Teaching compassion through drama

"Why don't we teach our children compassion?". 

Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week, implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.

On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion; they learn to get into someone else's skin.

I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful. 

Work-family balance: one front where Manmohan Singh has it easier than Barack Obama

Jodi Kantor's new book The Obamas reports that "Barack refuses to miss dinner with his family more than twice a week". Apparently, this is not good. Obama's family-centric approach "left him, when the going got tough, short of friends, short of people who owed him, short of people who felt that the White House was interested in them". Effective presidents are meant to be out and about, schmoozing with potential allies.

Powerful men across the political spectrum face the same trade-off - between family time and schmoozing - on this side of the pond. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all in what the Economist calls their "Gruffolo years", the time when dads read stories to their children. By most accounts, all three party leaders make time for their families. 

I clearly sympathize with Obama's and Cameron's choice (I'm writing this after having read out The Blackberry Mouse to my daughters). I want to believe that work can and should be organized so it can be done within defined working hours. But the truth is, there is a trade-off. I inhabit a less exalted world than the Obamas' and the Camerons', but even in my little world, schmoozing is clearly useful, but it is a potentially infinite drain on time and energy.

How much easier it must be for Manmohan Singh. He didn't have to face these hard trade-offs between bedtime stories and professional schmoozing when he became Prime Minister of India, aged 72.  Maybe working into what used to be the "retirement years" isn't all bad.

  

Roger Federer: The Middle Class Champion

The dust has now settled on Wimbledon 2011. We have two exciting young champions to celebrate in Petra Kvitova and Novak Djokovic. Rafael Nadal is taking time off to let his fractured foot heal. Maggie May, Andy Murray's dog, is also recovering, from all the stress and media scrutiny that comes with being a celebrity. Yet, after the fun and the excitement have died down, after the Pimm's No. 1 and the strawberries and cream have been put away, the taste that lingers on from Wimbledon 2011 is the taste of a golden age coming to an end: the Age of Roger Federer.

Just how golden the Age of Roger Federer has been became clear to me, thanks, unexpectedly, to the British press.

As is traditional during the Wimbledon fortnight, the British moaned on about the absence of a British champion. The explanation they most commonly trotted out is that British tennis is a middle class game. For instance, here is Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, writing about the Middle Class Malaise: "Why don't the British win Wimbledon anymore? Because we aren't hungry for success".

The term "middle class" merits some translation. In Britain, it does not describe people in the middle of the income distribution, a class now described as the "squeezed middle". It includes, and usually describes, affluent, well-educated, well-connected professionals: corporate executives, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, university professors. This haute bourgeois constitutes a middle class, rather than a privileged elite, because its members are notionally of lower rank than the hereditary landed aristocracy. These are the comfortably-off families who generally play and watch tennis for fun, and who generally fail to turn their children into Wimbledon champions. The claim that this class does not produce champions feels close to the bone, because this is the class I come from, and happily live within.

Prima facie, this reasoning looks like pure rubbish, nothing more than typical Pommy whingeing. But looking around at tennis, maybe the whingers have a point.

Consider, for instance, the Williams sisters' story. Their father, Richard Williams, son of a single mom from Shreveport, Louisiana, who now lives in the inner-city war zone of South Central Los Angeles, was idly watching tennis on TV when he was powerfully impressed by the prize money tennis players won. So he coaxed and cajoled his wife into having two more children, children #4 and #5, who would be raised from birth to play tennis and win that sweet prize money. Miraculously, this scheme worked, but it would never have occurred to even the most pushy tennis club members from suburban Long Island or Surrey.

Novak Djokovic, whose parents run a pizza restaurant in Belgrade, talks about growing up in a different kind of war-zone:

Djokovic reflected on how he had to negotiate some serious “ups and downs in life to become a champion”. The downs included a spell in spring 1999 when Djokovic, his parents and two brothers, Marko and Djordje, were living in a small apartment in Belgrade as Nato jets were targeting the Serbian capital.

He and Ana Ivanovic...along with Jelena Jankovic...would sometimes have to disappear into a bomb shelter when their practice in an empty swimming pool, which had been turned into a makeshift tennis court, was alarmingly interrupted.

Djokovic can remember the menacing drone of the low-flying bombers drowning out the renditions of “Happy Birthday to You” when he turned 12. Episodes like that build character. “All of us who went through that came out with their spirit stronger,” he once said. “Now we appreciate the value of life. We know how it feels to be living in 60 square metres being bombed.”

Andy Murray, the great British hope, comes from Dunblane, Scotland. Dunblane is about as far away from the manicured courts of SW19 as South Central LA is from the courts of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, or Bhagalpur, Bihar, is from the Bombay Gymkhana. Dunblane is best remembered in Britain for a horrific massacre of schoolchildren by a crazy gunman in 1996. Andy's brother Jamie was in school when this massacre happened.

While Andy Murray does come from a tough place, he may be an even better example of another clear pattern: champions created by pushy tennis-parents. Andy's story is less about escaping Dunblane, and more about being Judy Murray's son.

Judy Murray, then Judy Erskine from Glasgow, once tried to make it as a tennis pro. She took buses to European tournaments because she couldn't afford the airfare, slept in tents, and shared cigarettes in the locker room with Mariana Simonescu, then Bjorn Borg's girlfriend. Her tennis career failed. She became a secretary. She got married. Her marriage broke up, bitterly. Andy is her redemption.

Martina Hingis was brought up by an ambitious single mom who named her daughter after the great Martina Navratilova. Jelena Dokic has a famously pushy tennis-dad. The American Bryan twins' parents are tennis coaches, who made sure their boys spent every waking hour on either tennis or music. Bernard Tomic's dad used to coach Goran Ivanisevic. Andre Agassi's dad, who boxed for Iran in the Olympics, fits the pattern well enough.

This pattern isn't entirely new, but it is strengthening. Jimmy Connor's mother Gloria was a tennis teacher, who once attracted a fair bit of comment for being so present in her adult son's life. Gloria Connors was once a remarkable exception. Today she would be routine. In general, players coming through into top tier tennis either come from tough backgrounds, or have laser-focused tennis parents, or both.

An excellent book called Why England Lose looked at this pattern in football. More than 50% of the English population describe themselves as middle-class. They love football more than any other sport, and routinely send their sons to football coaching. Yet England's national team typically doesn't include a single middle-class player. The team consists entirely of men whose fathers were manual labourers, or on benefits, or former football professionals. These guys don't spend their precious teenage years swotting for math and physics A levels, or practicing classical music, or attending family reunions. They just play football. Therefore, they clock in the 10,000 hours of practice needed to be really good at something. The middle-class kids never do.

In this context, the LTA's strategy to develop British tennis is to spend surpluses from Wimbledon on courts in blighted inner-cities, and hope for a British version of Serena Williams, or Gael Monfils, to come through. Commentators talk about how Amir Khan, a boxer from Bolton with Pakistani roots, has breathed new life into British boxing. As a strategy, this makes sense. But at some deeper level, it sticks in my throat.

I'm all for social mobility. But surely, that is a serious question for schools, policing and public policy. Tennis is a game. Tennis is not meant to create pathways for social mobility, or win the Battle of Waterloo, or prove the superiority of the Aryan race, or of the Communist system, or serve any other political agenda. It shouldn't be about fulfilling a parent's frustrated dream either; that is just bad parenting. Tennis shouldn't really be about anything more than the pleasure of playing with a bat and ball.

The amateur ideal of previous generations was an attempt, however flawed, at letting the game just be a game. That ideal is now gone. As recently as the 1970s, the future of American tennis was the Stanford University tennis team. Now, kids who are serious about tennis wouldn't waste their time at Stanford University. Tennis, and sport in general, suffers from what Arnold Toynbee called a schism in the soul. The spirit in which amateurs play tennis is now completely disconnected from the spirit in which top professionals play.

Until Roger Federer.

Federer's greatness isn't fully captured by his sixteen grand slam titles. His reign is a golden age because of the spirit with which he played to win those sixteen titles, a spirit which is primarily about his love for playing the game. Here is a an extract from a story about Federer in the New Yorker:

... beneath that unflappable exterior I could sense that he was enjoying himself enormously—a deep, visceral joy that vibrated like an electric current in certain shots. Some of the top tennis players have given the opposite impression: Pete Sampras’s hangdog look on the court always made you want to cheer him up, and Andre Agassi, in his 2009 memoir, tells us again and again how he secretly hated the game. Federer clearly loves to play, and this is no small part of the pleasure in watching him.

Roger Federer didn't need to escape from a ghetto or a war zone. Federer's parents both work for Ciba-Geigy, the pharmaceuticals company, near Basel, Switzerland. This is the sort of upbringing I, and most readers of this blog, can totally relate to. My father was a tennis-playing executive at a multinational corporation. So am I.

Federer didn't need to fulfil the ambitions of a tennis-parent. His parents played recreational tennis at the firm's club. "We’d spend weekends on the tennis court," Lynette (his mother) recalled, "and the kids"—Roger and his sister, Diana, who was two years older—"would join us... It was Roger’s decision, at twelve, to quit playing soccer and to enter the program at the Swiss National Tennis Center, in Ecublens, two and a half hours by train from home.

Roger Federer's balanced perspective, his view of tennis as just a part of life, is why it now feels like a golden age is ending. Novak Djokovic has taken tennis to an entirely new level. Andy Murray has sworn to catch up by "working two per cent three per cent harder". These guys already work very hard. The marginal cost of that extra "two per cent three per cent" is high.

With his sixteen titles already in the bag, with his two young daughters at home, I doubt that Federer will put in that extra two per cent three per cent. He could spend that time at home, attending, say, a teddy bear's tea party. I know I would. Despite that, I think Roger Federer will will himself on to one more grand slam title before he rides off into the sunset. His best chance is at Wimbledon next year. One final chance then for Wimbledon, and the tennis world, to enjoy its great middle-class champion.

Tiger Mothers and OPEC

Amy Chua's fifteen minutes of fame are almost over. The Tiger Mother story has played itself out as a news item. Yet, after having read the Economist, Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, David Brooks in the NYT, Larry Summers in the WSJ, The Guardian, Slate and probably a dozen other stories about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I feel like the mainstream media are missing the central point, the reason why Tiger Mothers are both so heartening and so scary.

By now, most blog readers probably know the outlines of Ms Chua's story. Her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is supposedly a memoir about raising children on a strict regimen of no TV, no video games, no play dates and no sleepovers. The time that was freed up was reinvested in music practice and homework. Her regimen worked. Her daughters, now 18 and 15, grew into music prodigies with straight A grades.

Amy Chua spiced up this unsurprising story with the provocative claim that Chinese mothers are superior to Western ones; that her experience is evidence of this superiority. By mischievously framing the question in racial, or geopolitical, terms, she twanged a bunch of recessionary anxieties about Western decline and the rise of China. She has been rewarded for this cynicism with a firestorm of media commentary, and a place on both Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. The racial and geopolitical sub-text is so deliciously juicy that it has drawn most of the media attention.

However, to me, the Chinese angle is irrelevant. I grew up among the Tamil Brahmins of Mylapore, a culture which is chock-a-block with Tiger Mothers. This also kills the theory that Tiger Mothers are somehow products of the immigrant experience.

This isn't about Asian values either. Slackistan, a new movie I'm itching to watch, should illustrate this point. It is about the indolent lassitude of privileged young Pakistanis; Asian setting, no Tiger Moms in sight.

American Jews are pushy parents, according to stereotype. In this, they are no different from other Western families who want to provide well for their children. Spotting Western Tiger Parents from a wide range of cultures is as easy as watching tennis on TV. Venus and Serena Williams' dad Richard, or Andy Murray's mom Judy, or Martina Hingis' mom Melanie - Tiger Parents all. Every race, religion and ethnicity can and does embrace the Protestant work ethic, in the right circumstances.

Those right circumstances are defined by incentives. Tiger parenting happens when parents respond to incentives. If good grades open up a credible path to a better life, parents will push their children to get good grades. The bigger the gap between the parent's life and the promised life for the children, in terms of either tangible income or status, the harder the parent will push the children.

Slightly less obvious, the same dynamic works with parents further up the food chain. These are parents in high-status positions, who are not wealthy enough to pass the same status on to the next generation. Senior civil servants, army officers or tenured university professors like Amy Chua, who are rich in status but not in wealth, might push their children even harder than the aspiring middle class. One of the clearest results in behavioural economics is that the pain of losing something is far greater than the joy of gaining the same thing.

On the other hand, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and members of the Drones Club were so completely secure in their privilege that swotting to better one's life made no sense. Ditto for George W Bush. Ditto also for Jawaharlal Nehru, who was never more than an average student through his Harrow and Cambridge years. Similarly, coal miners who can only imagine that their sons will also be coalminers are unlikely to become Tiger Dads who push their sons to straight As.

Looked at this way, Tiger Parents, and the middle-class bourgeois values they reflect, are fundamentally good. They inhabit worlds with social mobility. They inject even more mobility these worlds with their energy, ambition and enterprise. They make democracy and capitalism possible; if this feels like an over-claim please read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom, a book I loved and wholeheartedly endorse.

So ambition and hard work are good. But how much is too much?

The scary thing about Amy Chua is not her ambition, or her Chinese-ness (she is a second generation American, married to a Jew, whose parents emigrated from the Philippines). Her problem is extent. No TV or video games until homework and music practice are done? Fine. No dinner unless the "The Little White Donkey" is played perfectly? No way. But that, apparently, is what Amy Chua does.

I find the most intuitive way to understand this is with another Econ 101 concept: cartels.

Consider OPEC, the cartel of twelve countries which controls most of the world's crude oil. It is in the best interests of the group as a whole to maintain a high price for crude oil. Their oil ministers meet, agree on production quotas, limit supply, and drive up crude oil prices to profit-maximizing levels. However, it is in the best interests of each individual country to renege on the agreement, and produce more than the agreed quota of crude. The higher the price of crude, the stronger the individual country's incentive to renege (especially if it is a democracy heading into an election year). As more countries renege on their production quotas, the price of crude drops, and ideally the cartel breaks down in a flurry of bitterness, finger-pointing and name calling.

Cartels can also do good. Everybody benefits from low trade barriers. Each country has an incentive to "cheat" and raise protectionist walls for local political gains. Supra-national arrangements, like the WTO or the EEC, are all about making it harder for individual countries to cheat, and therefore making everyone better off. In general, cartels work if they have fewer participants, if cheating is easy to spot, and if punishments for cheating are severe.

The supply of homework hours is analogous to the supply of crude oil. All families would be better off if there were limits on pushy parenting; say, children have at least an hour of unstructured time every day. The problem is with enforcing a cartel to limit the supply of homework time. Lots of suppliers, no way to monitor cheating, no punishments for being caught... this cartel would break down in a flash. Tiger parents will immediately turn that hour of free time to homework, to get ahead of the competition.

One of the few things I love about Amy Chua's story is that for fifteen years she never told her peers how hard she pushed her kids. She fabricated medical reasons why her daughters couldn't go on play dates or sleepovers. Her peers had no way to know she was "cheating", and couldn't punish her with social ostracism. A lot of the vitriol being directed at her now is the finger-pointing and name-calling that happens when a cartel breaks. I'm sure a lot of the finger-pointers and name-callers are secretly vowing to double-down and push their children even harder. I don't think there is a happy and harmonious resolution to having Tiger Mothers in our midst.

Sport as a metaphor for life might work here. A sportsman needs to focus, play hard, and play to win, even when the opponent isn't playing the right way. Say the umpire doesn't call a chucker at cricket. As a batsman, you just mark your guard again and bat on. Say your opponent is calling your shots long at a club tennis match. You stop going for the lines and find another way to win. Playing their game is not an option. Letting them win is also not an option. I guess that is one way to deal with Tiger Parents, because for better and for worse, they are here to stay.

Galli Galli Sim Sim

An auspicious post to wish all readers a happy new year...

Just discovered a piece of children's entertainment which is not just mostly harmless, but positively good. It is teaching my children that the differences between cultures around the world are there to be enjoyed, but that underneath these differences human beings are essentially the same, that we are The Family of Man (I think). This is a collection of video and music clips from Sesame Street around the world, published by Putumayo, a favourite music label.

My family is now singing along with Elmo, Big Bird and Sesame Street stars from India, Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. The look and sound of each of these video clips are distinctive and local. Yet, the same spirit and mood clearly animates each of these local executions. Unity in diversity, that old mantra of Indira Gandhi-esque national integration, applies not just to India but to all of humanity.

More generally, I also think this is a fair representation of how globalisation impacts local cultures and identity. At one time, even serious and well-intentioned people in India would have had doubts about whether letting Coca Cola and their ilk operate in the country would somehow dilute India's Indianness. The first debate I ever won, back in high school in the mid 80s, was about "Have we sold our culture for a pair of jeans?". I opposed the motion back then.

Now, two decades after liberalization started, that argument feels settled. Coca Cola and Sesame Street are very much a part of the Indian landscape, and have figured out that it makes a ton of commercial sense to adopt an Indian idiom. India is changing rapidly, India is becoming ever more closely connected to the rest of humanity, and yet India remains as distinctively Indian as it ever was.

And exactly the same logic probably applies to Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa as well.

Tear-free shampoo and the frightening guest

Took my daughters swimming on Sunday. Showered many blessings on the wonderful person who invented tear-free shampoo. And reflected that the history of science is obsessed with boring things like penicillin and does not celebrate genuinely great advances like tear-free shampoo.

This blogger is not alone in trying to set right this historic injustice. The late Viktor Schreckengost - whose name means "frightening guest" in German - is the grand-daddy of the sort of scientist who invents tear-free shampoo. Dan Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek thinks Mr Schreckengost has "done more for humanity than any single politicican in the twentieth century". Homage is in order.

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/01/viktor-schrecke.html

The lion, the witch and the wardrobe

My six year old daughter, Arundhati, is buzzed with the excitement of being able to read by herself. She is devouring books too quickly for my wife or I to edit what she's reading, or frame and contextualize her books for her. She's on her own now.

She has just devoured Enid Blyton's the Magic Faraway Tree (four times), Roald Dahl's Charile and the Chocolate Factory, and C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. She's a hop, skip and jump away from the rest of Enid Blyton, moving moving on to the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and perhaps Tolkien.

This is potent stuff. Fiction like this can shape values for a lifetime. Which is why I was a little worried when I noticed Arundhati reading C. S. Lewis. Because C. S. Lewis was, "not to put too fine a point on it, a racist and sexist pig."

Should I point out the racism to Arundhati, so she is better able to protect herself from toxic attitudes? Or should I just let her enjoy the narrative, and trust that the rest of her upbringing will give her enough protection from toxic thoughts? In the balance, my wife and I chose to let her just enjoy the narrative. But it wasn't an easy choice.

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Am I being being paranoid about C. S. Lewis? Nope. Tragic but true. A bigot is he. Here's Anne Fadiman's take on C. S. Lewis in her excellent introduction to Rereadings:

When my son was eight, I read C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy aloud to him...

Henry loved The Horse and His Boy, the tale of two children and two talking horses who gallop across an obstacle-fraught desert in hope of averting the downfall of an imperilled kingdom that lies to the north...

My jaw dropped when I realized that Aravis, its heroine, is acceptable to Lewis only because she acts like a boy - she's interested in "bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming"- and even dresses like a boy whereas the books only girly girl, a devotee of "clothes and parties and gossip" is an object of contempt. Even more appaling is Lewis's treatment of the Calormenes, a brown-skinned people who wear turbans and carry scimitars. Forty years ago the near homonym slipped me...

The book's hero, Shasta, is the ward of a venial Calormene fisherman, but, as a visitor observes, "this boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine, but the boy is fair and white." That's how we know he belongs to a noble northern race instead of an uncouth southern one...

It was difficult to read this sort of thing out to Henry without comment...I blurted out "Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy is not really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?"...

Henry...didn't want to analyze, criticize, evaluate or explicate the book...He wanted to find out if Shasta and Aravis would get to Archenland in time to warn King Lune that his castle was about to be attacked by evil Prince Rabadash and two hundred Calormen horsemen. "Mommy," he said fiercely, "can you just read?"

I sort of trust that Anne Fadiman's son will not turn out to be a racist or sexist despite having swallowed C. S. Lewis's poison.
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And how harshly should one judge C. S. Lewis himself? Was he just reflecting the spirit and attitude of his time? Or was he worse than that? Given his intelligence, erudition and the privilege he enjoyed as an Oxford don, I'm inclined to judge him harshly...but I can see both points of view.

And what about Tolkien? He is, of course, too sacred to be judged. But it does worry me a bit that he was a good friend of C. S. Lewis. I remember seeing their bust side by side when my sister Radhi and I had visited Exeter College, Oxford. This was before Hollywood made these men famous with Shadowlands and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.