I came across this story in Robert Sapolsky's Why Zebra's don't get Ulcers. It struck me as a wonderfully charming story of what I am hoping that we are hoping will happen for all people. The book in general is a fun read about the effects of stress on our mental and physical health. In this particular section of the book he is talking about type A personalities (and actually turns out that one of the people he references of the agnostic and the atheist in the story is the cardiologist who discovered the type A personality and it's links to cardiovascular disease - Dr. Meyer Friedman). In the midst of laying out the correlation between type-A behavior and heart disease, he tells this story which is followed by his wonderfully personal and surprising little footnote:
"A pleasing thing is that Type A-ness is not forever. If you reduce the hostility component in Type-A people through therapy (using some of the approaches that will be outlined in the final chapter), you reduce the risk for further heart disease. This is great news. I've noticed that many health professionals who treat Type-A people are mostly trying to reform these folks. Basically, many Type-A people are abusive pains in the keister to lots of folks around them. When you talk to some of the Type-A experts, there is an odd tone between the lines that Type A-ness (of which many of them are admittedly perfect examples) is a kind of ethical failing, and that the term is a fancied-up medical way of describing people who just aren't nice to others. Added to this is a tendency I've noticed for a lot of the Type-A experts to be lay preachers, or descendants of clergy. That religious linkage will even sneak in the back door. I once talked with two leaders in the field, one an atheist and the other agnostic, and when they tried to give me a sense of how they try to get through to Type-A subjects about their bad ways, they made use of a religious sermon.* I finally asked these two M.D.s an obvious question—were they in the business of blood vessels or souls? Was the work that they do about heart disease or about ethics? And without a beat they both chose ethics. Heart disease was just a wedge for getting at the bigger issues. I thought this was wonderful. If it takes turning our coronary vessels into our ledgers of sin and reducing circulating lipids as an act of redemption in order to get people to be more decent to each other, more power to them.
* I listened to a tape of this sermon, called "Back in the Box," by the Reverend John Ort-berg. It concerns an incident from his youth. His grandmother, saintly, kind, nurturant, also happened to be a viciously competitive and skillful Monopoly player, and his summer visits to her were littered with his defeats at the game. He described one year where he practiced like mad, honed his Machiavellian instinct, developed a ruthless jugular-gripping style, and finally mopped up the board with her. After which, his grandmother rose and calmly put the pieces away.
"You know," she said offhandedly, "this is a great game, but when it is all over with, the pieces just go back in the box." Amass your property, your hotels . . . [the sermon takes off from there] . . . your wealth, your accomplishments, your awards, your whatevers, and eventually it will all be over with and those pieces go back in the box. And all you are left with is how you lived your life.
I listened to this tape while racing to beat red lights on my way to a 5:00 A.M. commuter train, Powerbook ready so as not to miss a moment of work on the train, eating breakfast one-handed while driving, using the time to listen to this sermon on tape as research for this chapter. And this sermon, whose trajectory was obvious from the first sentence and was filled with Jesus and other things I do not subscribe to, reduced me to tears."
I found myself a little verklempt as I read. I loved the whole (especially his footnote), but was also particularly grabbed by his talk of ethics - though I might not use that word. The thing he seems to be getting at is that living better in the way we treat other humans actually makes our own lives better. Or conversely, treating other people shittily is bad for others and for us.
"A pleasing thing is that Type A-ness is not forever. If you reduce the hostility component in Type-A people through therapy (using some of the approaches that will be outlined in the final chapter), you reduce the risk for further heart disease. This is great news. I've noticed that many health professionals who treat Type-A people are mostly trying to reform these folks. Basically, many Type-A people are abusive pains in the keister to lots of folks around them. When you talk to some of the Type-A experts, there is an odd tone between the lines that Type A-ness (of which many of them are admittedly perfect examples) is a kind of ethical failing, and that the term is a fancied-up medical way of describing people who just aren't nice to others. Added to this is a tendency I've noticed for a lot of the Type-A experts to be lay preachers, or descendants of clergy. That religious linkage will even sneak in the back door. I once talked with two leaders in the field, one an atheist and the other agnostic, and when they tried to give me a sense of how they try to get through to Type-A subjects about their bad ways, they made use of a religious sermon.* I finally asked these two M.D.s an obvious question—were they in the business of blood vessels or souls? Was the work that they do about heart disease or about ethics? And without a beat they both chose ethics. Heart disease was just a wedge for getting at the bigger issues. I thought this was wonderful. If it takes turning our coronary vessels into our ledgers of sin and reducing circulating lipids as an act of redemption in order to get people to be more decent to each other, more power to them.
* I listened to a tape of this sermon, called "Back in the Box," by the Reverend John Ort-berg. It concerns an incident from his youth. His grandmother, saintly, kind, nurturant, also happened to be a viciously competitive and skillful Monopoly player, and his summer visits to her were littered with his defeats at the game. He described one year where he practiced like mad, honed his Machiavellian instinct, developed a ruthless jugular-gripping style, and finally mopped up the board with her. After which, his grandmother rose and calmly put the pieces away.
"You know," she said offhandedly, "this is a great game, but when it is all over with, the pieces just go back in the box." Amass your property, your hotels . . . [the sermon takes off from there] . . . your wealth, your accomplishments, your awards, your whatevers, and eventually it will all be over with and those pieces go back in the box. And all you are left with is how you lived your life.
I listened to this tape while racing to beat red lights on my way to a 5:00 A.M. commuter train, Powerbook ready so as not to miss a moment of work on the train, eating breakfast one-handed while driving, using the time to listen to this sermon on tape as research for this chapter. And this sermon, whose trajectory was obvious from the first sentence and was filled with Jesus and other things I do not subscribe to, reduced me to tears."
I found myself a little verklempt as I read. I loved the whole (especially his footnote), but was also particularly grabbed by his talk of ethics - though I might not use that word. The thing he seems to be getting at is that living better in the way we treat other humans actually makes our own lives better. Or conversely, treating other people shittily is bad for others and for us.
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