The arc of the art and of life

Listening to the morning news programs on NPR over the weekend, I was interested to hear two separate interviews with the actor Robert Duvall. Duvall, who is 79, has a new movie coming out called "Get Low". In it, he plays a hermit, Felix Bush, who has lived the life of a misunderstood exile in a cabin in the woods for some forty years. Now he has come out of the woods to contact the local funeral director, played by Bill Murray, to plan his own "funeral party". The film is actually based on a real-life story of a hermit in Tennessee. The events took place in 1938.

In both of the interviews that I heard, Duvall made the point that there is a direct arc between his first role in the movies, Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird", and that of the hermit Felix Bush. Boo Radley was a shy, sensitive, emotionally fragile man who was not able to deal with society. Felix Bush is, apparently, almost an older version of that man - a loner, a man who cannot be at ease in the company of others. It started me thinking about the arc of my own life.

I can certainly trace my beginnings as an only and sometimes lonely child on a poor hill farm to the person that I am today. I see the very same insecurities and faults in myself today as I can recognize in that child that I was. In some ways, I see the same strengths as well. It just makes me wonder if anyone ever truly escapes the arc on which one's life is set early in that life. I wonder if that child that was isn't always there, tugging us back to the predetermined path, even if we try to escape and set our feet in some other direction. And if one is forever the captive of the child that was, what of free will? Do we ever really have the power to make our own decisions and choose our own roads, or are we forever guided by, perhaps ruled by, our pasts?

I wonder what made Boo Radley so afraid of contact with others. What happened to him to make him such a man? Would he ever have become an extravert bon vivant life of the party type? Or would he have forever lived his life alone in the shadows and become Felix Bush in the end? Can we choose our own destiny or are we forever bound to the past in a continual arc?

Maybe Freud had it right, after all.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains it all

Have you hear of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Well, neither had I until today, but now that I have, I must say I think it explains quite a lot. I came across a discussion of the effect in a blog that I follow called Skeptical Science. It's a blog that explains sometimes very complicated scientific concepts in relatively easy-to-understand layman's (or laywoman's) terms.

Dunning and Kruger are two Nobel Prize winning scientists who wrote a scientific paper for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." I love that title and it pretty much says it all.

The "effect," as I understand it, is that the more unskilled or unaware an individual is, the more likely his/her assessment of his/her own abilities is likely to be inflated and not consistent with reality. Conversely, as one's skills and knowledge level increases, one tends to be more realistic or even modest in evaluating oneself. If you look around, I think you can find plenty of examples to illustrate this effect in public life today, but I can best describe it using myself.

I can remember (barely) that, years ago, I used to believe that I was pretty smart. Fresh out of college with my shiny new degree, I was ready to take on and conquer the world. As life experiences accumulated, I began to realize that not only had I not been nearly as smart as I originally thought, but I had also been hopelessly naive. Through the years, my assessment of my abilities has been adjusted downward time and time again until I think I may be finally nearing a realistic view of what I can actually do and accomplish in life. It is a humbling process, but one that anyone with an ounce of self-awareness must go through in their life.

One could only wish that some of our more self-important and self-aggrandizing leaders would go through that process - the sooner the better. But perhaps that is one of the hallmarks of such people; i.e., they go through life with the firm idea implanted that they are smarter than everybody else and that they can change the world. Sometimes, they even manage to do it, but not necessarily for the better.