Take This to Heart As Well As to Mind

Just last week, I wrote a bit on advice. Following up, my son (sic) sent me this bit from The Best of Craigslist—“Advice to Young Men from an Old Man.” I won’t reprint the whole thing, which you can find here (link)—but this is a sample:

1. Don’t pick on the weak. It’s immoral. Don’t antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid. …

4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose. …

9. You’ll spend your entire life listening to people tell you how much you owe them.You don’t owe the vast majority of people shit. …

23. Realize that love is a numbers game. Guys fall in love easily. You’re going to see some girl and feel like you’ll die if you don’t get her. If she rejects you, move on to the next one. It’s her loss.

Even as excerpted, I cannot endorse this list unreservedly. For example, when I was young I did get in a few fistfights. I always lost and I cannot imagine what good it did me. But on the whole, the list seems balanced, compassionate and generous.

But it did set me to thinking about the general matter of advice. It’s a puzzle. There is, first of all, the matter of the target. We know that the son of Lord Chesterfield, that most famous of all advisers, for all his loving tutelage, ended life as a nonentity and largely a failure. Does anyone ever take advice except that which he wants to hear? Or even understand it? Does anyone ever ask for advice, except when he knows that he will get the advice he wants?

There is also the problem of the adviser. We’ve all heard of radio announcers with Tourettes’ Syndrome, who can’t speak in sentences unless we are on the air. We know that Machiavelli, the grand master of political advise, was an unemployed second-tier civil servant seeking (unsuccessfully) after a new job. Is there any connection at all between the character of advice-givers and the advice they give—and is so, is it perhaps negative, as in “don’t do as I do, do as I say”--? Could it be that the guy from Craigs’ List makes a habit of picking on the weak and antagonizing the strong, and running away from fistfights at every chance?

For more on this line, perhaps the best source of all is Samuel Johnson in an essay for The Rambler, for January 15, 1751 (link). Consider, inter alia:

Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious. But for the same reason everyone is eager to instruct his neighbours. To be wise or to be virtuous is to buy dignity and importance at a high price; but when nothing is necessary to elevation but detection of the follies or faults of others, no man is so insensible to the voice of fame as to linger on the ground. . . . Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without very accurate inquiry whether it is right. It is sufficient that another is growing great in his own eyes at our expense, and assumes authority over us without our permission; for many would contentedly suffer the consequences of their own mistakes, rather than the insolence of him who triumphs as their deliverer.

Or at last, from the guy on Craigslist:

Remember, 97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.