April 2024
If you pay attention to the sciences and to history enough you know that almost every scientific discovery began with investigating a correlation. The blueberry patch was getting thick and wore out. The fire came through and burned the patch up. The boles of the blueberry bushes pushed out brand new canes. The new canes correlated with an abundance of blueberries. Did the fire cause it? Do we need a fire? Can a knife do what the fire did? Pruning was discovered.
History and sciences developed controlled environments where experiments could be conducted to find the cause for the correlation. Why? Because we are human and sometimes we get it backwards, sometimes we go for the easy answer because we want it to affirm a bias.
The Great Depression/World War II Generation is called the Greatest Generation for many obvious reasons. One of the things that happened during this generation is that there was a lot of social data gathered about its members because a vast majority worked in, with, and through the government. Whether it was the vast programs to deal with unemployment or the sheer numbers necessary for defeating the fascists in the war, a vast majority of Americans had social data collected about them to figure out where they would fit in to this vast scheme to defeat global economic collapse and fascism’s attempt to rule the world. As that generation aged they accomplished so many amazing things in the 50s and 60s. That vast trove of sociological data was followed up on and a wonderful correlation was noticed. This generation, the Greatest Generation, was as a whole hard-working, amazingly innovative and creative, productive, and happy. And they had high self-esteem.
In the excitement of the discovery a real basic scientific principal was ignored. The correlation was noted that people with strong and high self-esteem were hard-working, amazingly innovative and creative, productive and happy. Causation, though, was not investigated. In the giddy excitement of the times it was thought that the high self-esteem is what caused this generation to be such great and productive citizens so, therefore, it was assumed that if we make a concerted effort to raise self-esteem we will create model citizens. By the way, the highest measurable self-esteem was found to be in people who were imprisoned on death row – traditionally not model citizens. This anomaly was ignored in the excitement of the utopia we were going to create.
In the 70s the Self-Esteem Curriculum took over. Participation trophies started showing up. The bell curve for grading started to get abandoned. It was drilled into people that they were great and amazing already. We were creating a generation of wonderful people who loved themselves and because they were so wonderfully put together and self-aware they would make a great world. Self-esteem did increase……and with it depression and narcissism. Depression and narcissism are extremely similar, by the way, because the sufferers of both often cannot see beyond themselves. What happened? Their participation in voting wavered. Attendance in churches, scouting, civic engagements steadily dropped. In spite of the fact that they had been raised to have a high self-esteem.
Turned out that the Greatest Generation did not accomplish great things because they had high self-esteem but that they had high self-esteem because of what they had accomplished. That generation had taken on really huge problems: global economic collapse and world war. It was not easy. They wouldn’t wish massive unemployment and global conflagration on anyone. They had to work extremely hard and be deprived of a great many things, they lived with rationing, they recycled and repurposed. They had been challenged and they met the challenge therefore they had a strong self-esteem. We tried to raise self-esteem by taking away the challenges. Turned out that we might have had a better shot at creating the society we wanted if we had made things tougher rather than easier.
In bowling centers gutter bumpers started showing up in the 80s. They were brought in to keep the ball on the lane and take away the humiliation of a gutter ball. It was thought that kids would then stick with it and more people would bowl. People learned though that no matter what they did they still got pins knocked down. Because their actions didn’t matter the interest in bowling dropped. Bowling was the number one leisure sport in the 50s through the 80s – today it is 20th out of the 39 listed. Gutter bumpers may have had the opposite of the intended effect. With the challenge gone why play?
I have had to meet a lot of challenges in my life and I feel I am a fairly productive and beneficial citizen. It was community, with its balance of love-accountability-challenge, that helped me. It was the elders in family, church, scouts, sports. These entities didn’t make the tasks easier, necessarily, they just patiently loved me as I struggled, didn’t kick me to the curb when I failed, made me tie my own shoes, forgave me, and celebrated when I succeeded. But each of those elders loved me with a fierce love that gave me the confidence to persevere. The love was given: the self-esteem was earned. I am not perfect, I have tasks still before me, but I do believe that hard work and effort and friends and colleagues are more likely to lead me to success rather than unearned praise.
In Christ,
