310. Aging in place plus

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Aging in place

One of my (older) cousins is having health problems and so they are considering moving into an "independent living" complex. They have a website, of course, so I checked the place out. It's nice enough... if I could redecorate everything and move it to an urban location.

But it got me thinking about the best way to handle housing for people who are not getting any younger. Most people would prefer to "age in place." But our built environment was not constructed with Universal Design in mind (designing spaces to work for the frail elderly and disabled as well as people who can dance up stairs.) The best workaround for that is for people some time after they are 55, to move into independent living complexes that are designed with these future limitations in mind. Both my mother and my aunt lived in one of these places, so I'm quite familiar with them. They are very similar to a regular apartment complex with a few extra features and a few drawbacks. But they usually work well until people get into their eighties and start needing even more "assistance." That's why these complexes usually also have an "assisted living" section. This tends to be a fairly posh nursing home.

Also, around fifteen years ago when both my parents were making their exits in hospitals, it occurred to me that for many people, a good hotel would be a better (and often cheaper) alternative to a loud and chaotic hospital. Hospitals are designed for the convenience of doctors, not patients. 

So combining these two trains of thought, it occurred to me today that something very like our Four Seasons Hotel and Residences could be an ideal solution to many of these problems. The Four Seasons Hotel has retail at ground level (on Market Street) that I would replace with an Urgent Care operation. Above is a large fitness center, that I would keep, along with the usual ballrooms and the like. Above that are many floors of hotel rooms, and above those are many floors of condos. I'm pretty sure you can get room service in the condos.

In my vision, the Building would negotiate with hotel operators to get a tenant that would operate the hotel while providing some services to the residents above at reasonable rates: room service, discount dining, discount rooms for guests. There would be similar negotiation with the fitness center and Urgent Care tenants.

Optionally, the high-rise residential section would follow my "Medieval Urban Sky-street" model so it isn't just stacked, double-loaded corridors. (In which case the residential area would be below and the hotel section above.) 

You would move in some time after turning 55 when you were still working (in the Medieval Urban Sky-street case you might even move your business into the building with you.) As you aged, you might take advantage of additional "aging-in-place" services or you might move into a smaller unit or even sub-let your business space. You would probably make more use of room service and Urgent Care (a quick elevator ride away.) Your actual world might shrink, over time, to mostly just the building, but the building would offer most of the services you needed. If you eventually became house-bound, necessary services would be available to bring what you needed to your unit.

Devolution

Just when I think the tenants in my building can't get any dumber when it comes to disposing of their trash I'm proved wrong. I now accept that they can't distinguish between the three color coded toters, but now someone -- I'm assuming the most recent addition -- is putting their trash into the small can we have next to the dryer for the disposal of lint and other odds and ends. 

Today I finally gave up and pulled that can off the floor and replaced it with a tiny container. If she just puts her bag of trash on top of that, I may snap. This would make for interesting jury selection at the trial as prosecution and defense quiz the jury pool on their feelings about recycling and proper trash disposal. 

Education

Speculation - what is the best way to develop character for either the average person or the troubled person?

I'm not a huge fan of Plato (or you could say Socrates, though I'm not entirely confident with Plato's account of Socrates), but I do have my Republic moments when I think how I would order things if it were up to me. I've always seen the ideal educational system evaluating individuals to see in what way (if any) they excel, and then helping them develop those skills. This would include addressing weaknesses -- in much the same way the US Navy helped its young officers develop -- but I don't usually see the role of education as turning people into something they aren't by nature. Admittedly, this reflects my personal preference for following the route of least resistance.

But even I acknowledge that there is no such thing as a route of no resistance. Learning to deal with various kinds of resistance is also necessary. I know the least steep routes to most everywhere in SF, but when you live near the top of a hill, you eventually have to climb. 

To return to the great books again, I would not pick difficult books, like Fernand Braudel's, to tempt students into a field of study, but once they had discovered an interest, I would then encourage books like this. To change subjects, I might recommend The Elegance of the Hedgehog to lure people into both the Russian novels and the philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather than having them start with The Brothers Karamazov or The Birth of Tragedy or (God forbid) something by Kant. 

168. Francis Perkins

Previous - 167. A new start

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Little Me vs The Big Me & crooked timber

p5-6 Little Me vs The Big Me, another dichotomy this book is supposed to be about. I'm not going to quote as much of this as I should, but you can probably get the idea that people today are Big Me characters while in the past they were Little Mes -- secondary to the more important family or community or organization. This seems to me to be primarily a religious thing, though you would think we wouldn't be so much less Christian today (compared to before WW2) given the popularity of Christianity in America today. I agree -- viscerally -- with some of this, but how to defend it outside religion? And do we want to encourage the already Christian to be even more so? 

History, even Plutarch's list of exemplars, is full of Big Me personalities: Alcibiades, Alexander, Sulla. We love seeing Big Me personalities taken down a peg, but we put up with them when they are playing for our team, Patton leaps to mind here.

p11 And now we get the "crooked timber,"

...Moral realists are aware that we are built from "crooked timber" -- From Immanuel Kant's famous line, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." People in this "crooked timber" school of humanity have an acute awareness of their own flaws and believe that character is built in the struggle against their own weaknesses. As Thomas Merton wrote, "Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers."

At least in the context of military history, I certainly see that this is true. Sheridan might have been the best commander of the American Civil War but the war ended before he could be fully tested, so it's hard to look past Sherman, who had so many more opportunities. 

Frances Perkins & Mount Holyoke College

I've always assumed a Classical education was built on studying the Classics, learning Greek and Latin so you could learn the lessons of a thousand years of literate civilization. That with this foundation of knowledge you can then go on to learn anything you please. This account of Holyoke suggests that, at least here, the character building aspect went even deeper. The Christian form this character building took is obvious for a region settled by Puritans, but I wonder if men's colleges were so very different? (I don't know.) I imagine many of them also had Christian aspects and that even those that didn't probably followed similar practices in being more concerned with building the character of undergraduates than in determining their personal strengths. I would have found this frustrating, but I can see the point of it. I can see why Brooks praises this approach.

I wonder if the Great Books colleges keep this aspect of education in mind? Do they include books that will challenge the students as well as inform them? When I dream up lists of books that I would want these programs to teach, I tend to go with titles I think would be the most approachable and entertaining. Maybe this is a mistake. God knows I learned more from trudging through Fernand Braudel's dry and endless prose than I learned from any number of more user friendly books.

But what was the end purpose of this character building? The obvious answer is to populate John Winthrop's "city upon a hill." As he wrote, "We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." So, again, you can't really remove this sense of "character" from it's Puritan context.

This sense of character, which we will see repeated in Dorothy Day, is even markedly different from the Russian Orthodox sense of religious character represented by Zosima. This is a more Protestant, Calvinist, Jansenist; a more bourgeois interpretation of character than Dostoevsky favored, which is why Brooks need to go all the way back to Augustine.

It's also why the author has to be very careful about even glancing in the National Socialism/Communism direction. Could be why he mentions Tolstoy and Dostoevsky but never Thomas Mann.

It is worth noting, however, that a great many of the Christians who spent the centuries following Luther savagely killing each other, had wonderfully developed characters in the sense Brooks advocates here. And it's probably hard to find an Islamic suicide bomber who hasn't found his "calling" or her "vocation." It's easy to imagine a version of this book edited for an Islamic State audience.


Perkins and FDR
Something that is very rarely commented on is that the New Deal was unsuccessful in breaking the Great Depression. Many fine programs resulted but you can't cure a crisis of capitalism with a socialist band-aid. It was the war, by giving work to everyone in America who could work, that brought back the happy times.

p44 She [Perkins] also reflected on a distinction that had once seemed unimportant to her. When a person gives a poor man shoes, does he do it for the poor man or for God? He should do it for God, she decided. The poor will often be ungrateful, and you will lose heart if you rely on immediate emotional rewards for your work. But if you do it for God, you will never grow discouraged... The person thus is performing a task because it is intrinsically good, not for what it produces.

This is, of course, the same logic that allowed true believers to participate in Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and Hitler's Final Solution, with a clear conscience. 

And is this really what the average person means by "intrinsically good?" If you burn me at the stake to save my soul, I suppose we have to give you credit for feeling good about it, but is any real good done? Is an act good because it makes the doer feel good about themselves regardless of the effect on the receiver of this good? I just don't see that Brooks has completely thought any of this through.

For both Perkins and Day, the consequences of their good works -- the outcomes for the poor people who will always be with us -- seem secondary and almost accidental. The real point is not to do good but to be holy. 

That said, however, I suspect they probably have a better chance of doing actual good than the bureaucratic social worker who is just following procedures and doesn't care at all. I can't help thinking that the best solution to the "homeless" problem I see everyday on our streets is something very like the monasticism that became popular as the Roman Empire in the West was collapsing. This may be the only place where Dostoevsky, Day, and I see eye to eye.

Next - 169. Eisenhower

167. A new start

Previous - 166. Montaigne

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The Road to Character: Take two

pxii Now I'm in a much better position to see what's important here in the Introduction. Brooks associates what he calls "resume" values with Adam I, and "eulogy" values with Adam II. Here's a key passage, 

Adam II lives by an inverse logic. It's a moral logic, not an economic one. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

I have mixed feelings about this -- ignoring for a moment the bit in bold. I've never been a career oriented, Adam I type person. I've always been more interested in values and self-discovery. So this should get an enthusiastic "Amen!" from me, but, now, with Brooks's Adam II exemplars in mind (Francis Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower and his mother, Dorothy Day, George Marshall, A. Philip Randolph & Bayard Rustin, George Eliot, Augustine, Samuel Johnson & Montaigne), I'm mostly just confused. 

In The Brothers Karamazov it was obvious who exemplified the values important to Dostoevsky -- and these values would sound very similar to these resume values. Zosima, of course, but also his mentor and Zosima's brother. Even Alyosha. (And particularly Lizaveta, but that may just be my view.) I can't imagine Dostoevsky making any more sense of Brooks's list than I can. Less, actually, since I don't assume all American's are busy paving the road to hell. In fact, I think he would see this list as proof that America was so depraved now that we can no longer even distinguish bad from good. 

Brooks is looking at character building, or at least forming, but to what end he seems not to care as much about. I'm kind of appalled to find myself defending Dostoevsky's position here, but what I see is character building in support of resume values. The end product is more productive middle class strivers. And this is why Montaigne stands out -- from my perspective in a good way -- on this list.

Now for the bit in bold. One of the first books referred to by Brooks is Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl and this is also at the heart of this book. Brooks only talks about religion, Augustine in particular, but also Day, but there is, in my opinion, a huge hole in this book where he fails to explicitly mention National Socialism and Communism, the other ways man commonly found meaning in the 20th century. 

I can almost believe that an American could write a book about values that is blind to the middle class world order, but that anyone can write a book on values so early in this new century that ignores the main plot points of the previous century seems odd, to say the least.


I'm trying to apply this character building to myself, with limited success. I struggled unsuccessfully against three different foreign languages and all I learned was that I'm not good with languages. I struggled with Scholastic Philosophy and learned that cult dogma is not my thing -- though I might have a little more success with the subject now than I did in my early twenties... but not much more, if I'm being honest. I struggled with conventional notions of sin and lust in my younger days, even after I lost faith in the religions that were the basis of those notions, but I always struggled in vain -- which is the point, from the view of the religious institution as clever con. The house always wins. 

I did learn from, and don't regret, my football playing days, but I'm not sure learning to hit the other person harder than he hits you is really character building. From struggling with technical writing I learned that other people are probably better suited to that line of work, except when I'm uniquely qualified, which is rarely the case. I have learned a great deal from a lifetime of making mistakes in almost any realm you can think of, which makes me better at many things, but not necessarily a better person.

Perhaps I haven't risked enough. If fact I'm almost certain that's true, but it's still hard for me to view common sense as a moral failing. Did Dante envision a circle of hell for people guilty of sins of omission? What would that be like? 

I did think of one thing that might possible apply, my being forced to go to the gym by my back problem. There's no way I would have done this on my own but have stuck with it now for about 25 years. But I'm not too impressed with this change as I'm pretty damn sure I wouldn't continue if I weren't worried about my back and keeping in shape for my trash sorting and hauling work. 

I'm like a Viennese Jew with a serious weakness for rich German bakery items, who lost weight and grew healthier in the camps. I appreciate the silver lining but can't take much personal credit.


pxiii This book is about Adam II. It's about how some people have cultivated strong character. It's about one mindset that people through the centuries have adopted to put iron in their core and to cultivate a wise heart...

A moment ago I was reading about Syria and the al-Assad family. Now there are some people who have cultivated strong character and put iron in their core. It isn't easy to rule an assemblage of peoples when you come from a minority tribe and minority religious group. This may have come easier to Hafez, as a military man, but for Bashar, who was trained as a doctor, it must have been a struggle. Perhaps this would be a good point in time to try to sell Game of Thrones virtues like those Bashar has learned, but I still think it would be a hard sell. And would we call these "eulogy" values? 

Isn't it more correct to say that the people in this book started with significant personality weaknesses that they found a way of overcoming or dealing with. In some cases, they really only lacked a direction for their lives which they eventually found.

Here's what I think Brooks is actually writing about, and it is interesting enough: When I was reading the biographies of Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance, I noticed that the U.S. Navy took some trouble to put young -- promising -- officers in circumstances that would challenge them. Halsey left the Academy as a football player and discipline problem so he was given M.P. duties early on and then sent to not only the Naval War College, but the Army War College as well. (That he ended up as naval commander under MacArthur in the South Pacific during WW2 looks almost like divine intervention, though Nimitz was likely the divinity in question.) The more intellectual (for the Navy) Spruance had a problem dealing with less cerebral officers, so the Navy kept assigning him to particularly dim and difficult superior officers until he found a way of working with them.

In the interest of creating better officers, the Navy forced these young officers to grow as people so they would be in a position to excel in their military careers. The care the Navy seemed to take in this task is surprising and impressive, if also supremely self-serving.

Since Plutarch's Parallel Lives is mentioned, and is an obvious inspiration for a collection of biographies like this, it's worth noting that Plutarch could have chosen to pair up his subjects quite differently. Instead of similar Greek and Roman biographies, he could have paired two Romans or two Greeks living in very different eras and contrasted the virtues each exemplified. Camillus may have been George Washington's model of virtue, but he would not have been a success in the age of Sulla and Caesar. The Younger Cato's problem was that his virtues were already out-of-step with his times, though I'm not sure he would have been any happier really in an earlier age. 

Next - 168. Francis Perkins