Rhapsody in Realism
By DAVID BROOKS June 26, 2014
A few years ago, I came across an article on a blog that appealed tremendously. It was on a subject that obviously I have a lot to learn about. But it was actually the tone and underlying worldview that was so instructive, not just the substance.
The article was called “15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years” by Lydia Netzer. The first piece of advice was “Go to bed mad.” Normally couples are told to resolve each dispute before they call it a night. But Netzer writes that sometimes you need to just go to bed. It won’t do any good to stay up late when you’re tired and petulant: “In the morning, eat some pancakes. Everything will seem better, I swear.”
Another piece of advice is to brag about your spouse in public and let them overhear you bragging.
Later, she tells wives that they should make a husband pact with their friends. “The husband pact says this: I promise to listen to you complain about your husband even in the most dire terms, without it affecting my good opinion of him. I will agree with your harshest criticism, accept your gloomiest predictions. I will nod and furrow my brow and sigh when you describe him as a hideous ogre. Then when your fight is over and love shines again like a beautiful sunbeam in your life, I promise to forget everything you said and regard him as the most charming of princes once more.”
Most advice, whether on love or business or politics, is based on the premise that we can just will ourselves into being rational and good and that the correct path to happiness is a straight line. These writers, in the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” school, are essentially telling you to turn yourself into a superstar by discipline and then everything will be swell.
But Netzer’s piece is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”
People with a crooked timber mentality tend to see life as full of ironies. Intellectual life is ironic because really smart people often do the dumbest things precisely because they are carried away by their own brilliance. Politics is ironic because powerful people make themselves vulnerable because they think they can achieve more than they can. Marriage is ironic because you are trying to build a pure relationship out of people who are ramshackle and messy. There’s an awesome incongruity between the purity you glimpse in the love and the fact that he leaves used tissues around the house and it drives you crazy.
People with a crooked timber mentality try to find comedy in the mixture of high and low. There’s something fervent in Netzer’s belief in marital loyalty: “You and your spouse are a team of two. It is you against the world. No one else is allowed on the team, and no one else will ever understand the team’s rules.” Yet the piece is written with a wry appreciation of human foibles. If you have to complain about your husband’s latest outrage to somebody’s mother, she writes, complain to his mother, not to yours. “His mother will forgive him. Yours never will.”
People with a crooked timber mentality try to adopt an attitude of bemused affection. A person with this attitude finds the annoying endearing and the silly adorable. Such a person tries to remember that we each seem more virtuous from our own vantage point than from anybody else’s.
People with a crooked timber mentality are anti-perfectionist. When two people are working together there are bound to be different views, and sometimes you can’t find a solution so you have to settle for an arrangement. You have to design structures that have a lot of give, for when people screw up. You have to satisfice, which is Herbert Simon’s term for any option that is not optimal but happens to work well enough.
Great and small enterprises often have two births: first in purity, then in maturity. The idealism of the Declaration of Independence gave way to the cold-eyed balances of the Constitution. Love starts in passion and ends in car pools.
The beauty of the first birth comes from the lofty hopes, but the beauty of the second birth comes when people begin to love frailty. (Have you noticed that people from ugly places love their cities more tenaciously than people from beautiful cities?)
The mature people one meets often have this crooked timber view, having learned from experience the intransigence of imperfection and how to make a friend of every stupid stumble. As Thornton Wilder once put it, “In love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve.”
（我把中文的译文贴上，我觉得英文原文读起来更简洁，幽默，意味深长，作者毕竟是个政治社会的精英学者，共和党人。也许有网友更愿意看一下中文。补贴在下。BYMYHEATRT）
几年前，我在一个博客上读到了一篇引人入胜的文章，文章讲的显然也是一个我了解并不多的话题。但颇具参考意义的实际上是其语气和底层的世界观，而不仅仅是内容本身。
这篇文章题为“婚姻持续15年的15个方法”(15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years)， 作者是莉迪亚·内泽(Lydia Netzer)。第一则建议是“生着气睡觉”，通常人们给夫妇提出的建议都是，睡觉之前要解决所有的争论。但是内泽写道，有时候还是要直接睡觉，人又累又 恼怒时，熬到很晚都不睡是一点用都没有的。“早上吃几片薄烤饼，所有事看起来都会好很多。我发誓。”
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Josh Haner/The New York Times
戴维·布鲁克斯
另一则建议是，在众人面前夸耀你的伴侣，而且让对方无意间听到你的夸耀。
之后，她告诫妻子们，应当与闺蜜订下一个“丈夫规约”。 “丈夫规约要这么写：我承诺倾听你抱怨你的丈夫，即使是用最狠毒的措辞，但这并不会影响我对他的良好评价。我认同你最尖刻的批评、接受你最灰暗的预测，在 你形容他是丑陋的怪物时，我会点头、皱眉、叹气。等到争吵结束，爱又像美丽的阳光一样在你生活中闪耀时，我承诺会忘记你说过的所有话，再一次把他当做最有 魅力的王子。”
无论是对于爱情、生意，还是政治，多数的建议都是基于这样 一个前提：我们可以强令自己变得理性、正面，而且通往幸福的正确道路是一条直线。那些属于《高效能人士的七个习惯》(Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)学派的作家们，实质上是在告诉你，通过自律把自己变成超级巨星，所有事就都能有很棒的结果。
然而内泽的文章却方便地基于这样一个前提：我们都是弯曲的木材。我们在不同程度上是愚蠢的、软弱的，而且经常完全无法解释——我们一直都会这样。就像康德所说的那样：“以人性这种弯曲的木材，根本做不出什么直的东西。”
持这种弯木心态的人，常常会观察到生活中满是反讽。知识界 的生活满是反讽，因为很聪明的人常常会做最蠢的事情，原因恰恰是他们因才智而无法自持。政治充满反讽，因为有权力的人以为自己能取得超出自身能力的功绩， 进而招致灾祸。婚姻也满是反讽，因为你要尝试与一个草率脆弱、邋遢凌乱的人，建立一段纯粹的关系。你会面对惊人的反差：一面是在爱情中窥见的一鳞半爪的纯 粹，另一面则是他会在家里乱放用过的纸巾，简直能把你逼疯。
持弯木心态的人，会试着在五味杂陈的起起落落之间，寻找喜 剧般的情节。内泽对婚姻的忠诚，持有一种狂热的信念：“你和你的伴侣，两人是一个团队。你们合力对抗全世界。不能允许其他任何人进入这个团队，其他任何人 永远都不能理解这个团队的规则。”然而这篇文章也令人哭笑不得地承认了人的荒唐。如果你必须要对某人的母亲，抱怨丈夫最近犯下的大错，她写道，那就向他的 母亲抱怨，而不是你的母亲。“他的母亲会原谅他。你的却永远不会。”
持弯木心态的人，会努力采取一种愉悦而喜爱的态度。有这种态度的人会发觉，恼人的事讨人喜欢，笨拙的事惹人怜爱。这样的人会努力记住，我们每个人站在自己的角度看到的自己，总会比站在他人的视角显得更崇高。
持弯木心态的人是反对完美主义的。两个人协同努力时，总会 有不同的观点，有时候你找不到解决的办法，只能退而求其次地接受某种安排。必须要设计一种包含足够多让步的结构，来承受人们把事情搞砸的时刻。必须要将就 地接受(satisfice)——司马贺(Herbert Simon)用这个词来表示任何一种并非最优，但效果恰巧足够好的选项。
事业无论大小，往往都要经历两次新生：第一次带来纯粹，第二次带来成熟。《独立宣言》(Declaration of Independence)的理想主义，后来让位于《宪法》中冷静的制衡。爱开始时是激情，到后来就成了拼车。
第一次新生之所以美好，是因为崇高的愿望，但第二次新生之所以美好，是因为人们开始喜爱脆弱。（你有没有注意到，与来自美丽城市的人相比，来自丑陋地方的人，对家乡城市的爱更不屈不挠？）
我们遇到的那些成熟的人，常常持有这种弯木心态，因为他们已经从经验中了解到，不完美有多么顽固，以及怎样与每一个愚蠢的过失为友。就像桑顿·怀尔德(Thornton Wilder)说过的，“只有负过情伤的士兵才能去服爱的兵役。”
翻译：王童鹤
