Does the World have it ass backwards, or what?

Does the World have it ass backwards, or what?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005


George is not too happy with my long and unfamiliar website name: www.peripateticphilosopher.com, and my equally confusing blog name:
peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com. He wrote:

OK Jim, I understand, you want everyone to go to your Blog. Good idea! To facilitate this new habit I would suggest you invest in one more domain name that can be remembered and typed in a browser in less than 10 keystrokes.

George often stimulates a rant on my part and an example follows:

* * * * *

It is always good to hear from you. I will mull over your suggestion, but I must admit I have a problem with it.

Perhaps I am too "old school," too much an old foggy, but I have a problem with people lacking the initiative, interest and focus to take the extra step to learn something, something that may be worthwhile, something essentially free for the asking.

I am going to ramble now, so be prepared.

Only today there was an article in the newspaper about people in "the electronic age" who feel standardized tests and grading systems of A, B, C, and D lack the "human touch," and besides are hopelessly inaccurate. I'm not arguing the point because standardized tests are faulty and grading is, indeed, inaccurate.

Interestingly enough, the article went on to say, when students asked if they would accept an A at the cost of learning nothing about the subject in class, the answer was 99 percent "yes."

Two things come to mine in my "lazy meter." I go back to the era of the Stanford-Binet Intellectual Quotient (IQ) Tests when these tests were treated like dogma. You couldn't get into some high school classes if your IQ scores were say,
"average."

It makes me smile now. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, claimed an IQ of 105, which is average. When asked how he could explain his achievements in science, he admitted he didn't have too high an IQ, but insisted he was curious.

John Cheever, the famed Pulitzer Prize winning author, essentially "flunked" his army test, as his scores were so low. Historians today think Abraham Lincoln wouldn't have scored well on a conventional IQ test, mainly because it wouldn't be broad enough to capture his genius. The irony is that we seldom here from those that do well on these tests. For instance, I wonder what the mean IQ score would be for the American Congress.

In typical fashion in our society, we get everything ass backwards. The test, the grade, the school we attend are more important than the individual effort, commitment to learning, or, indeed, to the actual learning.

We have been reminded in the press of social promotions in school, where high school graduates cannot read, and of the inflated grading of Ivy League schools, where the gentleman C has been replaced by the common A, not to mention the epidemic of cheating common to university education across the country in the era of the Internet. We are led by the elite and it is leading us into the ground.

When I return to graduate school after being absent from academia for more than a decade, I took my Graduate Record Examination (GRE) without any preparation. I was taking it with students who could almost be my children.

One student during a break asked me where I took my GRE prep course for the exam. I had no idea what she was talking about. She was shocked when I told her I had attended no such course.

"Oh, my God," she said, "I feel so sorry for you. You know, they'll kill you," meaning, I would imagine that I'd do so poorly that I wouldn't be allowed to register for graduate school at the university.

Then she confessed, "This is the third time I've taken the test, you know, and I must get 1200 to get into my program." Obviously, she hadn't gotten that score before, but did say she had done better on each test she had taken. "I think this last prep course was the best," implying she didn't expect to have to take the GRE a fourth time.

I wondered why she didn't put the same effort and energy into learning that she put into passing the GRE. I did okay, and got into my program, finding that the math came back like riding a bicycle, and that the language part was actually easy. I couldn't imagine why someone so young and so vivacious would find it not so.

I had been living abroad and would learn that similar prep courses were openly advertised and dutifully attended for high school students boning up for their scholastic achievement tests (SATs), as well as college graduates wanting to get into graduate school.

Indeed, I was reentering a world that had become so cynical to the obvious pleasures of learning that it had gotten enlightenment totally ass backwards. That was 1969.

I was in my thirties, a father of four, retired, wondering as the Peggy Lee song goes, "is that all there is to love," only I was asking, is that all there is to life, the making of a good living? I wanted more, expected more of myself, not more money, but more fulfillment. I had reached the point in the pyramid where I was on automatic pilot and being paid well for it.

When I was in high school, I had a physics teacher that one semester asked the students to "grade themselves." I had gotten an A the previous semester but felt I was weak in mechanics (I'm still weak in them), whereas I had excelled in light, heat and sound. I gave myself a "B," whereas a classmate that shared a lab bench with me, who could barely spell physics, thinking it was a lark, gave himself an "A." He got an "A" and I got a "B," the only B I got that semester.

So, I realize grades are arbitrary, but I also know that students will exploit a system in which they are "honored bound" to assess themselves in their learning, and why not? Freud alerted us to the fact that we go from pain to pleasure, from comfort to complacency, and then swim in the murky waters of denial.

Students are programmed to be lazy; students would rather be somewhere else doing something else than in school; students are bored; students have been programmed into believing education is a product (degree, diploma) and not a process (a learning experience). They are programmed to be passive, reactive, looking for shortcuts, comparing and competing, and justifying their failures as somebody else's fault. And guess what? Our leaders behave precisely as these lazy students.

One of the constant justifications I have heard throughout my life by people who find themselves ignorant, unsuccessful, unfulfilled, and unfocused is, "I had a lot of poor teachers. They failed to motivate me to appreciate learning."

Bullshit!

The best teacher I have ever had is "me, myself and I." I can count on one hand the number of teachers that were truly inspiring. They kindled my interest, perked my curiosity, and showed me the way.

But the guy that has been doing the heavy lifting works inside my head and carries this aging body, and is still attempting to grow.

I have met many people that think better than I do, write better than I do, see things more clearly than I do, but they cower behind a wife or a husband, a discipline or a profession, a job or an income, doing, saying, thinking, believing and behaving as a second hand suit of clothes hooked on that rotating machine in a dry cleaners, but never seem to notice it.

There are exceptions.

An author friend of mine, the most brilliant person I know, a person who never finished high school, and has self-taught himself the equivalent of a Harvard Ph.D. in a number of fields, appreciates that learning is a privilege, not a right; that learning is not something you are given but something you take; that learning is not a passive process but an active experience; and that learning is a lifelong commitment to serving society by being all that you can be.

Yes, he is a former US Marine, and echoes marine sentiments, the author of several books, and by no accident, heads a publishing company with the name of Autodidactic Press. Look up the word if you aren't familiar with it. It fits him perfectly.

One of his fans and friends is the extraordinary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I'm sure his flow psychology of optimal experience would be much more read if his name was Joe Smith. Those that go to the trouble to read him, I'm sure, appreciate the value for the extra attention to an unfamiliar named author.

I have worked hard all my life to excavate the diamonds that I have discovered at my feet, diamonds that I have gently polished and then essentially given away, hoping that they somehow might justify my existence for taking up the limited resources of my planet.

I have a discriminating mind, a mind that I value, and my Beautiful Betty knows that I feel comfortable with the best minds of my day, and many others who have gone before me but are now limited to the pages of books. I don't put anyone on a pedestal because as brilliant as some are I know they are equally stupid in other ways as well.

I am constantly reminded by friends, such as yourself, that I could be more accessible, more popular, more in the mainstream if I would bend a little; if I would put aside my pontifications and loosen up a bit.

Thank God for BB who understands that I like being just as I am and worry little whether people take me seriously or not. My job, I tell her, is to see, assay, report and publish, and let the audience; either large or small, or nonexistent fill the void.

She says, and I can't disagree, that I feel at an advantage not being the focus of attention, that somehow I fear it might corrupt me if I became a literary darling. Some may think these sour grapes, but I wonder how well Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway might have written had they not become more celebrated than their art.

While I'm at it, I have a strong sense that she would be in agreement with you and your suggestion. She is getting impatient with me, again, because I'm writing essays and not reading my South Africa books in preparation for writing my novel. I've read some ten books and had to take a break, and read a few novels, a couple of histories (one the first 30 days when Hitler came to power), and tread water for a spell.

The Hitler book puts me right back into thinking about leadership. What is so sad about leadership, aside from there being none at the moment, is that we seem to have learned nothing from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or from the Cold War.

It is almost as if world leaders managed to get through school, and into their positions of authority, lobotomized from the history of the past, even the recent past. A twentieth century malaise has spread into a pandemic of leaderless leadership in the twenty-first century.

Ten million young men were killed in World War I, six million Jews, and ten million or more in World War II, and on and on. What is common to all these wars is that we feel a need to demonize our enemies as being subhuman while we make ourselves uberhuman. There is no room for dissent when the blood of our children is being spilled in foreign lands; everything must be answered with patriotism. It is programmed hysteria by cynical leadership.

When we are all dead and gone, and the wars of this and the past century are calmly analyzed by historians and philosophers, I sense that this will be judged a barbaric period in man's history, rivaling Genghis Khan for its excesses and denials.

Alas, the sins of leaderless leadership prove to have mortal consequences. The German people thought they were signing an armistice with the allies at Versailles after World War I, not an unconditional surrender. The brutality of the treaty's terms would throw German society into chaos, runaway inflation, massive unemployment, and bankruptcy. Average Germans thought their leaders could negotiate the peace, but they did not know that there is no negotiation when a people are made synonymous with unmitigated evil. How does it go: those without sin cast the first stone?

Tuesday (October 18, 2005) I watched the Frontline on PBS titled "The Torture Question."

The program was about our military treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanimo Bay. Immediately, I thought about the German and Japanese treatment of prisoners of war, and noncombatants in World War II that was shown in newsreels in movie theaters. I could not believe human beings could treat other human beings so brutally. I was just a boy then. Now, I am an aging man and see how my fellow Americans in the military are treating and have been treating people designated as "terrorists." The Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war has been suspended to gain information vital to the war effort. The body has suspended the mind as well.

It was as shockingly and unsettlingly inhuman as I remembered those newsreels sixty years before.

I wanted to turn the program off because I didn't want to believe Americans could be guilty of such crimes, or that they would attempt to justify the behavior on the flimsy excuse that these men "were terrorists and had secrets to tell that would save American lives." I won't go into the brutality of the treatment. It is too painful and embarrassing to report.

I was an enlisted man in the navy, and had absolutely no knowledge of where we were going, what we would be doing, or why. What would torturers get out of me? Nothing! Absolutely nothing because I knew nothing, as perhaps as many as 95 percent of these prisoners, if not more.

Then I wondered, "What will these young Americans be like when they return home to American society and are expected to be law abiding citizens?"

It made me shudder. I remember counseling a Viet Nam war veteran at Honeywell. He was struggling with guilt, crying for help, confused with trying to retrofit himself back into American society. I listened. He cried. He was a broken man and not yet thirty. Several days later I read where he shot up a place and was nearly killed by police. He didn't shoot anyone, just wildly until the police arrived, perhaps a disguised attempt at suicide.

The PBS program showed how the United States changed after 9/11. Paranoia, fear, and hatred surfaced with a hunger for retribution. It was a time for leadership, for level heads, for looking at the situation from every possible angle, to employing the best brains and most reliable information, assessing, analyzing and evaluating options. We reacted: ready, fire, aim!

The first casualty of war is truth, not only in lies to the public but in excessive secrecy and propaganda. It takes a great deal to leverage our passive society into being mobilized and focused on the hatred of shadowy figures of a distant people different from the majority of us. We are perfect cannon fodder for the manipulators, for the revenge seekers, for those who would sell revenge as the road to justice; and war as necessary for peace. George Orwell lives!

The Versailles Treaty, which ended World War I, produced World War II, and was the mother of Hitler's Third Reich. The war to end all wars was punitive and humiliating to Germany, which had not felt defeated, and thought it would sign an armistice, not a surrender document. It gave Adolf Hitler the grievance he needed to rise to power in thirty days. Yes, thirty days.

Read Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 (Castle Books 2003) by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr.

We have not always been reactive, not always dominated by leaderless leaders, not always shortcut takers.

A departure from this predilection was The Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine after World War II, in which America's generosity and humanity saved European democracies, and provided the good will we are still collecting dividends on despite bonehead after bonehead strategy on our part.

It was not charity, alone, that motivated us, however, but fear of the Russian Bear, and the "Red scare." It helped, too, that we could identify with Europeans as being fellow Anglo-Saxons with a similar cultural experience.

Alas, if the leadership had been there, If only we had shown the same charity after the first Gulf War, there might not have been a second. Instead, we in effect guaranteed Saddam's survival and abandoned the Kurds and the Shiites to his butchery. Little wonder that few dare trust us in Iraq today.

My "Manifesto of Leaderless Leadership," which apparently has been read about the globe, continues to be corroborated by the international community of leaders, extending, and too often sadly so, on down to the roots of our society, as in the case of Hurricane Katrina.

So, am I likely to make my wonderings more accessible to the lazy, the careless, and the apathetic? What do you think?

Be always well, and thank you for obliging me,
Jim
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