Gioia on the Morning

Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia (pronounced Joyah) is an interesting man. I first encountered him in a YouTube video talking about the grim future of music in the age of TikTok. He's a jazz musician and currently holds forth on a variety of subjects from his newsletter The Honest Broker on Substack. In one of his recent posts, he outlined what he called "My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character." When I began to read the post, I only got as far as #1:

Over the years, I developed several techniques for assessing character—and a few of them I’d even describe them as secret skills, because such matters are rarely discussed and some of the best evaluation methods aren’t widely known .

The careful application of these techniques has saved me a lot of heartache and agita. My dealings with people tend to be positive nowadays, and mostly because I’ve put a lot of effort into ensuring that they are good, trustworthy people. This is valuable both on the upside and downside.

1. Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.

This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.

This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find.

So the next time you’re introduced to strangers at the party, and they start talking business, spend at least a little time sizing up their partners. If you don’t pay attention to this, you will have lost an important source of insights, and may pay a high price as a result.

At this point in Gioia's post I stopped reading. Wow, his standards are a lot higher than mine. He sounds like he never made a mistake in love - assuming that his marital "choice" had anything to do with love.

And, right off the bat, perhaps I should simply cry "mea culpa," since, by Gioia's standards, my marital choices were revelatory of my flawed character. Gioia would probably not want me for a business partner or as a candidate for city mayor (since he clearly isn't providing his readers with criteria for choosing friends). 

But I think Ted Gioia is dead wrong about this - his #1 rule for judging a person's character should totally avoid their choice of spouse. I have good friends who made disastrous mistakes in marriage. I didn't hold it against them and it never made me question their character. My dear late sister married - and divorced - five times. What should I have done, disown my own sister because her choices told me that her character was deeply flawed?

And even if Gioia is only talking about a choice of business partners, why should his criteria be so different from those he uses in his choice of friends? 

I would argue that a spouse, assuming that one is marrying for love, is rarely a matter of choice. In defense of my argument, I recall a brief speech made by Raúl Julia in the movie Tequila Sunrise that has stuck with me almost thirty-five years since I first heard it: 

Friendship is the only choice in life you can make that's yours! You can't choose your family! Goddamn it, I've had to face that! No man should be judged for whatever direction his dick goes! That's like blaming a compass for pointing north, for Chrissake! Friendship is all we have.

The "choice" of a spouse - of a person one loves - is probably the only occasion in one’s life when making a mistake is permissible - and completely understandable. And no one should ever interfere or offer advice before, during or after. And saying "I told you so" will warrant a punch in the mouth.

But it goes much deeper than this, and it brings into my argument two of the greatest intellects of history: Leonardo da Vinci and Sigmund Freud. 

When I was in college I first encountered a quote by Leonardo that went something like this: "Nothing can be loved unless it is first known." At first, like everyone else, I saw the quote as pure sagacity, drawing a direct line between love and knowledge. But after doing a little more living, the quote started to worry me: I realized that it simply wasn't true. I speculated about the veracity behind the remark, arriving at my own conclusion: 

I used to think that Leonardo had somehow got it backwards, that nothing can be known unless it is loved. Now I know that there are few things more irreconcilable than love and knowledge. But it is a beautiful thought - and perhaps all the more beautiful for being so untrue.

Years later I discovered that Sigmund Freud, in his fascinating character study of Leonardo, commented on his strange quote and had come to the same conclusion that I had:

In an essay of the Conferenze Florentine the utterances of Leonardo are cited, which show his confession of faith and furnish the key to his character. "Nessuna cosa si può amare nè odiare, se prima no si ha cognition di quella." That is: One has no right to love or to hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. And the same is repeated by Leonardo in a passage of the Treaties on the Art of Painting where he seems to defend himself against the accusation of irreligiousness:

"But such censurers might better remain silent. For that action is the manner of showing the workmaster so many wonderful things, and this is the way to love so great a discoverer. For, verily great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it you will be able to love it only little or not at all."

The value of these utterances of Leonardo cannot be found in that they impart to us an important psychological fact, for what they maintain is obviously false, and Leonardo must have known this as well as we do. It is not true that people refrain from loving or hating until they have studied and became familiar with the nature of the object to whom they wish to give these affects, on the contrary they love impulsively and are guided by emotional motives which have nothing to do with cognition and whose affects are weakened, if anything, by thought and reflection.

Leonardo only could have implied that the love practiced by people is not of the proper and unobjectionable kind, one should so love as to hold back the affect and to subject it to mental elaboration, and only after it has stood the test of the intellect should free play be given to it. And we thereby understand that he wishes to tell us that this was the case with himself and that it would be worth the effort of everybody else to treat love and hatred as he himself does.

Freud concludes that it was the exceptional nature of Leonardo, in which the emotional impulses of art were often interrupted by his analytical penchant, that prevented him from surrendering, like everyone else, to the compulsions of love. It also prevented him from completing more than the fewer than twenty extant art works that are attributed to him.