When the things we care about are not what we're good at ...
Adam Gopnic has written and broadcast a "Points of View" article, from which I took my "quote of the day" which can be read on the BBC website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29657506,
or listened to at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04l3ly6.
The broadcast article is called the "Football Fallacy" - as one part of the article argues that the British are better at watching football than playing it. But the article is actually much more general and wide-ranging in scope. On the internet the text version is called
"Why are our obsessions never the things we're best at?"
His basic argument is that the activities which often most interest or indeed obsess people, and which they think they are good at, are often things which in fact they are rubbish at.
Now I absolutely cannot accept that this is always true, because someone who is obsessed with something often works very hard at it, and there are very few human activities which are not enormously improved by practice. An individual who would otherwise be terrible at an activity but who really, really cares about it and practices a lot will often do better than someone whose gifts should have made them well above average at the activity concerned but could not care less about it and makes no effort.
Where I think Adam Gopnic is absolutely dead on is that whatever level of attainment has actually been achieved, people who are obsessed with something nearly always think they are better at it than they actually are.
He starts by arguing that the English are obsessed with football, and very good at watching it, but not very good at playing it.
Then he moves on to the French and writing literature. After talking about the French reverence for great literature, he continues,
"To be a writer in France is to be blessed with a reverence that no British or American writer can ever hope to attain except in France. Yet, let us be honest, you probably have not actually read a novel by a working French novelist in a long time ...
"The French talk spellbindingly about great literature more often than they actually make it."
But if his comments about the English and French are likely to be painful for some readers in those countries, that's nothing to the intellectual ICBM he fires at his fellow Americans:
"No one talks more about democracy, republicanism, self-government and liberty than Americans. But in truth Americans have no special skill at self-government - they are only good at dramatising their struggle for it. In many respects, the United States is the least democratic of the big democratic countries. The entire Constitution, fetishised by Americans to a religious degree, is designed to keep the country from ever actually becoming a representative democracy."
"Americans are not very good at practising democracy - but we are very good at advertising democratic ideas which makes us also imagine, God help us, that we are good at spreading democracy, with the results we know."
Ouch!
I don't go all the way with Mr Gopnic - for the reasons I gave above people are not always terrible at the things they obsess about. But he probably has a point that we should distinguish between being fascinated by something and convincing ourselves that we're brilliant at it.
or listened to at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04l3ly6.
The broadcast article is called the "Football Fallacy" - as one part of the article argues that the British are better at watching football than playing it. But the article is actually much more general and wide-ranging in scope. On the internet the text version is called
"Why are our obsessions never the things we're best at?"
His basic argument is that the activities which often most interest or indeed obsess people, and which they think they are good at, are often things which in fact they are rubbish at.
Now I absolutely cannot accept that this is always true, because someone who is obsessed with something often works very hard at it, and there are very few human activities which are not enormously improved by practice. An individual who would otherwise be terrible at an activity but who really, really cares about it and practices a lot will often do better than someone whose gifts should have made them well above average at the activity concerned but could not care less about it and makes no effort.
Where I think Adam Gopnic is absolutely dead on is that whatever level of attainment has actually been achieved, people who are obsessed with something nearly always think they are better at it than they actually are.
He starts by arguing that the English are obsessed with football, and very good at watching it, but not very good at playing it.
Then he moves on to the French and writing literature. After talking about the French reverence for great literature, he continues,
"To be a writer in France is to be blessed with a reverence that no British or American writer can ever hope to attain except in France. Yet, let us be honest, you probably have not actually read a novel by a working French novelist in a long time ...
"The French talk spellbindingly about great literature more often than they actually make it."
But if his comments about the English and French are likely to be painful for some readers in those countries, that's nothing to the intellectual ICBM he fires at his fellow Americans:
"No one talks more about democracy, republicanism, self-government and liberty than Americans. But in truth Americans have no special skill at self-government - they are only good at dramatising their struggle for it. In many respects, the United States is the least democratic of the big democratic countries. The entire Constitution, fetishised by Americans to a religious degree, is designed to keep the country from ever actually becoming a representative democracy."
"Americans are not very good at practising democracy - but we are very good at advertising democratic ideas which makes us also imagine, God help us, that we are good at spreading democracy, with the results we know."
Ouch!
I don't go all the way with Mr Gopnic - for the reasons I gave above people are not always terrible at the things they obsess about. But he probably has a point that we should distinguish between being fascinated by something and convincing ourselves that we're brilliant at it.
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