Examined Life

Opening address to the Social Science Research Society alumni gathering

We seem to live in an age where the word “life-changing” gets used rather freely. Life-changing restaurant, life-changing film, life-changing book. When I see people who use this phrase often, they’re generally not people who’ve lived very long. When “life-changing” is thrown around too casually, the meaning and weight it carries gets diluted — and I find that a little sad.

In truth, it isn’t easy for a single book or a single piece of writing to change a life. It doesn’t happen often. I’m thirty-five this year, and there have been exactly two such pieces of writing for me.

The first was Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, which I encountered as a university freshman. Through economics, I learned for the first time that all human behavior could be reduced to elegant models on an x and y axis, that human beings and the world could be understood through systematic and rational methods. In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, the young man says that when Socrates questions him in his midwife’s fashion, he feels dizzy and overwhelmed with “giddiness”. And Socrates replies that this giddiness is the beginning of philosophy. The shock of economics was, I think, the beginning of my own intellectual life.

The second piece of writing was, ironically, one that completely overturned that worldview. During my undergraduate years I was active in a graduate preparation study group, and one day our faculty advisor visited our meeting and bought us pizza. As he left, he casually handed out a short piece of writing — barely two pages — and told us to read it on the way home. Being an obedient new member, I really did read it on the bus home. To say that it shook my world would be a woeful understatement.

The short essay, titled A Scholar’s Quest, was a transcript of a lecture by Professor James March of Stanford Graduate School of Business. He writes:

Consequentialist reasoning is the basis for most of modern social and behavioral science and preeminently for economics. Action is seen as choice, and choice is seen as driven by anticipations, incentives, and desires… but it leads us… largely to exclude from our visions of human behavior a second grand tradition for understanding… action. It is a tradition that speaks of self-conceptions, identities, and proper behavior rather than expectations, incentives, and desires.

The clearest example of this tradition in literature and philosophy, March says, is Cervantes’ Don Quixote. When challenged to explain his behavior, Quixote does not justify his actions in terms of expected consequences. He simply says: “Yo sé quién soy — I know who I am.”

“Quixote reminds us,” March continues, “that if we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our humanness — our willingness to act in the name of a conception of ourselves regardless of its consequences.”

This Society was that kind of space for me. It was not a place with a common practical purpose. It was not a law school prep group, not a civil service exam prep group. It was not even a place assembled to build cultural literacy. We simply read — because we had to, because we wanted to be people who, as March puts it, “respond to senses of themselves and their callings, who support and pursue knowledge and learning because they represent a proper life, who read books not because they are relevant to their jobs but because they are not.” We read books that we might never get around to if not now. This Society was a social science reading club, but for me it was really a place to find the answer not to what to study, but to how to study, and why. I hope it was that kind of space for you too.

Living as a reading and thinking person, I have had far more moments of loneliness and solitude than I needed. In those moments I found consolation in books. In Montaigne’s essays, in Nietzsche’s aphorisms, in Homer’s epics, in Dostoevsky’s novels — finding myself between their lines was both a thrilling experience and a deep consolation.

The knowledge that I was not alone. That there was someone else who had asked the questions I was asking, endured the anguish I was enduring, shed the tears I was shedding, discovered the same beauty that had seized me. That someone, belonging to an entirely different physical time and space, had once inhabited the same coordinates of emotional space I was in, and left their traces there. That knowledge gave me a consolation beyond what words could describe.

What this Society opened up for me was the possibility that such people might exist not only in ancient Greece or sixteenth-century France, but right here, right now, next to me. More than the books or the studying, the greatest gift this Society has left me is the precious friend I met there, an intellectual and emotional companion. Marcel Proust wrote that reading is “the fruitful miracle of communication in the midst of solitude.” Thanks to the person I met in this Society, I was able, if only briefly, to be in less of a solitude. I hope you too have found such people in this Society, and will continue to find them.

Thinking of the familiar faces and the faces I’ve missed, I open this evening. My deep thanks to the organizing committee who worked so hard to make this happen, and my hope that every alumnus here tonight will have a joyful time together. With that, I will step aside. Thank you.