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.

Silence week 1

I know.  The pursuer of the virtue of silence who doesn't post all week on her blog is a startlingly earnest joke, which is to say a bad joke. 

What Franklin wished to avoid in courting silence / avoiding the trifling was in fact confusing to me at first, even if my long solo work hours tended to moot it for much of the week.  My only opportunities for conversation were when T. came home from work, and truth be told, we both enjoy conversation that jumps abruptly (and sometimes with little explanation, so he tells me) from the serious to the trifling and back again.  From my point of view, the two injunctions – "Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself"; "Avoid trifling Conversation" – were thus, in the light of happy cohabitation, partly at odds.  Some of those trifles are beneficial!  Franklin had a happy marriage, and I expect that he may have exempted his domestic world from some of the more onerous of the virtue requirements. 

But perhaps not.  Throughout his Autobiography, Franklin reminisces about social engagements that he tended to want to turn to rhetorically and philosophically improving activities.  A boyhood friend and he communed by arguing about "the Propriety of educating the Female Sex in learning, & their Abilities for Study."  They enjoyed attempting to confute one another, exchanging written arguments on the subject, writings which stirred Franklin to perform extensive private exercises to improve his style and rhetoric, since the other boy was at first a better writer and had the upper hand.

Or there is the social club Franklin formed in Philadelphia, a secret society called the "Junto," formed for "mutual Improvement."  Franklin's rules for the club had each member posing questions on morality, science, and politics, and writing an essay to present to the group every three months.  Not a hedonistic bunch!  To prevent attempts at social domination and to ensure that egos would not be put at risk, another rule forbade "all Expressions of Positiveness [certainty] in Opinion, or of direct Contradiction."  Assert your position too strongly in the Junto, and you would be subject to a fine.

It is a little tiring even contemplating extending such efforts at improvement into every corner of one's waking life.  And yet Franklin's drive to better himself was extremely powerful; to him, ideal social relations would be those that could participate in the programme.

This week I exempted conversations at home from such stringent requirements for even casual talking for the reasons above – domestic intimacy engendered by them seems a valuable end in itself.  I can't justify the cost to congeniality and communion and, since I am less exhilarated than Franklin by the prospect of such focused conversational efforts, I predicted more deficit than benefit.  Perhaps at the next iteration of Silence week I will be more experimental and ambitious.

*  *  *

One of the week's work responsibilities proved a provocative test case.  With the other members of my department, I hosted visiting students who might wish to join our graduate program.  Various events encouraged us to mingle and chat, as well as to expound the resources we offered more rigorously in more formal settings.  An introvert, I find the less scripted of these events (receptions, group dinners, and the smalltalk therein) draining, if not exactly because the conversation in them is "trivial" – indeed the conversation has gotten steadily easier for me to improvise, even in large unfamiliar groups (afterward I inevitably collapse).  I was amused watching Franklin's principles collide.  Promotion of one's office, business, or community is a highly valorized activity for him.  Here it was achieved in part through being diverting, that is, through diverting our attention from our work and "mutual Improvement" proper.  Yet one expects this diplomat and politician was skilled at offering such easy entertainments to those he wished to persuade.  Maybe sober talk at home was his respite.

Here the scorecard of the week: 

Barring the little blot against sincerity, inevitably incurred during one of those recruitment events, it wasn't a bad week for the outlier virtues.  Still, I had more difficulty in what I am thinking of as the the 3 central categories.  This means days where I have a work plan I can't stick to (though often I wind up compensating for a slow start by working until late at night).  The current week is Order week, however ("Let all your Things have their Places.  Let each Part of your Business have its Time").  In theory this would be the most crucial week to date, though my agenda will be challenged by business travel (a conference).  Off to Seattle with the Virtue Project, where my business will have its time.