The lost art of giving good advice (National Post, June 7, 2006)

Barbara Kay, National Post
Published: Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Occasionally, family members or friends ask me to give them advice. When I say "occasionally," though, I'm referring to their asking, not to my giving. It would be more true to say that I frequently offer unsolicited advice to those I deem in need of it.

I come by the tendency honestly. I grew up in the '50s, when a common social morality aligned with a near-religious faith in psychotherapy seemed to promise a cure-all for human frictions. My mother was in vigorous accord with poet Alexander Pope's dictum that "the proper study of mankind is Man."

She urged upon me the new crop of psychiatric literature (Bruno Bettelheim, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney et al), persuading me -- for a time -- that psychological awareness was the key to repairing and advancing all interpersonal relations.

I was also nosy about other people's lives, especially their marriages. I was therefore very much taken with a feature of the monthly Ladies Home Journal called "Can This Marriage be Saved?", in which a husband and wife separately vented their grievances, followed by a marriage counsellor's recommendations for successful reconciliation. Compromise was a staple motif of these summings-up, as was the now quaint, superannuated notion that it was a mark of maturity, and a virtue, to curb one's ego in the interests of a stable home rather than "fail" at marriage.

Having only acquired wisdom with age myself, I was surprised to learn from a recent Wall Street Journal article that the first newspaper advice column was penned in 1898 for the New York Evening Journal by a 20-year old woman. As "Beatrice Fairfax," Marie Manning received almost 1,500 letters a day on womanizing husbands, overbearing mothers-in-law and "suppressed desires." Barely adult herself, she must have found certain appeals intimidating: "Tell me please, how far a girl can go and still be good. My body cries out to be loved ... But I do not want to be cheap, promiscuous or foolish ..."

Manning was an advisor after my own heart. She eschewed sentimentality ("large doses of common sense and no sobbing" were her watchword), urging disenchanted married readers to consider the lives of the people around them who might be negatively influenced by their impulsiveness.

Manning's most successful 20th century progeny, such as Dorothy Dix, Ann Landers and her sister Abby Van Buren, sang from the same hymnal: Yielding to transient yearnings can create a far-flung, destructive ripple effect amongst family and society itself; thus, our desires should always be measured against the consequences to those whose security and happiness is bound up with our choices.

The common denominator of that period's advice-givers was not higher education; some of the dumbest advice comes from judges who know the law though not the human heart. Rather, it was common sense, a moral compass and the conservative understanding that certain elements of human nature are immutable and impervious to monolithic social theories.

Still, role-modeling is key to credibility for any advice-giver, and the stalwarts of the genre could not withstand the twin juggernauts of feminism and moral relativism. Even Ann Landers eventually divorced, while the once wildly popular Dr. Laura Schlesinger's bizarre personal life discredited her remorseless jeremiads, and drastically shrank her circle of awed groupies.

The only nationally accessible Canadian columnist I know of who still honours the fading "agony aunt" paradigm is the Toronto Star's Ellie Tesher -- not coincidentally a woman, like myself, of a certain age and outlook. There are younger magazine columnists and various radio talk show tipsters who specialize in dating and sexual etiquette, but the global advice field is now loomed over by Oprah, and sub-contracted to the various Dr. Phils of TV land.

Ms. Manning chastened the people who confided their secrets to her (and her alone, not 20-million voyeurs) to encourage good character. Our postmodern advisors only affect indignation at the immoral behaviour of the shameless social losers (the more feckless the better) they have actively sought out for their shows. Their real business in scolding these hapless "guests" is not, like the advice columnists of my era, to imbue weak or ethically ambivalent witnesses with renewed moral fibre. These new bully pulpiteers prey on human wreckage to fight ratings battles and entertain sensation-seeking audiences, who in their turn only affect collective shock and disgust in order to conceal their schadenfreude.

bkay@videotron.ca

© National Post 2006