  The pressure to conform can lead to beneficial results.  Cain, a self-described introvert, tells of overcoming her own bête noire, panic at speaking to large audiences or even within small groups.  Her TED talk shows how successful she was.  But when the adaptation involves a denial of an essential part of one's temperament or values—say, enjoyment of quietude—it can cause disastrous inner conflicts, unhappiness and further alienation from society.

  The pressure starts at the earliest ages, both in schools and from parents anxious for their children to succeed.  Cain recalls a passage from William Whyte's 1956 book The Organization Man stating that concern for pupils' "social adjustment"—their ability not to concentrate on just one or two friends or be content by themselves—was beginning to trump concern for their intellectual achievement.  About that time, classrooms began to morph from desks arranged in ranks facing the teacher to pods of desks facing each other or circular tables accommodating several pupils, who were encouraged to work as groups rather than individually.

  Other books from the fifties—David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit—described the same syndrome of the collective displacing the individual in the broader world.  And Cain points to some astonishing statements from that decade: Harvard's provost declaring that Harvard should reject the "sensitive, neurotic" type and the "intellectually over-stimulated" in favor of boys of the "healthy extrovert kind," and Yale's president saying that the ideal Yalie was not a "beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man."  Colleges focused on what corporations would want in their graduates: active, gregarious types.

  Teamwork was also the motif in those corporations, which ignored the fact that creativity is mostly a lonely activity, conducted in quiet by people who are more introverted than not.  (See my posting from last May on this point.)  By the 1950s, corporate "brainstorming" in groups was all the rage; supposedly it drew out and developed the very best ideas from participants.  Detailed brainstorming rules were formulated by its inventor, Alex Osborn, a founding partner and the "O" in the advertising firm BBDO.  (Think Mad Men.)  Scientific studies later showed the technique to be a much inferior path to creativity.

  Is it any wonder that students rebelled so violently in the 1960s, Mario Savio charging that universities considered students simply as raw material to be formed into product and sold as fodder for corporate groupthink?  The subsequent hippie generation, while sometimes forming communes, didn't glorify the commune over the individual; indeed, its members escaped from the day's deified extroversion through the ultimate introversion: acid trips.  Lone, creative individuals found more space to breathe and more respect from their peers.  For a few decades, the tide turned a bit, and being an inward-looking individual regained some respectability.  As I have in past ruminations, I point to that day's Silicon Valley as a nexus where the lone inventor/entrepreneur became a model.

  But we're back to our old habits.  In the twenty-first century we have again lionized the glad-handed, ebullient risk-takers, those who plunged us into the Great Recession, just as we lionized their ilk in the 1920s.  Perhaps we're now a bit more wary of them than we were before 2008, yet I'm sure the boom-and-bust cycle will continue.  It's in our national DNA.

  Cain has set forth on a crusade: to enable introverts to bring out their hidden talents, their "quiet power," for the betterment of their lives and society; and for society to value its introverts more.  On her website, she urges them to "Join the Quiet Revolution."  She is their Betty Friedan (the crusading feminist of the 1960s).  I wish her well.

 

  Yet there's a long way to go.  To the great detriment of the nation, some introverts, especially women, are still dissuaded from choosing curricula like science and engineering, fearing the additional nerdy image that would give them.  And, in the aftermaths of such horrors as the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, introverted loners are increasingly viewed with suspicion as possible psychopathic loners, although introverts and psychopaths could not be more different: the former, being hypersensitive, are more empathic than normal, the latter not at all. 

  And where is today's reclusive but esteemed Thoreau?  Its Emerson?  I sometimes yearn for a return to the inward-looking "culture of character" of their nineteenth-century America, a culture of seriousness, discipline and honor, a culture lapping over enough into the Depression-chastened 1930s of my youth that my mother felt no compunction about encouraging my own introspective development.

  Okay, I'll admit it: when someone starts pining for "the good old days," it's probably a sign of cantankerousness or senility or both—in my case, I hope no more than the former!

Philosophy, Schmilosophy!

  You've already been introduced to my son David, for I've linked to two of his songs elsewhere in this blog [1,2], and he wrote a guest posting praising the LSD-induced creativity of the 1950s-1960s Bay Area [3]. 

  Recently, David has seen several of his friends' fathers die.  More acutely aware of the inevitable, he has suddenly increased the frequency of his visits to me from London.  It's a gesture that has deeply touched me.  Still, I feel like any or all of the Jewish mothers in this venerable joke:

Mother 1:  "My son is an entrepreneur, starting companies left and right, but—bless him!—he writes to me every day!"

Mother 2:  "Huh!  My son runs a big multinational company, yet he finds the time to call me each day from all parts of the world!"

Mother 3:  "That's nothing!  My son, as busy as both of yours combined, spends an hour a day just talking to his doctor about me!"

(Joking aside, I should here also thank my architect daughter Abby, who calls me almost every evening—from all parts of the world!—to chat and wish me good night.)

  On his most recent trip to California a few weeks ago, David and I explored our very different views of the universe.  My universe is random at its core and is without any transcendental meaning.  His has a cosmic unity of which everything is a related part, so he sees the whole and his place in it as having an ethereal purpose.  Although neither of us is religious in the practicing sense, I think our contrasting world views roughly register the difference between two of the faces of the Jewish God that I earlier discussed: Elohim and Adonai.  The former, the Creator of the universe, lets it unfold in chaotic ways and cares not a fig for us mortals as we wend our way through His maelstrom.  The latter acts as an agent who transforms the chaos of creation into order and sanity, representing our striving to make sense of our existence.  I relate to Elohim; I believe that David would more likely cleave to Adonai.  Of course, since the central precept of Judaism is that God is One, a true believer must accept the whole of this Janus-like deity, a position I think neither of us can accept.

  Our differing viewpoints sometimes lead us to loggerheads.  David holds that I am denying a vital link to a spiritual mind-essence unifying all of creation.  (I believe philosophers would call him a panpsychist.)  I can't fathom this: I point to my head and insist, "What I am is only what's in here, no more, no less!"  On the other hand, he cannot understand my passive acquiescence in an underlying dominion of chance.  Since our universes are so different and each is so much a matter of metaphysical axiom, I often try to bring our discussion to a close by using Wittgenstein's admonition, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  I see no point in arguing about axioms.

  On a more mundane level, though, our disagreement is a study in irony.  I, believing in the suzerainty of disorder, have striven to establish localized order in my minute corner of the cosmos, an attempt I liken to the possible but vastly improbable spontaneous rushing of all air molecules into one corner of a room.  He, convinced that there is a oneness in all of existence, is unconcerned with random dislocations and anomalies, which he thinks will work themselves out as a matter of karma.  So here's the paradox: I try to construct a preternaturally orderly life in spite of universal turbulence, and he—who is unconcerned that life is buffeted by turbulence—calms his mind, almost as a Buddhist, with a sense of cosmic unity and peace.  Starting from such incompatible foundations, we seem to have arrived at similar places, each with its own sort of equanimity.

 

  Are our lives therefore that much different, given the polar philosophical axioms from which we start?  Except for a 35-year difference in age and therefore a generational difference in outlook, and very different financial statuses, I'd say "No."  We share the same concerns about inequity and iniquity in the world, the same worries about the environment, the same political outlook, the same moral code.  In a word, our vast difference about the grand question of the nature of the universe seems not to reflect itself all that much in how we conduct ourselves in it.  We should be on different channels altogether, but it seems we operate instead mostly on the same one. 

  Does that not say something about the value in everyday life of philosophical disputation?  The old New York Jew that I am wants to say, "Philosophy, schmilosophy!"