A Wank Supreme

Thanks for the shoutout, Professor Liberman!

The strongest Supreme.

Brooks ("Can People Change After Middle Age?") sounds as if he's wondering about himself again, or maybe Trump:

I sometimes read that people don’t change much after middle age.

He doesn't tell us where he reads it (is it always in the same place or does it pop up in different contexts?), so I'm not sure how seriously I want to take this. According to old William James, as I learn from the blog of Melissa Dahl, it was worse than that; personalities stop changing around 30, well before traditional middle age begins, according to his 1890 Principles of Psychology:

“In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

On the other hand, that picture has itself begun to soften in the nearly 130 years since it was formed. Many psychologists feel there's a genetic component to one's Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) that leaves you with a kind of fixed endowment that really won't change much beyond softening us around the edges, but a large study at UC Berkeley conducted by Sanjay Srivastava and published in 2003 found reasons to question that and, pleasantly enough, that we all tend to get better. We get more conscientious through our 20s, and more agreeable starting in the 30s; and although younger women are more neurotic and extraverted than younger men, that difference begins to erase itself with time. So isn't that nice! Was there anything else you wanted to know?

But everyday experience contradicts this on a weekly basis.

I mean of course everyday experience actually takes place seven times as much as weekly experience does. Are you suggesting that people change after middle age just 14% of the time? It's probably too stressful to do more of it.

For example, this week in Shreveport, La., I met two guys in their 60s named Bo Harris and Mike Leonard.

There you go. As Brooks gets older, he gets more conscientious and more extraverted! He would never have run around meeting people for journalistic purposes in Shreveport two or three years ago.

Bo was a football star at Captain Shreve High School. During his junior year, the school was integrated, but in the worst possible way.

It turns out the worst possible way was by not integrating it at all, at least as far as football was concerned:

The black players, whose high school was closing, were told to watch the existing team practice through a chain-link fence. Words were exchanged and Bo went out and pinned one guy, who had a broken bottle in his hand, up against the wall before administrators intervened.

Now we're cooking with gas! This is going to be a story that has some relation to race, and Bo the football star is the white guy. Probably he will get to know Mike Leonard, the black kid with the fearful weapon, later in life, and come to understand that the words didn't simply exchange themselves and he bears some responsibility for them; that the black players were really deeply hurt and wronged by their treatment as unpersons who could only be trusted to watch on the other side of the fence; and that that broken bottle was really just a Coke can, right?

Nah.

He went on to play linebacker at L.S.U. and wasn’t always a gentle soul. “Anger was a resource I called upon on the field” — and sometimes off it.

Mike joined Bo on the L.S.U. football team a few years later, though they didn’t get along. Mike’s father, who died when he was 14, had the bigoted attitudes of the time and place. Mike was raised in that tough guy culture. Once, an L.S.U. fan threw a whiskey bottle at Mike and hit him in the back. Mike charged the stands to take revenge.

Wait, so Mike's the white guy? I really had to reread this opening four or five times before I grasped that Mike and Bo are both white guys and race and bottles broken or otherwise weren't the issue; black people play no intentional role in the story, Bo and Mike just didn't like each other, and that wasn't the issue either.

In fact they hardly have anything to do with each other. Bo makes it into professional football, playing several seasons with the Bengals (where I imagine he must have spent plenty of time with black people. in the 1970s), Mike becomes a dentist, Bo turns financial advisor, and then gets opened, first in the heart, then in the leg:

Bo joined a group of 14 guys who had breakfast together every week. The friendships opened his heart. Then in 2009 he was driving with his preteen son with a .45 automatic rattling around on the dashboard. Bo heard an explosion and felt a pain in his leg worse than anything he’d experienced in the N.F.L.

So it's really about breakfast clubs! Breakfast clubs are the new bowling leagues, where a guy can loosen up some of the anger that kept him going through his years with the Bengals and working as a financial advisor. Though they can't protect you from getting shot, any more than keeping and bearing arms on the dashboard can. That's just something a man has to go through.

Meanwhile, Mike was prospering in the normal way, serving his patients, going to church and playing golf. But internally, he was troubled. He heard about Arnold Toynbee’s theory of civilizational decline and worried about America. Personally, he felt unfulfilled. When he went to the Pearly Gates would St. Peter really care how low his handicap was?

“In the dark recesses of my mind I didn’t trust people enough to let them know what was going on.” Then he was handed a book called “The Master Plan of Evangelism” and by Page 5 his life was altered.

For some people it's breakfast clubs and bullets, for others it's Toynbee and the Master Plan of Evangelism. I guess it all comes down to the same thing. Bo and Mike finally got together, in a cute meeting or possibly non-meeting at Shreveport's Community Renewsal, a builder of settlement houses for kids in dangerous neighborhoods,

where volunteers sponsor activities and build relationships. It’s one of the most successfully integrated organizations I’ve seen.

Mike pulled out of his dental practice at age 49 and works at Community Renewal, often without pay. Bo heard about the organization from a member of his breakfast group and is now a volunteer and donor. 

"Often without pay?" Sometimes he just works all day without punching in, though most of the time he doesn't? But that's how it goes in one of the most successfully integrated organizations Brooks has ever seen, that these two problematized old white guys finally become friends, or at least co-volunteers with literally thousands of rescued black children (Brooks never says they're black. just as he never says Bo and Mike are white, but you do kind of know) populating the background, creating the context in which this happy outcome can occur.

Mike says his younger self would have looked at his current self as some sort of crazy person. “I was unused to crying all the time.” But leaving the practice “was the greatest decision I ever made.”

(Wondering if he ever thought about sticking with the practice and offering these people some free dental care in his free time, if they might have thought that was a more useful deal than the relationship-building game, but I guess nobody cares that much about those people.)

But wait! There's more! It's about old folks changing after all, on the basis of a three-step procedure.

First, they’ve gone through a sort of moral puberty, as if a switch turned. They’ve lost most of their interest in egoistic calculation and some sort of primal desire for generativity has kicked in.

It's an analogue to sexual maturation, and you can't tell me it isn't creepy—generativity in Brooksish means "giving back to your community"—and it really sounds as if Bo and Mike have now grown big moral balls and are driven to spread their moral sperm wherever they can in the moral harem they've acquired. Do older women go through moral puberty too?

Second, they have what Baylor’s Paul Froese calls existential urgency, and obsessive connection to a social problem. When Gallup asked people around the world in 2007 if they felt a sense of meaning in their lives, Liberia came out as the nation where most people felt they led meaningful lives and the Netherlands came out last.

As Shreveport has become more and more like Liberia as opposed to the Netherlands that's so great for Bo and Mike! They can just keep crying their eyes out more or less nonstop. Who says conservatism never gave anybody anything?

Finally, they speak in the middle voice. Sometimes we speak in the passive voice, when things are happening to us. Sometimes we speak in the active voice, when we’re lecturing and taking charge. But mature activists speak in the middle voice, which is receiving and volleying, listening and responding, the voice of equal and intimate relationship.

The what the fuck? The middle voice? ENGLISH HAS PASSIVE AND ACTIVE BUT IT DOESN"T HAVE A MIDDLE VOICE which is a thing you have to deal with in Ancient Greek (Brooks may have run across the term in commentary on the New Testament and imagined he understood it instead of trying to find out what it meant). The Greek middle is a verb form indicating that the subject and object are the same, as in English reflexive, "I control myself." An example of an English verb with middle properties would be "shave" when you use it without an object ("I shave" as opposed to "the barber shaves me"); when I shave I'm both the agent of shaving and the object being shaved. It has nothing to do with whatever Brooks imagines he's talking about.

But then again it certainly does have something to do with Brooks, if you think of the verb "wank". Brooks's concept of this activity you'll be impelled to take up once you've gone through moral puberty, growing all that unsightly moral hair and buffeted by all those crazy moral impulses, is essentially of something you do on your own, actor and beneficiary (in an orgasm of tears). It turns out that the beneficiaries of the moral actions Brooks has been urging on us all these years aren't even entirely there, fading into the background with their bottles or weapons—or both—in their hands. It's you, middle-aged white man, with your middle-aged white circle-jerk buddies, who are lover and beloved in this story, a wank supreme.