The Problem of Vocation

I want to start a new blog for short writing.



I keep wanting to share short pieces of writing that I care about and also regard as provisional, incomplete, and, of course, imperfect. For a long time, I worried that someone would take such writings as representing either my settled view or the best I could do. I will say at the outset: these papers are neither my settled view or my best work. I think that's enough.


Please take these to be protected by copyright and don't quote them without credit.  

The first piece I'll post was  written for students who were enjoying the feeling of disagreeing with people without hating them. I wanted to give them something to disagree with. I don't know what I think about this piece; I seem to be living by it.

The Problem of Vocation -- or How to Find a Job

 June 4, 2010

It is useful to start out by saying why it is hard to write about this stuff. It is useful to say a lot really fast, so that people get the whole picture before they get tired, because the plausibility of each part depends on other parts. At the same time, that quick writing requires not going into lots of matters in detail, not defining terms and not explaining how one might work out suggestions. Normally, I hate that kind of writing: I’d rather spend forever on some example leading to some small, particular point. But here I want to leave the roads not taken as projects to be completed by anyone who finds the overall idea convincing, and to say that the notions that aren’t defined might take their definition from some plausible and sincere effort to define them. Discussions that don’t lay everything out are not deficient; they just trust the reader or discussion group to do some work, at particular points.

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Ethics is partly about living a meaningful life and partly about saving the world. These are distinct enough projects that they can in some particular lives conflict; sometimes, one has to sacrifice a meaningful life to do some particular work to save the world or turn completely away from the problems of the world to make meaning out of the materials one has been given to make a life. They are also intertwined projects -- in that, for example, one’s world-saving may be thwarted by neglect of the meaning of one’s life (see Mill’s autobiography) and one’s meaning-making may be puny and short-sighted for not taking account of the ways the world is not prospering. (I think this logical relation of dependence and yet independence is interesting and likely not a feature just of these to two goals.)

Vocations and jobs are partly about having a meaningful life and partly about saving the world. This piece will address just the “saving the world” wing of this issue.

This paper is about some important decisions one can make about one’s life. I don’t want to suggest that people very often make decisions about their lives. Mostly, people drift, do the next thing that comes along, settle big matters for hardly any reason at all. So the first preliminary thing anybody who studies ethics has to do is to stop drifting and think. That is not easy, especially since there are so many tricks abroad for thinking one is thinking without really thinking. Thinking is high prestige, and most people like to think of themselves as thoughtful. I take it to have been Socrates’ contribution to ethics to show that many people who think they are thinking aren’t really thinking at all. So, step one in ethics is: break the trance, stop drifting, start thinking. This may take years, may require all sorts of complicated intellectual and psychological technology. Let’s jump over all that. Somewhere in the library of Plato’s heaven there is a book, “How to Stop Drifting and Start Thinking.” Let’s assume we have all read it and taken it to heart, so that we are ready to really and truly make decisions.

The decision to have a career or a public life is not one everybody makes, though everybody is visible to other people, has effects on others, participates in reciprocity. Sometimes, one is just too sick to worry about anything but surviving somehow: that drives one’s decisions, and one does – whatever it takes, bounded by one’s principles. Sometimes, one has a demon or a bug to do logic or write music or pray so strong that one does whatever one needs to to keep that bug or demon working in one’s system. Some people are lazy and just want to slide by and have fun. I am not talking to any of these people. I am talking to people who have some real choice about what they do with the center part of their day and who want to do something valuable or good with that part of the day – people that is whose vocational choices are responsive to the ethical concern to save the world.

Most people who talk to people about jobs or vocations are interested, have a stake in one decision or another. University employees have a stake in jobs that require that people take out loans to attend – you guessed it – universities, and people who are working in a job have a stake in having someone else validate their experience, by doing what they did, or by doing something else they have come to wish they did. So, in this area above all, one has to be careful of someone else’s advice, however caringly delivered. Be especially careful about my advice.

From the standpoint of saving the world, I think it is likely a moral mistake to start out aspiring to be “one more” something – a missionary, a senator, a car salesman, a neuro-surgeon. One may eventually decide that one wants to be one more something, but that should be something one comes to, not something one starts from. The alternative to wanting to be “one more” something is sometimes wanting to be “the only” something, sometimes to make a difference that one has good reason to believe would not have been made without one.

I can seldom be sure I will make a difference that would not have been made without me. Napoleon could be pretty sure, as could the last speaker of an aboriginal language, but scientists generally can’t, presidents sometimes can. And if one says, “I want to make a good difference that would not have been made without me,” that gets even harder, since even those who know they are making this kind of difference rarely can be very sure it will be good. Napoleon couldn’t be sure; the last speaker of an aboriginal language can be quite sure that preserving it is a good thing.

I think that, despite the uncertainties about this goal, the right initial goal to have for one’s career life or one’s public life, if one decides to have a morally significant career life or a public life, is to make a good difference that would not have been made without one. It is reasonable to do things that make that very likely, even in circumstances in which one cannot be sure. This would not be the right goal in all circumstances, but I think it is the right goal for human beings of moderate to affluent means, in decent health, in 2010, because so many things are getting worse so fast that an infusion of genius and heroism is urgently required. Let me not at this point argue for the claim that this is the right goal but instead try to set out what sort of thinking would take off from this initial goal, what trains of thought it sets up. Part of anybody’s resistance to the idea of this as a goal surely comes from the intuition that it is incoherent or internally confused, so just seeing what it might mean is part of the project  of coming to evaluate its rightness.

The first place to look for information about what it would be like to achieve this goal is the family, because family members from me on out, my descendents, are indefinitely many, over indefinitely many hundreds or even thousands of years. We are all, like Abraham and Sarah, the fathers and mothers of nations. So things I do now may amplify for thousands of years through my family, just as things some remote ancestor did, perhaps a thousand years ago, have been amplified by descendents to reach me, my cousins, my nephews etc. Some processes may have built up an historical head of steam, by the time they reach me, so that, with relatively little effort, I can carry them forward to the next generation and can allow them to exert their influence on the world, a particular influence derived from this particular genetic and cultural engine, my family.

That doesn’t always happen. When it does, we speak, in positive cases, of something like dynasties: the Bachs, the Roosevelts, the Adams, the Bellamys. We rely at every level of society far more on dynasties than our public myths allow, and one early step in good vocational thinking has to be to kill those myths and see dynasties as hugely important and then to try to figure out whether we are in a dynasty – that is, whether my family carries something forward into the world with significant energy. If so, that does become my vocational destiny, in the sense that that is one of the main things I have to decide about, in sorting out how I can make something happen in the world that would not happen without me. The most obvious decision to make is: shall I express and also carry forward the family legacy? That decision may make the difference roughly between connecting my engine to a 9 volt battery and connecting it to a nuclear power plant.

Some legacies are mixed; some are bad. One change one can make in the world is to try to purify a mixed legacy. Another change is to end a bad legacy, to end the family line in some definitive way. One of the biggest good decisions one can make is not to have children and not to teach.

Legacy has to be some strange combination of culture and genetics. Since we don’t know that mix, if we are intending to continue a legacy, it is best to have biological kids.

Not every family carries a legacy that can be identified and evaluated. Immigration interrupts the lines of transmission, as does random marriage, as does interruption in the circumstances in which cultural information is transmitted. (You can’t easily pass down druidism on the MN prairie.) So I’d expect that most people who look honestly at what they carry in the way of a family legacy will conclude “nothing in particular.”

That result leaves one with the question of whether to found a legacy, to be, like Abraham and Sarah, the father or mother of nations, and that is surely the first big question facing the person who is interested in making a difference that otherwise wouldn’t get made, because the historical amplifier effect is so powerful, and we know that dynasties do in fact get established. It’s by no means certain that one will establish a dynasty by trying to do so, but it seems like the right sort of risk to take (and ultimately, remember, one can never have certainty that one will make this kind of difference; one can have, at best, a pretty good chance of making this kind of difference. Founding a family and establishing a legacy is one reasonable way to bet in this corner of the life lottery.)

There are two books that need to get written at this point, “How to Found a Good Dynasty,” and “When and How to Kill a Family Line,” and I don’t know how to write them, but I know something about what one would have to study to write them, so let’s, for now, assume that they are  written and inserted in place of the *, and move on.

Apart from family dynastic and legacy business, which is surely and by far the easiest and most important way of making a difference, there are some other moves to think about. The other items are all really legacy items and so quite a lot like the family project. They are about multiplying one’s power beyond one’s personal scope or beyond one’s lifetime: machines, experiments in living, and seed saver activities. They all offer this small percentage of changing the world, of making a difference that otherwise would not be made.

Machines – I can’t imagine anybody smart who wants to make a difference in the world relying merely on actions. You want something to reliably produce intervention after intervention of the sort you approve of. So you form a habit, or an organization, or a newsletter, or invent a game, or coin a vocabulary word – you do something to multiply your individual energy by a great many times. You try to set up that multiplication so that what is done in all the contexts that are out of your direct control is beneficial in the way you want it to be beneficial without being harmful in any very serious ways. That’s a trick of invention, and it defines a definite class of machines. Most machines are not predictable enough or limited enough in their effects for moral work. Most do lots of different things, or unpredictable things in different circumstances. You have to be very careful in building machines.

At the *, please insert a book, How To Make a Sound Moral Machine.

Experiments in living – Sometimes, you can live in a way that nobody has lived before but that has some promise – in the way that a new drug might have promise against cancer – and then report back how it went, what you saw from the perspective induced by that way of living. Thoreau tried something like this; so did the guy in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

Seed saver activities – We don’t know what will happen to society or to the planet, but it seems pretty clear that humanity and animality will go through some bad times, quite soon. The ways of living and thinking and doing things that work within our current context will likely stop working or stop working so well, and we will need to draw on the full legacy of human social, psychological, and technical invention, not just rely on the newest or latest thing. So we have to preserve irrelevant traditions, to grow them out by making lives that incorporate them. Otherwise, they just won’t be available when we need them.

---Remember the other wing of this project, about vocations or jobs and meaningful life, is still to be written, and it is also important to ethics, so this stuff about changing the world is not the whole story. Also, since the meaningfulness of a life affects its ability to save the world, this isn’t even the complete story about saving the world.