Helpfulness

Last week, I spent the afternoon with a book called 8 To Be Great: The 8-Traits that Lead to Great Success, by Richard St. John. It's a two-hour read and I don't regret buying it, but you can probably guess what's in it from the title alone. The author interviewed or read about several hundred successful people (call me typically academic, but he never actually defines "success") and concludes that they have eight things in common. These include passion for what they do, a strong work ethic, good ideas, perseverance, and so forth. No real surprises.

Like many self-help books, it's written in that cloying, indifferently punctuated, stream-of-consciousness style that Strunk and White call "breezy" (example: "A cabin in the woods! Hey, maybe that's what I need. I mean there are so many distractions here in the city I'm having real troubling concentrating long enough to finish this section on concentration.") It's amiable enough, I suppose, but there's no particular reason to read it. There's a three-minute video on TED and a six-minute video on the author's website that sums up everything you need to know. The rest of the book consists mainly of supporting quotations from well-known people, followed by a brief and breezy annotation by the author.

Is this sort of advice actually helpful? It's hard to say. Most self-help books suffer from selection bias, and this is no exception. The author has interviewed the rich and famous and sorted their qualities into categories. But to be meaningful, an equivalent study would have to be conducted of unsuccessful people: bankrupt businesspeople, failed inventors, forgotten athletes, unpublished writers, penniless actors and artists, hated teachers, anonymous academics, and the like. We might very well find (in fact, I'd be surprised if we didn't) that many of them possessed the same passion, work ethic, focus, and perseverance as those who succeeded, but failed to succeed all the same, and for a very simple reason: because the universe doesn't care about us. In fact, if the universe does have some sort of guiding intelligence, there's every reason to believe that it hates us and wants us dead, after a suitable interval of tormenting us with a host of disgusting bodily infirmities and albums from the runner-ups on American Idol. What kind of god would give us both irritable bowel syndrome and Clay Aiken?

The fundamental problem with self-help books is that they convey the impression that life is fair and that we are in control of our own destinies. But this is a conclusion that no one with an acquaintance with history could possibly reach. Of course, we must take responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of our own actions, and I am grinding my teeth down to nubs from dealing with students who feel that they are entitled to academic accolades without working for them. But history is jammed to the rafters with people who did everything right but who were forced into bankruptcy by economic circumstances totally beyond their control; who were resented, hated, feared, and consequently held back because of their talents; who were victims of monolithic forms of racial, religious, or sexual prejudice; and who were making their way in the world just fine until suddenly they were buried by landslides, drowned by tidal waves, stricken with cancer, or killed by Nazis.

So much for the hideous pseudo-therapeutic daytime talk show piffle that "no one can make you a victim without your consent." Tell it to these people. Is their problem that they don't know The Secret? Do they not have enough perseverance? Perhaps they need to learn about neuro-linguistic programming. Oprah, after all, overcame her troubles with weight gain - several times, in fact. If she can do it, why can't they look on the bright side of famine and genocide?

I think you get the point. Before you go accusing me of making a strawman attack, you really should read my friend Alison Hunter's review of The Secret, a book that actually does say that if you're victim of, well, anything, it's because you've got a bad attitude. Let me, instead, leave you with much a better consideration of the human condition from the most famous and widely-read self-help book of them all:

(Ecclesiastes 9.11) I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

War

" War is Not the Answer" states a small poster on a bulletin board where I work. Well, it depends upon the question, doesn't it? The failure of the 1930s was not a failure to settle Europe's troubles through peaceful negotiations, it was that peaceful negotiations were attempted for far too long. Negotiation is not possible when confronted with an ideology that regards peace only as an interval during which one prepares for war, and war as a natural state for imposing "racial purity" on a vast scale. Nazism could not be appeased, contained, or co-existed with. It could only be destroyed, and its destruction was, as the late Stephen Ambrose once observed, "the supreme accomplishment of the first half of the 20th century." Today, adolescents can re-create that cure in hyper-realistic, graphically-intense video games, digitally reliving for their amusement the horrors that a former generation actually experienced. Some games even allow them to play the other side, as if the two sides were or ever could be morally equivalent.

As an historian, I meet all sorts of history buffs whose interest is confined to years 1939-1945. A quick look at the history section in any bookstore or at the History Channel's lineup of programming will confirm that the public seems to have an insatiable interest in the Second World War, despite the annual scolding we receive from that cadre of fusty antediluvians at the Dominion Institute. However, as an historian one will, from time to time, meet history buffs who will tell you , often in a slightly conspiratorial tone of voice: "You know, Hitler had a lot of good ideas. He just went too far." My former response to this sort of thing was to take a sharp step in the opposite direction. Now I prefer a policy of engagement. "And what," I usually ask, "do you consider 'too far'? You were with them at the book burning phase, but drew the line at beating Jews? Or perhaps they had you at beating Jews but you jumped ship when involuntary euthanasia began?" The fact is, of course, that the regime was a lunatic asylum from the outset, and my advice is to avoid people who are willing to flirt with the idea that a racist, totalitarian, single-party state, organized for endless war, may have something going for it.

Sixty-five years ago today, a combined Anglo-Canadian-American force fought its way, inch by bloody inch, up the beaches of Normandy in what was probably the single most complex military operation in history. Over the next six weeks, they would utterly destroy two German armies in the Battle of Normandy, decisively proving that the Nazis (and their subsequent admirers) were utterly wrong to believe that totalitarian societies are better at war than democracies. Sufficiently aroused, the power of free people and capitalist economies to wage war proved to be far beyond that of the dictatorships. While fighting the Battle of Normandy, the Allies simultaneously conducted vast campaigns on land, sea, and air on many fronts across two major theatres of war, while all the while supplying — crucially, as we now know — logistical support to the Red Army through the auspices of the Lend-Lease program. As the civilians of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were to learn, the fury of democratic societies, aroused to what was for them the very unnatural state of war, was both awesome and terrible to behold. Allied bombers had reduced nearly every major Germany city to rubble and ash before the Red Army — carried, incidentally, on American trucks — set foot on Germany soil, while the Japanese were to suffer the immolation of dozens of their towns and cities, acts of vengeance culminating in the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

War is a dreadful thing. But it is not, as some on left the say, to be avoided at all costs, nor is it true that there are no winners in war. Pacifism is morally defensible only when it is a choice you make for yourself. The pacifist who allows himself to be beaten has made one kind of moral decision; if he allows someone else to be beaten, he has made another one entirely. Sometimes we must fight. The destruction of National Socialism and of Japanese militarism was necessary for the safety and survival of free societies throughout the world. For all their faults and foibles — and these are, as we all know, numerous — the liberal democracies do not murder or enslave their own citizens. We are, as I have said, the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most culturally prosperous people in the history of the world, and in large measure because our grandparents had thrust upon them the dreadful duty to fight those who would have enslaved us all.

Executions

The fact that some people deserve a good killing is not, by itself, a persuasive argument for capital punishment. There's no particular evidence that the death penalty deters crime (last year, American states with the death penalty had nearly twice the homicide rates of states without it), and the principle of an "eye for an eye" belongs to the long list of cruel and tyrannical Old Testament injunctions that should give a moment of pause to those who believe that scripture both automatically and axiomatically provides instruction in good morals. But the foremost objection to the death penalty is more straightforward: so long as the sentencing option exists, there is a chance that it will be carried out on an innocent person.

The Innocence Project has a list of over 300 wrongly convicted felons – many of them freed on the basis of DNA evidence, while the Death Penalty Information Center maintains a list of an astonishing 133 convicts released from death row after having been exonerated. Nearly sixty of these cases occurred in the last 10 years. There certainly are some sociopathic killers who seem to have abdicated their right to life, but my concern is with the innocent. The evidence suggests that the probability of sentencing error is very far from negligible, and death is the one form of punishment for which no compensation could be provided in the event of error.

Polls show that most Canadians want the death penalty back , but polls also reveal that people favour all kinds of frightening and undemocratic ideas (such as random police searches of homes) if you ask them in the right way. Fortunately, there is little chance that the death penalty will return. Our Parliamentarians are, I am convinced, mostly incompetent, but there's something to be said for stupid people running things, provided that they're also lazy, because at least they accomplish nothing, whereas stupid people with ambition can do all kinds of damage.

At any rate, I suspect that the death penalty never will return to my country. If it does, however, executions absolutely must be made public again. The people crying for blood don't get to shield their eyes from it when it is spilled.

Classmates

A month ago, I had been prepared to tell my senior students that they should under no circumstances go to graduate school, much as this author did in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (It's worth reading.) I still think that it's a momentous decision, and not something one should choose by default. If you're one of those people who just loves to learn, well, the library and a book club can probably satisfy those cravings just as well as more school. As I've argued elsewhere, it may very well be the case that doing a PhD will actually impede your personal education. Moreover, the academic job market is very tough and getting tougher year by year. Some people are publishing monographs before their PhD is done these days, and I have heard of candidates for academic jobs who have hired personal trainers, wardrobe consultants, and even voice coaches in preparation for their interviews.

Of the past 30 graduates from my former department's PhD program, nine have secured full-time academic positions. Moreover, in the past two years that program alone has graduated more PhDs in Canadian history than there have been academic openings for full-time historians of Canada in the entire country. You heard me right: in terms of numbers, that one program could supply the needs of the every university in the country for new tenure-stream professors of Canadian history. For those graduating with PhDs in American and European history, they are in competition for an equally small number of jobs, but arrayed against them is a potentially larger pool of applicants, including graduates from elite America and European universities.

If you get a tenure-stream position anywhere, it will be because you beat at least fifty or sixty others who applied for the same job. I know of one recent case where there were more than one hundred applicants for a single position. This should give even the most gifted undergraduate, thinking about graduate school, some serious pause. The six or seven years you are about to spend getting your PhD are not a meal ticket, and your chances of getting a full-time academic appointment are probably less than one-in-five. Oh, I know: there's a wave of retirements coming up. And we will all have flying cars and live in domed cities on the moon.

However: over lunch with a former student on Saturday, something occurred to me that made me reconsider my pessimism. In 1999-2000, the year I began my Master of Arts degree, my program at the University of Western Ontario accepted five M.A. and two PhD students. It was a remarkably small cohort, even for those days, and I got to know the others in classes of just two or three. Of those seven people, I know not the whereabouts of two. Of the remaining five, an astonishing four now have full-time university appointments. Lynn, whose dissertation won a major award from the Organization of American Historians, is associate professor of history at Lethbridge; Amy is an assistant professor at the same institution, and has an accomplished new book out; Andrew is assistant professor at Laurentian, has a book out and another under review (I know that none among my cohort will object when I say that he was the brilliant one); I am myself at King's University College at UWO. And the fifth? Well, he's doing what he wants to do, too: Peter's a high school teacher, which was his plan all along.

Not bad. In fact, staggeringly good. I doubt if any cohort from any graduate program anywhere in Canada in the past decade can claim to have done so well: of the four people who entered wanting academic appointments, all of us got them, and very shortly after our respective graduations, too.

But there was more to it than that, even, at least for me. I entered graduate school both professionally and intellectually unprepared, and the shock of encountering serious people such as these, while studying under the tutelage of senior professors with decades of experience, helped me to realize that I had a great deal of work to do if I was going to make it through.

In the mega-cohorts of today — my former program will accept approximately seventy new graduate students this fall —I would almost certainly have come to a bad end. Instead, I emerged from my course work and field exams incomparably better off than I was before – and in large measure for having been in the company of a cohort of such excellent people, people who were far more generous of spirit to me than I was to them. I realize that a gesture of thanks, however sincere, can seem somehow hollow when it arrives ten years after the fact, but I offer it nonetheless.

For my graduating students, then, I offer the following reconsideration. I know that you are probably quite uncertain and perhaps even afraid right now. After so many Septembers of school, the prospect of something different must be very unsettling. And it is undoubtedly true that when you enter the workforce, it may very well be near the bottom, and you will have to spend some years paying your dues and climbing the ladder. We all have to do things in life that we do not want to do; in measure, doing them can ennoble us, and is part of leading a good life. But we also live in what most certainly is the healthiest and wealthiest society in the history of the world, and yet so many of us seem to endure rather than enjoy our lives. If I have had one truly staggering realization over the past ten years, it is this: life is short. We have four thousand weeks, if we are lucky. So if you feel that you must do more school – not in the sense that you don't know what else to do, but in the sense that you would not enjoy your life if you didn't– then do it. Do it. Life is too short to live in alienation from yourself. Find a good school – a small school, if you can; get to know people; make friends; be generous; work hard; read outside your field; go for beer sometimes; pass on what you have learned; accept the reality of the job market, and hope that chance will favour you with classmates such as those that I had.