Some Overdue Thoughts on Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond in 1971, the year he
released “I Am… I Said”

I started ragging on Neil Diamond’s 1971 top-five hit “I Am… I Said” years before I heard it. Despite its high Billboard ranking, it generally isn’t regarded among Diamond’s greatest hits—let’s acknowledge, it’s no “Solitary Man” or “Sweet Caroline.” It doesn’t get extensive classic rock radio airplay like others of Diamond’s peak career recordings. Even for many fans, it’s largely a cypher.

Therefore, when humorist Dave Barry made it a recurring theme to belittle Neil Diamond in general in the 1990s, and “I Am… I Said” particularly, I didn’t blink. I knew Barry’s mockery was exaggerated for comic effect, because no matter how earnestly over-written Diamond’s hits were, hell, the man still wrote “I’m a Believer” and “Cherry Cherry,” and I’ll fight you if those aren’t classics. But “I Am… I Said”? Surely radio programmers buried it on purpose.

Barry quoted Diamond’s lyrics, particularly the central hearing-impaired chair, extensively. He said nothing about Diamond’s music, his life, or the cultural context amidst which Diamond wrote. Barry simply threw out Diamond's refrain lyrics, which aren’t exactly Robert Frost. Without context, and especially without the more subdued stanzas surrounding the refrain, the lyrics looked bathetically ridiculous, like an Angora cat in the rain.

Superficially, I had no reason to believe Dave Barry wasn’t representing Neil Diamond accurately. If I’d thought more deeply, I would’ve realized Barry also pooh-poohed “Cracklin’ Rosie,” which is maybe a bit overproduced but seriously still slaps. Cool, rational thought might’ve told me that, if Barry disparaged a banger like “Cracklin’ Rosie,” maybe his representation of “I Am… I Said” wasn’t wholly reliable.

In my limited defense, I hadn’t turned twenty yet.

Years later, I finally heard the song. When my local radio station started playing the opening riff and first stanza, I clearly identified it as belonging to the 1970s, a decade when hippie utopianism began surrendering to ennui, age, and the realization that it required more than optimism to change the world. Though most artists didn’t record anything quite this melancholy until after 1973, it’s instantly recognizable in its time.

More importantly, “I Am… I Said” is pretty good. It isn’t Diamond’s best, not in a career that produced classics like “Red Red Wine” and “Kentucky Woman,” but it’s a substantial glimpse into the psyche of a man facing his own age and mortality. The contrast between Diamond’s understated, more poetically complex stanzas, and ostentatious orchestra behind his choppy refrain, presages later anthems to adult futility, like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Neil Diamond in 2018, the year his
health forced him to retire from touring

I believed Dave Barry’s criticisms in the 1990s because I hadn’t yet heard Diamond’s song, and I presumed Barry represented the song accurately. I realized Barry, a humorist, might privilege the joke above facts. Yet in 1993, when one couldn’t check YouTube or Spotify to verify the source, I chose to assume Barry was essentially honest. I adopted Barry’s jokes as my own opinion, and repeated them for nearly thirty years.

Everyone sometimes adopts others’ opinions as our own. Nobody can possibly have encyclopedic knowledge of, say, climate science or presidential politics or big-ticket TV productions. We must trust scholars, critics, friends, and others. When that happens, we must obviously evaluate whether that person’s opinion is trustworthy enough. Is the scholar scholarly enough to be reliable? Has the movie reviewer seen enough movies?

Dave Barry is probably the funniest White person of my lifetime, a man who often extracted comedy from well-written descriptions of furniture. He commanded language to cultivate emotions in readers, without depending on voice and performance, a mark of somebody who thinks deeply about every word and phrase. Because he commanded written English with an ease I find enviable, I presumed Barry must’ve thought equally deeply about his subjects.

It never occurred to me that Barry might’ve misrepresented his subject, or omitted information that would’ve influenced my opinion, such as Diamond turning thirty, divorcing his high school sweetheart, or having little to show for his career. I trusted the evaluation of a critic who, it appears, was more invested in the joke than the facts. Barry’s take-down of Diamond’s lyrics remains hilarious, but frustratingly divorced from reality.

This forces me to ponder: what other untrustworthy “experts” have I trusted? As an ex-Republican, I certainly shouldn’t have trusted P.J. O’Rourke and Thomas Sowell, who influenced my early politics. My parents admitted the ideas they taught me were often informed by fear. Much of adulthood involves purging false teachings from untrustworthy mentors who concealed their agendas.

And that chair totally heard you, dude.

The Forces That Built the World We Live In

Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

Something must change, but it’s impossible to untangle the overlapping social, political, and technological forces driving our world. Activists and reform advocates have wanted to change the ways we built cities, generate power, grow food, and distribute money. But every time somebody makes even fiddling procedural changes, it creates a domino effect of unintended consequences. We need a guide with encyclopedic knowledge to organize reforms without creating a cascade.

Despite searching, I can’t determine Vaclav Smil’s original scientific specialization. Every press biography and university write-up calls Smil a “scientist,” and his writing shows definite interdisciplinary background knowledge. He definitely comprehends technical aspects of modernity that well-meaning activists frequently miss. Yet reading him, I noticed that Smil misses something, too: technological whiz-bangs require humans to operate them, and humans make choices.

Professor Smil identifies four synthetic products which he calls “The Four Pillars of Modern Civilization”: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia (he apparently excludes naturally occurring petroleum). These products create physical stability, economic prosperity, and at least a measure of control over the natural environment. Unfortunately, each also carries environmental and economic prices, some vast. And we cannot remove any without upsetting the architecture of technological modernity.

So far, so good. But Smil’s analysis of these products and their public applications, overlooks that using these products always entails human choices. Sometimes, those choices are private: you individually decide whether to spray weed-n-feed, an ammonia product, on your lawn. But when those choices are scaled to society-wide levels, we call that public policy, and it always involves conscious decisions, by lawmakers or their appointed bureaucrats, about how we’ll direct our public resources.

Because I live in Corn Country, I noticed Smil’s disregard for policy mostly in his passages on agriculture. Start with this: Smil insists that, to adopt an organic agriculture model free of synthetic chemicals and heavy equipment, we’d first have to revert to medieval peasant lifestyles. This is patently ridiculous, because Jethro Tull’s seed drill and its successor, John Deere’s steel plow, displaced agricultural workers long before diesel fuel and ammonia fertilizers existed.

Yes, Jethro Tull and John Deere were real people, before they became brand names.

Smil contends that only modern agricultural output makes modern civilization possible. But in Nebraska, where I live, corn (maize) farmers flail desperately to find or invent markets for their produce. This represents chemical-intensive farming technology, but also government decisions about which crops to subsidize. America regularly unloads surplus corn on chronically impoverished nations as “food aid,” undercutting native agriculture and increasing urban poverty and global dependence.

Vaclav Smil

Similar objections permeate Smil’s technological analyses. Portland cement produces approximately seven percent of Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions, but we can’t manufacture modern roads without it. And we need roads, right? Only somewhat. Roads are an example of what economists call “induced demand,” observed when newly constructed superhighways become congested within five years. Building roads creates the need to use them, especially as Americans refuse to fund public transit networks.

Modernity has produced unprecedented comfort and wealth, as Professor Smil writes, in the aggregate. Yet modernity hasn’t distributed its benefits evenly. Traffic jams represent a manifestation of modern wealth, after all. So did Houston’s inability to drain following Hurricane Irma. Single-use urban design, which necessitates commuting, and slovenly urban design, which causes rainwater to pool and wash away topsoil, are the product of policy choices, not inevitable outcomes.

I cannot find fault with Professor Smil’s technological analyses, especially since he’s more widely informed than me. He makes a persuasive case that living like we to today absolutely requires his Four Pillars, and even minor amendments will inevitably create painful dislocations with broad knock-on effects. We didn’t get into this position of economic inequality and looming environmental collapse overnight, and we won’t escape this position without changes that will overhaul our society.

Yet for all his technological clarity, Smil’s analyses completely omit the public policy and economic considerations which created such material dependency. Notwithstanding a later chapter on “risk analysis,” Smil defines risk in substantially technical terms, excluding nonlinear human variables. The world Smil describes didn’t just happen; bureaucrats, capitalists, and other unelected decision-makers built it, brick by brick.

This book provides valuable insights into the technical qualities of modernity, in plain-English terms for non-specialist readers. But Smil writes checks his analysis can’t cash, because he sees technocracy as an inevitable progression from cause to effect. He completely excludes the human decision-making processes that got is into the situation, thus overlooking the only forces which might get us out.

Introduction to the Psychology of Doing

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 119
Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning

Austrian psychologist Victor Emil Frankl spent three years in German concentration camps, mostly Dachau. His survival sometimes depended, by his own admission, on blind luck and circumstance. But he also witnessed something perplexing: some people survived, while others surrendered, dying long before the Gestapo executed them. What made some people persevere, and others die before they died?

Frankl divides this volume into three sections. The first is his memoir of the labor camps, a single exhaustive narrative undivided into chapters or other smaller, more digestible segments. Like Frankl, we must consume the experience without guidance, an exercise in existential absurdity. Frankl quotes generously from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, emphasizing that survival comes from meaning, and meaning comes from one’s interior mental landscape, not from outside.

The second section provides a plain-language introduction to “logotherapy,” Frankl’s version of psychotherapy. Opposed to fellow Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud, who believed healing came from resolving past conflicts, Frankl finds healing in the future, in giving patients something to live for, something to work toward. Frankl believes meaning doesn’t exist objectively, within either the world or the self, but is something people make, sometimes at great cost.

His third, and shortest, section is a lecture revising and updating his therapeutic approach with new discoveries made in the 1970s and early 1980s.

According to Frankl, humans find meaning, and therefore something to live for, when they see something to strive after in the world. For him, this means either work or relationships. (I say “relationships” where Frankl says “love,” but a century of pop songs has tainted that word.) Meaning comes not from some list of principles, but from the work we do and the people we care about. This, for Frankl, is highly existentialist, in the Kierkegaardian sense.

Thus Frankl’s philosophy harbors a contradiction. We create meaning internally, but we create it outside ourselves, in our actions and relationships. Viewed another way, meaning is necessary, but it doesn’t objectively exist; it dwells in the realm of Platonic ideals. Though Frankl isn’t hostile to religion (and was, by reports, an observant but private Jew), his philosophy doesn’t require subsuming oneself into an external God. Meaning is, and isn’t, in the material world..

Victor E. Frankl

Calling this “philosophy” isn’t accidental. Frankl utilizes the scope of Western philosophy, but through a medical scientist’s eyes. Though his autobiographical section describes how he tested and defined his philosophy in the violent laboratory of Dachau, his therapeutic section contains practical applications, mostly questions for patients to ponder. Frankl doesn’t demand a closed loop, but neither does he require every student to reinvent philosophy, as Plato does.

Perhaps most importantly, his philosophy steers us away from abstractions and buzzwords. We don’t find happiness by seeking happiness, Frankl writes, nor do we find healing by seeking healing. Rather, we find both by seeking something that gives our lives definition; happiness and healing are ancillary benefits of meaning. And again, meaning comes either from doing productive work, or pursuing nurturing relationships.

The points Frankl makes in technical terms in his second section, he demonstrates in practice in his first section. He survived the labor camps because he had a wife waiting and research to complete. (His wife died in another camp, but he didn’t know that for years.) Others survived because they had art to create, children to raise, or houses to build. Those who survived believed they had something waiting outside, and strove to remain connected with it.

Admittedly, Frankl’s narrative has garnered criticism. Historians dispute his labor camp memoir as somewhat fictionalized, as though no autobiographer ever streamlined events for clarity and readability. More fair are criticisms directed at specific details. Frankl repeatedly describes Auschwitz as though he faced extended internment there, though it was merely a layover; he mostly stayed at Dachau. This is slovenly and misleading, but doesn’t undo his message.

More important is the contrast between internal psychological meaning, and external nihilism. From King Solomon to Jean-Paul Sartre, thinkers have agreed that this world is chaotic, violent, and antithetical to human wellbeing. Yet like those thinkers, Frankl agrees we have control over only our own responses. We must at accordingly.

Victor Frankl wrote multiple volumes on the process of finding and making meaning. But this brief, plain-language book contains probably the most accessible and most widely read introduction for non-psychologists. He proffers a useful guide for finding meaning in a world suffused with despair. Only in seeking meaning through work or relationship, he contends, do we find happiness and healing within ourselves.