EP. 95: SHAPING A SOUL, BUILDING A SELF

Jan 16

WITH WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

An essayist and cultural critic discusses the value of a liberal education in shaping courageous, imaginative, and moral identities and how this enables us to create purposeful lives.

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Episode Summary

As an English professor at Yale University, essayist and literary critic William Deresiewicz observed a trend across American higher education that troubled him deeply. Instead of learning to think independently, critically, creatively, and courageously, students were increasingly subscribing to a mode of careerism, credentialism, and conformism that focused on climbing the academic or professional ladder.

So what is the value of higher education? As Deresiewicz writes in his 2014 book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, colleges, first and foremost, are supposed to teach you to think, to help you develop a habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. More than that, college is where you build a soul — your moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional self, through exposure to books, ideas, works of art, and pressures of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers to the big questions. Questions of love, family, God, mortality, time, truth, dignity, and the human experience.

Over the course of our conversation, we discuss the search for a meaningful life, the worth of a liberal education, the role of mentorship, the relationship between solitude and leadership, what it means to cultivate moral imagination, and more.

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
Bill has published over 300 essays and reviews. He has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and a Sydney Award; he is also a three-time National Magazine Award nominee. His work, which has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, and many other publications, has been translated into 19 languages and included in over 40 college readers and other anthologies.
Bill taught English at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer. He has held visiting positions at Bard, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges as well as at the University of San Diego. In 2024, he will serve as an inaugural Public Fellow at American Jewish University.
In this episode, you will hear about:
• 3:00 - Deresiewicz’ approach to teaching during his years as a college professor
• 6:25 - The reason why parents are not ideally positioned to guide their children through questions of what they want to do with their lives
• 8:02 - What Deresiewicz believes is the purpose of higher education
• 10:50 - What it means to “shape the soul” of students
• 17:12 - What we miss when we take a scientistic view of the world
• 20:45 - The challenge of establishing normative values in society, and why a “moral education” should be prioritized instead
• 28:25 - The search for individualism among students today
• 30:55 - What true leadership looks like and why people in powerful positions in our society do not often exhibit these traits
• 40:28 - What does it mean to have a sense of purpose?
• 43:00 - How young people can work to develop their sense of a calling or purpose
Henry Bair: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:02] And I'm Tyler Johnson.
Henry Bair: [00:00:04] And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered what makes medicine meaningful. Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:27] In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and health care executives those who have collected a career's worth of hard earned wisdom probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine. We will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.
Henry Bair: [00:01:03] As an English professor at Yale University, essayist and literary critic William Deresiewicz observed a trend across American higher education that troubled him deeply. Instead of learning to think independently, critically, creatively and courageously, students were increasingly subscribing to a mode of careerism, credentialism and conformism that focused on climbing the academic or professional ladder. So what is the value of higher education? Well, as he writes in his 2014 book Excellent Sheep Colleges, first and foremost suppose to teach you to think. To help you develop a habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. More than that, college is where you build a soul: your moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional self through exposure to and challenges with books, ideas, works of art, and pressures of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers to the big questions in their own ways. Questions of love, family, God, mortality, time, truth, dignity, and the human experience. We speak with Bill on this episode because we believe his ideas on searching for and living a meaningful life are highly relevant to how clinicians are shaped and trained today. We discussed the worth of a liberal education, the role of mentorship, the relationship between solitude and leadership, what it means to cultivate moral imagination, and more.
Henry Bair: [00:02:35] Bill, welcome to the show and thanks for being with us.
William Deresiewicz: [00:02:38] I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Henry Bair: [00:02:41] I have to say, this episode is quite the treat for me. I first came across your book Excellent Sheep early in my sophomore year in college, and it has deeply influenced how I approach my own education since then. I credit it with giving me the fortitude to pursue my studies in classics and medieval literature during university, a decision I always look back on with fondness and gratitude. My hope is that our conversation today will be interesting and insightful for medical educators, students, and really anyone curious about how doctors are trained. To kick us off, can you tell us while you were a professor at Yale, what was your general approach to teaching students?
William Deresiewicz: [00:03:23] Well, I don't think I ever consciously formulated an approach, but certainly I think some of the most important things about the way I went about my job were, first of all, treating my students like human beings, regarding them as human beings, as opposed to, you know, just vessels to put information into, or people whose relationship with me was exclusively confined to the classroom. And, you know, the work they did for the course. I cared about who they were. I cared just on a human level. But I also felt that what I was doing as a teacher addressed them in their I don't want to use grandiose language, but address them in their full humanity. In other words, I wasn't in the business of training future specialists, and even to the extent that I was, I felt that college is about is about more than just learning a specialty. I encourage students to come and talk to me during office hours. I didn't insist on it, but when they were interested in doing so and I created a tone that was welcoming, I enjoyed having open ended conversations with them, and a lot of students over the years wanted to do that because, you know, young people are looking for. Well, they're looking for a lot of things, I think, from a potential mentor. They're looking for a sympathetic ear, but they're also looking for someone who can help them think through the questions that naturally arise at that time of life. And this is the second thing that I would say about my approach as a teacher, both in office hours and in the classroom.
William Deresiewicz: [00:05:01] It's that word "questions". Again, people have said this before. To me, education is is not about information transfer. It's not filling a bucket. I mean, obviously that plays some role. But I mean, I think in college and certainly if if it's a decent college, the students should be responsible for most of that themselves. The job of the teacher is to ask questions that open up a student's thinking. And the job of a mentor is to ask questions that opens up a student's thinking about their own lives. Right. So there's a misconception about what you do as an advisor. What you should do. You don't you don't tell students what to do. You ask them questions that help them think through the problem themselves. As a student, I quote an excellent sheep said about one of his teachers. She asked me the questions that lie behind the questions like students might come in an undergraduate might come in and have a question about their course schedule for the next semester or something like that, or about different majors, you know, if they're freshmen or sophomores about different majors. But the bigger questions behind those questions are, what do you want to do with your life? I mean, that's a question that you need to start asking yourself. And there's a certain respect in which parents cannot be the ones to work through that question through with.
Henry Bair: [00:06:25] Yeah, that's actually one point I was going to just point out, like many people might hear that and say, why is it the job of a university professor? And I think you're just about to get into that. So so why is it that you say that to some degree, parents aren't the best positioned to posit these questions?
William Deresiewicz: [00:06:41] And let me say, first of all, I mean, I didn't see this as my job with every student. Like I said, I thought it was my job to make myself available for that. Parents are too invested in the answer. That's the basic problem. Parents have their own ideas, and even when they don't, the rare parent who really gives their child the freedom to figure out to be who who they should be or who they might want to be, even then, you know, the parent knows you as a as a small child. The parent has already an extremely well developed sense of who you are, and it's very liberating and very important for young adults to have relationships with sympathetic older adults who haven't already formed opinions about them. You know, people with whom they can start to be the next person that they're going to be, rather than the person they were when they were five years old.
Henry Bair: [00:07:34] So what kinds of courses did you actually teach? Like what were the subject matters?
William Deresiewicz: [00:07:38] I specialized in modernist literature, so I taught courses in British modernism, you know, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and so forth. I love teaching courses in the great books in the Western canon, which I had started to do as a graduate student at Columbia, and partly because I was already a freelance writer while I was in, even while I was in graduate school, let alone at Yale, I taught a fair number of writing courses.
Henry Bair: [00:08:02] When you describe your approach to mentoring students, I think that would be quite striking to a lot of people who, when they consider what colleges today at least purport to do, right. When you ask most people 'why go to college? What are you hoping to get out of it?' I think a good job is pretty much like right up there. As the most common response you'll hear. What do you think is the purpose of higher education?
William Deresiewicz: [00:08:27] I don't think we can talk about a 'the purpose'. I think higher education serves multiple purposes, and I think it should serve multiple purposes. And one of those certainly should be helping you to get a better job. And I would say that even if college weren't as expensive as it is. But typically, you know, if you're an 18 to 22 year old, these are like four crucial years at the beginning of young adulthood. And you have to do something more with that time than just prepare to get a job, let alone a specific job or a specific career that you decided to pursue when you were 18 or 16 or, God forbid, 12, or your parents decided for you to pursue, you know, decided for you, this is a crucial stage of development. And part of what I'm criticizing, railing against an Excellent Sheep, and which continues to be a problem, is that this credentials arms race.
William Deresiewicz: [00:09:21] Plus the way we've come to conceive of college and purely vocational utilitarian terms has meant that all that developmental stuff has gotten squeezed out. I mean, some of it is stuff that professors have nothing to do with, and it has to do with building relationships with peers, including romantic relationships. It's really important to start to like, practice how to be a grown up in relationship, but also the professor part. And I think especially, quite frankly, the humanities part and the humanities professor part has to do. And I know you're going to want to talk about this has to do with developing a sense of self. I mean, there's a lot of prepackaged language out there that I don't like, but I will I'll use it anyway as a shorthand, you know, figuring out who you are or building or creating who you are or finding your purpose.
William Deresiewicz: [00:10:13] And just to tie this back before I finish my answer. This is not separate from the vocational piece. This is not separate from getting a good job. This is about helping you to figure out what path you should pursue. Uh, and that's not just about life satisfaction. Although I think life satisfaction is pretty important. It's also about how well you're going to do it. Are you going to do work that excites you, that gets you out of bed in the morning? Or are you going to do work where you sit in an office 10 or 12 hours a day and hate your life and can't wait to leave?
Henry Bair: [00:10:50] Yeah, well, as you hinted about, I do want to talk a lot about what you characterize as building and or shaping a sense of self, or you even use the word 'soul' several times in your writings. And I think that when we hear that word, at least today, it can strike us as a little bit idealistic, a kind of fuzzy hand wavy, Like, what do you mean by soul? Are we talking about like in a spiritual, religious context, or is this something else entirely? What do you really mean by shaping a soul?
William Deresiewicz: [00:11:22] Right? That word can act like a red flag in front of a bull's nose. For some people, that's the effect it had on Steven Pinker, who was very offended by this and wrote and railed, you know, inveighed against the book. But as I say in the book, I'm not a believer, I'm an atheist, and I don't believe in a soul, in a transcendental soul. I don't believe in a soul that exists before our birth or that persists after our death. I explained what I mean, and I and I use the word because I take it from a passage in the letters of John Keats, the English poet who talks about the world as a Vail. Vail in Vail. It's the old meaning of valley, the word as a vail of soul making, in other words. And Keats says this, we're born undifferentiated, you know, we're born maybe with potential, but we're not. We're not. There's not really much to us when we're born, and it is the world. It is experience that shapes us into an individual, into someone who is different from everyone else. Experience does this, but you know, it doesn't always do it to the same extent. In other words, it's important to become self conscious about this process, to become introspective, to become self aware, to become aware. I mean, I think psychologists would say this to become aware of your own responses to things, of your own emotions, of your own desires.
William Deresiewicz: [00:12:54] This is a big problem. It's a big problem for my Excellent Sheep. The book came out in 2014. It's a much bigger problem now because when I wrote that book, I mean, social media was was sort of in its infancy and the iPhone was still smartphones in general were kind of still spreading throughout the world. So I didn't even talk about that piece. There were enough problems with the meritocratic rat race that gave people little time to develop anything like a self. Now we have a screen life that cuts people off in a profound way at a very simple level, from their bodies, from their senses, from their emotions, from their intuitions. These are the things. And I don't think again, I don't think there's anything touchy feely about it. It may not be quantifiable, but if you don't know your own emotions and desires, first of all, again, you're going to be a very thin person, but you're going to be a miserable person. And I wish I had talked about this in Excellent Sheep. You're going to make the people around you pretty miserable too. If anyone listening to this is married to such a person, or has a parent or a child who is such a person, it's not pleasant to be around. So this is what I mean. There's nothing mystical or magical or religious about what? What I call a soul. It's really just a word for a self, but a self with depth, a self with self-awareness, a self that is capable of evolving and evolving in a mindful which simply means a self-aware way.
Henry Bair: [00:14:32] So let me ask you, because I think if you frame it like that to a lot of people, it sounds great. I think people are like, yeah, of course, having depth is great, having self-awareness. I want some of that. Mindfulness is a very popular terme these days. At the same time, you know, I'd imagine some people might hear that and say, yeah, but how how do you know you've done it? How do you measure your progress on creating a sense of self? How would you respond to that?
William Deresiewicz: [00:15:00] You can't measure it. Again, it's not quantifiable. And one thing that we need to be very clear about, and this is a part of the problem with I mean, my father was a scientist. My brother was is a scientist, I was a science major. I'm very pro science. I simply recognize that science has limits. And when we see science as the measure of all things and only things that are quantifiable have a real existence, we get ourselves in a lot of trouble and we miss out on a lot of life. So how do you you can't measure your progress? I'm not really sure I know how to answer that question. I mean, I think I think the question itself is a problem because it sees this task as something to be approached externally, like learning a skill or learning a body of information, which is exactly how, you know, meritocratic strivers approach every problem. Everything is a skill to be mastered or a subject to be learned. Not everything in life is like that. You didn't ask me this. Maybe we were going to get to it anyway. But part of the problem here is that. This business of soul building requires time. You can't do it while you're busily running around busily accomplishing tasks, jumping through hoops. It's something that happens through undirected reading. Through undirected conversation and through, you know, undirected introspection, unplanned introspection. You don't sort of you don't mark out 30 minutes a week to engage in introspection. You give yourself the time to whatever it is that works for you, you know, go for a walk or. I mean anything where you are not engaged in goal oriented activity. And then I think, you know, to a certain extent it just happens naturally at that point, especially when you're young, because young people have questions about life that they're going to ask unless they're prevented from doing so, which we've gotten very good at preventing them from doing.
Henry Bair: [00:17:12] Yeah. I want to go back to something you said, which was that approaching the world, trying to quantify everything, thinking that science is the highest mode of knowledge has its limits. It reminds me of a conversation I had early in college where I went to Rice University, which has a very strong biosciences and engineering department, and I think during my time there, during my four years, there was around the time when computer science became the most popular major. And I remember having this conversation because at the time I had no idea what computer science really was. And I remember one of the the seniors I talked to say that they loved computer science because it allowed them to reduce everything to algorithms, like, everything in life becomes an algorithm. And they loved it. They loved that. It is understandable. People's interactions became algorithms, the markets became algorithms. Everything became, you know, just so easily. You can lay it all out, right? And takes the emotion out of it. And of course, like, I think it's really easy for us. I mean, intuitively, something feels wrong when I hear that. But I'm hoping you can expound upon that. Like, what exactly are we missing if we take a scientistic view of the world?
William Deresiewicz: [00:18:24] Right. Scientistic rather than scientific. That's right. Scientistic meaning the belief that science can address all problems. First of all, I hope that it's intuitively obvious that that's a psychotic way to behave. But what I would say fundamentally, what I would say just to reduce it to its simplest terms, what science and quantification and algorithms and objectivity cannot capture is our values, right? They do not enable us to value things, meaning they do not enable us to decide what is more important to us than other things. You can give me a utilitarian calculus, but even behind utilitarianism, there are always values. You actually don't avoid the problem by trying to take a utilitarian approach. Or in other words, you cannot take yourself out of the equation of conducting your life. So you cannot avoid. And I think this is another thing that Pinker doesn't seem to understand. You cannot avoid the assigning of value, but science cannot help you assign value.
William Deresiewicz: [00:19:31] One of the things that enabled modern science to establish itself was to separate itself from values, from valuing, from ought, rather than is, from value rather than fact. So how do we come to value things? We come to value things through emotion. It is emotion that tells us what the relative value of things are for us, the relative value of one person rather than another. Are you going to make a utilitarian algorithmic calculation over whom to be friends with? I mean, you might do that. You might decide that, you know, someone is going to give you a greater financial return on investment because this person is a business major and some somewhere down the line, they might be able to help you get a job or something. Again, that is psychotic behavior. I mean, I shouldn't throw around the word psychotic. It's de-personalized. It is just it's disassociated. Right? So what you will end up with is a life that may be rich in various quantifiable rewards, like wealth, but will be utterly impoverished in terms of emotion. In terms of, dare I say it, love? Affection. That's what's at stake here.
Tyler Johnson: [00:20:44] Well, it's striking to me, too, that, you know, there is this strange, almost like a cultural reflex which previously I would have assigned more to the political left. Except that now it's just as strong, if not stronger, on the political right to pretend like there is a way to talk about how we should manage ourselves in the world that doesn't involve any kind of normative language. Right? So it's like there's this myth that you can just get rid of shoulds and oughts, because if you talk about should or ought, you are being moralistic or you are being narrow minded, or you are being prescriptive or you are being something, but to the point that you were making, it seems like what people almost always when they say that, what they're really doing. It's not that they don't want normative arguments, they just want a different set of normative arguments that are in favor of things that they happen to favor, which, of course is reasonable to discuss. But it just becomes so confusing when you pretend that you can take the idea of should out of the equation, as if there's any way to talk intelligently about anything that doesn't involve talking about what a person should or shouldn't do.
William Deresiewicz: [00:22:00] Well, I take your point, but I have to say, and maybe I shouldn't have used that particular distinction between ought and is, although it was important in the development of science. I take your point, but that's not really what I was talking about, and certainly not really what I'm concerned with at this moment, but I understand by normative judgments are judgments that we make for others. You know, we're saying this is how people should live or this is what should be the case in the world. And of course, there's an important place for that. But I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about what should you know if we want to use the word should, what should I do? What do I care about? And it doesn't have to be general generalizable. In fact, I think it's really important for it not to be. You know, I love reading and various other pursuits, but it doesn't mean that I think everyone should love them and everyone should do them. Not at all. I think we each have our own nature, and we should each pursue our own nature and be permitted to. But again, that's a matter of value. That is a matter of feeling, of affection, of relatedness. It is not quantifiable.
Tyler Johnson: [00:23:10] Do you think, though, that there is a way ultimately to talk about? Because even the word value, right. You can use the word value to signify a thing that matters to me. Right. Or you can use the word value to talk about a thing that is important in the abstract. Right? And while, of course it is true that all of us have things that we value that have no ultimate moral capital V value, right? Whether a person I mean, we could talk about maybe reading is actually does have a capital V value. But, you know, whether I like to play a particular sport or watch a particular television program or wear a particular kind of clothes or, you know, those kinds of things in general are going to not have much value. But it does seem to me that we at least need a vocabulary for talking about things like having compassion is better than not having compassion, regardless of which person you are or where you're operating in the world. Or do you disagree with that? Do you think that there should be no universally normative values? I'm genuinely curious. I'm not even I'm not even trying to challenge. I'm asking.
William Deresiewicz: [00:24:15] This is not something I think about very often. I recognize the problem with having a society that has no normative standards, but I'm very wary. I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community. It was an intensely normative environment, and I rebelled against it. And I'm very wary of the idea of establishing normative standards for others. I mean, really the whole idea of liberalism and of course, we don't. I don't mean, you know, the politics of the center left of the Democratic Party, but liberalism in the grander historical sense, the whole idea of liberalism is that it is value neutral, that the state does not prescribe normative standards, and that everyone is free to pursue by themselves or in association with others, their vision of the good life, their vision of what is valuable and the job of the state is to let them do that and not impinge on that. I'm a big believer in that.
Henry Bair: [00:25:06] One of the things that that you write and talk a lot about is the value of having a moral education, right, and cultivating a moral self and moral imagination. What do you mean by that, especially given the context of what we talked about? Right. Like maybe it's not so much about having universal normative values. So then what do you mean by cultivating moral imagination and why is it important?
William Deresiewicz: [00:25:32] Right. So I talk about this in Excellent Sheep in the context of what I see as a central problem with the kinds of high achieving students that I taught and that I was myself when I went to college in the 80s, which is the difficulty that they can so often have in just deciding what they don't want to do with their lives. I mean, just in the simplest terms, because there is so much normative, yes, normative pressure from their environment to achieve success in, in certain, very narrowly defined ways, and of course, often a great deal of pressure from their parents to do that. And I saw many students and again, I was one of them, really feeling miserable under this regime of expectations. This is what you must do with your life, doctor, engineer, those are your choices, whatever it happens to be functioning in environments of intense conformity, right of peer conformity and communal conformity and so on and so forth. So how do you begin to rescue yourself from that? Well, part of the answer is what we were talking about before. It's about developing a self, developing a sense of who you are and what you want, developing something that's strong enough to push back against the world when it pushes against you. But another thing that's important is what I call moral imagination. I mean, I didn't invent the phrase moral imagination, which is simply by moral. I don't mean this is really important. And it gets back to our that thing about normative versus non-normative by moral.
William Deresiewicz: [00:26:59] I don't mean right or wrong. I'm talking precisely about the kinds of choices that really don't have a universal right or wrong. Should you be a doctor or should you be a teacher? We're not going to say everyone should be one, or everyone should be the other. And in a sense, that decision is nobody else should be nobody else's business. Right. But how do you make that decision? Or even better, how do you realize that there are a lot more choices in the world than the five that your world has presented you with? Well, you need some moral imagination. You need the ability to imagine other kinds of choices. By moral, I mean just the making of choices. Then the thing that I pair moral imagination with is moral courage, because it's not just enough to think of something that you could do that no one's presented you with, but also you need to do it. And that requires a lot of courage. I mean, I think that courage itself requires a lot of self confidence, the sense that you have a right to make the choices you're making and the sense that you are capable of making those choices. And these are hard things for young people to win. This is what having a self is about. It's about having somewhere to stand, a ground to stand on, from which you can, you can, you can take these kinds of leaps that are going to cause a lot of resistance from your parents and your peers and your environment.
Tyler Johnson: [00:28:25] You know, it has always been interesting to me since reading the original article and then the book, Excellent Sheep, one of the things that strikes me as so interesting about it is that I think it is true that if you go to any major college campus, certainly elite college campuses, at least the ones where I've spent a lot of years, I think that most students, if you ask them, would say, oh, my independence is one of my most important values, right? Like, of course I'm not letting anybody else tell me what to do. I'm just doing the stuff that I want to do because it's the stuff that I want to do, right? Like there is a sense, I think, among most college students that they are fiercely independent and blazing their own way and, and all the rest of it. And I think that that's one of the most striking insights from your writing on this subject is precisely that people who are so tightly constrained by academic and institutional and societal expectations, and in fact, that is largely how they get to elite institutions of learning in the first place. But they're so tightly constrained that they have ceased to notice the constraints in the first place. Does that sound about right?
William Deresiewicz: [00:29:40] I was not aware of this. I will be perfectly honest with you. I don't think I've ever asked students that question, nor have they ever volunteered an answer. I certainly believe you because I think young people like to believe that about themselves. They like to believe that they're nonconformist, that they're rebels. We also live in a society in which everyone is is encouraged to think of themselves as, you know, you know, these desperado revolutionaries. Yeah. I mean, it was ridiculous 50 years ago in the age of social media, it's it's comical and sad.
Tyler Johnson: [00:30:12] Henry, does that track? I mean, I think if I were to go around to most students on campus here and say, you know, you really strike me as a sheep, you're just kind of following the crowd. I mean, that would not go over well. Henry does that.
Henry Bair: [00:30:25] No, not at all. Yeah. I think people like to think that they are. Yeah. Standing up to the powers that be. Right. And I think that's why especially this is at elite universities. You know, I spent the last six years at Stanford, granted in the, in the, in the graduate schools. But I interacted with undergrads a lot. That's why I think there's so much involvement in social justice, for lack of a better Tum. And a lot of that is good, well intended. But I think that's sort of a way for them to express how nonconformist they are. But actually, it's it's kind of an interesting segue because Bill, you also wrote a piece on leadership and solitude and how elite institutions have been thinking about this in a way that's not actually conducive to what leadership actually means for students. Can you share with us, in your view, what what does it actually mean to be a leader?
William Deresiewicz: [00:31:12] Right. So I want to stipulate I never intended to set myself up in the business of a leadership guru. I wrote an essay in the early days of social media almost 15 years ago now, about solitude and my sense that solitude was disappearing because of social media. And a friend who was teaching in the English department at West Point saw the piece and shared it with some of her colleagues, and they invited me to come and talk to the plebes, the first year class about solitude. And I thought, you know, I'm at this pointy headed Ivy leaguer. These kids are undoubtedly very different from the ones that I'm used to talking to or hanging out with. I need to figure out a way to reach them by talking about something that matters to them. And I very quickly just poking around in the West Point website, I saw that leadership really is kind of the holiest word there. But of course, at West Point, leadership actually means something. They're going to be commissioned as second lieutenants and might be going and leading a rifle company, a rifle platoon in combat. Anyway, so the talk that I gave, which became this essay, was called Solitude and Leadership. It was really a very simple strategy here. Like they care about leadership. I'm going to talk about solitude. I want to talk about solitude. So I'm going to talk about solitude and leadership, which required me to think about whether there really was a connection between those two things. And and again, it was a really, at base, a very simple argument, which is that in order to be a leader in any genuine sense, you need moral imagination and moral courage, right? You need to be able to go in a different direction and not simply be a functionary, not simply be a bureaucrat who inherits a position and keeps the system going. And if you're going to be able to think for yourself, you need solitude. You need that space, whether that's a literal solitude or just kind of mental solitude, you need that separation.
William Deresiewicz: [00:33:11] To my great surprise, this piece actually was taken up very widely, not only in the military but in the business world. Even though I have never been a leader, I never want to be. But I think it's because there is so much talk about leadership. And you're asking especially with colleges. Colleges love this word too. They also love to everybody loves to talk about leadership. Everybody, you know, they want to be a rebel, but they also want to be a leader. So there's so much talk about it and so much is such complete nonsense. And I thought, especially with the example of West Point in front of me, where leadership really does mean something. Well, what does it mean in most elite institutions? And I think it's clear it just means getting to the top. It just means that you're going to be a winner rather than a loser, right? When places like Stanford say we train leaders, I think that's really what they're saying. Whether they think they're saying it or not, they're signaling you're going to be a success. It has no reference to anyone else. It has no reference to ideas like duty or self-sacrifice, or thinking about the greater good, or thinking about the good of the people you're leading, which are all ideas that actually are proper to leadership.
Henry Bair: [00:34:21] Yeah, it made me think of... So, I also spent some time at the at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, and the actual I don't know, I don't know if anyone at the business school is going to be hearing this, but the actual motto, the slogan of the school is 'Change Organizations, Change Lives, Change the World'. It's not 'improve' the world. It's just 'change' it. And I always found that to be kind of comical.
Tyler Johnson: [00:34:45] Run fast and break things, Henry. Run fast and break things. Yeah. You know, it is really interesting. So I'm one of the primary mentors for medical students at Stanford and one of the sort of the core faculty members. And so I end up taking a walk a lot with medical students to talk about various things. And one of the things that I end up talking with people the most about is, in effect, getting them to a place where they will believe me when I give them permission to not. I mean, this sounds ridiculous to say give them permission, but it really is what it feels like to not have the rest of their life be focused on just achieving the thing that is hardest to achieve. I think that most medical students genuinely start with some kind of altruistic drive, right? Whether it's to do research to find a cure to cancer, or it's just that they want to, you know, be in front of patients taking care of patients. But at some point, many of us, not them, us, many of us become so engrossed in the race to the top, which at first is sort of intertwined with all kinds of altruistic things or soul building things or whatever, that. Then over time, the altruism falls away, the soul building falls away, and the only thing that's left is the race to the top right. And that, I think, becomes both empty and corrosive. And I think speaks to the the sheep syndrome that you talk about so much in your book and, and also makes leadership impossible. Right. Because if you become a leader and the only thing that got you to being a leader was that you were the best person at racing to the top, then you get there. And substantively, you may not have anything to offer because the only thing you remember how to do anymore is race to the top and now you're to the top. So what are you going to do with it?
William Deresiewicz: [00:36:33] Yes, yes, yes. And in fact, I devote the last chapter of Excellent Sheep to talking about the fact that our leadership class now for for several decades since the, you know, the installation of this meritocratic admission system in the 60s, but certainly the leadership class that's emerged since the 90s is very clearly the adult version of these, you know, adolescent high achievers with disastrous consequences for for every institution and every, you know, country that they've been running. And one important aspect of that is what you just said. They don't actually believe in anything. The only thing they believe in is getting to the top. And once they get to the top, they don't know what to do there except stay at the top.
William Deresiewicz: [00:37:16] The example I like to give no one was more ambitious than Lyndon Johnson, and he finally gets to the presidency. And high on his agenda is the civil rights is civil rights legislation. And his advisor said, this is going to be really damaging for us politically. And Johnson knew it. He said, we've lost the South for a generation. He underestimated it. But he's like Robert Caro always quotes this what's the presidency for? Why did I do this? I did this for a reason, and he did it knowing, knowing that he would pay a political cost. But how many people do we see doing that? You know, we saw Liz Cheney do it, and maybe Mitt Romney, not a lot of other people and very few people in institutional positions. I mean, look at these university presidents we have now. These are people who who it would never even occur to them to take a stand on principle.
Tyler Johnson: [00:38:11] The more I have thought over the last, I don't know, five years or so about the idea of a meritocracy, the more problematic it becomes. And I think one of the reasons that it's problematic is because there is an assumption in so many corners, in so many different scenarios that meritocracy is the goal. Right? And obviously, I get that in one sense, in the sense that if we're, you know, trying to work our way past monarchy or autocracy or aristocracy or whatever, that there's certainly an argument to be made that meritocracy is better than all of those things. But at the end of the day, if meritocratic achievement is the point of life, right? If that is the only thing that you're seeking, is that, then it becomes almost entirely narcissistic. And I think that the point that you're making, which is that, like I remember when I got to medical school and look, I'm I want to be very open about this, right? Like my pursuit of I wanted to get into the best medical school because I wanted to go to the best medical school. Right. So I include myself in everything that I'm saying here. But I remember that there were certain of my classmates who I could tell almost immediately, were truly there because they wanted to make the world better in XYZ ways. And being there was just a step to allow them to be able to make the world better. But they were such shining exceptions, unfortunately, to the rule for most of us, which was that we were there because we had wanted to be at a top place and now we were at a top place.
William Deresiewicz: [00:39:46] Right. I talk about this in excellent shape. You know, I talk about purpose again. It's one of those words that gets thrown around a lot. But I think I like it more than, you know, passion or following your bliss. You know, what does it mean to have a sense of purpose? Becoming a lawyer is not a purpose. Becoming a lawyer to, you know, defend the rights of workers or to prosecute criminals. That's a purpose. And sure, once you know what your purpose is, I can understand that a lawyer who knows what they want to do with the law is going to want to go to the best law school they can because it will give them, you know, for obvious reasons, right? It'll give them a lot of efficacy in the world. Terrific. But you need there needs to be something more than just I want to distinguish myself for.
Henry Bair: [00:40:28] Yeah, and I think this this gets to the point of discovering a calling. Right. And I think the example you use being a lawyer, I think I see that a lot in medicine, which might be a little bit surprising because, I mean, being in the healthcare, being in a healing profession seems just overtly, intuitively meaningful and purpose driven. But, you know, you talk to medical students and a lot of them say that this is like the most prestigious thing or this is what their family wanted them to pursue. And when you ask them like, okay, so what do you want to do in medicine? Right? A lot of them can't really give you a concrete answer. I guess from your years of experience, just talking to so many students about discovering a calling, what would you recommend students, medical or otherwise do? Like kinds of explorations should they embark on to discover their calling? What kinds of conversations and experiences should they try to seek out for themselves?
William Deresiewicz: [00:41:26] I'm very wary of this question because it can feel like an enormous expectation. It can feel like you have to sort of wander around waiting in a field, waiting to be hit by a bolt of lightning, and it can be really debilitating. And so I do use that language in the book. I mean, I, I introduce several different terms, so we don't get stuck on any of them, like purpose or calling or passion. So I do use it, but I don't fixate on it. I mean, I think one of the most important things is just to try different things. This is why I think, you know, your 20s are a really important decade. I mean, I think if you're already in medical school, it's probably a little too late to decide, you know, not to go to medical school right away. Uh, and, you know, some people might really be certain in a, in a way that I would find very legitimate about what they want to do. I think in general, it's a pretty good idea if you've been doing nothing but school your entire life until age 22. And schools, in the way that we've been talking about this, this incessant treadmill, you need to step off that. It's a really good idea, if possible, to step off, that you haven't had a chance to to find out what most of the things in the world are. Even a few of the things in the world actually feel like when you're doing them, for lack of a better word, you need to wander again. Maybe not physically, but you need to let go of the goal orientation long enough to maybe find some different goals.
Tyler Johnson: [00:42:59] So the reason that Henry and I started this podcast is because there is this epidemic of burnout among health care workers, right? So depending on. Exactly which measure you want to use. Somewhere between a quarter and greater than half of all health care workers are either thinking seriously of leaving the profession. They feel a acute sense of depersonalization and demoralization and whatever. Anyway, there's a lot of this in the health care field right now, and we had a sense that we could have a series of discussions that would help to either help people recover from this sense, or maybe especially for younger listeners, help inoculate them against this happening in the future. And so here's the question that I would like to think about. If we just waved a magic wand, if you were just made in charge of a body of higher education, and they were to say, you can make whatever changes you want to help better orient education at this institution towards whatever you want to call it making a soul wandering, discovering your calling, whatever it is. How would you reformulate higher education so that it could do a better job of doing that? Because even though you may talk about it in more sort of general education terms, I think there are important lessons to be distilled from that about how we think about educating doctors.
William Deresiewicz: [00:44:25] Yes. This is not an easy question, and I don't need to tell you that a big part of the problem isn't even a medical school. It's it's the way the health care system has been restructured. You know, if you have ten 15 minutes at most to spend with a patient, I mean, those human relationships that are, you know, should be at the heart of clinical practice and are surely a big part of the reward of clinical practice, you know, becoming possible to develop. But you didn't ask me about that. And I don't need to tell you about that one thing. And this wouldn't really be in the power of the dean. Is schools too expensive? And if you don't have the financial pressure, you have more room to breathe. You have more room to take the time to figure out what you want, or to take different classes, or to go into a into a specialty that is less lucrative, but maybe more rewarding on a human level. I think students, like I said, certainly undergraduates are way too busy running around accumulating credentials, chasing extracurricular activities and internships. So I guess I would wave a magic wand and say, you can't do any of those things.
William Deresiewicz: [00:45:36] I mean, I wouldn't say you can't do any of those things. How do you structure? I mean, you know, this is a voluntary situation, right? I mean, college students get to do what they want, so I wouldn't want to compel them, but I would certainly try to create an environment in which they did less and they just had more more downtime, more time to have those long conversations that college students used to have with each other, more time to read in an undirected way. I mean, yes, I would want students to study the humanities more, especially future medical students, because the humanities enable you to reflect, to self reflect. But really, I mean, I think when I think about the reading, that meant the most to me when I was young, it was just stuff that I did on my own. I'm not really answering your question because I don't know how to structure a college, let alone a medical school, to create time for that. And of course, you need to learn your subject, especially if you're a doctor. Does this mean adding yet another year to medical education? I mean, I don't think anybody wants that for lots of reasons.
Tyler Johnson: [00:46:39] No, but I think the principle there is important. Right. Part of the point that we were discussing earlier, I think it's easy, especially in medicine, to fall into an almost mechanistic view of what a doctor is and what a doctor does. And if you have a purely mechanistic view, then the kinds of things that you're talking about aren't even on the radar screen, right? They're not even part of what you would think about doing. And so I think at least that degree of philosophical reorientation is important.
William Deresiewicz: [00:47:07] And just in case it isn't already very clear to everybody, this business of doctors not having time to spend with their patients and be human with their patients, we patients, we hate it, we all know it. We all experience it. We all talk about it. We can't stand it. And it's not just that. It's dehumanizing. We also feel that doctors miss things because they're not actually listening. You know, especially I mean, specialists are the worst. You just know when you when you're going to see a specialist, you're going to get seven minutes. They're going to, you know, if you say get out two sentences, they're going to interrupt both of them. And, you know, and you just hope that they're actually good at what, you know, replacing the knee or whatever it is.
Henry Bair: [00:47:52] Yeah, indeed. One of the passages I remember from your book, you use as an example of why it's important to cultivate 'moral imagination' in the health care profession is that it allows you to go way beyond treating the disease and to actually treat the person, the whole person to bring to bear the full range of the human experience. Everything that you have ever read or experienced or had conversations about into this soul sitting in front of you. And that was a that was a really powerful thing that that you wrote about and that we have reflected upon over the the course of this hour.
Henry Bair: [00:48:28] So with that, we want to thank you again, Bill, for taking the time to share with us your insights and your experiences. I'm sure this is going to be very eye opening and valuable for students, for future clinicians, and for those just generally interested in how we shape minds. So thank you very much. Again.
William Deresiewicz: [00:48:45] Thank you very much.
Tyler Johnson: [00:48:46] Thank you so much.
Henry Bair: [00:48:52] Thank you for joining our conversation on this week's episode of The Doctor's Art. You can find program notes and transcripts of all episodes at www.thedoctorsArt.Com. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, rate and review our show available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tyler Johnson: [00:49:11] We also encourage you to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy the program. And if you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.
Henry Bair: [00:49:25] I'm Henry Bair
Tyler Johnson: [00:49:26] and I'm Tyler Johnson. We hope you can join us next time. Until then, be well.