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JANUARY 23, 2022

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

 

Hour 1

"A Round of Golf with My Father"
 

With William Damon     

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

Hour 2

"Wrath - America Enraged"

 

Peter Wood     

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO
 REPEAT FROM DECEMBER 5, 2021

About William Damon

William Damon is a professor at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.  He is the author of the new book, A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present.

 As William Damon demonstrates: Viewing our past through the eyes of maturity can reveal insights that our younger selves could not see.  Lessons that eluded us become apparent.  Encounters that once felt like misfortunes now become understood as valued parts of who we are.  We realize what we’ve learned and what we have to teach.  And we’re encouraged to chart a future that is rich with purpose.

In A Round of Golf with My Father, William Damon introduces us to the “life review.”  This is a process of looking with clarity and curiosity at the paths we’ve traveled, examining our pasts in a frank yet positive manner, and using what we’ve learned to write purposeful next chapters for our lives.

For Damon, that process began by uncovering the mysterious life of his father, whom he never met and never gave much thought to.  What he discovered surprised him so greatly that he was moved to reassess the events of his own life, including the choices he made, the relationships he forged, and the career he pursued.

Early in his life, Damon was led to believe that his father had been killed in World War II.  But the man survived and went on to live a second life abroad.  He married a French ballerina, started a new family, and forged a significant Foreign Service career.  He also was an excellent golfer, a bittersweet revelation for Damon, who wishes that his father had been around to teach him the game.

We follow Damon as he struggles to make sense of his father’s contradictions and how his father, even though living a world apart, influenced Damon’s own development in crucial ways.  In his life review, Damon uses what he learned about his father to enhance his own newly emerging self-knowledge.

Readers of this book may come away inspired to conduct informal life reviews for themselves.  By uncovering and assembling the often overlooked puzzle pieces of their pasts, readers can seek present-day contentment and look with growing optimism to the years ahead.

https://spectator.org/why-everyone-could-benefit-from-a-life-review/

Why Everyone Could Benefit From a “Life Review”

by William Damon

A “don’t look back!” approach to life has lots of appeal. We aim for bright futures. Why not focus all our mental energies on plowing ahead with vigor? Preoccupations with the past can slow us down. Future-mindedness, for good reason, is deemed a character strength for people of all ages.

Yet totally turning away from the past is not the best way to build a well-directed future. We can’t learn lessons from past mistakes unless we openly recognize them. We can’t unburden ourselves from old regrets and resentments unless we confront them. In a positive sense, our past accomplishments contain rich troves of ideas about what we’re capable of doing, what’s given us satisfaction, who we’ve become, and who we can aspire to be in the years to come. This is what Soren Kierkegaard meant when he wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; and then it must be lived forwards.” A contemporary version of this insight was offered by Steve Jobs at a Stanford commencement address in 2005: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

 When thinking about our past, we often recall the high points with nostalgia and the low points with regret. While these are natural emotional inclinations, they are not particularly useful because neither nostalgia nor regret help us with the challenges of coping with the present and preparing for the future. They may even stop us from confronting these challenges by disguising what actually happened and obscuring important lessons we otherwise would have taken to heart.

In my life, a dramatic phone call from my daughter triggered in me a burning desire to take a new look at my past and the people that shaped it. I had grown up without a father, and when I was young I was led to believe that he was killed during World War II. When I later found out that he survived the war and abandoned my mother and me before I was born, I deduced that he was a scoundrel and I wanted to hear no more about him. But my daughter’s phone call revealed a different story that, to my surprise, affected me deeply.

My daughter had taken an interest in her grandfather and discovered that, after disappearing from my life, my father forged a distinguished Foreign Service career and established a second family with daughters who were my unknown half-sisters. He passed away before I heard this, but he left a trail of records, friends, and relatives that I could explore for further discoveries. I had never seen a picture of him or knew anything about what he was like. Now, fired with curiosity, I found out everything I could. In the process, I gained an understanding of how he had influenced my own life in ways I never imagined.

The revelations of my father’s life moved me to conduct a “life review,” a method of self-analysis developed by the legendary psychiatrist Robert Butler. A life review involves searching our memories, interviewing old friends and relatives, and retrieving school records and archival documents. With it, we can reconstruct our pasts in a manner that can provide three benefits: 1) acceptance of the events and choices that shaped our lives, fostering gratitude for the life we’ve been given, in place of self-doubt, regret, and resentment; 2) an authentic understanding of who we are and how we got to be that way, leading to a well-grounded self-identity; and 3) a clarity in the directions we wish to take our lives, reflecting what we have learned from what has given our lives meaning in the past.

By finding the positive in earlier experiences—including experiences that may have appeared unfortunate at the time—we can affirm the value of our lives and chart a hopeful path forward. As Butler wrote: “One’s life does not have to have been a ‘success’ in the popular sense of the word. People take pride in a feeling of having done their best … and sometimes from simply having survived against terrible odds.” Butler believed that life reviews would promote “intellectual and personal growth, and wisdom” throughout the lifespan. He noted many psychological benefits, including the capacity to enjoy pleasures such as humor, love, nature, and contemplation; and “an acceptance of the life cycle, the universe, and the generations.” This, of course, is a list of the pillars of psychological health.

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My life review uncovered a wealth of insights about how I developed my interests, skills, beliefs, and personal characteristics. One influence I never realized was that my father attended the same school as I, a fine independent school mostly unknown to the less-advantaged circles in which I was raised. This revelation cleared up a question that always puzzled me: how did I make my way to this exceptional school? It now became clear that my mother had arranged the necessary scholarship and urged me to attend because she knew that my father had gone there decades earlier. With my new awareness, I was able to see how this choice was pivotal and turned my life in a direction it may otherwise not have taken. What’s more, as I searched my old school records, and my father’s, I found other fascinating insights regarding personal traits he and I shared, including some longstanding foibles (such as a degree of “stubbornness” that several of my teachers noted over the years) that I decided I still had time to correct in myself.

During my life review, I also determined that, because of my intentional obliviousness to elements of my past, I missed opportunities to meet my father and his family when I was young. The review exposed mistakes I made. For example, I avoided the difficult conversations with my mother that would have clarified the truths about my father’s life in the years before my mother passed away. Those years, like all years, are irretrievable. I needed to come to terms with these regrets. My life review helped with that, too.

I came to wish that I had started my life review earlier. I lived too long with unresolved feelings about growing up fatherless, with mistaken notions about how I took the schooling path that led me to my vocation, and without contact with members of my family who would have been a great joy to know. The information that my life review uncovered resolved those feelings, revealing the truth about my father, correcting my false assumptions about my own developmental trajectory, and enhancing my present-day family relationships.

There is a paradox at the heart of a life review. The ability to look forward in a confident, well-directed manner requires looking back in an intentional and open way. We cannot separate the past, present, and future like walled-off compartments on a moving train. As Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” To be fully alive now and in the future, we must realize that our past, far from being dead, is in many ways a living concern and has many life-giving lessons to teach us.

"Wrath - America Enraged"

Peter Wood         

WE THE PEOPLE RADIO
About Peter Wood:

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the new book, WRATH: America Enraged, as well as last year’s acclaimed 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. A former professor of anthropology and college provost, he is the author of several books about American culture, including Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2003) and A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (2007).

Wood is a frequent media guest who has appeared on major radio and television programs nationwide. He is the editor in chief of the journal Academic Questions and a widely published essayist. In 2019, he received the Jeane Kirkpatrick Prize for contributions to academic freedom. He is based in New York City.

Wrath  America Enraged                                            

 By Peter W. Wood                 

Washington, DC—Anger now dominates American politics.  It wasn’t always so.  “Happy Days Are Here Again” was FDR’s campaign song in 1932.  By contrast, candidate Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign song was Mary J. Blige’s “Work That” (“Let ’em get mad / They gonna hate anyway”).  Both the left and right now summon anger as the main way to motivate their supporters.  After the election, both sides became even more indignant.  The left accuses the right of insurrection.  The right accuses the left of fraud.  This is a book about how we got here—about how America changed from a nation that could be roused to anger but preferred self-control, to a nation permanently dialed to eleven.

In WRATH: America Enraged (Encounter Books, October 12, 2021), Peter Wood—president of the National Association of Scholars—analyzes the new era of political wrath and explains how American culture beginning in the 1950s made a performance art out of anger; how and why we brought anger into our music, movies, and personal lives; and how, having step by step relinquished our old inhibitions around feeling and expressing anger, we turned anger into a way of wielding political power.  But the “angri-culture,” as he calls it, doesn’t promise happy days again.  It promises revenge…and a crisis that could destroy our republic.  Peter Wood argues that the country should step back from confrontation and violence and channel its wrath into ways that “wrest the powers of government back into the hands of those who love our ordered liberty and hold our founding principles in high regard.”

Peter Wood contends: “Some wrath, I believe, is justified.  The popular will of Americans has been thwarted by a combination of careerist elites, progressive ideologues, an unprincipled press, and a business class more attuned to global opportunities than to domestic flourishing.  Because traditional forms of political protest have been tourniqueted by mass arrests, censorship, and decisions by law enforcement and the courts to stand aside, many Americans see themselves as having been denied a legitimate voice in their own governance.  They are right in that judgment, and it is the kind of judgment that turns anger into wrath.”

WRATH outlines how the rage of this era is “further prodded by a progressive elite that seems to take sadistic delight in devising new ways to torment ordinary Americans…‘Antiracism’ is a psyops campaign aimed at institutionalizing discrimination against Whites.  The 1619 Project is an attempt to erase American history and put in its place an elaborately constructed lie in which slavery explains everything.  ‘Critical race theory’ (CRT) further amplifies the message that American success is built entirely of the bricks and mortar of White racial supremacy.  The elite preaches and now practices the benefits of abolishing our national border and flooding the country with illegal immigrants, at the expense of working-class Americans…Progressives manipulated the Wuhan virus epidemic by turning a manageable health crisis into a major economic disaster, an excuse for stripping Americans of their civil liberties, and an incitement of mass hysteria.  And progressives, claiming the need to protect ‘voter rights,’ seek to lock into place the subterfuges they used to steal the 2020 presidential election.”

Peter Wood warns, as he previously did in A Bee in the Mouth, against the consequences of a culture of indulging too freely in the celebration of anger.  He maintains that “the ferocious political and ideological battles of 2020 and 2021,
I argue, should be seen through the prism of what I call ‘new anger’: that self-regarding, self-rewarding, flamboyantly expressive, and narcissistic form of performative rage.  New anger often gets in the way of our better judgment, but that doesn’t mean that the underlying anger is necessarily foolish.  We may be angry for the right reason but angry in the wrong way.”

Ultimately, WRATH hopes to “inspire confidence in those who are determined to wrest their nation back from the elites who have taken it away.  Their efforts must overcome the silencing, censorship, criminalization of dissenting opinion, and other forms of persecution that are becoming the standard operating procedure of the illiberal regime now in power.  To those who feel angry about this but who are ridden with doubts about how to contest this new order, this book offers the counsel that, in some circumstances, your wrath is your best defense.  But wrath is a dangerous weapon, and you must use it wisely to avoid self-injury.”

 To arrange an interview with Wrath author Peter Wood, please contact Stephen Manfredi at 202.222.8028

 or smanfredi@ManfrediStrategyGroup.com

 

10 Interview Questions
for Wrath Author Peter Wood
To Learn More About Wrath, visit www.EncounterBooks.com

  1. Why did you write WRATH: America Enraged?
  2. How did anger come to dominate American politics?
  3. Why are Americans on both the political Left and Right so angry post-election?  Is the Right’s anger against Biden different in any important way from the Left’s anger against Trump?  How did the United States change from a nation that could be roused to anger but preferred self-control, to a nation permanently enraged?
  4. What is “new anger” and how does it differ from its older forms?  What is the difference between anger and wrath?  In your first chapter you discuss the “grapes of wrath” and The Battle Hymn of the Republic—references to the American Civil War.  Is America on the brink of another civil war?
  5. In WRATH, you contend that “Some wrath, I believe, is justified.  The popular will of Americans has been thwarted by a combination of careerist elites, progressive ideologues, an unprincipled press, and a business class more attuned to global opportunities than to domestic flourishing.  Because traditional forms of political protest have been tourniqueted by mass arrests, censorship, and decisions by law enforcement and the courts to stand aside, many Americans see themselves as having been denied a legitimate voice in their own governance.”  Please explain.
  6. How are progressive elites stoking rage on a range of issues from “Antiracism,” Critical Race Theory, and efforts to erase American history like the 1619 Project to unfettered illegal immigration, the Covid pandemic response, and new “voter rights” campaigns?
  7. Even if the anger is justified, what are the risks of losing emotional self-control and consequences of a culture of indulging too freely in the celebration of anger?  How could the “angri-culture” actually threaten our republic?
  8. How does “new anger” actually get in the way of our better judgment?
  9. WRATH hopes to “inspire confidence in those who are determined to wrest their nation back from the elites who have taken it away.  Their efforts must overcome the silencing, censorship, criminalization of dissenting opinion, and other forms of persecution that are becoming the standard operating procedure of the illiberal regime now in power.  To those who feel angry about this but who are ridden with doubts about how to contest this new order, this book offers the counsel that, in some circumstances, your wrath is your best defense.  But wrath is a dangerous weapon, and you must use it wisely to avoid self-injury.”  How can Americans use their wrath constructively?
  10. What practical steps could the average citizen take to step back from confrontation and violence to “wrest the powers of government back into the hands of those who love our ordered liberty and hold our founding principles in high regard”?  Do you think peaceful civil disobedience is an effective tool in today’s climate to counter woke progressivism?

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We want to thank Stephen Manfredi.  He brings us some really amazing guests!!!!

Stephen Manfredi

Manfredi Strategy Group, LLC

1478 Kirby Road, Suite 1000

McLean, Virginia  22101

202.222.8028 mobile

www.ManfrediStrategyGroup.com