Glenn Loury’s memoir is remarkable. One of the finest economists of his generation dishes on his own addiction to porn and drugs, rampant infidelity, endless lying, and all sorts of other misdeeds that most people would go out of their way to cover up — not publish. In the opening chapter, one of the most riveting I’ve ever read in a memoir, he writes:
I am going to tell you that I have lied, because I need you to believe me. I am going to tell you that I have deceived those closest to me, because I need you to trust me. I am going to tell you that I have abandoned people who needed me, because I need you to stick with me. I must tell it all in this memoir, because if I don’t tell it all, nothing I say will be heard. The skeptical reader will have observed that this game has already begun.
Glenn repeats a refrain throughout the memoir about the difference between the “cover story” and the “true story” — and his own life was full of cover spin, masking darker truths, and so it goes for many us in our presentation of self in everyday life.
Aside from all the jaw-dropping moral confessions, Glenn’s intellectual evolution is fascinating. He is an African American economist who grew up on the wrong side of town and who made his way into the most prestigious corridors of academia. Presumptions of allyship on the basis of race came from both the political left and the political right at different times in his career. But Glenn is fiercely independent, rejects labels, and at different turns and on different issues (be it affirmative action, race and crime, Obama, Trump), surprises people who thought they had him (and his worldview) figured out.
The real reason this memoir has generated so much attention, though, relates to his personal life misadventures — not his academic accomplishments. He speaks apologetically about his addictions and betrayals, although with not quite as much scathing self-judgment as one might expect. He takes a fairly balanced tone about it all, even though words of disapproval about himself appear frequently.
I don’t know Glenn personally or the players who appear in this book. But I read about his flawed mind and heart and I am not decisively repelled. I would be open to the possibility of friendship with someone like Glenn. Not that Glenn cares, but it made me think about singular moral purity tests for friendship. I don’t have them. This is borne from a recognition that things are more complex than they can seem from the outside, that almost nobody should be judged in full by their worst deeds, and that I, too, am morally flawed. To be sure, there are people who, in sum, morally repel me. But it’s often a function of their lack of self-awareness and lack of desire to improve more than it is a decisive black-and-white litmus test on particular beliefs or actions.
Some direct quotes / highlights from the memoir below.
My bet is that this strategy of self-discrediting disclosure will accomplish two things: First, it will appease your impulse to find cracks in the edifice of my self-presentation, to search out my contradictions and too-convenient narrative contrivances.
Since I was a child, I had watched Adlert and Alfred seduce their way through the South Side. Adlert was very clear about it. Despite his professional accomplishments, he told me, point blank, that life’s goal was to “get as much pussy as you can.”
I found myself doubting that he fully grasped the pain, frustration, anger, and self-doubt many of us felt in moments such as these, when the seeming intractability of American racism made itself felt by such vicious means.
She was not the most stylish dresser, and she was not a conventional beauty in their eyes, although I found her very attractive.
She now knows for sure that there is someone in my life I’m not telling her about. I know that she knows. She knows that I know that she knows. But, amidst this intersubjective game of tacit consent and thinly veiled deceit, neither of us ever lets on that we know what we know, even though my infidelity has now become common knowledge between us.
I was overcome by a sense of panic. None of it seemed good enough to live up to what was expected of me or to what I expected of myself or to what I saw my peers doing. My research questions just weren’t big enough, I felt; my insights were insufficiently deep and original. Along with this terrifying suspicion that I could not measure up came an old, familiar feeling: I really was choking.
It’s the excitement that comes from the adventure of entering an unknown situation with an unknown person and betting that I can charm my way past whatever reservations she may have.
I had met Bennett previously, and he and I got along well. He had a sharp mind and a sharper tongue. I liked him. Although he made his name as a crusader for family values and public morality, behind the scenes he was a bit of a hedonist. The first time I saw him in a private setting, I was astonished by his appetite for alcohol. Who was I to judge? I had my own appetites.
A baby would mean I would have to curtail my affairs and flings. I knew what having an infant in the house was like, and it would be almost impossible to continue to exercise my right as a Master of the Universe to seduce any woman I could, whenever I wanted to.
…can be a little like talking about Israel with a Jewish American. Just as an otherwise liberal Jew can take a surprisingly hardline stance on the Israel-Palestine issue, even some conservative African Americans buckle down and shake their heads if you question affirmative action. In such matters, the call of the tribe can ring out louder even than political ideology or, indeed, than reason itself.
I still considered them friends. But America in Black and White represented a viewpoint that had, I felt, led conservatives down the path to apathy and, at times, to a kind of smug satisfaction at the failures of the policies they abhorred.
It seemed to me that I was being instructed by my conservative colleagues not to think, and to choose sides between my political affiliations and my race, my tribe. I felt compromised.
But it seemed to me that stigma could be more readily explained as both a rational response to a set of social circumstances and the cause of those circumstances. Imagine the case of the stereotypical New York City cab driver who does not want to stop for young black men because he fears being robbed. He believes picking up a young black man to be less wise than picking up, say, an old white lady, because he believes that young black men are, on the whole, more likely to rob him than old white ladies. Now let’s also say that, as a statistical matter, the cabbie is correct. No matter how unlikely he is to be robbed by a young black man, he is still more likely to be robbed by one than by an old white lady. Cabbies then rarely choose to pick up young black men. But when this happens, young black men who are simply looking to hail a taxi will notice that it’s almost impossible to get one to stop. They’ll then find some other means to get where they’re going and eventually stop bothering to even try to hail a cab. As a result, cabbies who engage in biased profiling will have incentivized law-abiding riders to take themselves out of the pool of potential fares and also increased the likelihood that any young black man looking for a ride will be a robber, as only robbers will be left. In that case, the cabbie will be acting rationally when he sees one of them trying to flag him down and keeps driving. Through this rational behavior, he will also have brought into being the very state of affairs to which he is reacting.
I showed that biased social cognition can go a long way to explaining any number of forms of racial inequality, and without relying on the idea that such inequality is necessarily the result of racial animus or malice. Ordinary people and institutions can respond to incentives in totally rational ways that actually create and perpetuate the very stigmas they are responding to.
suggested to me that in my lecture I had described something like a bank run on black people. That had never occurred to me, but Larry was right! A bank run happens when people come to believe that their bank is going to run out of money. Believing their savings to be at risk, they all, in a totally rational fashion, attempt to withdraw it at the same time. But when everyone tries to withdraw all their funds at the same time, the bank actually does run out of money, which does put the savings of anyone who didn’t make it to the bank in time at risk. A shared belief about some state of affairs, regardless of whether or not it is unavoidably true, brings that state of affairs into being.
“I never understood what you got out of those relationships.” I cannot deny that his bemusement spoke well of him. I didn’t really answer his question at the time, but there was an answer: Nothing could define me. I wasn’t reducible to “economist” or “Christian” or “black man” or even “husband” or “father.” I was those things, certainly. But I was much more than that. This was my life. I was only going to get one shot at it, and if I saw a way to broaden my experience, to enlarge my world,
Some years earlier, Richard John Neuhaus was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer that he thought would kill him. He survived, but in the intervening period, when he believed he was facing death, he wrote As I Lay Dying, a book about the experience of preparing yourself for the end of life. I read this book to Linda in bed, and we both took solace from its wisdom.
I also found a self-help book in her library. It was about learning to forgive those who have wronged you. As I leafed through the pages, I saw that Linda, ever the diligent scholar, had underlined passages and scribbled notes to herself in the margins. Many of those notes clearly referenced things I had done. She made a study of forgiving me. Perhaps that’s what it took to live with me. I had to be treated as a miniature research project.
An absent father was no doubt a difficult thing to deal with, but his life was one of prep schools and elite universities and the political fast track. I don’t think that one must undergo hardship in order to lay claim to their blackness, but the dissonance between Obama’s claim to represent “the black experience” and his actual life experience was just too grating for me to ignore. My childhood friend Woody was “blacker” than Obama, as far as I was concerned.
None of the disqualifications of Trump that his critics listed—ceaselessly, day after day, year after year—could negate the gut-level satisfaction I got from watching him. Sure, he lied constantly, but Americans had become so inured to the dishonesty of their politicians that it was actually a relief to hear someone lie with brazenness and glee, instead of prevaricating and equivocating while pretending they had a claim on moral authority.
enforced silence in a marriage is just as unsustainable as rancor.
In my seventies, I have nothing left to prove and nothing to hide. Whatever promise the young man showed sitting in Mr. Reffels’s solid geometry class at John Marshall Harlan High School has long since come to fruition. I now find myself receiving honors that point backward to what I have accomplished in the past rather than garnering grants that anticipate what I might yet accomplish in the future.
It sometimes seems acceptable to do that which I, inspired by Václav Havel, had fought so hard against: “to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life.”