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Does an Autobiography have any Value? [A Fictional Symposium]

by B. de St.-G.
Moderator: Our symposium today will consider the nature and value of the autobiography from the perspective of experts in related fields. We have a priest, we have a social historian, we have a biographer, we have a productivity expert from the realm of work and leisure, and we have a psychologist and an educator. I will present topics and ask for comments from specific members of our panel. Let me ask the biographer first. As a historical record of a person's life, is the typical autobiography worth anything? Biographer: I think if we were to ask questions directly to a person about his life, we would get a very different portrait of the person than we would from his autobiography. Most autobiographies are very amateurish, the terms of analysis are often limited by intellectual range and experience of the writer, and also the autobiographies often have an agenda that is not very valuable from a historical perspective, and that is, first, to promote or justify a person's actions, and second, to entertain a reader. The author of the autobiography does not necessarily have to have publishing in mind to write it in an entertaining style. That may simply be a habit. Politicians, for example, are in the habit of catering to an audience. An author, even if he does a fairly thorough analysis, is often limited to the sort of topics that are considered relevant in his own era. Yet as we know, in history the topics of interest change from era to era. In many ways a diary, emails or letters that record daily activities and thoughts would be more valuable than an autobiography. Diaries however often are very shortsighted and are distorted by temporary moods. Ideally we would have both a diary and an autobiography based on the diary, which could provide a broader perspective. One point that has to be made however, about all historical records, is the truism that history is sometimes bunk. We are totally reliant on the writer's choice of what to record and how he 1

expresses himself. Human language is not the most precise and realistic means of capturing events as they happen. Language is very value-laden and judgemental and also ambiguous and carries with it a huge baggage of nuances, some relevant, some irrelevant. I think that, all that said, an autobiography is useful as a corroborating record. I don't think any biographer would rely exclusively, in terms of trying to create a historically-accurate document, on someone's autobiography. Much more valuable would be a Day-Timer type of diary that records activities, quotes what has been said, and records thoughts as they happen. An autobiography writer can also act as his own biographer by interviewing people who were witnesses to his life, especially his parents. Of course parents guilty of poor child-raising may be loathe to submit to any questions, especially any that may produce feelings of guilt. But such interviews would be worth the effort, regardless. A biography differs from an autobiography quite radically in that the range of topics in the biography is set by the social context of the audience and has a wide breadth of hindsight. The social historian will comment on how a person's contribution to society ought to be a focus of an autobiography. Autobiographies are often written from a rather selfish perspective and they leave out many of the questions of the writer's relationship to the broader society. The autobiographer often asks himself, "What could I have done to make my life happier for myself." Whereas a biographer asks, "How did the person make his social contribution." Like all the writing arts, autobiography is still in a rather primitive state. You cannot go to a public library now for example and find a textbook on the art of autobiography. But I would set down several terms by which an author should analyze his life. Those are the following six items: (1) a person's aptitudes and handicaps, (2) his motivations, (3) his experiences, his opportunities and hurdles in life, (4) his perceptions and his strategies in life, (5) his skills, and (6) his accomplishments. There would be quite a bit of thought in dealing with each of those topic areas. One could also evaluate one's life in terms of a standard of success or failure, but I'm not sure how accurate or worthwhile that would be. This panel will discuss that viewpoint later. In practice the typical autobiography simply asks, "Why didn't life treat me better". Moderator: Let me now ask the priest a slightly different 2

question, that is, "Is spending the time to write an autobiography morally justified or morally worthwhile?" Priest: I think a lot of people, when they write an autobiography, ask the question, "Did my life give me the opportunity to selfactualize? Did I have the opportunities to reach my full potential?" Well, the church might find that to be a rather selfish outlook. After all, among the duties of a human being is not selfactualization. One's duties are to God and to his fellow human beings, and also avoiding such evils as sloth, malice, indolent excess, and so on. All that said, the church sees meditation as a way of communicating with God as well as reflecting on how well we have performed our duties as human beings, in other words, a selfanalysis in terms of virtue. An autobiography as opposed to meditation could well be simply an act of vanity, recording one's accomplishments in the form of a boast, or exonerating oneself for one's failings rather than accepting them. Yet, to the extent that a person fulfills his duties as a human, the church has no objection to a person spending time recording his lifeprovided the autobiography is used as a means of educating others or improving oneself. When one improves oneself he is doing a social good, because he is then better able to help others. When we talk about charity in the contemporary world, we usually think about money, which is really too bad, because money doesn't really have much value in terms of human life. It's not an end that can be justified. Recently the pope talked about the evil of excessive wealth and the duty of people to give away money rather than hoard it. Well there is also an analogy that can be made to knowledge. One can hoard knowledge, and it is our charitable duty as human beings to share our knowledge with others. We are not required to beggar ourselves in spending a lot of time and energy in acquiring knowledge, and then giving it away without enough compensation to support ourselves. But when we have knowledge in excess of what is necessary to support ourselves, we are morally obligated to share it with others. How many giant players on the human stage have gone to the grave without recording the lessons of their lives and the knowledge they had acquired? Whole realms of human knowledge go to the grave every year in that way, because people do not have the charity to communicate what they know so it can be transmitted to other humans. In that way, I see the autobiography as a vehicle for transmitting human knowledge, and so as a good thing, if used selflessly, as a way of educating others about life. 3

Moderator: Thank you, father. Now let's go on a completely different tack. Let's ask a productivity specialist, "Can we use an autobiography to judge how productive a person's life has been?" Productivity Specialist: One thing that we must acknowledge when looking at human life, as recorded in some sort of tome no matter how thick or thin, is that the amount of a person's productive time is quite small every day. Most of our time gets frittered away. For the average person, his human capacity is devoted almost entirely to merely to subsisting, keeping the body together and nursing himself from injuries. In many ways our lives as humans involve basic acts of sustenance that are universal. People's lives from one person to another are quite predictable, probably 99%, and one need not record most of one's life. Things of value in life are often in short supply and have to be fought over with other humans. The battles and the compromises we construct, sap a huge amount of our time. Let's look at the work world as an example. Many people would judge what they have accomplished in life by what they have done in their place of work or in their profession. Yet because work is a social activity, it requires the devotion of a great deal of time and energy to interacting with other humans. That of course has an enormous effect on one's productivityoften detrimental. Why is socializing such a large part of the workplace? Today employment is seen as a right, that is, it is considered a form of socializing necessary to the mental wellbeing and that cannot be denied to anyone without accusations of cruelty. However, as we all know, in every workplace there are people whose presence not only does not contribute to the output of the enterprise, but retards it instead, the shiftless, the idle, the selfish schemers, the incompetent, etc. The workplace today is not designed to create the greatest public good but is designed to create an arena for socializing. Thus, I think in the end when one writes an autobiography, one might ask, "Did I let others waste all my time?" Many autobiographers will claim that the reason they accomplished little of lasting value in life is that they devoted themselves to others. My great grandfather used to call himself "a living human sacrifice". But one must make an important distinction between letting people fritter away your time and giving your time constructively to others.

An autobiography, especially a diary, can be a very useful tool in maximizing one's productivity in life because it can help identify those distractions that are frittering away your time. One does have choices in life, and one can extricate himself from situations where his energies are being dissipated. In this day and age we are very much attuned to thinking that productivity is something that comes out of a factory or officea product or service for other people. However there is another side of life called leisure. It too can be the subject of a productivity evaluation. The term leisure should be clarified. It is not time spent recharging oneself in order to go back to work. Instead, it's an opportunity to further one's grasp of life: to develop one's potential and give vent to one's special talents. The product of leisure is really what is called "self-actualization" coupled with self-potentiating. Now the person who sits in front of the television watching mindless game shows, some may say, "He's at leisure." But he's not at leisure. He's inert. Leisure implies an active effort to improve one's ability to get the most out of life. There is a good social reason for promoting leisure: people who reach their full potential are better able to make valuable social contributions. In an ideal world people would have the leisure to maximize their potential, to follow their own special interests and aptitudes. However such is the demand for products and services now in our industrial age consumer society that most people are turned into drudges for a good deal of their time and must forego the selfimprovement that true leisure could provide. One last thought: regarding the value of a diary versus an autobiography, I would say a diary may not involve a great deal of self-reflection; it may be just a recording of one's thoughts and activities without putting them into a context or trying to draw a pattern from them. In contrast, the autobiography may be more useful in analyzing one's situation, provided one withdraws oneself from the day-to-day events and tries to analyze his life in broad terms. Moderator: Thank you. Now let me ask the social historian, "Is it possible for us humans to really understand what is happening to us? That is, can we hope to understand the human condition well enough so as be able to analyze our lives in the form of an autobiography?"

Social Historian: Just as an example of the changes in human condition over time, let's look at the issue of physical pain. I think the argument could be made that there is actually more physical pain in the world now than at any time in the past, because people endure more stress, are more adventurous, take greater physical risks, for example in athletics, with automobiles and motorcycles, and mainly because they live longer and live to the point that their bodies are almost completely worn out. So, does the human condition improve over time? I think the general answer to that is probably, no, the human condition just changes. Some generations are lucky in some respects and unlucky in others. I think the generation that came into adulthood after World War II were financially extremely lucky. However they came onto the scene a little too late to enjoy the full benefits of the most revolutionary machine of all time, the computer. An 18th century Russian peasant may not have had many books available to him, but he had an enormous amount of free timea hugely long winter in which to sit around. To that kind of person the idea of working 52 weeks of the year would be an abomination. I suspect that in the future it will become clear to everyone that lengthening human life is not an improvement, especially when it is paid for at the cost of having to work at a desk until one's body is completely worn out. In sum, times always have some good and some bad. But generally the human condition cannot be seen as improving or declining, but merely changing. There are several things that militate against improvements in the human condition. The most potent of those is the fact that each generation is born as a tabula rasa and has to learn everything from scratch. When the older generation dies an enormous amount of human experience and knowledge is lost. To advance their cultures, humans are able to build on little scraps of knowledge that manage to get passed down. Some of that knowledge is completely erroneous and misleading, however. Some of it becomes irrelevant but some of it proves a valuable heuristic for future acquisition of knowledge. There are certain features of human life that are more or less immutable from generation to generation, for example language, urban fabrics, genetic pools, and the ownership of capital. All of those things change very little even though each generation is born into them completely nave.

Language is a very good example of the factors that constrain improvements in the human condition. All major languages are aggregates of several different languages, and that introduces a lot of disparity into the grammar, syntax, declensions, and what not. Those anomalies impede the learning of the languages and impede communication yet they are impervious to change. Human language also contains a great deal of ambiguity, which we know computers, as rationale devices, have a great deal of trouble fathoming. I do believe that when using language a person spends a great deal of mental energy filtering out of the language irrelevant features like connotations and competing denotations, not to mention homonyms and synonyms, etc. Of course it's true that most humans do not master even their own language, except to a modest degree. Regarding the gene pool, various attempts have been made by human populations to fashion it. When women make their own, spontaneous, decisions as to their sexual partners, certain fashions in male appearance tend to appear, such as height, skin and hair color, and, occasionally, intelligence. At one point in European history property was considered a necessary qualification for marriage, at least among the middle and upper classes. That meant that the least diligent were least likely to procreate. But all that said, there probably has not been an overriding pattern in the evolution of human beings in modern times. For every factor that promotes procreation among the intelligent and industrious, there are factors that promote procreation by the dull and phlegmatic. How does this relate to the autobiography? Well, the autobiographer needs to make a clear distinction between his times and his own talents, motivations, etc., so as not to blame the times for his own success or failure in life. The human condition is burdened with many of the same old difficulties plus new ones that appear all the time, so it is pointless to say, "I could have been happier had I been born earlier or later." Educator: I would say it is very difficult to know what form the human condition is taking from one generation to another. One constant is that there always seems to be some unsolved problems in every generation; the solution of one set of problems seems to introduce another. The epitome of the human condition is that we humans always face major difficulties. The education system is a good example of that. We seem to fix one problem, but in so doing create another. In the past when predominately the wealthy had access to higher 7

education, education was far more egalitarian. Higher education was spread among people who differed quite widely in their talents and intelligence, since they received the education by virtue of money accumulated by their families and not by their own intellectual drive or merit. Today we segregate people not in terms of money but in terms of their ability to perform well in the academic system that we have created for ourselves recently. There are some things that now may have been rooted out of top universities, characteristics such as creativity and spontaneity. What we have now at those institutions are students who are able to produce an academic product quite readily. They are people who do not slow down the academic production line, who don't become fatigued at their assembly posts. Those elite universities may at the same time have very little place for extremely intelligent and extremely talented people. The democratic roots of our current education system has undoubtedly dumbed down education and some people may simply be too smart to tolerate the slow pace and the lack of opportunities that the system presents for them, and so may drop out. The closer you are to the middle of the intelligence spectrum the more you will probably gain from the educational system, that much can be said. Modern education does not teach a student how to keep records about himself and certainly does not offer anyone the opportunity to learn how to write an autobiography. There are two reasons for that. One of them is that the autobiography as a literary form is seen as rather self-indulgent. Why personal record-keeping is not taught, I do not understand, as it is very practical. In business one must keep accurate records about his affairs, summaries of phone calls, etc., but colleges would never deign to teach such things. The reason is that those things are associated with what used to be called a "business college" curriculum, which, to the smug minds of university academics, means lowly clerical work. Well, that sort of elitist, haughty attitude is what has turned the contemporary university curriculum into an entirely consumeristic one that ignores useful, day-to-day, skills like composition. When I was a student at a university, many decades ago, an English teacher suggested to me and everyone in the class that we keep diaries. I took him up on that suggestion, though he provided no instruction as to how to record my life. One piece of advice he could have given me that would have been very valuable is that 8

one should record important bits of conversations verbatim in the diary. Don't just record your own opinions, which is what I did, to my regretotherwise the diary will consist of nothing more than a log of your gripes about life. I'm glad at least he suggested keeping a diary because I did keep one, and it has preserved a record of many things in my life that I would have completely forgotten otherwise. I should say, that man was not an academic per se. He was a savant who dipped his hand into university teaching now and again. I, for one, certainly think there is a place in university curricula for examining the autobiography as a literary form. However, as I say, there is a stigma attached to it as an act of self-indulgence, not to be encouraged, and really something beneath notice of the work ethic. All that said, I do believe that within the curriculum of modern education one is given a lot of tools that are very useful for the sort of self-analysis that is the basis of an autobiography: courses in psychology, literature (for example the roman clef), in sociology and history. Those are very useful in self-analysis. The schools promote those tools for use in analyzing other people and other cultures (usually to condemn them), but they can certainly be used for oneself. So modern education has got to be given credit for providing the tools for doing analysis necessary for the autobiography even though it neglects it as a writing craft. Another impediment to the teaching and practice of autobiography writing is one's need for privacy. Obviously one would not be feign to share one's private thoughts with one's classmates and certainly not with the teacher, since the teacher is undoubtedly subject to a great deal of private derision. So although one is not going to get any feedback about the quality of one's autobiographical writing in school, one could get guidelines and examples of exemplary works that would allow him to be his own judge. In one bizarre instance I recall a photography teacher giving students the assignment of a nude portrait of themselvesa graphic arts equivalent of an autobiography. The students sheepishly complied but quite begrudgingly. (Some of the better proportioned students attracted some new friends in class that way, however.) The autobiography writer need not be as conscious of an audience as when writing other pieces of literature. To the extent that the autobiography is usually kept private and exposed to other people, 9

if at all, after one's death, one need not be hamstrung by the social taboos and worries about political correctness that hinder free expression of thought today. My personal recommendation to the autobiography writer is, "Write as if your autobiography will never see the light of day, and you will have a much more realistic and accurate representation of your own life." Moderator: Thank you for your comments. Let's bring in the psychologist. Psychologist: The person who is verbally adept is far more likely to complete an autobiography. Of course, often with the help of ghost writers, rather mundane people in positions of political power or in any business that attracts a lot of public attention, such as the entertainment industry, can commit their lives to paper. So autobiographies are usually written by a unique few. One asset valuable for writing an autobiography is a high degree of awareness of life. How much one is conscious of his life, depends on the person. Some people's challenges are more severe, their need for self-reliance is greater, their need for self-reflection is greater, their need for an awareness of their environment is greater, or their experiences may be more diverse, through reading for exampleall leading to greater consciousness. That is not to say that the person who does a repetitive motion job for an entire lifetime at an assembly line experiences less out of life than others. It all depends on a host of factors. The person may have a very eventful emotional life for which the assembly line work is just a short respite. The person could be a very avid consumer of other persons' experiences as accounted in books, and may spend a lot of his seemingly mindless time at the factory pensively constructing a matrix of knowledge and experience for himself that raises his consciousness of life far higher than the average. Observers of clothing mills in the 19th century were surprised to see books on the most abstruse topics in philosophy propped up next to some looms. On the other hand, we might think that a person with a lot of pain would be much more conscious of life. Yet, in fact, pain has a dulling effect on one's perceptions, since the pain itself becomes the center of the person's consciousness. Wealth likewise does not necessarily make a person more conscious of life, though chances are that it does, since it undoubtedly increases a person's range of experiences. Thus, I would have to say that autobiographies inevitably vary in quality. Autobiographers would benefit from the 10

help of someone trained to be as conscious of life's experiences as possible. That could well be a psychologist, not to promote my profession to the exclusion of others, by any means. A report by a developmental psychologist would be as valuable as any photograph when recording a person's childhood, I believe. We may find that a poor state of mental health may prevent one from writing an autobiography. Some highly intelligent and talented people become inert because of alienation from society. One of the great stimuli for the average person is social interaction. That is a strong motivation for activity. However, we find that for people of high degrees of talent and intellect, socialization is not very tempting because they usually get very little out of it and they are more or less required to perform for others. It's a shame to lose those people, and we will probably not see them among the ranks of autobiographers too often because they are usually too demoralized. Alienation is a common feature of modern life because we are often tempted to look into the future, perhaps far too far into the future, and to believe that a better world could exist. But if we are honest with ourselves we will see the human condition will be forever beset by difficulties, unless humans are somehow genetically reengineered. That may happen, and then we will have many people all leading identical lives, and no one will be interested in reading the autobiographies of one's clones. I have the feeling that the nature of autobiography will change in the future. There will be a lot less complaining about how one had to overcome hurdles and disadvantages, because, through education and broader experiences, people will become aware that such hurdles are standard parts of every human life. Autobiography writing as an end in itself has much to be commended. It can be a good vehicle for self-analysis. It can allow a person to see how events in his life are related, and how he reached his present situation of happiness or sadness or distress. Of course there is no guarantee that the autobiography writer will make a correct analysis of his own life, and that is one of the dangers of autobiography writing. One would certainly want to avoid too rash a categorization of oneself in terms of a clinical mental disorder. Another danger is that by trawling in one's past, one may drag up and relive traumatic experiences that are best forgotten. During and after World War II there was a popular fad of 11

analyzing historical figures in terms of their mental states. I would say that using psychology in that way is a craft that requires a great deal of skill. To be realistic, we must admit that an autobiography is often a mask, often a very thick and heavy one, that people use to disguise themselves and their true conditions and motives, etc. But their real selves manage to peep through especially when we look at how the mask is constructed. Those parts of life that are most heavily masked are probably those about which the writer feels most inadequate and most vulnerable, and often are of the highest interest. It is possible to analyze a person's mental state by deconstructing the mask the person created. Finding the truth behind any autobiography, for that matter, requires a fair amount of skill because one must be able to accurately speculate about the writer's situation and the many things he leaves out. The more you share with the writer's life, the better you can fill in the gaps that he leaves. Moderator: We have discussed whether the autobiography has value for either writer or reader. Now let's turn to the question of whether an autobiography can serve as a good platform for evaluating someone's life. Father, since it is your profession to help people to do well at the ultimate judgement, the divine judgement, let's ask you for criteria that could be used to judge a person's life through his autobiography. Priest: First of all, a person need not have material success in life to stand out at judgement day. In contemporary society money is often the ultimate arbitrator of success, though for the divine judgement it would be the least consideration. I would have to note, though, some religious communities do make financial success one of the goals for their congregations, and an awful lot of what they preach is a lifestyle that is designed to lead to financial stability. John D. Rockefeller used to teach Sunday school and would spend the time talking about how his sober lifestyle had allowed him to make moneyand also taught his money-making techniques to the children. That sort of preaching has a strong appeal to people who are downtrodden and impoverished. But myself, I really do not see the religious message behind it all. My evaluation of someone's life would begin with the questions, "Did you honor God? Did you do good? Did you avoid evil, and if you did commit evil, did you repent?" Of course those three items are somewhat interrelated. The extent to which a person is able to accomplish those things differs from person to person, and what 12

God is asking is that you live up to your potential in doing those things. For example, not everyone is able to attend a formal religious ceremony as a way of honoring God; there is simply nothing available in their localities. Secondly, we have a duty to ourselves to protect our God-given bodies, which are temples of God, and thirdly, to look after the well-being of each other. Some religious denominations say there is no credit to be gained in heaven for helping other people. I don't happen to subscribe to that. Incidentally, a person can help others by improving himself. By developing one's potential to the fullest one gains added power to help others. I am certainly not saying here that the woman who has the most plastic surgery and looks the most radiant all the time is thereby reaching her potential to help other people. No. I am talking about skills that would be of use to society. Some of the early Christians believed that life was such a pathetic condition that it really wasn't worth bothering with. They eschewed even procreation in order to embrace a withdrawal from the world. That was monasticism in its most unearthly form. However, as monasticism developed within the church, it was very closely tied to providing social services and to the well-being of society in general. The pacification of many violent frontiers, for example, can be laid to the courage and good works of monasteries. Many evils derive from a lack of humility and an unwillingness to share with others. The mere condition of doing nothing in itself is sinful. It's called sloth. As well as asking yourself whether you did good or evil. You must also ask yourself were you a channel for evil or a channel for good. Did you lead other people astray? Were you a tempter, or did you facilitate goodness? Did you encourage the good acts of others? Evil must be atoned. The church sees the mere act of acknowledging one's evilness, item by item, preferably, confessing it and asking for forgiveness to be sufficient for divine forgiveness, though full atonement requires personal sacrifice. In an ideal autobiography one should recognize one's shortcomings and express not just regret but a wish for forgiveness. That is what we call confession. And in a way an autobiography can be a confession of our lives.

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Some psychologists might see no need for atonement. They might say that everything that happened to you and how you responded, was all set up by the conditions of your life, your personality, or your mental endowmentthings you have no control over. I don't subscribe to that at all. There is and necessarily must be guilt in this world. An autobiography could be a good way to establish your own guilt, to be followed by seeking forgiveness and making atonement. It may be too late to make amends to those whom you've hurt, but by personal sacrifice, such as good works, devotions and prayer, you can at least make amends to God. Also a person must ask himself did he ever ask people in the religious community or ask God, himself, for guidance, for his grace or for his forgiveness. Or did you just do what comes naturally? I don't think there is a need to convert an autobiography into a personal passion play in which good and evil fight it out. I think there is some value to the autobiography as a record of your own activities or for your own reference and as a guide for other people who are dealing with problems similar to your own. I am not suggesting that you confine your autobiography to judgements about the moral decisions you have made. Moderator: Let's hear now from the productivity specialist. How would you use an autobiography to measure how productive a person's life has been? Productivity Specialist: I think a historical or social biographer would want to find an extraordinary and lasting value that a person has contributed to society. Of course for the overwhelming majority of people in the world that sum is close to zero. That is nothing to be ashamed of. It would be nice if the figure were higher. We all accomplish something, however, no matter how insignificant. As I said before, when people write an autobiography many attempt to list those things that were the hindrances in their lives, and make their autobiography a sort of an apologia for themselves. Well, hindrances are definitely a factor in productivity, and I do believe they should be taken into account. But they should be measured against accomplishments, too, which are all too easily forgotten. When describing the lives of many people I would use the term "inertia". It is a state in which a person is not being hindered but is 14

not accomplishing anything either. Society tolerates inertia because it is not a threat, and it is widely accepted that it is each person's right to do absolutely nothing of lasting value. I remember watching a congressional hearing in which a gangster was asked what social contribution he had ever made. And he responded, "Well, I paid my taxes". Although the congressional hearing audience laughed, I think it was a sobering remark. After all, he was correct to say he had contributed to society by paying taxes, because the taxes were then used to advance enterprises that advanced human civilization, sometimes. Let me point to science as a beneficiary of taxes. Science is an extremely expensive enterprise because it is very wasteful. Much of the work involved in science amounts to nothing in the end; its discoveries are superseded by a better truth later on, or its end product is to merely show that a hypothesis is incorrect. Were it not for a lot of people contributing to society solely by paying their taxes, that kind of valuable enterprise would not be possible. To evaluate the productivity of one's life, one can ask, "What was the end result of my use of resources?" Those end results can be things that are rather mundane, like paying taxes, raising children, consuming literature, or can be things with a wider social value, for example, becoming an authority in a field of knowledge and communicating one's learning. It might make sense to describe a person's accomplishments as "attempts" because often what seems to be an accomplishment at one time in the future will be judged as something far short of an accomplishment. I am reminded of a 19th century French novelist, Balzac, who produced many, many works, and he prided himself on his huge output. But the fact is that now not many of the books he wrote are readable, and only a couple are really good and only one is a masterpiece that will be a classic. I think artists, like scientists, fall into the category of people who have experimented and who have attempted to accomplish some things, but future generations may discount the value of their work to zero. But one must give them credit for having tried. We should be aware however that some accomplishments, although they constitute a major social change, are in fact destructive and not contributive to society. The proponents of social idealism in the 19th century might be included among the peoples whose work was essentially destructive because it was based on flawed ideas. I suppose if one were to attribute the blame for the destructiveness of those ideas, however, one would have to look to the disciples who put some of those inane ideas into 15

practice or used them as an excuse to grab power. The authors themselves may have thought they were merely providing heuristics for consideration of the human condition, but they must also have realized the dangers of massive social change. Would Karl Marx have winced at the 40 million plus people in the Soviet Union and China who died from starvation during attempts to put his system into practice, if only naively and if only in name? I think you ought to be very wary of others' attempts to measure your accomplishments in life. We are still very much attuned to a work ethic, and things that don't come out of a work place are treated with a great deal of scepticism. An author who hasn't published, for example, is not considered part of the economic system, and therefore is not productive, some might think. The Internet, an almost zero-cost means of publishing, has begun to change that notion, however. There are rous in this world who would point to their sex lives as their greatest accomplishment in this world. I would be willing to say that is as much of an accomplishment as the number plates of exquisite food served up to guests that a society hostess may count up as her life's accomplishment. What we are essentially talking about there is producing human pleasure. I would not call it productive at first thought, but upon deeper thought, I would concede that the joy received by guests or sex partners may have allowed them to work harder and be more productive in life. The rous and the party hostesses were thus facilitators of production. I would say however that Happiness per se is no measure of the productivity of human life. The notion of Gross National Happiness is really blind because it doesn't take into account suffering, which is a really fundamental constant of the human condition. Gross National Happiness just counts the people who are suffering as having a happiness rating of 3 or 4 out of ten (Nobody ever gets a zero happiness rating because supposedly, "Things could be worse".). Reducing human suffering is one of the vital measures of human productivity. Of course new sources of suffering will come along all the time. That's just the nature of the human condition. Besides reducing suffering, among other worthy products of one's life, I would list contributions to knowledge especially when the knowledge enhances human culture, and contributions to keeping the human species alive, facilitating its reproduction and physical and mental growth.

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The arts don't have much of a place when evaluating a person's life, according to the work ethic. However they provide, from the ease of an armchair, new experiences and thus improve human consciousness and power over life, all very valuable contributions to human empowerment. In summary, I would come back to a maxim that I stated earlier: productivity is a measure of what one is able to accomplish with available resources, in other words, how little waste is involved for the value of the result. Moderator: Let's hear now from the educator. How would an educator evaluate someone's life through an autobiography? Educator: In this day and age of course people spend a great deal of time getting an education, 15-20% of their entire lives in educational institutions full-time. For some parents a child simply cannot get enough education. But does the education improve a person's potential to enjoy life, to make a social contribution, to improve his consciousness of life and ability to control himself? The important thing to note is not whether a person's education is any good, but does he make use of it. In the end, what we learn in life we learn on our own initiative, and we teach ourselves through observation and inquiry by various media. One must ask himself, "Did I learn information and skills [whatever way they were acquired, by myself or through schools], and did I acquire the means for acquiring new information and skills?" After going through the standard educational system, and getting a four-year college degree, some people would say, "Well, I got a certificate that will allow me to get a job. The university didn't ask me whether I learned anything, and I didn't ask them whether they taught me anything." You can ask yourself one simple question to test the quality of your education: "Can I read and write easily?" If you are socially-minded you must learn how to communicate what you know. One index of whether a person has learned to communicate is whether he even attempts to communicate. If you are the kind of person who dreads composing a social email, and so limit your emails to something telegraphic, a few words, a few sentences or less, you probably have not learned how to communicate and are what could be called "nondiscoursive". That is a very, very common condition in our passive, consumeristic day and age. One has to wonder how the experiences, knowledge and skills that recent generations have acquired will ever be passed 17

down considering that people do not have good communication skills nowadays. Some of you may believe that the future is in telepathysorry, that is not going to happen. You will simply have to learn how to read, write and speak. If one is not a good communicator, how is one going to compose an autobiography? The answer for famous people with a life story to sell, is of course to hire someone who has gone to that trouble to do it all for you. Otherwise the recordation of your life may consist of a few scattered notes, some bills, pay stubs, countless unlabeled digital photographs, and telegraphic emails, all of which will be discarded by your family and heirs after your death, and you will disappear from history. That is not a bad option, really. It's a humble option. Its a realistic option, if your life is not worth recording. To those of you who are still young and who think you would like to write an autobiography at some point, be sure to get an education that will give you the skills to analyze, to evaluate and record your lives. One good way of testing whether you have acquired those skills is to try, at any age, to write an autobiography. In fact an autobiography is probably best written at short intervals in one one's life because one would still have access to certain memories that at the end of one's life might be lost. Writing a chapter every year is probably a good idea. Moderator: Let's turn now to the psychologist, and ask how he, as an autobiographer, would evaluate his life. Psychologist: Most people think that every psychologist's goal is to help every person have a happy life. The audience may be surprised to know that being happy is not enough for some people. That is not their goal in life. In fact they associate happiness with mania or euphoria that gets in the way of producing something satisfying. My hope for people is that they get the most out of life and give the most to others. To do that you have to give yourself the power to reach your potential, enhance your skills and avoid the pitfalls of life, the desperations and depressions that can bring us to a halt, and to overcome handicaps due to genes or environment. None of us will be beauty contest winners, and we don't care. It is important to start an autobiography with a notion of what we really are, what our aptitudes are, what our real handicaps are, and then try to measure what we did with them. Overcoming one's 18

handicaps does not need to be the be-all and end-all of one's life. Being conscious of them and being aware that they did impose some limitations on us is the important thing. In a way, it is preferable, rather than to call them handicaps, to call them "characteristics". Many people spend their lives trying to become what they are not. It seems to be human nature to try to overcome our handicaps and become what we are not. Perhaps a manic person with an attention deficit problem will spend his life trying to become a scholar or a surgeon or an engineer, professions that requires a great deal of concentration. Of course, in an autobiography one can also congratulate oneself on one's talents and skills, despite negative things others have said, and despite the misgivings I might have had about myself. The important thing when writing an autobiography is to be honest with ourselves. The priest talked about atonement. That concept also has value as far as one's mental health is concerned. I would recommend that when one does a self-assessment, that one be willing to say, "Yes, I let myself down. I've let other people down. I will try to compensate for it." Over time we may linger over our sufferings and failures and neglect our positive experiences. Writing an autobiography over time, in a series, maybe once a year, as has been recommended would be a good idea. One would have time to reflect in stages and not wait until the end of one's life, and then decide in looking back that the whole life was a waste, every opportunity was missed, and now none of the pain can be erasedsimply because you can only recall the worst aspects of your life. If an autobiography writer wanted to do a very thorough job, he would not only write once a year, but would rewrite later, also. A young writer's perspective on life always lacks depth, so young writers need to be certain to use objective devices, like describing situations in a journalistic, reportage, style, using lots of quotations from conversations, etc.instead of trying to make sweeping conclusions about their lives for which they lack sufficient experience and understanding. Moderator: Let us turn now to the biographer, even though I doubt biographers attempt to judge the quality of their subjects' 19

lives. The biographer is usually faced with a fate accompli and is interested in factors such as the subject's motivations and accomplishments. But let me ask our biographer if he does have any comments. Biographer: Having a position of great power or influence will help you get the attention of biographers, especially if you were a very powerful person who was very secretive. Biographers like to have the opportunity to speculate. It brings out the novelist manqu in them. It also helps if you can be the object of people's fantasies in some ways, by being an actor or an extremely wealthy person for example. People like to fantasize what could be done with such resources. Sad to say, if you want to be certain to become the subject of a biography probably the best means of that is to be very destructive, kill millions. A friend of mine was referring the other day to the History Channel, and made the Freudian slip of saying, "The Hitler Channel", and we both had to laugh because there is a great deal of material about the Nazis in the history media. Sometimes you can get attention from biographers by doing a great deal of good, however your chances are less. One must blame the book publishing business and human curiosity for that. Moderator: Social historian, would you have anything to add to that? Social Historian: We social historians are often interested in trends and macroscopic sorts of issues. If we evaluated a person's life we might do so in terms of the broader culture. Social trends do have their leaders and inspirers, and the life story of those people would be of special interest to the social historian. But basically as a social historian I would not have a list by which to evaluate an individual's life. If you want to be singled out as exemplary of a culture or social trend, often you have to be a leader of change and an initiator. The preconditions for that are having good opportunities, having skills at self-promotion, leaving a good document trail of yourself for historians, and be willing to fail, to see the social change you would want to pioneer be rejected. The history of religion is a good example of a field with many, many who would have liked to have been the founder of a sect or a religion and who fail miserably at it, finishing their lives in a state of abandonment. Moderator: Thank you members of the panel. It should be said in closing that many, many people would not like to be the object of an evaluation as to quality of their lives. There is certainly one 20

way to avoid that kind of scrutiny from others, and that is to keep one's autobiography completely private. There are countless examples of autobiographers burning the complete text of a lifetime of scribbling about themselves in order not to be the object of someone's scrutiny after their death. Some would say that knowing thyself should be the sole object of an autobiography. But I would ask you to consider whether others could learn from your life, after you are gone. If so, hide your autobiography, and then leave it in your will to someone who could make good use of it. Thank you all for your participation and attention in today's symposium.

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