Justice week 1: wrong none

According to Franklin, injustice is achieved both actively and passively.  You can be unjust by hurting others.  But you can also be unjust by refraining from actions you should perform: "Wrong none, by doing Injuries, or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty."  Justice in this framework is related to Franklin's general theory of action and virtue, which is to be accountable for what you fail to do at every moment (Resolution – "Perform without fail what you resolve"; Industry – "Lose no Time"). 

As with Sincerity week, I didn't find it a particular challenge during Justice week not to do injuries, though it is always possible to feel as though we could "omit" less, do more for others.  What is the true scope of Duty?  

This question is hard for a regular person to answer responsibly but non-neurotically.  If the injuries we commit against others can be hard to assess in a global economy (under what conditions was the t-shirt I wore today made?), it can be even harder to know what benefits we might be obligated to confer and how.

Ben Franklin is not often invoked in this context.  Always a popular and populist figure, he is regularly named as a supporter of individual thrift and responsibility, of entrepreneurship, and even of modern free-market economics.  Not for nothing was he cited by economically conservative Congressman Aaron Schock in the interview with Men's Health I mentioned in last week's post.  Franklin can even be made to stand in opposition to policies seen as overly intrusive on individual liberty, as in this Cafepress t-shirt you can buy for a mere $35:

Here is Franklin as the hip anti-Obama.  He is neatly signified as opposing the federal imposition of health care or higher taxes on a polity that refuses to benefit from another's sense of Duty, or to be forced to perform that Duty themselves.

Similarly, as historian Jill Lepore notes in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Paul Ryan's Medicare- and social-services-cutting budget plan is named "The Path to Prosperity," a subtle echo of Franklin's famous essay, "The Way to Wealth" (discussed in April 19's Resolution Week 1 entry below).*  Economic conservatives readily name Franklin as the patron saint of freedom from the burdens of collective endeavor which, they imply, Franklin knew would hobble the individual and thereby, in their view, the nation.

Lepore argues against this, describing the difficulties of Franklin's sister, Jane Mecom, to whom, of all his correspondents, Franklin wrote most frequently.  Uneducated, married young, bearing child after child (nearly all of whom died), Mecom becomes for Lepore an argument that the state alleviate such misery – and convert it to productivity a la Franklin – by making universal education, health care, family planning services and, we might add, suffrage, available.  Pace Ryan, Lepore believes Franklin would agree.  She notes he gave a generous bequest to Boston's public schools in his will.  (Her eloquent argument may be found here.)

Franklin's definition of Justice in his virtue system could certainly support Lepore's reading (as might the record of Franklin's substantial endeavors for the public good, which only begin with him founding libraries and fire companies, and creating paper currency for the Colonies, long before his more well-known participation in crafting the republic). 

To assess Franklin and his role in our own age is to accumulate numerous quirky and troubling data.  (The abs are only the beginning: more to come.)  It's nicer, in my opinion, to credit him for his advocacy that we not omit the Benefits we owe others.

Coming up: return of charts, courtesy of restored hard drive.


*Thanks to Eugene's Blogger of the Year, Culinaria Eugenius, for bringing this to my attention.

Sincerity Week 1: Political abs edition

Sincerity week was less of a challenge than industry week for me.  Franklin exhorts me to "Use no hurtful Deceit.  Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly."  I didn't find myself much tempted to deceive others hurtfully, and so this wasn't a terrible challenge. 

I am intrigued that this is the first of Franklin's categories to attempt to monitor thought – the activity he seems to locate as the source of fair dealing.  Franklin cuts insincerity off at the source.  His cautious "if you speak" follows from his Silence adages (week 2; entry below), which stressed engaging solely in purposeful and beneficial speech.  While I therefore assume that "think[ing] innocently and justly" is meant to characterize my own thought and speech patterns – no lying, no unfair agenda – these adverbs seem possibly transferable to one's interlocutor, with whom one is being sincere.  Does Franklin imagine that the more "innocently and justly" I think, the more I will think others innocent and just?  Presumably speech intended to bait or call others out on their own insincerity isn't Franklin-approved (it's unproductive). 

Diplomacy, in short, remained a question for me with this system.  Franklin only cautions me to avoid "hurtful Deceit" but says nothing about white lies, or about the small flatteries and compromises that can often grease the wheels of administrative or other collaborative work.  I assume that a practiced and accomplished diplomat such as Franklin was well-acquainted with these and other forms of productive, necessary insincerity.  I plan to research this a bit the next time "Sincerity" is up.

Meanwhile, this week we had the pleasure of seeing Franklin invoked by none other than Aaron Schock, the Congressman from Illinois's 18th district who flaunted his pecs and six-pack in a shirtless photoshoot for Men's Health magazine:  http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/aaron-schock-fitness .  Most of the way down the page, Schock names Franklin as his (improbable!) fitness inspiration:

"One of my favorite quotes is from Ben Franklin, who said, 'A good example is the best sermon,' " Schock says. "And I think if you want to start talking about healthy lifestyles and staying in shape, then you yourself should do your best to try to be a model, an example to people you're trying to convince to do the same."

It is...piquant to see the Founding Father known for his comforting, comfortable heft cited in this fashion.  I can't imagine Franklin taking the necessary time away from, of all things, the business of public service in order to manipulate his appearance in this way.  Nor would he conflate being a "model" of fiscal prudence and actions of simultaneously public and personal benefit (his sweet spot, and what he is referring to here) with other forms of modeling.  (Similarly, later in the article, Schock describes his work as a Congressman as a useful part of his exercise regime, rather than vice versa: "Exercise...keeps me in good physical shape, and it relieves stress. And when you're a representative of the public, there's never a shortage of things to do.") 

Do I deduce some Insincerity in Schock's tribute to Franklin (more on this soon in relation to "Justice," coming up)?  Poor Richard's adages are, of course, meant to be detachable and adaptable.  Even exemplarity itself seems to have two sides, since elsewhere, we have Franklin declaring, in a proto-Wildean voice, that "Setting too good an example is a kind of slander seldom forgiven."

But I digress. 

There has been an improvement this week in industry and resolution, since I take last week's industry low-point seriously.  Unfortunately, there will be a temporary hiatus in charts, due to the death of my hard drive.  It will be resurrected, I hope, this week, in time for Justice.  Stay tuned.

Industry week 1: assessment

Franklin's explanatory motto for Industry is: "Lose no time.  Be always employed in something useful.  Cut off all unnecessary actions."

Look at that.  With its three (count 'em) logical absolutes (no time; always employed; all unnecessaries), it's a thing of beauty to me: an inhuman, uncompromising ideal, sure, but a powerful fantasy also.  For me it evokes an optimistic vision of what I might be able to achieve if I could regularly access an idealized, machinelike version of myself. 

The truth is, there have been periods in my working life during which I have almost realized this vision.  They occurred under short- and long-term deadlines.  The less interesting of these involve me grading for 12 or 15 hours straight, say, well into the wee hours of the night, with the tv on mute (to make me feel less isolated), ideally stuck on a channel with patterned images (so as not to distract me) – maybe on the choppy graphs of the weather channel, or the more engaging palette and lighting of CSI: Miami marathons.  I wind up sleeping for a few hours and teaching the next day.  Such all-nighters offer satisfying completions, but they aren't sustainable.  More importantly, they aren't even valuable in the longer term. 

Writing deadlines have a slower approach and a much bigger payoff.  When finishing a large project (articles, dissertation, book), I adopt longer-term versions of what I imagine Franklin conceives of here.  I have evolved taxing, but productive, daily schedules: two, and eventually three, multiple-hour writing stints per day; a daily bout of exercise to keep myself from imploding; a day off once a week, with grocery shopping and the week's only socializing.  Brief periods of daily rest are built into the schedule, primarily to enable its continuation.  That is, virtually all my pleasure during such a work period exists to serve the work.

Such monastic routines are increasingly hard to bear.  After I finish, I look back on them with a mixture of pride, awe, and a recollection of the mounting, agonizing desire they produce to complete them and emerge into a freer life.  They have produced my largest-scale and most intricate work, the research which is at the heart of my professional identity.  It's the hardest thing I do, since the earliest stages of writing have always been difficult for me and the later ones grueling and draining.

I've never been able to keep to such schedules for more than a few months.  I have a large writing project afoot now, and the Virtue Project was largely undertaken to facilitate it.  Thus far – about halfway through my first 13-week cycle of Franklin's virtues – I don't think I've been very successful. 

Part of this has to do with a strangely busy administrative season.  Mostly teaching-free though I may be, I have found myself attending daily meetings.  Arriving at home after these, I have trouble switching gears into a writing mode. 

But looking at Franklin's industry adage, my current days seem crammed with inexcusable, excessive periods of goofing off and delay.  Would the week's chart with its few blots I deem memorable lapses even be an adequate response?  I don't mark every time I fail to cut off an unnecessary action, each moment I "lose time." The singleness of purpose evoked by that adage seems to me to be Franklin's signature quality, and I haven't lived up to it.

For a while I've thought I might try to ratchet up the intensity of performance of the next 13-week cycle of virtues, and perhaps I need to start doing that sooner.  The writing won't wait.  Maybe it's time to return to monastic routines and a more intensely Franklinesque degree of scrutiny, in the interest of a more faithfully Franklinesque productivity.  Next week is officially devoted to Sincerity (more soon), but Industry is going to remain front and center for me.

Frugality week 1

A few of Franklin's virtues come fairly naturally to me.  I am still driving the same 1990 Accord that I've owned for 15 years; likewise, my cellphone is so primitive as to make me the butt of domestic mockery.  I resist all forms of refurbishment and shopping (except for groceries and books).  I bring my lunch to work and it is habitually cheap and temperate (fruit and yogurt with an occasional pb & j on an English muffin). 

In short, I expected frugality to be pretty much a breeze.  I did have to turn down a wine-tasting class (a bit of a frugality cheat, since I'll sign up for a sequel later in the season).  For fun, T. and I went on a hike and watched movies at home. 

Unfortunately, in catching up with friends and colleagues, this became a restaurant-heavy week (4 meals), and two meals were my personal favorite, sushi, which I felt I had to mark as a definitionally un-Franklinesque expense.  You can see the blots on Wednesday and Saturday:

Sushi represents a category of virtue project question mark that I have.  How would Franklin have adapted his system in today's world?  I have friends who put my frugality to shame: one of them will eat sushi, his wife tells me, but he insists on the various frugal combos, which I avoid because I prefer different (read: more expensive) fishes.  So maybe sushi isn't such a grey area.

But take Saturday's trip to the farmer's market: it often annoys my frugal self that I can't find much produce there that isn't organic; in Eugene, the beautiful, local, seasonal offerings are always enticing, but they can add up (I got out this week with just spinach and Chinese broccoli and enough of it for the entire week – reasonably frugal at $6.50).  So: would Franklin buy organic?  Or would he be delighted by the ingeniousness of modern agribusiness, which makes produce generally inferior but remarkably affordable.  Remember, this is a man who never remembered even what he ate.

But Franklin was also a man who lived in a time before reliable information about nutrition and environmental degradation was available.  He cared passionately about the people on the bottom and about the public good.  He invested substantial capital in enterprises he thought would pay off in the long run and was tempted by fad diets with weighty philosophical underpinnings, as his adoption of vegetarianism after randomly coming across a book that endorsed it attests.  From this perspective, I can imagine him enthusiastically adopting the local and organic food movements that are our Franklinesque secular religion in Oregon.

The point is, sometimes it is hard to assess how a modern-day Franklin would calculate.  I like his system because it is reasonable, flexible, and relies on its adopters' common sense.  But this can easily lead to the kinds of rationalizations that drove Franklin away from a general will to be virtuous and towards a less flexible system in the first place.

What good shall I do this day?

As part of his precept of Order, with Humility, the virtue with which he said he had the most trouble, Franklin added an additional chart to the "little book" in which he recorded his progress in virtue.  This one sketched out an ideal workday, so that "each part of [his] Business" could "have its Time."  Here is the chart:

 

As always, I am struck by how reasonable Franklin's structures are.  A two-hour lunch break presumably allows for more focus and good will in an afternoon work session.  I love that he includes time for reading at this point.  The eight-hour day itself bears noting, since in Franklin's time much longer workdays were the norm (in most industrialized countries, the movement for an eight-hour work period got serious only in the 19th century).  Like me, Franklin seems to like long adjustment periods in and out of work – the three-hour stretch in the morning is particularly appealing to me, since I am inefficient in the morning (and I am not talking 5 a.m., either) and like to bounce between business email, news, and columns or blogs for quite a while before settling in to work.  Franklin also builds a decrescendo into the day, using the evening to converse, divert himself, reflect on his day.  Taking stock of plans and achievements at either end of the day keep him honest.  As always, Franklin's plans for a productive and industrious life are formed on a human scale.

I'll need to shift his start and end times quite a bit, however, since I've always been most productive in the afternoon, evening, and (unfortunately) night, and so I need to go later than he does.  (By the end of every large-scale writing project I've ever undertaken, I am getting up at 10 or 11 am and working until 2 or 3 in the morning.)  Cheap electric light will make this a frugal shift.  I need more sleep than Franklin seems to have, and since I live in the age of cars and labor-saving technologies (oh, how he would have loved our technologies), I need to build exercise for me and my beagle into the day as well.

In short, I am becoming my own boss, setting my schedule and the tasks to be performed therein.  As Father Abraham advised in my last entry, I will work to avoid the shame of being caught idle – by myself.

My technical advisor has let me know we need an additional day for the chart: more to follow.

Bad employee

One of Franklin's most familiar writings from his popular miscellany, Poor Richard's Almanack, was a farewell essay of sorts, in which he collated many of the Almanack's adages and aphorisms encouraging readers to work hard in their own self-interest.*  The essay is popularly known as "The Way to Wealth," wealth being a goal Franklin assumed his readers would find powerful enough that they would allow it to govern their behavior, but also a goal he felt was elusive enough that he himself worked tirelessly to explain and promote it.

Franklin's adages are designed to make clear what is still evidently murky to hapless citizens who squander wealth and time they could better use otherwise, as though adding taxes to those they resent, those the (English) government levies, by effectively taxing their own idleness, pride, and folly.  What will get through to these people?  At one point Franklin's pseudonymous speaker, Father Abraham, attempts a change of perspective:

If you were a servant, would you not be ashamed that a good master should catch you idle?  Are you then your own master?  Be ashamed to catch yourself idle, as Poor Dick says.

I find this rather a profound insight. In a world of externalized authorities, a person may fear to be seen betraying a master – at least, a "good master"'s – trust.  The master is "good," and the master's objective witness of the servant's idleness is experienced as a searing attack on the self: shame.  Yet acting on her own behalf, this same servant may brazenly indulge in idleness aplenty.  The opinion of the servant about herself is apparently less vulnerable to her awareness (omniscient in this matter, if not objective) of her idleness.  She serves her master well, and herself poorly.

Note that Franklin-Abraham doesn't urge his hearer to correct her mistakes merely by thinking of herself as her own employee and master, however.  To do so would evidently not be enough to reduce idleness (though the premise that we are all our own masters is not asserted here with total confidence, but more coyly posed as a rhetorical question).  Franklin-Abraham has recourse not to his usual exhortation but to disincentive: he urges the listener to feel more shame, to duplicate her master-authorized shame in thinking of her failures of herself.  Shame is, for most of us, definitionally punishing to feel.  Implicitly, Franklin-Abraham argues, to avoid the shame, avoid failing your good-master self (or, perhaps, being caught by yourself).

Yes, it's been that kind of week**: 

The usual Wednesday pileup and more besides.***  Even in the week supposedly devoted to it, I can't say I've seen much improvement in resolution, at least on my own behalf.  It is always easier for me to complete the tasks set me by others, as in Franklin's analogy.  (Such tasks, which took up Tuesday and Thursday, are what save this week's chart from looking worse than it does.) 

I may have adopted the virtue project in order to amend my Resolution and Industry problems, but doing so hasn't changed my habitual failures of the will.  As Franklin himself noted with that initial surprise when he attempted moral perfection sans charts (see my first entry), merely knowing what you should do and wanting, at some level, to do it, isn't on its own automatically effective.

Does this call for another system within a system?  Tomorrow: becoming my own boss.



*In the essay Franklin performs a curious disappearing act, hiding his beliefs behind the form of the adages themselves, which purport to be a part of folk culture, emerging (rather effectively, as time has passed) as if without an author at all; Franklin also conceals himself behind a double persona, putting the adages in the mouth of "Father Abraham," a generic "plain clean old man, with white locks" who is overheard quoting Poor Richard's doctrine by "Poor Richard" himself , who re-records his own words in turn.  Franklin begins the essay in the person of Poor Richard by celebrating his own supposed obscurity as an author, an obscurity which permits him at times to advance his own doctrine "by quot[ing] myself with great gravity," as he proceeds to do at length while pretending merely to record a canny speech.

**N.B. By request, I am changing the chart so that the non-featured virtues are easier to identify.  Franklin just used initial letters, but that was for his own use.

***Another tranquility blot, to my surprise!  This one related to fleas, I'm afraid.  But they seem to be gone now, courtesy of aggressive laundering and diatomaceous earth.

Virtue and vice at a conference

"My scheme of Order," Franklin wrote, "gave me the most Trouble."  His theory of order was to assign times of the day to different purposes, and while that worked reasonably well for a man who could command his own schedule, for a man like Franklin himself, a printer catering to his clients, depending on their convenience, a man "who must mix with the World," there was more difficulty in consistent ordering of his schedule.  (And his possessions – more on this in a future post.)

I spent most of Order week preparing for a conference and attending it.  While the conference itself assigned mostly clear purposes to different times, purposes I by and large fulfilled, the week in general bore little relation to the discipline I intended the entire virtue system to inculcate.

Conferences, it turns out, offer numerous opportunities to commit "blots."  Let's take a look at the week:

You can see the pileup.  An overindulgence in the remarkable Sichuan food of Bellevue, WA (where I participated in a dinner involving the best-ever jellyfish, tiny cubes of rabbit and peanuts swimming in fruity chili oil, pork kidneys, and duck smoked in camphor wood, though I skipped the kidneys).  On Friday, I chose sleep and breakfast over the 9 am session, in a minor Resolution failure.  I spent more money than Franklin, quite possibly, could imagine (at the ballpark, for instance, where I chose better beer for nearly double the price).  My tranquility suffered when I heard my work misquoted and misunderstood by a hostile reader ("be not disturbed at Trifles, or at Accidents common or unavoidable"), an experience which in retrospect seems almost exciting.  And my humility suffered when my favorite critic made a date with me for a nightcap – even though he later forgot it after an attack of arthritis in the chilly, humid land of Microsoft.  (He bought me a beer the next day, so humility's comeuppance was short-lived.)

Not a good week for Franklin!

This week is Resolution: "Resolve to perform what you ought; Perform without fail what you resolve."  One of my resolutions is to follow more closely a Franklin-like system of scheduling the day – a system that properly should have been developed in a conference-free Order week.  As a result, I will continue working intensely on Order this week also.

I suspect Franklin was an extrovert, a person who is energized in company.*  Unlike me, he might not have been exhausted by even very pleasurable demands of catching up with new work in my field and with friends.  But such networking inevitably interrupts the leisurely solitary rhythms necessary for the writer – even Franklin would have had to make the five-hour drive down I-5 back to Eugene (stopping in Portland at Powell's to buy a couple of books – used, of course, per a return to Franklin normality).  There are few opportunities for betterment on the interstate.  But sometimes our profit necessitates mixing in the world, a pleasant displacement of order.



*Extroversion: I suppose this is debatable – Franklin seems so relieved, for instance, when he gets out of family dinners at his brother's printshop, preferring the oatmeal and raisins and private study.  Work as a printer was not solitary, but Franklin typically barely represents his co-workers except when criticizing their economy and efficiency (as when both are compromised by the alcohol consumption of English printers) or their competency.  Always a systems analyst, he comes off as a mind evaluating others rather than primarily interacting with them in fellowship.  Still, his few gestures at relaxation are typically social – the Junto, frolicking with fellow Boston youths by the seaside and on boats.  Alone, he is merely driven.  Maybe he is outside the categories of introvert and extrovert – someone recharged by industry and achievement itself.