The Peripatetic Philosopher Speaks: Anachronism & Atavism Collide with The Information Age-ed!

Anachronism & Atavism Collide
with
The Information Age – ed

The Peripatetic Philosopher Speaks

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 27, 2005


Among the best men are diversities of opinions; which should no more, in true reason, breed hatred, than one that loves black should be angry with him that is clothed in white; for thoughts are the very apparel of the mind.

Soldier & poet, Sir Phillip Sidney (1554-1586)

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

American clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

My hometown newspaper is under siege. It has entered and been cordon off by the Information Age, and finds its readers across the continent talking back to it with a vengeance. No longer is its copy taken politely as just this side of the word of God. The newspaper must feel the Internet is Lucifer personified.

I sense that the newspaper, now over one hundred years old, senses it is in a panic mode as readers attempt to influence the direction of the community who are no longer residences. Complicating the picture further is that the people running the newspaper have no sense of local history having never grown up in these environs. Now, the emails fly to its tainted nest like a swarm of locust, eating away its protective shell and exposing its naked vulnerability. It would be tragic if it were not so comedic.

In fairness to the current publisher, editor, and staff, the problem is endemic to the times, and certainly not an isolated incident, nor, indeed, is the condition a problem only of media, but in fact to all matter of industry and organizational pursuit.

I am copied by email of a network of several hundred former residences of this community now spread across the continent. Like myself, many are long in tooth with a passionate interest in the preservation of cherished community landmarks. These are scheduled to disappear with the expediency of America’s cryptic short-term perspective to be replaced by fast food businesses, parking lots, old folk homes, and other businesses that a decade hence will become perennial eyesores.

The folly of our times is that this is driven by the nonsense of “progress,” once America’s most important product, which has finally revealed itself for what it is.

Progress has most recently led to the mudslides in the high rent districts of California, to massive homelessness and mounting death in Haiti and The Dominican Republic, to the deaths of thousands of Chinese due to muddy rivers overflowing their banks brought on by torrential rains, and on and on and on . . . everywhere!

We thought we could cut up our environment at will incessantly and recklessly without consequences . . . forever. This philosophy extends to landmarks as well. We are the great waste makers.

My hometown is not the most beautiful or most historic in the region, but it has some remarkable architecture, work of pioneers a hundred or more years ago.

One such pioneer was a young Irish priest new to the United States who settled in this small Midwestern town and managed to build a church, a grammar school, a convent for teaching nuns, a home for retired nuns, and a Catholic hospital against as much pressure within the Catholic community as outside it. He was a leader and visionary when we had no vocabulary to describe such people.

Now, systematically, his landmarks are disappearing as if they were sand castles on a windy shore.

The first order of leadership is to listen to the people. The second order of leadership is to understand the will of the people. The third order of leadership is to develop a dialogue with the people in which ideas are cleared of excess polemics and made palatable to the majority. And the fourth order of leadership is to implement the people’s design with passion and vigor.

It is no accident that we have had Watergate. Nor is it an accident that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand understood before 9/11. And it is no accident that a community newspaper takes a combative position of paranoia in a panic reaction to its articulate critics.

My premise for the past fifteen years or so has been that the world of management has lacked leadership because it was too busy managing people as things to be managed, and too preoccupied with what it could get rather than bring to the operation. It lost perspective, and when it lost perspective it lost the ability to lead. The evidence points to the fact that the successful management of World War II has given the profession a fixation with nostalgia that it has never been able to escape.

The world has changed. People have changed. The balance of power has changed. But management has not changed. It has not changed in the running of a school, a church, a community, a company, a college, a religious institution, so why should we expect it to change in the running of a newspaper?

The result is that those running things don’t have a clue in how to deal with people, be they workers or citizens, much less citizens-at-large, or former citizens of a community who would challenge their excesses.

These ex-citizens, who the newspaper would label “out-of-towners,” in other words, deserters of the community, are often more informed, more knowledgeable, better educated, and therefore more enlightened than those who would summarily dismiss them as provocateurs.

It is a common problem in America at the moment. The leaders are on the sidelines while leaderless leaders, otherwise known as managers, continue to run things, and often into the ground.

This is happening in every company across the country, and in every community within such confines. Media may be likened to the pope, autocratic, dogmatic, omniscient, and authoritarian. This was true of all of the twentieth century. It doesn’t work anymore in the twenty-first, but damned if media aren’t going to try to make it work!

Regarding citizenship, a citizen is no longer confined to a place but to a mindset. Citizens no longer read newspapers with credulity. They have grown to become cynics of information, questioning its veracity, and querulous to its conclusions.

The days of promulgation to compliance are over. Suspicions must be addressed and satisfied. Motives must be transparent and explored for there is new fight in John Q. Public.

This is where my hometown newspaper missed the boat. It failed to realize that challenge must be entertained and dealt with in order to arrive at communication and to build consensus, the mission of a newspaper.

People want to understand, to have their fears allayed. But before that can happen, they must first be allowed to vent their frustration and confusion, and not be condescendingly labeled in derogatory terms.

It is the essence of a free society of a participative constituency. It is also the same in every enterprise without exception. It is the only way to develop consensus and experience cooperation, which are derived voluntarily, never coercively.

Labeling ex-citizens’ “letters-to-the-editor” as the complaints of “outsiders” is the ploy of the bully. On the other hand, if “insiders” of the community find comments of “outsiders” offensive that is another matter. A dialogue is called for, which will open the seams of discord and provide a theme to reveal what is actually going on in the community and why.

A newspaper in such an instance can act as a “third party interventionist” in this process between “insiders” and “outsiders,” playing the role of the unobtrusive observer. This is not far a field to what a newspaper purports its mission to be: that is, “to report all the news fit to print” without bias.

By assuming the adversarial role in this discussion, the newspaper has become the target taking the pressure off the politicians and change masters organizing the destruction of these community landmarks. It has unwittingly become their foil neutralizing its influence, and therefore its leadership in a debate, which I repeat, is endemic to the times. By so doing, it has obfuscated its role and sullied that debate. Given this, the problem has no chance for a satisfactory redress.

Communities across the land are wrestling with the “folly of progress” without knowing it. This is evident in this instance in the matter of the preservation of the community’s historic integrity against the pressing expedience of progressive development.

Historic landmarks provide identity and a sense of connection with community. We all need this sense of community because we all need to belong to something somewhere.

My hometown newspaper has come off the bad guy. It isn’t, just misguided, caught up in the hysteria of the emotions of the times as landmarks are seemingly set for indiscriminate removal.

I’ve written elsewhere that management is anachronistic, and that managers are atavistic. I hold to that idea.

Many emailers to the newspaper were born in the 1930s and 1940s before the war, and know the sanctity and hold of landmarks on their souls. I call them the “Information Age-ed” because of when they were born and the perspective they bring to this issue.

These old timers, like myself, have known power and can remember when their influence was unchallenged simply because their positions carried owner, president, CEO, vice president, general manager, program manager, supervisor, director, doctor, lawyer, professor, psychologist, engineer, and so on. They have known indisputable authority and remember how quickly they were obeyed. But they also understand, especially now, that it wasn’t because they were wise but because of their position power. Well, that power has evaporated, replaced by knowledge power.

The Information Age has made position power redundant. It has also made certain that there are no secrets anymore. My hometown newspaper is in the crucible of this reality. My desire is that it sees the folly of its ways and regains its important function once again.

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Dr. Fisher is author of several books; two soon to be published are WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE; and Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?