Below are links to some recent posts with background material (and a small amount of new reporting) connected my story in Wired on David Allen and Getting Things Done.
Wired profile of David Allen
GTD and "The Civilizing Process"
Courtesy, Conditioning, and GTD
What is a Good Cult?
The Unity Church Influence
The Eusocial "Meaning" of Getting Things Done
Why work so hard? If there's a sore point in the literature of business self-help, this question touches it. A person who carries a to-do list everywhere; who divides the workday into segments; who strives for optimal efficiency: the last thing such a person needs is a wiseacre teasing him from the sidelines and raising questions about the ultimate purpose of life. The problem is, this critical voice does not come from the sidelines. It comes from the founders of the business-self-help movement, from its most revered leaders.
Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.
Peter Drucker
Until now, it has seemed obvious that we can't perfect our means without a clear notion of our ends. Before you can answer the question of how, you must answer the question of why.
Begin with the end in mind...
Stephen R. Covey
To which a person devoted to David Allen's methods in Getting Things Done might reply: okay, but what if we don't? One of the secrets of why this book has proved so appealing is that Allen has magically removed from the genre something formerly thought to be crucial. He solves the problem of meaning in the simplest possible way: by ignoring it.
Strangely, this seems to work. In my Wired profile of Allen I review some of the mechanics. But here, I want to look more closely at where the old existential questions have gone. Isn't it strange that something like the meaning of life, or your most important priorities, once thought so crucial to any self-improvement scheme, could simply vanish, and, more oddly still, not even be missed?
In an earlier post, I described Allen's religious antecedents. He's at the end of a long series of innovations in American religion, innovations focused on using religious or quasi-religious practices (ranging from faithful prayer to positive thinking) to improve our life. This trend toward the worldly is one of the most powerful currents in religious life, and in this sense Allen's pragmatism is unexceptional.
But if questions of ultimate purpose have become increasingly irrelevant, then why do the greatest purveyors of business self-help, such as Covey and Drucker, always make a sort of metaphysical bow before handing over their tools? One reason is that logic seems to demand it. Drucker's advice to examine one's priorities begins as common sense, not as a metaphysical demand: Don't get caught up in details; look where you're going. But the dialectical spirit, once unleashed, threatens to go too far. You start by subjecting your quarterly goals to a broader strategic analysis, and end up with doubts about the very purpose of your firm. Or even your life.
Drucker was influenced by the great humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, who taught that attention to one's highest goals was crucial for realizing the potential of any individual. But busyness in pursuit of money and worldly advantage cuts against these ideals. Drucker's command not just to do things right, but also to do the right things, is a kind of ritual formula designed to lesson this tension. It raises the level of thought, but re-assures everybody that things won't get out of hand. It's a combination of an axiom and a prayer.
In a book called Flow, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes an interesting moment of metaphysical first aid. Csikszentmihalyi occasionally teaches a seminar for business executives on how to be happy. Many of them have mastered the techniques of efficacy, but have trouble and confusion in their private lives. After teaching the seminar a certain number of times, Csikszentmihalyi found a trick that seemed to work well. He now starts with a quick introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy. He treats the poem as a parable about the necessity of discovering a "life theme" that will underlie and direct their aims. The executives enjoy this exercise. Csikszentmihalyi reports that it helps them focus and be more open. For people who've already had great success, Dante may serve the same role as does the invocation of "meaning" in Drucker and Covey. It is a preparatory gesture, both an invitation to widen the critical frame, and an inoculum against the worry that they'll go too far.
What's strange about David Allen's work, then, is not really that the question of meaning has disappeared. What's interesting is that a certain gesture, the preparatory invocation of meaning, has been discarded as unnecessary.
Has something in the environment has changed? Does the communication network that makes such constant demands and offers such frequent re-enforcement somehow relieve the anxiety that older rituals of contemplation once addressed? The flow that Csikszentmihalyi describes is available at any minute by scrolling through messages on a Blackberry. Busy in that electronic colony that never flickers off, a person's "ultimate goal" is no more perceptible via study or self-reflection that it would be to other eusocial organisms; e.g., to ants. As far civilization is concerned, this might be considered an advance.
A long-term downswing in metaphysical demand would obviously be a force of religious change. Maybe the strange arbitrariness of religion today is a sign that it is in a transition state, flipping back and force between random, extravagant assertions, and a kind Zen-like posture devoid of concrete claims. A couple of days ago I posted a video (repeated below) of John-Roger expositing his idiosyncratic theology.
While the doctrine is unfamiliar, it is nonetheless quite traditional, in the sense that it attempts to explain and describe the unseen world. Only a genuine spiritual anxiety (or a base voyeuristic thrill) would get you through listening to the whole thing.
But this second video is more important. Here, an acolyte of dubious sincerity seeks counsel from John-Roger, and he refuses to help out. The audiences joins him as he giggles.
This is theology as a put-on, an attempt to demonstrate the pleasure of meaninglessness, and an interesting sample of the possibilities of eusocial religion. A benign and inarticulate spirit is moving through the crowd.
Books
Peter Drucker
Managing the Nonprofit Organization (link)
Stephen Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (link)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (link)
In a conversation with David Allen for a profile that ran in this month's Wired, I asked him how seriously he took the doctrines he encountered during the spiritual quest that led to him becoming a minister in the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, founded by a Los Angeles-based mystic named John-Roger.
Allen replied that, for him, doctrine was beside the point. He took his experiences seriously.
"People reify these experiences and take them for the truth," he said, "but they are only important as a working hypothesis. Let's pretend this is true, and measure the results."
His answer reminded me of something Sir John Templeton, the billionaire mutual fund pioneer, said to me during an interview a few years ago on the topic of science and religion. Templeton was funding the famous prayer study supervised by Herbert Benson at Harvard. Templeton's hope was that science would demonstrate the pragmatic benefits of faith. The results of the study were not yet in when we talked, but I pressed Templeton on the potentially subversive effects of his experiment. Did he think believers would accept science this as a yardstick? Say a person found out his prayers were less effective than he had believed?
"We never say yours is less effective," Templeton quickly replied. "We say, would you be interested in something more effective? Then they're on your side."
Religion, in this view, is not divine authority but verifiable technique.
Templeton is a Presbyterian. Allen, a minister in MSIA. But their approach to religion shares a common root. Both are spiritual heirs of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, great innovators in the "new thought" movement in Christianity, and founders of the Unity Church. The Fillmores emphasized the power of prayer to improve physical, emotional, and financial health. Prayer activated a divine spirit within the believer, while meditation, positive thinking, and visualization techniques were used to gain prosperity and happiness.
The Unity influence on Templeton is direct and he has acknowledged it frequently. The Unity influence on David Allen comes by way of Alexander Everett, a pioneer of the human potential movement. Everett, born in 1921 studied to be a Unity minister and was deeply engaged with Unity ideas. He moved to San Francisco in 1970 and founded Mind Dynamics, a quasi-spiritual enterprise that used positive affirmations and meditation to help attendees attain their personal goals. Mind Dynamics was a tremendous success. Among Everett's students were John Hanley and Robert White, who founded Lifespring, and Werner Erhart, who created EST. Lifespring and EST, in turn, were key sources for the Insight training seminars, launched by John-Roger a few years after he founded the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness. Through all of these channels, Allen has had the benefit of more than a century of experiments in "practical" belief.
The pragmatic strain in religion that characterizes Unity and its descendants is not confined to California, nor to the new religions and quasi-religious sects I've mentioned so far. The Mormons have it, as do many of the most successful evangelical leaders, from Aimee Semple McPherson in the twenties to Rick Warren today. But through Unity, the pragmatism that had found philosophical voice in William James and John Dewey, was formed into an explicit religious doctrine suited to popular use.
The question of ultimate reality, in these systems, barely counts; what's important are certain behavioral habits, along with an open, relaxed, optimistic frame of mind. "Belief" or "faith" is a description of a mental posture, not an assertion of metaphysical truth. But in this case, why doesn't doctrine disappear altogether? Why not go all the way to atheism, and enjoy pragmatism in its purest form?
That's a question that still interests me, and I'll post a few notes in the next entry.
Profile of Templeton from Wired:
Sir John's Divine Gamble
Books:
Harold Bloom
The American Religion (link)
Neal Vahle
The Unity Movement (link)
James R. Lewis and Gordon Melton, eds.,
Perspectives on the New Age (link)
Sir John Templeton
Possibilities for Over One Hundredfold More Spiritual Information (link)
Lately Thomas
Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (link)