Wordsworth who is the happy warrior

This is not to be mistaken for putting on a forced or fake positive attitude which will certainly not get you what you are looking for , but simple things like smiling occasionally and not complaining about the drive in or your previous position will often be a refreshing change for a hiring manager.

Having to work with a difficult employee is one of a boss's worst nightmares, so even experiencing you as simply "pleasant" may be the thing that tips the scales in your favor. The second personality trait is that of the Warrior. Metaphorically, as technologists we do battle with problems on a daily basis.

Are you able to convey a sense of "warrior-ness" when it comes to painting a picture of how you've charged into battle to tackle your company's challenges? In reference to your previous work accomplishments, do you exude confidence while describing the problems you have enjoyed solving? Do you convey a sense of confidence that you would love to bring to this company with the eagerness to help solve some of the challenges that your prospective employer is wrestling with?

One great way to do that is to be sure to ask in your interview what some of the more pressing problems are that you would be presented with should you be selected for this position. Wordsworth ends his poem with, "This is the happy Warrior; this is he that every man in arms should wish to be. This site requires Javascript to verify that you are a human. Please enable Javascript and refresh the page.

But sadness must be dinned into him by repeated teaching about the common predicaments of human life, the bodily frailty we share with others, the countless other miseries to which human life is subject. This lesson is reinforced and deepened by actual suffering: the deaths of animals that the child loves, for example. Not implausibly, Rousseau connects this teaching with ultimate happiness, in the sense of flourishing life: for he thinks that there can be no happiness in society where there is hierarchy and injustice, and there can be no justice without a common sentiment of suffering about the human predicaments.

To the extent that privileged groups live a charmed life and insulate themselves from the sufferings of the poor, everyone is missing out on happiness, since they are all living in a bad unjust world. Sponging off the misery of others may feel good, but it is not happiness, for Rousseau or any of the ancient thinkers whom he follows, since they think of happiness, with Aristotle, as living a flourishing life.

The teaching of painful compassion is the beginning of social change and of the possibility of real happiness. Indeed, they are more sympathetic with people who get stuck in traffic jams!

Another study that should give one pause is the study of adolescent males by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, in their excellent book Raising Cain. They should never feel and certainly should never admit to feeling, fear, pain, and weakness. The consequence of this deformed expectation, Kindlon and Thompson argue, is that these boys come to lack an understanding of their own vulnerabilities, needs, and fears, weaknesses that all human beings share.

They lack even a language in which to characterize their own inner world, and they are by the same token clumsy interpreters of the emotions and inner lives of others. This emotional illiteracy is closely connected to aggression, as fear is turned outward, with little real understanding of the meaning of aggressive words and acts for the feelings of others. We see too many such males in American public life, and it is likely that other nations have similar problems.

Strategies are linked to diagnoses. One might have doubts here. An alternative diagnosis of the American psyche would be that many Americans cannot stand to be unhappy, cannot stand to grieve, and cannot stand to look at poverty or the real damages of war. One could argue that this is a larger problem than the problem of excessive unhappiness. We all have our own sense of what the deeper problems are. But here I call George Orwell to my aid.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he imagines the world of the future as marred by an absence of deep pain and grief, a loss of the sense of tragedy. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, or deep or complex sorrows. Amartya Sen has shown that this happens even at the level of physical health: Women who are chronically malnourished and who are taught that they have no right to demand anything following the death of a husband report their heath status as good or fair, despite the evident presence of many diseases.

Feudalism went on for centuries without such a protest movement, sexism far longer. Footnote 32 Empirical work on women shows that they often report satisfaction at having less education than males, because that is what they are brought up to think is right and proper. Footnote 33 So deferring to the subjective experience of pleasure or satisfaction will often bias the social inquiry in the direction of an unjust status quo. Mill agree in a limited normative criticism of Benthamism: Namely, they agree that a life with feeling alone and no action is impoverished.

But there are many further questions once one gets clear about that. He clearly thinks it is better to be Socrates satisfied than a pig satisfied, but Socrates probably had few nice-feeling emotions and substantial pain, so what should we say about that comparison and the choices of lives that we might make after thinking about it? There are quite a few types of worthwhile action, and some of them are riskier than others.

Should one, then, choose a career that minimizes the risk of reversal and suffering? And should one urge others to choose such lives? If that aim makes sense, they all agree, one will probably choose a contemplative intellectual life. Contemplation is something that one can do under more or less all circumstances: if one is in prison, if one is poor, if one has no friends or family. Other sorts of lives require more specialized external conditions: A life of political action, for example, requires free birth, citizenship, friends, and at least some money.

The life of a person who cares for family will be blasted if they all die or if one proves to be childless. So should one rank those lives below the contemplative life? Now the Greeks exaggerate, here, the non-riskiness of contemplation. Aristotle, taking issue with that familiar picture, noted that it is ridiculous to suppose that someone who is being tortured can go on thinking well, and so, the picture of the sage thinking high-minded thoughts while being tortured on the wheel has something unrealistic about it.

But still, they have a point, which I shall make with an example. In , I had occasion to spend some time at St. Andrews University in Scotland. I was, therefore, involved in the commencement and honorary-degree ceremonies, and I met the people who were being honored. The two men I shall contrast both had worthwhile lives, worthy of public honor, and they were receiving that honor.

But they were very differently placed with respect to positive emotion and happiness. As they stood side by side on the stage, and as, later, I talked with them at various dinners and garden parties, I ruminated on this difference. David Cornwell was a very happy man. Footnote 34 He was relaxed and genial, gentle, and funny. It was clear not only that he felt proud of his achievement but also that he felt in control of his ongoing activity.

He loves writing—indeed, he lives in a very remote spot in Cornwall and rarely travels, so that he can write all the time. And nothing, and nobody, disturbs him. He has a lovely wife, also genial and funny, and he clearly enjoys living with her company and that of his books.

Footnote 35 Of course old age, illness, and death will disrupt that happiness eventually, but in , he was the very image of the contemplative life and its rich human satisfactions. In , however, there was no peace. Things were going extremely badly, and it was plausible to think that everything Hume had worked for all his life was out the window. He had even been rudely dumped by his own party. John Hume was not a happy man.

His face was like a tragic mask. He hardly spoke to a soul. He stood around at the garden parties as if he had no idea where he was. He stood up on the stage to be honored, but no glint of happiness appeared on his face. And when you think about his life, consider that he might have died the next day, before things began to go better, before the Prize, before his lauded retirement from politics in , at which time he was praised even by Ian Paisley, before the astounding reconciliation of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, etc.

Or should one focus only on the commitments and values one believes important, and follow those whatever risks they entail? The ancient thinkers did not believe that it was optional which valuable goals one pursued. So, the ones who believe that politics is part of the human good thought that its riskiness was no good argument against it: one has an obligation to pursue it, come what may.

Mill thinks that in a good society this would not be so, but that, in our present defective one, the good person should make the risky choice.

In other words, do not go into politics, especially in Northern Ireland, and perhaps not in America either! Probably all of us in the academy have given ourselves some such advice, or we would not be in tenured positions in universities, that safest of careers.

With Cicero, I think that there are some values that need to be fought for and that each of us ought to do some fighting and incur some risk, to fight for what is important, even if we are in the protected precincts of the academy. And if the world were such that everyone were as risk-averse as most academics by nature are, it would be a horrible place, with much less justice in it, even, than it now has. So, some, indeed many, good people must make the riskier choices of lives, or we all will end up with nothing worth living for.

Thus, while I enjoyed the company of David Cornwell more than that of John Hume, and while I found in David Cornwell a kindred contemplative happy spirit, I admired John Hume more and criticized myself for not being more like him. I have not made such choices: Indeed, whenever I travel, I ask for time to go to the gym, and I choose a good hotel. My excuse to myself is that I would be very bad at what they do and that what I do is not altogether irrelevant to the pursuit of justice.

But it is an uneasy excuse, and I honor them for their choices. Public policy should make room for, and honor, commitments that are in their very nature fraught with risk, pain, and difficulty, especially commitments to fighting for social justice, as not optional but mandatory parts, in some form, of the good life of any human being.

A society that thinks this way will make different policy choices: It will favor, for example, as I do, a program of compulsory national service for all young people, in which they will learn to care for elderly people and do other valuable and unpleasant tasks.

Where education is concerned, it will follow Mill and Comte in placing a great deal of emphasis on altruism and a sense of shared identity.

Public rhetoric, public art, and public festivals will all be constructed with this goal in mind. Footnote 37 Young people in America are all too often encouraged, instead, to follow pleasure and to avoid the risk of unhappiness. To the extent that such recommendations are successful, our country is the poorer. Benthamism already aggregates in a questionable way, by funneling all the states associated with diverse activities into a single quantitative calculus. There is, however, another type of aggregation to consider: its aggregation across persons.

For the Benthamite, we are to strive to produce the greatest net balance of pleasure over pain for the greatest number. The exceeding pleasure of a large number can justify giving a small number a very miserable life.

This is yet one more reason to doubt the facile equation of pleasure with happiness. But this criticism of Utilitarianism is so well-known and so often-discussed that I shall pursue it no further here. In one of the clearest, most rigorous, and most interesting discussions of the subjective-state approach, Paul Dolan and Mathew P.

Footnote 39 Their article, however, betrays some misunderstandings, and it seems like a good occasion to correct them here. While this objection might possibly be brought against some versions of the objective-list approach, it surely cannot be brought against mine.

Indeed, despite being pleased at being cited in this very good article, I am less than pleased by the fact that the authors appear not to have read chapter 1 of the book they cite Women and Human Development , which is all about the ways in which I would answer the charge of paternalism, or chapter 2 either, in which I fault some objective-list accounts for being insufficiently sensitive to desire and show what role desire plays in my idea of justification.

The book has only four chapters, chapters 3 and 4 being less pertinent to the question they pose. It is difficult to summarize briefly the results of such lengthy discussions, but let me try. First of all, the nature of my project must be described: I am not trying to provide an account of well-being for all public purposes.

I am trying to provide an account of a central group of very fundamental entitlements, those without the securing of which no society can lay claim to basic justice.

The account is closely linked to constitution making and to the idea of fundamental constitutional rights. Third, the items on the list, these key political goals, are, crucially, capabilities, not actual functionings.

The point here is to leave room for choice. A person who has the right to vote and really can go out and vote, with no subtle impediments or discrimination may always choose not to vote; a person who has access to adequate health care can always choose an unhealthy lifestyle. A person who has the freedom of religion may decide to have nothing to do with religion. The only place where my conception is paternalistic, imposing a specific mode of functioning, is when we are speaking of children.

Here, I would impose compulsory primary and secondary education, and I would also allow the state to intervene in parental health care choices where the health and life of children is at risk.

But this is hardly controversial. It seems obvious that people may endorse a given item as a capability while believing that, for themselves, it would be quite wrong to function in that way. The Amish believe that it is wrong to vote, but they can happily endorse the right to vote as a fundamental entitlement of all citizens in a pluralistic society. A person whose personal choice is to live an extremely unhealthy lifestyle and never go to the doctor can happily endorse a decent national health care program: Nobody is forcing her to use it, and she realizes that fellow citizens, whom she respects, do not share her lifestyle preferences.

Even the most militantly antireligious people in the U. Fourth, even at the level of specifying the items on the list, the conception leaves much room for the democratic political process to play itself out. A free speech right, for example, is never fully specified in the founding document itself: Its contours become clearer over time through a combination of legislative and judicial action.

Within limits, different societies may legitimately do this differently, in accordance with their different traditions. Fifth, the list includes many of the major liberties of choice without which meaningful choice is not possible. If a society does not commit itself to the right of free speech, the right to free association, the freedom of conscience, all in a way that entrenches these entitlements, setting them beyond the vicissitudes of majority vote—as, for example, in a constitution somewhat difficult to amend—it is showing, I would argue, deficient concern for human choice and liberty.

Sixth, the list is ultimately justified only through a complex process that involves consulting informed desires of certain types. I shall not elaborate further here, since the entire second chapter of Women and Human Development is required to give those conditions. Seventh, the list is a template for persuasion, not for forcible implementation. If any country is going to put these items into its constitution, it will be only because it has gone through some type of political process internally, for example, a constitutional convention.

I am against any sort of forcible intervention in the affairs of another nation, except in the case of genocide. I am not sure, then, where the objectionable element of paternalism is. If Dolan and White believe that the very fact of having a list of fundamental entitlements specified in a constitution entrenched beyond majority whim is an objectionable form of paternalism, they certainly do not make that argument.

Nor do they make any argument trying to show that the capabilities on my list could not become the object of an overlapping consensus, as capabilities , among people who endorse very different comprehensive views of the good life. I say nothing at all about what account of well-being should be used by administrative agencies when they are not following core constitutional mandates. But the general tenor of my account would be that whatever they do should be respectful to the plurality of comprehensive doctrines that citizens reasonably hold.

When, then, is it right to focus on subjective states, in the light of all these normative difficulties?

Here, we should return to Mill. Wordsworth focuses so much on fine activity that he suggests that subjective feelings of pleasure do not matter at all. In his Autobiography , Mill describes himself, during his depression, as still active in accordance with a variety of good purposes.

And yet his life felt empty and meaningless. Shortly after that, he met the love of his life, Harriet Taylor. Subjective states matter greatly, and sometimes we can produce them through direct interventions, even though by and large pleasures are closely associated with activities. Public policy should certainly adopt the treatment of depression as a valuable goal, for example, and it would not do so if it followed purely Wordsworthian lines.

Indeed, my capabilities list makes room for this, making the opportunity for at least some pleasure and the relief of pain a central entitlement. Public policy should also focus on the mitigation of the sort of pain that is not an enrichment of the soul or a deepening of self-knowledge, and there is a lot of pain that is not conducive to anything good. If we can totally eliminate hunger and painful childhood diseases, for example, we should do that.

We should also strive to eliminate child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and rape, all of which are pains that seem to have no positive educative function. When people have a painful illness that cannot be cured, palliative treatment should be supported by a decent scheme of national medical insurance, and this same decent scheme should adequately cover the treatment of depression and other mental illnesses.

The badness of pain should be a central consideration in end-of-life care and in the discussion of physician-assisted suicide. Beyond this, Dolan and White make sensible recommendations in the area of curtailing environmental pains, such as noise pollution. We can add that nuisance law, as it has evolved, is a sophisticated set of strategies for dealing with the distress that people may cause to other people without direct physical assault, and such laws have a valuable social purpose.

Indeed, we had better not be Benthamites, or else we are likely to use such insights in ways that dangerously subordinate and oppress. To some people, the distress caused by the presence of a homosexual couple next door is just as acute as the distress caused by the presence of a running sewer next door. The law, however, has learned to distinguish between an actual physical distress directly caused by a bad smell and the type of distress that is mediated by imagining what people are doing behind closed doors.

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