Improving People

 In my first months of law school, I welcomed the encouragement and advice of others. I assumed I would be first in my class, so I found nothing to resent in people asking me how my grades were looking. I felt entitled to dream big about my future legal career, so I had nothing against people quizzing me about how prestigious my 1L summer internship was going to be. 

Then, as law school continued, and my record proved to be persistently less than perfect, I started to panic. "Uh oh," I thought. "I'm letting everybody down." It became an intolerable snub to hear someone say, "I assume you're going to be top of your class"—because I knew I wasn't. When friends said, "You're going to become a judge someday, right?" I had to cringe and admit it was unlikely. 

And somehow, the more encouragement was given, the harder it was to motivate myself to live up to it. I grew more insistent upon doing nothing and making no effort. It was the only form of feeble revenge I could muster. "You know what," I told the world, "I'm not going to be this amazing lawyer. I'm going to be resolutely average. Take that!"

And once I had lowered the bar of my own goals, it became possible to fulfill them. Once I said: "I'm going to try to graduate from law school; nothing more onerous than that. Everything else can wait," then I found myself enjoying the experience again. The goal became achievable. I was motivated to reach it. I started to actually work hard again at my courses. 

It is a known fact, beyond dispute, that a small amount of encouragement is essential to greasing the wheels of achievement in life. But it is equally true, I think—if less notorious—that too much encouragement is profoundly discouraging. It makes one think that everyone expects great things. And when one is just trying to summon the energy for good enough, this puts the target dispiritingly out of reach. 

It's not, by the way, like I was doing so terribly in law school. It's more just that law school takes three years, and is full of long stretches of waiting. The outcome of the whole process in the meantime is inherently uncertain. And when people around you are asking: "You're on track for ideal outcome X, right?", all you can say in response is: "I don't know yet! All I can aim for with near-certainty is good enough."

When I eventually explained all this to a friend—"the encouragement is stifling and killing me!" I said, "The high expectations do the opposite of motivating me, instead they just fill me with despair and hopelessness, because I feel like the standard is perfection and I will always fall short because I am imperfect," it prompted in him a moment of reflection. "Uh oh," he said—"have I been a 'tiger friend'?"

He was making a connection obliquely, of course, to our society's debates over parenting styles. Some parents, Amy Chua-like, assert that one must set high expectations for one's children, and insist that they meet them, in part by telling one's kids over and over again that you know they are capable of doing so. Others take a more laid-back approach: let them find their own way. 

It also relates to a question that frequently arises in the context of relationships. Should one encourage one's partner to try to address their flaws and foibles? Should one say: get out of the house; be productive; you can do it! Well, try it and see. It may work. Or they may shrivel and withdraw. The advice may sound like criticism. They may grow to hate you and want to fail even harder just for spite. 

I was reading W.S. Merwin's collection The Lice the other week, and I found in it a poem that reads as a perfect fable for the folly of trying to fix, encourage, and improve others—whether friends, children, or spouses. The poem, "Fly," describes the poet's attempts to fix the deficiencies of an overweight flightless pigeon he finds in his barn. He keeps picking him up and dropping him, shouting, "Fly!"

The pigeon makes the attempt, but always falls flapping to the ground; then he comes back around to the poet asking for more seed. Then one day, the poet finds him "in the dovecote dead/Of the needless effort." The poet reproaches himself for demanding too much of this corpulent bird that had only wished "to live like a friendly old man." He reflects: "So that is what I am [...] I who have believed too much in words." 

One is reminded of the sort of parents who drill encouragement and advice into their children's brains until the latter simply give up trying in revolt. "I will never be as good as you want me to be, so why bother?" And, just as with the pigeon, one is left to wonder: what was so wrong with them before that needed changing? Why was it not possible to let them be?

This is of course also what many people wonder in the context of relationships. Time and again, one partner will want the other to get a job, or a better job, or a more prestigious job, or to go back to school in order to someday get a better or a more prestigious job, and the other will simply not have it in them. They will wish, like the pigeon, to be left alone in good-hearted complacence. 

There is a parable of this too contained in Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy, which I read this weekend. Murphy, the protagonist of Beckett's stylistically immaculate and uproariously funny satire, is a man "who belonged to no profession or trade" and who spends his time "doing nothing." He survives, alongside his girlfriend, largely on the proceeds of a corrupt side-bargain he has made with his landlady. 

His girlfriend Celia insists he get a job and set up a proper home for them, so that she does not have to go back on the streets. He eventually agrees to do so, but warns her—the quest will destroy him, and with him, their love. What she loves is himself. And he will not remain himself much longer with a job. Therefore, her love will not survive the catastrophe of his gainful employment. 

Eventually, Murphy's prophecy is fulfilled: "all her loving nagging," he reflects, "had only served to set him up more firmly that before in the position against which it had been trained, the position in which she had found him and would not leave him; how her efforts to make a man of him had made him more than ever Murphy; and how by insisting on trying to change him she had lost him, as he had warned[.]"

Could not the same be said by Merwin's pigeon? The poet's encouragement, his "loving nagging," his attempts to improve the bird, served only to defeat it, make it cling more intransigently than before to its complacent ways, and to abandon all effort. By trying to change him, the poet lost him; by trying to overturn the position in which he found him, he confirmed him in it. 

This is the risk that the tiger friend, or the tiger parent, or the improving spouse or partner always runs: they may try so hard to make a change in the other person that they leave the other to conclude simply: "Okay, I guess I'm inadequate in your eyes in my current form; you don't like me for who I am; and since you detest me so much as myself, why should I do anything to please you?" 

And so people double down on the very behaviors one was trying to change in the first place. One ultimately confirms the very thing one was trying to combat. One creates the very problem that one was trying to forestall. By trying to make a flier of the pigeon, one killed him; by trying to make a breadwinner of Murphy, one merely accentuated his Murphy-ness—and eventually destroyed him.

What then is the answer? I suppose, instead of encouraging someone else to reach for things in the future, one can applaud and celebrate the incremental steps they have already taken. One can emphasize the positive in what they have already achieved, and this affirmation will encourage them far better than would visions of a future that may seem far-off and unattainable. 

But, one can also simply learn to accept what cannot be changed. One can love the pigeon for what he is—a complacent old gentleman—not for what one wishes he would become. One can keep loving Murphy as he is, instead of transforming him into someone else who—because he is no longer the Murphy one loved—one no longer loves. One can appreciate that the world needs flightless birds and Murphys too. 

I am reminded of a passage in E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread. The English characters in the novel have all been desperately trying to interfere with and improve one another's private affairs. But the most poignant moment comes when one of them, beholding the infant that was the object of all their manipulations, scheming, and strategies, suddenly realizes it was all unnecessary. 

Why was it unnecessary? Because the baby is wonderful simply for what it is, without need of special improvement. "It did not stand for a principle any longer," writes Forster. "It was so much flesh and blood, so many inches and ounces of life—a glorious, unquestionable fact [....] And this was the machine on which [the English characters] had for the last month been exercising their various ideals."

The parable of the pigeon; the parable of Murphy—these illustrate with profound wisdom the peril of "exercising ideals" upon living things and demanding that they represent a principle or a pinnacle or a paragon—rather than simply themselves. They are warnings to us all to let each other be what we are. The world has surely never been worse off for having a few "friendly"—if complacent—pigeons.