Nine-Things-I-Learned-in-Ninety-Years

Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years

Edward Packard

Introduction

Looking back over my life from when I was about ninety, I ruefully

reflected on how often I went off the rails. That I’d survived thus

far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit,

determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck. Considering my

most memorable lapses, the consequences of which ranged from

unfortunate to catastrophic, I suspect that they all would have been

avoided if it hadn’t taken me most of a lifetime to get a grip on a

few basic principles. I’m laying them out here for readers who

might want to be aware of them.

Nine Things I Learned:

1) to be self-constituted

In her book Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (2009)

Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard draws on Kant’s and

Aristotle’s philosophy to make a case for self-constitution — being

“consistent, unified, and whole”–– having “integrity.”

  Korsgaard says that to be good at being a person, you need to be

committed to acting in accord with what Kant called “a universal

law,” for which I would substitute “a virtuous moral framework.”

How is that constructed? A strand of thought in philosophy asserts

that moral precepts can’t be scientifically established –– they are

indicia of the ways of thinking of particular cultures or religions.

Arrayed against this dismal take on our need for guidance are

propositions in the “we hold these truths to be self-evident” category,

basic principles like, what causes or tends to cause misery and

suffering is bad; what causes or tends to cause joy and happiness is

good. Anger, hatred, envy, jealousy, dishonesty, meanness,

vengefulness, cruelty, resentment, and despair are bad; joy,

cheerfulness, kindliness, fairness, compassion, and honesty are good.

That’s my moral framework as far as I’ve developed it.

I think of life as like being on a raft drifting downstream on a river

of time, other people getting on and off; meanwhile, you’re poling,

trying to steer the best course, sometimes hanging up on a shoal,

maybe falling asleep and awakening almost on the opposite bank,

where the wind took you, which is not where you meant to be, getting

back mid-stream somehow and carried along with the current through

sometimes wildly unexpected weather until you reach the sea. Maybe

that’s why I admire Huckleberry Finn’s moral framework: “What you

want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and

feel right and kind towards the others.”

Professor Korsgaard says, “Your movements have to come from

your constitutional rule over yourself. Otherwise, you’ll be ruled by a

heap of impulses.” That permeated my consciousness. If you aren’t

self-constituted, if you aren’t unified, if you don’t have integrity, you’ll

be a mess.

But what if you are a self-constituted, self-aggrandizing narcissist

who is “consistent, unified, and whole” in your life project of gaining

ever more money, power, and dominance without regard to how it

affects anyone else? That’s not in accord with my moral framework, or

Huck Finn’s, or with Kant’s and Korsgaard’s universal law. You need

moral strands woven into your self-constituted character to be a good

person.

Once you’ve achieved that — once you are virtuously self-

constituted — you will be self-assured and have reason to be so. You

will be emotionally invulnerable to being pushed around. You will not

entertain feckless impulses, much less yield to them. It will be in your

nature to do the right thing.

2) to keep awake and aware

If you’re not awake and aware, you’re sleepwalking. I spent much of my

life in this state, and I know all about it. When you’re sleepwalking, you

fail to consider what the purpose is of what you’re doing and how what

you do or don’t do will affect you and how it will affect others.

Sleepwalkers can go off the rails and stay there unless they luckily

stumble back on track.

Sleepwalking doesn’t necessarily diminish mental acuity, though I

think it invariably affects judgment. Many sleepwalkers hold positions of

power. Coming upon Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe

Went to War in 1914 (2014), I knew at once why he had chosen that title.

In each of the primarily responsible countries, men of imperious bent and

puffed-up notions of honor prevailed over wiser and more thoughtful

ones in formulating and implementing national policy. Almost without

exception, those responsible for making fateful decisions proved

incapable of weighing the risk of a staggering continent-wide catastrophe

such as was about to unfold. Referring to Austria-Hungary, whose

leaders were determined to act forcefully after the assassination of

Archduke Ferdinand, Clark says that the decision-makers had no basis

for their preconceived notions of how events would play out.

Charles Swann, a principal character in Proust’s novel In Search of

Lost Time, gives us a close-up look at how a sleepwalking state is

initiated. Swann is intelligent, cultivated, and socially adept, but

whenever he must confront an unpleasant fact if he is to make a rational

decision, “a mental lethargy, which was, with him, congenital,

intermittent, and providential, happened at that moment to extinguish

every particle of light in his brain.”

  Sleepwalking is an all too accessible alternative to confronting

inconvenient facts. If you are sleepwalking, and it becomes habitual, a

day will come when you act, or fail to act, in a way such that, were you

in an awakened state, it would be obvious to you that if you continue

your present course of action, or inaction, a catastrophe will ensue.

  One can stop sleepwalking and keep awake and aware by becoming a

buddha. This might seem impossible, outlandish, outré, and out of the

question to you, but I have it on the authority of the revered Buddhist

monk Thich Nhat Hanh and my own experience that it’s doable. In

Hanh’s book The Art of Living (2017), he says that being a buddha

doesn’t require any particular belief or practice. Simply “being fully

present, understanding, compassionate, and loving” is enough.

  "It's not so difficult to be a buddha," says Thich Nhat Hanh. "Just

keep your awakening alive all day long.”

3) to consider what others may be thinking and feeling

For most of my life, whenever I spoke or acted, I first considered what

seemed to be in my best interest, or, more often, gave no thought to the

matter at all. Only rarely did I consider how anyone affected by what I

said, or did, or failed to say or do, would react.

Fixed in my mind and occasionally emerging in my consciousness

is a conversation I had during college years. It was with a man a

generation older than me, whom I wanted to impress. At a pivotal point,

I thought of a witty remark I could make regarding his boat. I imagined

that I would be displaying a high degree of sophistication in making it.

That was the extent of my thinking before I blurted it out. If I had taken

a few seconds to consider it further, I would have realized that, although

there was a possibility that this gentleman would find my remark to be

clever, it was certain that he would find it to be crude and offensive, so

much so that I’m reluctant to repeat it here, half a century later.

Despite this memorable lesson, it took me a long time to learn to

give thought to what may be going on in the minds of people I’m

interacting with, both empathetically –– sensing how others are feeling,

and cognitively –– conjecturing how they are thinking. The latter is

called “theory of mind,” it being one’s theory as to what’s going on in

another’s mind.

Littered among my memories like pieces of trash along a trail are

occasions when I said something that worked to my disadvantage even

though I had supposed that it would impress, or persuade, or engender

respect for me on the part of the person I addressed it to. Belatedly, I

became aware that decisions involving interactions with others should

be informed by reflecting on what whomever you’re interacting with

may think and feel in response to what you say and do.

4) to make happiness my default state of mind

For some years, I scrolled down Facebook posts every day and once in a

while came across one by the Dalai Lama. One day, I read:

As long as we observe love for others and respect for their

rights and dignity in our daily lives, then whether we are

learned or unlearned, whether we believe in the Buddha

or God, follow some religion or none at all, as long as we

have compassion for others and conduct ourselves with

restraint out of a sense of responsibility, there is no doubt

we will be happy.

That got me out of my normal slouch and sitting up straight. Can

happiness be assured if you just follow a few simple precepts? No need

for mastering meditation techniques, observing elaborate religious

practices, or divining the wisdom to be found in ancient texts?

I’m sure that the Dalai Lama, a practical man who respects science,

would agree that one can’t be happy when being subjected to extreme

emotional or physical pain. But for most of us who are fortunate enough

to rarely or never experience vicious assaults, I came to believe that, if

we feel and behave the way the Dalai Lama recommends, happiness can

become our usual state of being –– our default state of mind.

Later, I came upon another post by the Dalai Lama:

  Even more important than the warmth and affection
  we receive, is the warmth and affection we give… .
  More important than being loved, therefore, is to love.

I’ve come to think that understanding this, too, is required for

happiness to become one’s default state of mind.

5) to seek an eternal perspective

I said that the third thing I learned in ninety years was to consider what

other people may be thinking and feeling. The 17th century philosopher

Benedict Spinoza expanded his view from that of his own ego to include

the view of other people, and beyond the view of other people to the

view of what he called “God,” or “Nature,” –– meaning the entire

cosmos. He believed that, through knowledge and understanding, one

could find joy and equanimity in the natural order of things. It’s a

perspective akin to that of Buddhism, whose central thought, the 20th

century mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote, is “compassion without

attachment,” a condition in which “you can stay alive, in action, but be

disengaged from desire for, and fear of, the fruits of your action.”

  Achieving a similarly expansive embrace of life and the world –– an

eternal perspective –– led Spinoza to conclude that, “A man strong in

character hates no one, is angry with no one, envies no one, is indignant

with no one, scorns no one, and is not at all proud.”

  Can you feel fully alive if you are trying to achieve a challenging

goal, but, because you are disengaged from desire or fear (have an

eternal perspective), you don’t have an emotional investment in what’s

going on about you? Isn’t life colorless if you are never thrilled when

you succeed and dismayed when you fail? Achieving extraordinary

equanimity has obvious merit, but if you are emotionally disengaged,

doesn’t it drain the excitement out of life? Aren’t you less likely to be

satisfied?

   Not necessarily. In Peter Matthiessen's book The Snow Leopard,

(1978) he describes his trek with the zoologist George Schaller, in the

Himalayas, in search of a reclusive snow leopard. They found scat, but

never caught a glimpse of the exotic animal they were stalking.

When they returned to base camp, a Buddhist monk asked Matthiessen if

they had seen the snow leopard. When Matthiessen replied that they had

not, the monk said, “No! Isn’t that wonderful?”

   It would have been very unBuddhist if the monk had said, "How

unfortunate.” Was saying “Isn’t that wonderful?” a stretch? I don’t think

so, the point being that it was a release from attachment, the expedition

itself was wonderful, their thinking and talking about it was wonderful,

that they were “alive, in action,” was wonderful; and that there was a

majestic animal nearby that was not to be seen was wonderful.

  Some philosophers find seeking an eternal perspective to be at odds

with pursuing one’s legitimate self-interest. In his book The View from

Nowhere (1986), Thomas Nagel seems to see it as a balancing act. He says,

“The hope is to develop a detached perspective that can coexist with and

comprehend the individual one.” I think Spinoza would say that an eternal

perspective needn’t be qualified to accommodate a self-fulfilling

life; it’s a necessary condition of having one, bringing with it equanimity

and joy.

6) to guard against self-deception

        Certitude is not the test of certainty.
                                                         Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)

Self-deception occurs when one’s decisions and conclusions are driven

or influenced by skewed beliefs, unbalanced emotional states, wishful

thinking, and so forth. It doesn’t take much for us to be subconsciously

ingenious at justifying insupportable conclusions. A common example

of the process is confirmation bias –- giving greater credence and

weight to data supporting one’s entrenched beliefs and ignoring or

minimizing what would undermine them. People who are brilliant and

highly educated can be as vulnerable to self-deception as anyone. They

employ their superior intellectual capability to display a virtuosity of

sophistry most of us could never attain.

 In his book Things That Bother Me (2018), the British

philosopher Galen Strawson quotes two notable thinkers who lived four

centuries apart, but cast lights of similar wave-lengths on how self-

deception becomes entrenched in one’s mind:

Once the human mind has favored certain views, it pulls

everything else into agreement with and support for them.

Should they be outweighed by more powerful countervailing

considerations, it either fails to notice these, or scorns them,

or makes fine distinctions in order to neutralize or reject

them … thereby leaving untouched the authority of its

previous position.

                                             Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in

any propositions, however absurd, when they are sustained

by a community of likeminded believers.

                                             Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024)

  In his book The Disordered Mind (2018), Nobel laureate

neuroscientist Eric Kandel notes, “All conscious perception depends on

unconscious processes.” Unconscious processes wreaked havoc on my

decision making.

  I had planned, as the heading of this section, to claim that I had

learned to avoid self-deception, but after reading more about it, I

decided that I had learned only to guard against self-deception. At that

moment, a cloud of uncertainty threatened to envelop me. Recalling

Yeats’s foreboding poem, “The Second Coming” (1919), I had to tell

myself: Don’t let it be that “The best lack all conviction” is true.

7) how to confront mortality

                              Keep death and exile before your eyes each day. . .
                                                                                 Epictetus  (d. 135 C.E. )

                              The free man thinks of death, least of all things.

                                               Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677)

The ancient Greek and Roman Stoics believed that it’s wise to

contemplate death well ahead of the event. I suppose their idea was that

it’s desirable to contemplate death’s inevitability so as not to be shocked

when it’s staring you in the face. If you have cultivated Stoicism, you

might be better able to bear unexpected news that you have little time to

live. Stoicism is a noble stance, but I prefer Spinoza’s, which is that the

path to equanimity, self-control, and disinterest in one’s mortality is to

be found in gaining an eternal perspective through knowledge and

understanding.

   Spinoza rejected all supernatural claims of the world's religions,

including anthropomorphic conceptions of God and of rewards and

punishments administered by a deity to living persons or in an

afterlife. He lived simply, but disdained asceticism. He considered

doctrinal and myth-based religions to be superstitions; yet he was

pragmatic. Knowing that his landlady found comfort in her religious

beliefs, he took care not to undermine her faith.

I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never

see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of

impersonal life to attain greater intensity — possible for us to

gain much more independence — than is usually believed, of

the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.

                                              George Eliot (1819-1880)

Eliot translated Spinoza’s treatise, Ethics, into English. The passage

quoted above, from one of her letters, is a snapshot of an eternal

perspective in the making.

The best way to overcome the fear of death — so at least it

seems to me — is to make your interests gradually wider and

more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede,

and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.

                                             Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

In Russel’s essay “A Philosophy for Our Time” he observed that

Spinoza’s philosophy generated an impersonal feeling that overrode

anxiety, and that, even as Spinoza’s death was approaching, “he

remained completely calm at all times, and in the last day of his life,

showed the same friendly interest in others as he did in days of health.”

I look forward to oblivion.

                                             Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003)

Katharine Hepburn was one of the most high-spirited and goodhearted

public figures of her time. Her sentiment, quoted above, which she

expressed when she was aged, helpless and futureless, exemplifies the

fearlessness and bravura that marked her character throughout her

illustrious life.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither

worrying about it, nor about the unfinished gardening.

                                           Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

The great essayist was probably as sensible a person as anyone who

ever lived.

8) what an outsized role is played by luck;

In his book, Night Thoughts (2009), the actor, playwright, and essayist

Wallace Shawn says that he was born lucky (that is –– to well-heeled,

sophisticated, highly intelligent, generally enlightened parents). But

unlike most people who were born lucky and take their unusual

circumstances for granted, Shawn began to notice the differences

between lucky and unlucky people at an early age. “Lucky people tend to

expand, to fill the space their luck has given them,” he writes.

  We've become familiar with the very very lucky — billionaires who

buy penthouses in incongruously tall towers and fund politicians who

express their gratitude by revising the Internal Revenue Code so it favors

to an even greater degree the rich and especially the superrich, who then

rest their bulky elbows even more heavily on the scales of what happens

in our governing bodies, perpetuating for them what they think of as a

virtuous circle. But even many rungs farther down the wealth ladder are

many who are luckier than most people who ever lived. Shawn notes that

if you’ve lived a relatively peaceful life and not been bombed or harassed

or had to live in fear and you’ve been able to get two or three decent

meals a day, you’re lucky. And if you’ve accomplished a lot in life, it’s at

least in large part because you were lucky in the opportunities you had,

in how your path was smoothed, and in how someone helped you along

at a critical time.

  So much depends on luck: your genetic makeup, the circumstances in

which you grew up, the mix of events and influences that formed your

disposition and your predispositions, the random happenings that swiveled

you in directions not of your choosing. It follows, I think, that the luckier

you’ve been, the more humility and generous spiritedness you need, and

the unluckier you’ve been, the more compassion for yourself you need,

and unfair as it may seem, the more you need irrepressible resolve.

9) to consider what you have at the moment.

As a general principle, be dynamic, take initiatives, don’t be a stick in

the mud, and so forth, for sure, but there are times when it’s all

important to first think for a moment, lest later you reflect that it would

have only taken a moment —

For it falls out

           That what we have we prize not to the worth

           Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,

           Why, then we rack the value, then we find

           The virtue that possession would not show us

           While it was ours.

                                                     Much Ado About Nothing
                                                      William Shakespeare

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