No Family, No Chance

Whenever I hear someone say that the solution to our social problems is a return to strong families, I cringe. Don’t get me wrong, I think families are important. I'd have nothing to write about in this blog if it weren't for my family. And there is no question that a good family, one with the emotional and financial resources, and the time, to support one another, gives a child an important head start. Such a family doesn't guarantee success for its offspring, but it certainly doesn't guarantee failure.

That's the problem with a bad family: it almost seems to guarantee failure. If you're abused or neglected and malnourished, if there is no one to help you when you need it, to show you the way when you stray, the odds are you aren't going to have such a good life. You're more likely to end up in prison than college, more likely to pursue drugs than dreams, more likely to engage in risky behaviors that lead to teen crime and pregnancy and effectively end your adult life before it begins.

We have a notion of family as a kind of Platonic ideal: we bear our children and look after them; with every generation the cycle repeats and humans flourish. Maybe that ideal was reflected in reality in some long-ago time, but no one can read Hugo or Dickens and not realize that, especially among the poor, it hasn't been that way for a long while.

There seems to be something in our nature that wants failure to be a choice. If someone is fat, he just doesn't have the willpower to push away from the table; if someone is out of work, she isn't looking hard enough; if a child goes hungry, his parents are lazy or negligent, or both. I suspect the psychological underpinning of this is in part our understandable desire to preserve the illusion that we are in control of our own fates--that bad stuff won't happen to me. But I fear that another part of the reason may be to absolve us from responsibility for doing anything about the adversity that befalls others--that's their problem, it's up to them to solve it. This enables us to feel sympathy, to reassure ourselves that our hearts are in the right place, without having to open our checkbooks.

Let's start with children. Surely no one thinks it's a newborn's fault that he was born with drugs in his system. Surely no one thinks a toddler should be responsible for finding her own food, or that a six-year old should teach herself to read, that a twelve year old should be forced to learn math by intuition. Kids need nurture and education. Can we all agree on that? And if they don't get it, not only are their lives the worse for the lack, society as a whole bears the inevitable cost. We not only lose their productivity, we pay for their prisons, for their medical care later in life, even their burial. And what do we or they get for those societal expenditures? Nothing.

Judith Warner had a good column in today's NYT in which she urged more employer support for families, more generous paid family leave, more flexible work schedules to accommodate family emergencies and needs. Higher level employees already have many of these benefits, but those down the salary scale have few. And it’s those lower-paid employees, the ones without the flexibility of greater financial resources, who most need the benefits. If we want the family to take responsibility for itself, we may have to give it a little help.

As hard as it is in today's political environment to get food stamps and day care for kids, it's even more difficult to get help for their parents. The relentless drumbeat to reduce unemployment benefits is just one example. The feeling seems to be that grownups are not children, and they can damn well look after themselves.

The problem is that many of them can't. Many are young men and women raised in poverty without the education to make much of their lives. Many others are older and have lived in poverty all their lives; as far as they can see, there is no way out. And yet we--not all of us, but too many--we who have ourselves benefited from good families look upon these unfortunates in the same way some look down upon people who are obese: those folks need to get a grip, try harder, pull themselves up by their bootstraps. While that may be a Puritanically satisfying plan of action, it's not going to happen.

Let's talk about obesity. Why has it increased so much in the last fifty years? Did we all just get lazy and fat? Did we all loose our willpower? I don't think so. I think we all started eating refined and processed foods that gave us more sugar, salt and fat, and in bigger doses, than our bodies were evolved to handle. Too many calories equals too much body-fat. Is that our own fault? Yes and no. It's sort of like smoking and cancer: we just didn't realize what these new foods and eating habits were doing to us until it was too late. Now we know, but were hooked. Nothing is harder than quitting smoking, except maybe quitting eating stuff that's bad for you.

The point is that we're not always fully responsible for what happens to us. Humans are good at many things, but changing established patters of behavior isn't one of them. And when those mass behaviors create widespread damage, it has to be the job of all of us to clean up the mess. No one person, no one unit of social organization--like the family--can do that. It's too hard. We have to work together. We have to fill in the gaps. We have to take care of those who aren't being taken care of.

I don't think many disagree with those broad principles. Maybe a few hardcore libertarians, but not many. The problem is that we haven't yet developed remediation systems that we all agree make sense. People worry that the government wastes taxpayers' money with inefficient programs that are riddled with fraud. Private charity hardly makes a dent. Workplace reforms come slowly, because capitalism is a jealous mistress who punishes the unprofitable. In the absence of solutions in which we all have confidence, we’re having a hard time mustering support--within companies, communities and governments--for specific programs.

Okay, so we're just going to go slowly, as we always do. We're going to grope our way. We're going to get better and better over time, but maybe over a long time. While we're on that long journey, though, I think we should be singing "We Shall Overcome" and not "Get a Job."

The Map of Our Lives

At my father's funeral, the local pharmacist, who had a soda counter where Dad went to eat strawberry sundaes to try to keep up his weight, to try to stay alive to see his fiftieth birthday, told me that the year I got my first bonus as an associate in an LA law firm was the year my dad knew he'd lost me. Until then, I guess he'd hoped I might come back to Nashville. He'd offered to buy me a house there before I left, offered me a junior membership in the country club where I grew up playing golf. But I couldn't wait to get out of there. Nashville was a small town. Everybody knew me and my family, or at least that's how it seemed to me. I wanted a little anonymity, a chance to figure out for myself who I was.

The cities where my children are. Or, "Why is this map smiling?"

Three years later, who I was was a son grieving for his father. His death didn't make me wish I'd not left--not then or even now, with the perspective of time--but it taught me something. Several things, really. For instance, I didn't realize until I heard it in the tone of my father's friend the pharmacist how much my father had wanted me to stay. He offered the inducements I mentioned, but he never really said it. Or maybe I just wasn't ready to hear it. We could have come back together in a few years (maybe I could have enticed him to come to LA), but I needed space first, and then he was gone.

Flash forward a few decades. Here I am again, but this time the shoe is on the other foot. I'm the father hoping his sons will come back home. One is. Not because I want him to (although I’m sure he’s glad I do), but because this is where he means to seek his fortune. He'll graduate in a couple of weeks with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. Silicon Valley is to him what LA was to me when I was his age: a honeyed land of opportunity. Everything he wants to do is here. Meg's and my good luck is that so are we.

But our other son wants to be an economist, and he's just been accepted into the PhD program at Harvard. I couldn't be happier for him (nothing could have kept me out of Harvard law school if I'd gotten in), but I confess to a bit of melancholy. Before he got his Harvard acceptance, when I'd thought he might come to Berkeley, I'd launched into a not too subtle marketing campaign for California: sunshine, family nearby (but not too close), a lifetime supply of the shorts he loves to wear, that he wore even as an undergrad in Chicago, until the snow was over the tops of his tennis shoes. Who knows, a new car might not be out of the question, I hinted.

I should have known better, right? Wasn't it my own father's solicitations that drove me away? Well, not really. True, I sensed that his bribes were merely a more sophisticated means of controlling me as, with expansive bursts of drama, he had always tried to do, but I was used to that and knew how to deal with it. No, the real problem was that Nashville was a small town in those days, too small for me. Say what you want, but the San Francisco Bay Area is not provincial. And although I do probably make too many helpful suggestions to my children, I am not my father.

Except in this way: I can see myself sitting down with a friend and saying, "Damn, I've lost him now."

I know this because I've already lost three. I married the first time when I was very young and had three children by the time I got out of law school (hence my father's offer of a house, which would have been a weird thing to offer a single young man). By the time Meg and I married, two of my first three kids were in college and the third was a senior in high school. My oldest son went off to the University of Pennsylvania and never came back. He's a lawyer in Philly now, with a lawyer wife and two children. My second son is in Atlanta with his wife and three kids, via college at Vanderbilt (a bit of irony) and business school in Cambridge. My daughter got her MFA in drama in New York and stayed for a while to perform off Broadway. By the time she returned to LA to pursue a career in film, I was gone. And now her mother has left too. Hers is less a case, I suppose, of her leaving her family than of her family slipping out of town while she was working on her dream.

There are, in my experience, three forces that pull and push us as we make our way in the world apart from our parents. There is a positive force, a kind of gravitational attraction to family and place, that pulls us back home. There is a negative force, the dark matter born out of the Big Bang of family stress, that pushes us away. And there is a kind of free-floating youthful energy that has nothing to do with family and that crackles like a Van de Graaff generator with the restless urge to learn and feel and grow, to be vibrantly alive. Whatever the force that propels us, however, if we go far enough away, for long enough, although we might not think much about it at the time, gradually a new way and place of living becomes the status quo. Suddenly, somewhere else is home.

Twenty-five years after I left Nashville, I returned. Meg and I were married and had Chris and Nick. I took a job there that I shouldn't have, that wasn't right for me. I was licking my wounds after a business failure. Maybe subconsciously I was slinking back home. I quit that job after a month, but we stayed in Nashville. Meg was writing, and soon so was I. Nashville was affordable, the boys were in a nurturing elementary school and, most importantly as it turned out, my mother and grandfather were there. In the years we stayed, I reconnected with them and Meg and the boys got to know them. By the time Mom died, I had a completely different appreciation for her than when I'd first bolted from town all those years before. I wouldn't give anything now for those last years with her, even though I admit that if I had found a better job somewhere else, I never would have gone back home. So what is that? Life giving me a second chance?

Sentimentality is not a young-person's game. No one is going to die. There is always time to go back home and catch up. Chances to grab the brass ring, on the other hand, feel urgent and fleeting. If we didn't take them, not only would we feel bitter about opportunities missed, civilization itself might stagnate. Still, if you believe that literature shows us who we are, think about what it tells us. I'm pretty sure there are far fewer angsty, heartbreaking and triumphant novels about jobs and friends than about family. For better and worse, our deepest passions are reserved for our families. Living too far away from them is a little like having a long-distance romance: It can be exciting, but in the end it leaves you missing a lot of love every day.

When I was a boy, I had a cat named Pepper. She disappeared one day. We looked for her, but we had no idea what had happened to her. Big dogs roamed loose in the neighborhood in those days. I imagined an owl had swooped down on her in the night. Years later, an eternity in the lifetime of a boy, she reappeared. She had been gone so long that not only did I not recognize her at first, I almost didn't even remember her. Her reappearance was like a magic trick. I wish I still had that cat. Maybe she could teach me how she did that.

The Invisible Hand Reaches Out to Help

Imagine you work for a company that pays you not for the profit you produce but for the good you do. The more poor children you feed, the more money you make. The more old people you get to their doctors' appointments, the more money you make. The more graffiti and trash cleaned up in a bad neighborhood, the more money you make.

Nice, you say. But fugetaboutit. Who's going to pay for that?

The answer is: The same people who are now covering the costs of not doing those good deeds. Hospital emergency rooms. Health care insurers. Prison systems. Fire and theft insurers. Governments at all levels.

As a society, we're gradually coming around to the view that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Annual physical exams, vaccinations and cancer screenings are now free under the Affordable Care Act. Auto insurers give lower rates to drivers with no accidents. Home insurers give premium discounts for homes with alarm systems.

Still, so much that we could do to prevent predictable (and expensive) future problems remains undone. I believe this is because we lack a coherent and well-adapted infrastructure to incubate new approaches to solving persistent social problems. Government now shoulders much of the load, but government is notoriously inefficient and, even when well-intentioned, frequently not very expert.

There is an alternative to government, though. A tried-and-true model we can pull right off the shelf. One we have used with tremendous success throughout our nation's history. One that many argue is the only model that has ever been or can ever be successful. What is this holy grail, this ideal approach to problem solving? It is greed. Or, as it's known by its polite name, capitalism.

Here's what we might do. First, we set up companies--let's call them FutureFunds--to address specific societal needs that are underserved. Then we identify the institutions that bear the long-term costs of not meeting those needs, and we offer them this deal: Pay us now to save you more (maybe much more) later.

Each new FutureFund would establish its own plan to attack the problem it is addressing: health emergencies, home fires, gang violence, teen pregnancy, crime, incarceration. The FutureFund pays its workers to get the results it has promised--reducing the costs of poverty, bad health, poor education, etc., etc.--and, Voila! Everybody's a winner.

There is a company in Nashville, Tennessee that is doing this in the healthcare area. It takes payments from health insurers of a set amount for each patient insured and promises to reduce health claims by at least the amount of the total payments. If it does not, it refunds the money it didn't save. If it does better, it and the health insurer split the savings. The way it reduces claims is by getting close to patients and helping them keep their doctors' appointments, take their medications, go to their exercise therapy. The work is labor intensive, but the company has a well-trained patient-outreach staff supported by good data systems. It's too early to tell how successful it will be, but it's in its third round of funding. And it's no charity case. It's doing this all on its own, within the incentive structure of free enterprise.

The Tennessee healthcare entrepreneur is betting that if people follow their doctors’ advice, they will have better health outcomes. This seems intuitively correct. But sometimes cause-and-effect connections that seem obvious turn out not to exist. Two things can happen at the same time—that is, be positively correlated—without one necessarily causing the other. They may both be caused by a third thing, for example. Breakfast eaters may be less likely to be obese, but is that because they eat breakfast, or is it because they are physically active, which both makes them hungry in the morning and less likely to be overweight? (Thanks for the example, Kahn Academy.)

Perhaps the foremost challenge to creating a workable model for making money by doing good is establishing cause and effect. To attract support, a FutureFund will have to make a sound, empirical case that what it plans to do will produce the desired cost-saving benefit. The good news is that we have never been better equipped to tackle this challenge. All fields of study--medicine, social sciences, economics--are getting better at sniffing out the root causes of our most persistent problems. In the past, sometimes we just haven't had enough information to know what to do. Big data, crowd-sourcing, learning software, and an overall higher level of connectedness are allowing us to peel back the layers of causality. Relatively new disciplines like behavioral economics are intersecting with psychology and sociology to help us better understand what makes us act the way we do. As we come to better understand the causes of our persistent problems, we will be able to design better solutions.

The second big challenge is patience. Even assuming we are correct in our belief that better childhood education provides long-term benefits—in health, achievement and productivity—the economic effect of those benefits for a particular child will not be realized for decades. Indeed, they will not be fully realized except over the person's lifetime. Who can we expect to make an investment with a payoff that is so deferred? The obvious answer has been government (local, state or federal). Government is the primary beneficiary of many social investments—through lower poverty rates and higher future tax revenues, for example—and it has the capital and, election-year politics aside, the necessary long-term strategic horizon. Up until now, when these kinds of strategic social investments have been made, they have, for the most part, been made by government.

I hate to say it, but the problem with government spearheading any investment is that often it’s not very good at it. We all know about the $150 hammers and the $300 toilet seats the Department of Defense buys. Private enterprise is generally better (that is to say, more disciplined) at successfully structuring and monitoring the deployment of capital and labor. The role government can usefully play is facilitator. This is an accustomed role. The tax code, for example, has long been used to encourage various kinds of investments. (Okay, I’ll admit that, given the Swiss cheese of loopholes and ill-advised tax expenditures that make up the current tax code, that may seem like a bad idea; but it’s something we can do while we’re waiting for tax reform, which seems to be hiding out with the Abominable Snowman and Santa Claus).

Government could help our private FutureFunds by funding research into cause and effect and by providing incentives like lower taxes on returns on investments in FutureFunds. FutureFunds could be non-profits, thereby making them attractive for donors wishing to support their research and operations.

But while government could give FutureFunds a leg up, the burden of financing them can and should fall to private capital. Managing risk is not new, but managing risk for profit on a contract basis is more novel. The rewards would be long term, so the capital best-suited to a FutureFund enterprise would be from investors seeking moderate but steady returns, as opposed to, say, the sky-high returns required to attract capital to new commercial technologies. There would have to be a break-in period where FutureFunds proved they could produce results, but once they had done that, the underwriters of societal risks, both private and public, would likely line up as customers. And private investors, once they are convinced of the long-term stability of the business model, would open their wallets.

Think of the fun we could have working for a FutureFund. The satisfaction. I dare say such a company would have no trouble attracting an enthusiastic workforce to the positive energy of doing something that was doing good. Half of us might line up to be on the front lines of operations and the other half might hunker down over the statistics and regressions needed to find out which solution worked and which didn't.

Would it be only do-gooders who wanted to work at a FutureFund? Most of us like doing good, but we've got families to feed and kids to support, so we need to get more out of these jobs than feeling good about ourselves. I don't see why compensation at a FutureFund couldn't rival that of any traditional business. Executives could make big bucks--perhaps not Wall-Street big bucks, but solid compensation--and workers could be paid well. The idea is not that the business would be run on the cheap, like a volunteer soup kitchen, but that it would not be making profits for shareholders. It would pay its salaries and other operating costs, it would repay it's lenders and investors, whose investment returns would be fixed to levels more like bonds and preferred stocks, rather than having the unlimited upside of common stock. There would still be plenty of other commercial enterprises for investors who wanted risky returns. But for those seeking stable, patient yields, FutureFunds would be attractive.

Think of it. No more frustrating waiting for Congress to decide whether to fund a project. No more political battles over whether a project was worthwhile. If you had solid research supporting your plan, you could attract investors and customers. If not, back to the drawing board. But you would be the master of your destiny. Not some politician. Not some shareholder who only wanted a bigger corporate jet. You. And me.

Hollow Days

Have you ever wanted to help someone and not been able to? Sometimes they need money you don't have. Or connections you don't have. Sometimes you don't know what they need. Those are the tough ones.

Let's say your mom's hands shake too much to pay her bills. That's the kind of problem I like. I can write her checks for her to sign. Problem solved. But what if she's lonely and bored. Maybe dying. Not dying tomorrow or next week, or even next month, just gradually slipping away. You can't be there three times a day to help her with her eye drops. You can't come over at three in the morning to search her blankets for the little portable radio she keeps in her bed, near her hand, so she can listen to NPR in those long dark hours when she can't sleep. And when she does slip away, you don't tell yourself you did everything anyone could, you only remember the times she was frightened and you weren't there.

Or maybe it's your grown child who has hit a rough spot. When she fell from the monkey bars and gashed her chin, you rushed her in for stitches. Problem solved. There's nothing like the way a child's cuts heal. Fast. Scars so faint they're almost attractive, like badges of a brave and adventurous spirit. But what about when that brave and adventurous spirit gets driven off, frightened away by demons you can't see and, even when they're described to you, you have trouble understanding. These are not the sharp objects and traffic-filled streets you spent your life protecting her from. These are daggers of the mind that cut away emotional defenses and resilience and open the way for fear and doubt.

Like your mother in her last years, your adult child has good days and bad days. On good ones, she's her old self: bright, talented, perceptive, amazing. You think: She's fine. She's going to be fine. Then the clouds come. The days of not leaving home, of crying. The irrational fears. Wounds that can't be stitched up, that need help you can't provide. All you can do is hope for the good days to return; and hope nothing disastrous happens before they do. This person is not a child. You can't cosset her in her childhood bedroom. It won't do any good to sit on her doorstep. She doesn't want you there. It's not as simple as finding her radio for her in the night, and even that wasn't so simple.

When you're thinking about people you love who are suffering, people you are accustomed to helping, people whose problems, some of them anyway, you've been able in the past to fix, doing nothing is almost unbearable. Even though you know these are problems you can't solve, you can't shake the notion that you should be trying harder, that you should be rushing to the rescue, not going to a movie or sitting in a park somewhere in a faraway city while she can't leave her apartment. 

On your own bad days, your desire to fix the problem, and your inability to do so, sucks the life out of you. You feel guilty for your own good fortune. You would gladly give up your health or sanity so that she may have hers. But it doesn't work that way. And it leaves you feeling a little like you imagine she does: hollowed out. 

Perhaps there is some awful comfort in that. Some feeling that by your own pain you may somehow share her burden. Some hope that by confronting your own guilt and doubt you may find within yourself something that will help you both.

What If

Fiction writers are “what-iffers." What if the hero falls into a pit of despair. What if he falls in love? What if he falls and breaks a leg? You come to a place in a story where you're stuck about what should happen next and the what-iffing begins. When a story is boring, it’s usually because there hasn't been enough what-iffing.

So also a life. When you don't know how to get out of a rut, that's the time for some what-iffing. What if I go somewhere where no one knows me? What if I ask his name? What if I sell everything, grab a backpack and hit the road.

When we’re very young, we have powerful imaginations. I remember a recurring dream in which I could fly. For a long time, I thought maybe I really could. Flying becomes winning at some sport or getting into the college you want, maybe landing a particular job. I'm not saying those aren't good things hope for, but they're a long way from flying. Over time, life coaxes us off that childhood height where we stood with our arms spread to the wind and, as Louise put it to Thelma, we get what we settle for.

Meg (one of my dreams that did come true) particularly likes a bit of writing advice the novelist Tim O’Brien gave her: “Have people behave in extraordinary ways to illuminate ordinary emotions.” When you come down to it, most of what we want is pretty ordinary. How bold we are in pursuing it is what makes the difference.

We are, each of us, the authors of our own stories. When we feel the plot dragging, it may be time step back and ask "what if.” There are reasons to be reticent about taking some daring leap in life—money, time, other commitments—but often as not, if our lives are boring, our biggest failure may be one of imagination.

Letting Go

I was eating a burrito at a restaurant patio table on beautiful day when I decided to let go. Of my money. Some of it. A dollar. There was a modest older man at a nearby table who was politely asking passersby if they could spare a little change so he could get something to eat. I was writing, sort of, mostly letting my mind float free, and his quiet and respectful request floated in and out of my thoughts and eventually took hold of them. I went back into the restaurant, broke the twenty in my wallet and took him a dollar. I said it didn't look like he was having much luck. He said he was mighty hungry. He wasn’t thin or scruffy. His clothes were worn but he wore them carefully. His mustache was neatly trimmed. He didn’t look like a drunk. In that moment, I didn’t care whether he was. I didn’t care what he did with the dollar, I just wanted to give it to him.

I've seen a lot of homeless people over the years. I wrote here about one who became a family friend, a chess-playing street musician in Santa Barbara named Mason B. Mason. Mason was in and out of jail, but he played chess with my sons Chris and Nick and we all liked him and were sad when he died of cancer unexpectedly. There was a woman in our local park in Palo Alto who I saw so often I always spoke to her. She never replied, but that was okay. She died a few weeks ago of hypothermia. Her middle-aged daughter had been trying for years to get her off the street. She'd been a good mother when she was younger, her daughter said.

Most of the homeless people I see are anonymous. Sometimes I give them a little something, but I don't carry small bills, so I rarely reach into my pocket for someone I pass on a sidewalk.

I see them, though. I see them watch me as I say, "Sorry man," or as I just look the other way, pretending not to notice them. I feel ashamed when I do that. They'll just buy booze with it, I might think, to make myself feel better. Or I remind myself that Meg and I give money to Second Harvest, which feeds the homeless, and to homeless shelters like The Opportunity Center, which offers housing and life and job counseling. They're on the street because they want to be. You hear that so often you begin to believe it. Or you want to believe it. If it's their choice, it's not your fault.

I suppose some of my rationalizations are rooted in truth, but I don't like myself for thinking about people that way. I want to let go of that habit, that reflex. I want to let go of the cliches and stereotypes. I want to let go of my need to shape my worldview to accommodate my desire not to have small change jangling in my pocket. What do I know about those people? One of them might be another Mason B. Mason, a friend to my sons. One of them might have been a good mother to her daughter when she was young, a daughter who cannot understand what happened to her mother, why she sits all day on her bench saying hardly a word.

Homelessness is a dreadful state of existence. It is also a terrifying mirror held up to us, reflecting our inability to help one another sometimes, even our indifference to their suffering. When I gave a dollar to that man on the restaurant patio, I resolved from then on to carry a pocketful of dollars to give to others like him. Without judgement. Without fear. I don't know what they’ll do with the money. When you make a gift it’s no longer yours to control. A dollar isn't going to change anyone's life, but perhaps the daily giving will change mine. All I know for sure is that I can no longer look away.

When he was ready to leave, the man I'd given the dollar folded his newspaper, slipped on his jacket and stood and smoothed his clothes. He came over to me and said thanks again. He walked away a few steps and turned back to me, glanced up at the sky, where clouds were gathering, and said, "Stay dry."

Downton Days

I admit it: I love Lady Mary. And Mrs. Patmore. And Daisy. And Bates. Let’s see, that’s three to one in favor of downstairs. I don’t think I have a soft spot for servants, but the characters who appeal to me seem to be the ones with problems ranked lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I worry more about the struggle to make a living than the quandary over which gown to wear to the ball.

As entertaining as it is, watching Downton Abbey is beginning to annoy me; or perhaps I should say discourage me. Why are we so fascinated with the aristocracy? Why do we care about them at all? Sure, they’re people; they have problems like we all do. Sort of. It’s too bad for Lady Edith that she went from ugly duckling to pregnant pariah without ever passing through the swan stage. But she’s not going to have to work two jobs or queue up for food stamps to get by as a single mother. She’ll board the wee bairn on the estate and go back to afternoon tea served by Carson and that conniving Thomas we all love to hate.

There have always been classes. Some societies—notably Britain and India—formalized them. They didn’t just tolerate them, they maintained that one person’s dominion over another was a natural right. It is less popular these days to codify superiority, but as part of the human condition class is sticky. Even when nations have violently thrown off the shackles of caste—as in Bolshevik Russia and Red China—the ensuing totalitarianism ushered in not an egalitarian utopia but rather a concentration of power and privilege on a lofty peak overlooking a thickening fog of paucity and suffering. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about a capitalist “democracy” like ours is that at least there is no dictator.

It seems odd to me, if perhaps historically inevitable, that a country like the United States, which was founded by hearty individualists breaking free of their feudal fates, has come to look more like nineteenth-century England’s realm of landed gentry than a wide-open new world of prairie schooners and gold rushes. We’ve run out of easily accessible opportunity—land and natural resources—and we are stratifying. Our economic institutions (and, through them, our political structures) are becoming the domain of a plutocracy that is consolidating power and building deregulated walls and untaxed moats to defend it.

I’m not foolish enough to wish for Marxism. I’ve read what Stalin did in Russia. I saw the newspaper accounts of Mao’s purge of China’s intellectuals in his cultural revolution. But still it pains me to see Bates putting on Lord Grantham’s cufflinks. It doesn’t seem right that one group should be subordinate to another. I know how it happens; I understand the driving economic and cultural forces behind it, the apparent inevitability of our tendency to rank ourselves (and our universities) one against the other, but it doesn’t seem right.

Utopia germinates in revolution but always seems to end up being bastardized by political or economic bullies. I suppose I think that, among large pluralistic cultures, the United States still offers the best hope for us to live together in comparative equality. There’s no getting around the privilege of money, but I hope we can avoid the snobbish entitlement that baronies and duchies carried with them in the run-up to Downton Abbey, when a lady of the manor falling for a chauffeur was an epic scandal.

There is an insulation that goes with economic privilege that dehumanizes those of lower classes. They become takers and parasites. Mitt Romney’s forty seven percent. Unworthy even to participate in governance, at least by the reckoning of the rich venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who recently proposed that only the rich should vote. When we look upon one another that way, utopia seems a long way off.

There have always been rich snobs, and will ever be. What I fear now, as we return politically and economically to something like the Gilded Age, is that we are losing sight of the notion that a rich snob is not a good thing to be.

The Habit of Achievement

Two of my grandchildren (I know, it's shocking to me too) are competitive swimmers. They swam this past weekend in the Georgia State Championships and did well. I was talking to my son Grant, their dad, and saying how great it was, and he said it was nothing compared to the news that same day from one of my other sons about his grad school plans. Grant was just being generous, and modest, but it struck me that what he said wasn’t true. What his little swimmers were doing in that noisy pool, among the excitement and commotion of parents and peers, was as important as anything they would ever do. They were laying a cornerstone in the foundation of character: the habit of achievement.

The next day I was talking to my oldest son, whose children are budding musicians, one a pianist the other a violinist. He said his daughter’s violin teacher has a patient way of emphasizing a step-by-step approach. It made me think of something a recent Olympic gold medalists (Mikella Shiffrin, as I recall) said about her approach to slalom racing: she focuses on the process, each movement, step and turn. The cumulative result takes care of itself.

I read a piece in The New York Times recently that, in the old debate over nature vs. nurture, came down on the side of nature. Recent studies suggest genes are destiny. Which leaves me with mixed feelings: oh, good, I couldn't have screwed them up too badly by denying them video games and dispensing occasional ranting lectures; vs., what was the point of all that diligent parenting, anyway?

Well, it was fun. That's one thing. I know that because I miss them. And when they achieve something cool, I, like presidents and governors, always give myself a lot of credit, even though I know I don't deserve it. I know this because I never even did their homework for them. But now I've come up with something to hang onto, something that, now that I consider it, I wish I had thought more about before: my pack-mule role in helping my children develop.

Achievement is up to the child, but enabling and facilitating a habit of achievement is something a parent can do. It's something we do out of love and perhaps some kind of instinct, like a mama lion teaching her cub to hunt for food. We get up early to take them to swim practice; we hang around soccer fields and chess tournaments; we go to their plays and concerts; we remind them to practice; we tell them not to give up when they get discouraged. We help them get started, and we help them persevere. Sometimes it takes a while for them to find the thing that lights their fire, but we keep taking them back to the metaphorical activity store. We rent pianos and saxophones, we buy balls and rackets of all types, we hire coaches and senseis.

Do you remember the feeling of realizing for the first time that you were good at something? Anything. It doesn't matter. Sports. Spelling bees. Magic tricks. Do you remember how empowering it was? Hey, I can do something, and do it well. It makes you proud. It makes you confident. It makes you willing to try other things. It makes you willing to take risks.

DNA may be the car, but it needs a driver. It's not going to go far with one who is too cautious, too unconfident. And it's likely to crash with one who lurches from point to point without mastering driving skills along the way. That's what achievements are: driving skills. Although, I kind of hate to think of it that way when I remember my moments terror as I taught them actual driving skills and tromped on the brake that did not exist on the passenger side of the car.

Why Learn?

My grandfather was one of the smartest men I ever knew. He was an academic with a photographic memory. He lived to be ninety eight, and I remember thinking when he died that his death was a waste of a lot of knowledge and wisdom. My father was a doctor. He was a restless man and a restless learner. He did the first intrauterine fetal transfusion in the South, to save babies whose blood cells were being attached by their mother’s antibodies. He died at fifty. All his skill in saving babies, all he had learned about a possible cure, went with him.

So it goes. Collectively, we pass along our knowledge, but individually each one of us more or less has to start over. We are born clean slates, waiting to be marked on. For a while, it is others who draw our lines, but it isn't long before we take over the effort ourselves. At that point, our life-long quest for things we want to know begins.

We build skills. We build understanding and reasoning. We go out into the world and use what we have learned to make money, make love, make art, make bridges and mobile apps. In our prime, we are machine learners, applying our CPUs to the task of learning what we need to know to do what we want to do; doing it, learning more, refining our skills, learning still more, becoming accomplished.

At some point we slow down. We make enough money. We tire of a passion and get antsy for change. We move on. We learn again. We do again, or maybe we just keep learning, not altogether certain what to do with the knowledge we are gaining, yet still as thirsty for it as one too long in a wasteland.

I found a new science feed for Flipboard, and you would have thought I discovered electricity. I'm not going to be a scientist—I suppose I have to finally admit that—but wow, is there ever a lot of cool stuff out there. The great thing about being a writer is that I can rationalize that anything I learn might be useful to my writing. I'm no longer limited in time or interest to “useful knowledge,” like the corporate tax and securities laws I had to study back in the day. Anything I want to know now, however arcane, is fair game.

Of course, I made better use of my narrower field of inquiry when I was a lawyer. Everything I learned had a purpose. I was like a giant processing machine: laws and regulations in the hopper, loopholes and evasions in the output tray. It was obvious to me why I was learning then. But why now?

I don't know the answer to that. This isn't one of those essays with an answer. The question is more or less its own answer I suppose. Or is that just the lawyer in me peeking out, offering a clever but meaningless aphorism?

I seem to need to learn in the same way I need to exercise. In both cases, I feel crappy if I don't. In both, the effort is exhilarating and frustrating. Too late to be a Nobel scientist. Too late for the Olympics. But still I love the effort. I even like the frustration. When I can't run as far as I want to, it just makes me want to try harder. When I see a policy issue that I think is getting mangled, it makes me want to write an essay. I'm not racing anyone but myself at this point, but still I put in the miles.

We're a curious lot, we humans. Both figuratively and literally. We're capable of great kindness and cruelty, great art and ugliness, great discovery and, now and then, especially when we don’t like what we hear, stubborn ignorance. It is our curiosity, though, that has gotten us where we are. It propels us. It is our heart. It keeps pumping until we die. And the parts of us we pass along to our children pump in them, fueling the unbroken quest that is our humanity.

Hooking Up the Freight Trains

Meg and I have these friends in Santa Barbara who are like Russian nesting dolls: you keep opening them up and finding more surprises inside. Melodie is a successful mystery writer, but in another life she was a dazzling actress. She even starred with my hero (as a cowboy, not a politico) Clint Eastwood. He was a little stiff, she said (no doubt struck speechless by her beauty); she told her husband, Bones, she didn’t think Clint would make it as an actor.

Bones is a drummer for occasional gigs in Santa Barbara, but in those days he was a renowned music producer. At their house his gold records are hung inconspicuously in a hallway, but his Grammy for producing the Fifth Dimension’s “Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” is in the living room. He said it isn’t the original Grammy; that one was made of pot metal that fell apart, so they replaced it for him. It’s not that big, about the size of a water pitcher, but it is stunning. I asked him to tell me the story of how the song was made.

He was working with the Fifth Dimension at the time, and they told him they wanted to record “The Age of Aquarius,” from the rock opera “Hair.” He went to see the show, but when he heard “Aquarius” his reaction was that it was only half a song. He didn’t see how it could work. The play went on, and after a while a guy swings out over the audience on a rope (probably naked, like most of the cast was), singing the opening of “Failures of the Flesh,” which ended with the repeating chorus of “Let the Sunshine In.”

That chorus stuck with him, and after the show he got the idea to make it the missing second half of “Aquarius.” How can you fade them together? someone asked. “I’m not going to do that,” he said. “I’m going to hook them up like freight trains.”

They recorded in several cities, including Las Vegas, where the Fifth Dimension was opening for Frank Sinatra. The studio was near the train tracks, and their session was interrupted by an actual freight train. While they waited for it to pass, singer Billy Davis Jr. started riffing over “Let The Sunshine In.” “Save that,” Bones told him. “We’ll add it in later.” And he did.

The record company, when they heard the song, said, “This is going to be number one.” Bones told them he’d been around long enough to not make that kind of prediction. He said he just did his best on each song and whatever happened happened.

The song was Billboard’s number one for six weeks, won a Grammy for Song of the year and is, by Billboard’s reckoning, the 57th greatest song of all time.

I love this story because of its glimpse into the craft, creativity and serendipity behind artistic success. “Hair” was a transformative musical. The Fifth Dimension was a wonderful group. Bones married them for the ages. “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” defines the era of my wannabe-but-too-conventional-to-take-a-chance bohemian youth.

We had dinner with Melodie and Bones that night. Melodie had offered beef stew or coq au vin. We said the chicken sounded great, but that we’re a tad allergic to tomatoes. The dish was delicious, but Melodie teased us all night about how lame it was without tomatoes. When I wrote her afterwards to thank her for a lovely evening, and to ask if Bones would mind if I posted the photo I had taken of his Grammy, she said he would consent “only if you put a tomato in the horn.”

And so I did. Who am I to argue with creative genius? As much as his talent, I admire Bones’s advice for making art: Do your best every time and whatever happens happens.