IS OUR QUEST FOR SUCCESS KILLING US?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman
Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.
Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.)
At one point in my life, when my work took me about the globe, I thought what ails the world was the “American Disease,” CORPOCRACY. In my writings, I go against the grain and claim business is the prime practitioner of this disease if not its architect.
I have come now to understand that corpocracy is only symptomatic of this disease. For the reader not familiar with my work, I claim CORPOCRACY consists of ten elements of management:
· It is insensitive to its employees;
· It supports company politics at the expense of productivity;
· Secretiveness is the controlling aspect of communication;
· Documentation is its principle product;
· Endless meetings get in the way of productive work;
· Its focus is internal while its language is external;
· Its planning is proxy for action;
· Individual initiative is suspect for you never know where it might lead;
· It is isolated from operations by the insulation of mahogany; and
· It overtly praises while covertly discouraging innovation.
Corpocracy, outlined here, is the working (not the theoretical) model of most multi-national corporations despite all the electronic wizardry of the moment. The evidence is palpable with a predisposition to treat people as things to be managed rather than people to be led.
We see this from the recent New York transit strike over the 2005 Holiday Season to the constant battle of Wal-Mart to put a halo on its business by a full-court public relations campaign, rather than quietly dealing with internal problems directly. We see it, too, with employers of steel workers, autoworkers, airline employees, and retail clerks across this nation, and now it is infecting other parts of the globe as well.
Missing in the paradigm is that most people, wherever they are, prove to be quite reasonable. They want a living wage, but along with the living wage the respect, dignity, trust and freedom to do the job. Not all pay is in coin.
The curse is that we are addicted to progress, and progress is impersonal.
People are a thing in this equation, which finds them being hired and fired at whim as the economy fluctuates, and it fluctuates radically because progress is its most important product.
The fall back position of corpocracy is that entitlements are killing companies, which I addressed nearly a score of years ago (Work Without Managers 1990).
The disease, I have come to concede, is not corpocracy. Success is the disease. No company can ever have too much success, even if its success is at the expense of killing the land, killing the sea, killing the air, and killing the spirit of the workers who grind at the core of progress.
Success is the narcotic that has found companies losing their moral compass and way. Sartre says an authentic life is lost when what people do has little to do with what people would prefer to do. It is the same with companies.
Companies have jumped aboard the treadmill, which goes faster and faster. Rather than get off when they can't keep up, they attempt to slim down to stay on. They do this by cutting and trimming, and downsizing, and reorganizing, and reengineering, and doing whatever is the current fad to stay aboard.
It never works because companies lose their identity in the frenzy. Companies are dying like the land, the sea, the air and the spirit of their people that they have unwittingly killed.
Success has resulted in the world being turned inside out with the natural perverted to the unnatural, the good to the bad, and the sensible to the ridiculous. Small wonder that we have corruption, collusion, wire fraud, bribery, duplicity, chicanery and scandals of all description. A singular appetite for success with reckless abandon feeds this beast.
Once sensible people viewed a little comfort, a roof over their heads, clothes on their back, food on their table, the company of family and friends, and a job to go to enough. The rest was fluff.
It is this fluff that has made success a disease, and its master driver, corpocracy.
This finds research scientists painting spots on laboratory animals at the Sloan-Kettering Research Institute to corroborate research data. It leads renowned physicist William Shockley, a Nobel Laureate, to fudged research data on race to show whites superior to blacks. It results in Dr. John Darsee, a brilliant young doctor, creating fictional medical studies, getting gullible and lazy famous medical scientists to “co-author” these works.
Once these works were published and found bogus, scores of papers and abstracts had to be rescinded, damaging literally thousands of works where other medical scientists had referenced Darsee’s works.
It underscores the blatant denial that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health of a panel of tobacco CEOs before the US Congress, when they held the overwhelming evidence of this fact in their bulging files.
Most recently, an esteemed South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, admits his stem cell research is unhappily counterfeit. A national hero, the drive to achieve, to win adoration and acclamation was too heady for this scientist when success was the Siren.
Even the great discovery of DNA and the “double helix” by James Watson and Francis Crick is not without its chicanery.
The key to the discovery was the exhaustive basic research work of the late Rosalind Franklin. She spent thousands of hours in refractory X-ray analysis of coal, exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation. Exposure to this took her life in her mid-thirties, or before the Nobel Prize was awarded to these two men, along with her boss, Maurice Wilkins.
Incidentally, Wilkins gave the vital X-ray photograph of crystalline DNA in A form to James Watson without her knowledge. Once he and Crick saw this photograph the rest, as they say, was history.
Watson in his best selling book THE DOUBLE HELIX (1968) referred sarcastically to Dr. Franklin as “the dark lady,” because of her singular dedication to research and little inclination to small talk. Watson and Crick were model builders far removed from the laboratory. The American biochemist, Linus Pauling, already a Nobel Laureate, was hot in pursuit of this prize as well, but an ocean and a continental coast away from his enterprising fellow American Watson.
Science is grossly Machiavellian when reduced to transparent success.
We live in the so-called “scientific age” with miraculous scientific breakthroughs taking precedence in status to billionaire CEOs, or to corporations growing ten percent per year. The marvel of success has shifted and with it our moral moorings.
While some think a McDonald’s on every square mile of the planet typifies American crass materialism, others believe industrial global expansion mirroring that of the United States is killing the planet. If true, it would seem the quest for success has become iatrogenic, or the economic cure worse than the disease treated.
While half the people in the world have no decent housing, clothes to protect their bodies from the elements, enough food on their table, or even a job to go to, but instead are subjected to unimaginable terrors, the other half of the well-fed world are dying from too much of everything.
Dubious success is a disease that fractures the soul, kills the spirit, and plays havoc with the capacity for moral goodness. It is not because success is necessarily bad; it is because it has been turned inside out exposing devious motivation.
Look at history and you see war and terror are at root dissatisfaction: the “haves” look for justification, the “have-nots” for satisfaction.
Traditionally, religion has assuaged this division. Now, it is part of the problem, as science has eclipsed its roll and is meant to provide the solution. The new knights of the periodic table, however, are proving just as vulnerable to this crippling disease of success with its driver, corpocracy. Einstein was on to something when he said, “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”
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Author’s note: Dr. Fisher’s books and articles address this concern, with an in depth discussion in his not yet released book, “Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?”
Monday, December 26, 2005
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO!
AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Christmas 2005
As dreams are the fancies of those that sleep, so fancies are but the dreams of those awake.
Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649 – 1697)
English Author
The Christmas Season was always a nostalgic period in my hometown of CLINTON, IOWA on the banks of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, which often froze over because of the cold. Of particular significance was the ITEN CHRISTMAS DISPLAY, which the Iten family always erected on their majestic estate on South Bluff Boulevard.
Frank Iten, who with his brother ran and then sold the ITEN BISCUIT COMPANY, which was known in those mid-twentieth century days as The Snow White Bakery. The company was sold to NABISCO, which wanted to gain the patent rights to the brothers’ saltine cracker formula. So, now you know the origin of “Saltine Crackers,” an invention of two enterprising brothers in a little town of 30,000 on the Mississippi River.
The Christmas Display was a hobby of these two men that grew in eloquence and elaboration over the years, becoming a tourist attraction bringing people from far and wide to view this winter delight.
Author and Clinton historian Gary Herrity has poignantly captured the sense and sensibility of this attraction in his columns in The Clinton Herald, noting that the Iten brothers employed a couple dozen men to design, build, construct and set up the elaborate lighting and sound system to bring the display to state-of-the-arts perfection. This was the era before electronics, computers, or touch-of-the-button synchronicity.
This is all also mentioned here because Iten Christmas Display plays with the mind of an impressionistic youth in the Christmas following World War Two, when the display was moved.
What follows has appeared in a published story and will reappear in another form in the present novel I am writing, titled THE TRIPLE FOOLE.
I was a student at St. Patrick's Grammar School on Third Street and Fourth Avenue North, which has since been erased from sight if not history this past year. I had attended a Friday Novena, which is a series of Catholic worships on nine successive Fridays, with my mother, and was going to Warren's Grocery store on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue North, or west instead of directly north to my home.
My mother was going straight home as the temperature was between 10 - 15 degrees below zero on this early December night. Christmas was weeks away, but the Christmas spirit had already lightened my mood in anticipation. It was a time when Christmas was treated as the Holy Season, and the focus was on the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The Clinton Herald was resplendent throughout the season with pictures of the Nativity Scene, the Madonna, and of the Three Wise Men.
I might add that this was a very devout period of my life, going to mass and communion every day, trying never to swear, think bad thoughts, or lie, preparing myself for what I thought was to be my vocation, as a priest in the Jesuit order. It was my mother's wish and I thought God ordained.
It was a very dark moonless night, crunchy cold, too cold to snow, but it had snowed the previous week. So, each step I took made that crunchy music with my feet like stepping on eggshells.
As I approached Fifth Avenue North on Fourth Street, after going to Warren's, on my way to Six Avenue North and home, I heard this ethereal music and saw this misty light emanating from Congregational Hill, what we had always called "Hoot Owl Hollow," but which had been purchased by the Congregational Church.
A faint light and even fainter sound emanating in that direction startled me. Instinctively, I stopped, made the Sign of the Cross, and then a vision of the poor children of Fatima crossed my mind. Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, The Lady of the Rosary, or the Madonna appeared at Fatima in Portugal on six occasions to three simple shepherd children, giving them profound messages for the Church and the world, many of which came true. I shuddered with the thought that I was about to be visited by the Blessed Virgin Mother, and I was not ready! I was not worthy!
I actually fell to my knees in the snow directly by the side of Kirkwood Elementary school, where the cylinder fire escape shoot snaked down from the second floor of the school, a slide I often crawled up to slide down, shivering now, not so much from the cold as from the idea that I was either losing my mind or about to have a beatific vision.
Not only was I not ready, I knew nobody would believe me. I wanted to retrace my steps from whence I had come all the way back to St. Patrick Church, but my legs wouldn't move. How can I escape the Virgin? I asked myself, answering, I can't!
My mind was oblivious to the few passing cars, and fortunately, no one else was on the street it was so cold. Then I made out the music as "Silent Night."
I picked myself up, so embarrassed and humiliated that I shouted with a vapor trail leaving my mouth, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"
I swore I would never tell a soul, not even my best friend, Bobby Witt, and never did, until I wrote about it. Not yet a teenager, it was, however, an experienced that changed me. I promised myself that I would take life seriously, but never myself. Only a boy, I realized how impressionistic my mind was, and how impressionable I was. It is probably why I became a chemist, and later a psychologist.
Some who think me a bit cynical, were they to know what I share here, could trace it like a wire back to its source where wisdom and folly reside.
If you read my more than a million published words, the hint of that night is buried in there somewhere, which all started when the location of the Iten Christmas Display was changed.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Christmas 2005
As dreams are the fancies of those that sleep, so fancies are but the dreams of those awake.
Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649 – 1697)
English Author
The Christmas Season was always a nostalgic period in my hometown of CLINTON, IOWA on the banks of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, which often froze over because of the cold. Of particular significance was the ITEN CHRISTMAS DISPLAY, which the Iten family always erected on their majestic estate on South Bluff Boulevard.
Frank Iten, who with his brother ran and then sold the ITEN BISCUIT COMPANY, which was known in those mid-twentieth century days as The Snow White Bakery. The company was sold to NABISCO, which wanted to gain the patent rights to the brothers’ saltine cracker formula. So, now you know the origin of “Saltine Crackers,” an invention of two enterprising brothers in a little town of 30,000 on the Mississippi River.
The Christmas Display was a hobby of these two men that grew in eloquence and elaboration over the years, becoming a tourist attraction bringing people from far and wide to view this winter delight.
Author and Clinton historian Gary Herrity has poignantly captured the sense and sensibility of this attraction in his columns in The Clinton Herald, noting that the Iten brothers employed a couple dozen men to design, build, construct and set up the elaborate lighting and sound system to bring the display to state-of-the-arts perfection. This was the era before electronics, computers, or touch-of-the-button synchronicity.
This is all also mentioned here because Iten Christmas Display plays with the mind of an impressionistic youth in the Christmas following World War Two, when the display was moved.
What follows has appeared in a published story and will reappear in another form in the present novel I am writing, titled THE TRIPLE FOOLE.
I was a student at St. Patrick's Grammar School on Third Street and Fourth Avenue North, which has since been erased from sight if not history this past year. I had attended a Friday Novena, which is a series of Catholic worships on nine successive Fridays, with my mother, and was going to Warren's Grocery store on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue North, or west instead of directly north to my home.
My mother was going straight home as the temperature was between 10 - 15 degrees below zero on this early December night. Christmas was weeks away, but the Christmas spirit had already lightened my mood in anticipation. It was a time when Christmas was treated as the Holy Season, and the focus was on the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The Clinton Herald was resplendent throughout the season with pictures of the Nativity Scene, the Madonna, and of the Three Wise Men.
I might add that this was a very devout period of my life, going to mass and communion every day, trying never to swear, think bad thoughts, or lie, preparing myself for what I thought was to be my vocation, as a priest in the Jesuit order. It was my mother's wish and I thought God ordained.
It was a very dark moonless night, crunchy cold, too cold to snow, but it had snowed the previous week. So, each step I took made that crunchy music with my feet like stepping on eggshells.
As I approached Fifth Avenue North on Fourth Street, after going to Warren's, on my way to Six Avenue North and home, I heard this ethereal music and saw this misty light emanating from Congregational Hill, what we had always called "Hoot Owl Hollow," but which had been purchased by the Congregational Church.
A faint light and even fainter sound emanating in that direction startled me. Instinctively, I stopped, made the Sign of the Cross, and then a vision of the poor children of Fatima crossed my mind. Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, The Lady of the Rosary, or the Madonna appeared at Fatima in Portugal on six occasions to three simple shepherd children, giving them profound messages for the Church and the world, many of which came true. I shuddered with the thought that I was about to be visited by the Blessed Virgin Mother, and I was not ready! I was not worthy!
I actually fell to my knees in the snow directly by the side of Kirkwood Elementary school, where the cylinder fire escape shoot snaked down from the second floor of the school, a slide I often crawled up to slide down, shivering now, not so much from the cold as from the idea that I was either losing my mind or about to have a beatific vision.
Not only was I not ready, I knew nobody would believe me. I wanted to retrace my steps from whence I had come all the way back to St. Patrick Church, but my legs wouldn't move. How can I escape the Virgin? I asked myself, answering, I can't!
My mind was oblivious to the few passing cars, and fortunately, no one else was on the street it was so cold. Then I made out the music as "Silent Night."
I picked myself up, so embarrassed and humiliated that I shouted with a vapor trail leaving my mouth, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"
I swore I would never tell a soul, not even my best friend, Bobby Witt, and never did, until I wrote about it. Not yet a teenager, it was, however, an experienced that changed me. I promised myself that I would take life seriously, but never myself. Only a boy, I realized how impressionistic my mind was, and how impressionable I was. It is probably why I became a chemist, and later a psychologist.
Some who think me a bit cynical, were they to know what I share here, could trace it like a wire back to its source where wisdom and folly reside.
If you read my more than a million published words, the hint of that night is buried in there somewhere, which all started when the location of the Iten Christmas Display was changed.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD -- OUR DEBT TO PLATO!
IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD
OUR DEBT TO PLATO
Ideas control the world.
James Abram Garfield (1831 – 1881)
Twentieth President of the United States of America
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
If you want to identify the source of the joy and sorrow, the pleasure and the pain, beauty and ugliness in the world, you would do well to see the connection of these emotions to ideas that have spawned them, ideas once born were doomed to be interpreted and reinterpreted until they often meant the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean. Take the idea of brotherly love.
Religion for all its assertions that it is the righteous possessor of truth is at root an idea. This was brought home to me in Time magazine (December 12, 2005). Andrew Sullivan, in his interesting article, points out that the new German Pope Benedict XVI’s draconian measures against gays for being or becoming priests are inconsistent with the idea advocated by Jesus to hate the sin but never the sinner; that “he who would be without sin cast the first stone.”
It would seem that ideas like everything else erode with time and are reduced to acronyms such as, “WWJT?” – or – “What Would Jesus Think?”
Author Sullivan reminds us that Jesus wasn’t into stereotypes. Take Mary Magdalene. She was a sinner in the biblical sense, but Jesus did not reject her, but embraced her as a person worthy of love. Jesus believed pigeonholing people into categories was not only wrong, but also not useful.
People of ideas don’t have to write books, be revered by the public or courted by people in power. People such as Socrates and Jesus captured the spirit and weaved the invisible themes of their times into a tapestry of thought that would grow in prominence far after their parting.
WESTERN THOUGHT AND AN UGLY LITTLE MAN
Socrates was an ugly little man in the physical sense, but beautiful in a soulful sense. He wandered about Athens engaging his fellow citizens in debate without portfolio or prominence. Plato, on the other hand, was tall and handsome and born around 427 B.C., when Socrates was 42.
In his late teens, Plato became enraptured of this peculiar man, as did several of his aristocratic friends. They followed Socrates through the streets of Athens, accepting with good humor as he reduced their patrician arrogance to students lost in a wilderness, a wilderness that he understood and walked every day.
The importance of ideas is as much on how they arrive in the fabric of society as to whoever becomes the personification of their expression. You will see in this series of little essays that the men of ideas may have relevance to our time, but it is also important to note that their ideas were created out of the world they inhabited, a world that often misunderstood them as well as their ideas.
PLATO’S TIME
Plato came of age during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war in which Athens suffered a total and humiliating defeat in 404 B.C. He was twenty-three when the war ended.
Sparta then imposed a dictatorship of thirty tyrants, some of whom were Plato’s relatives and Socrates’ fellow students. This led to corruption, chaos, confusion, and rebellion with democracy eventually being restored.
The irony is that it was the new democratic government of Athens that tried Socrates for religious heresy and corrupting of the youth of Athens. He was executed in 399 B.C. by choosing not to recant his ways or to admit the charges of corruption by swallowing hemlock. Plato was then twenty-eight, and never held democracy in much esteem thereafter.
This wrenching event found Plato turning his back on public life, inspiring him instead to turn to philosophy. But first, after the execution of Socrates, he had to flee to safety with other followers. Plato took temporary refuge in Megara in Greece with the philosopher Euclides. He then traveled widely in Greece, Egypt and Italy and commenced to write his dialogues in the format of the conversations Socrates had had with his fellow Athenians.
A decade later, now thirty-eight, he traveled to Syracuse in Sicily to study Pythagorean philosophy, eventually returning to Athens in 387 B.C. at the age of forty, founding his Academy. Aristotle was among his young students with whom we will learn more in a later essay. The Academy discussed philosophy and mathematics and lasted until A.D. 527, or nearly a thousand years.
He returned to Syracuse in 367 B.C. at the age of sixty in an attempt to mold the city’s young tyrant, Dionysus II, into a philosopher-king, which was his utopian idea of governance. It failed to take hold. He revisited Syracuse six years later in 361 B.C. to attempt the process again. It failed so miserably that it placed him in personal danger and he had to flea for his life.
He never made such an attempt again, but turned his complete attention to the dialogues that featured Socrates as the protagonist. These secured his reputation. He died at the age of eighty in Athens in 347 B.C.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME
Plato lived in a transitional period both for Athens and for the Greek civilization. There was a literary boom in his time as histories and philosophies of the past were recorded and critically studied.
Meanwhile, religious rituals and myths of the gods and titans were coming under greater scrutiny after the death of Socrates, as scholars and philosophers were adopting a more worldview compared to Greece’s more relaxed ethnocentrism.
A whole set of traditional values had fallen into doubt led by itinerant philosophers known as sophists. They preached that morals were relative and not specific. For a fee, sophists provided instruction in rhetoric and debate selling people with the idea the only measure of what is right or true is who comes out of the debate on top.
Sophists capitalized on the vulnerable void left by the disenchantment of citizens with ancient myths and religion, as the Greek world moved toward a more rational aspect.
Old values no longer computed with what people were experiencing in their own lives, and therefore these values were losing their relevance. With no new values to replace them, moral relativism became popular with sophist bravado being taken as wisdom.
It was a time when man was searching for understanding of the world and his place in it. This thirst for knowing would give birth to Western mathematics, science, psychology and ethics, as well as Western philosophy.
Sophists were relatively new in Plato’s day, but he considered them from the first the enemy of virtue. His Republic is his answer to sophist relativism, using dialogue to find a solid grounding for moral values posing questions of popular positions, and then using dialectics to cross-examine these positions to recognize and refute sophist errors and assist readers in making positive discoveries in rational principles.
Plato perfected this style over time by the systematic process of dividing a position into parts and then making generalizations that would advance the idea.
For example, Plato’s “theory of forms” maintains there are two levels of reality: the visible world of sight and sound. We can recognize beauty in a painting or hear it in a voice, and therefore have a general sense of beauty whichever form it takes.
This capacity to recognize beauty is abstract and therefore invisible and lives in the mind. We take the conceptual beauty with us as memory and it lives in our minds as an extension of us.
Plato, however, does not develop this theory of forms, as he apparently felt no such need. It was self-evident. In essence, the “theory of forms” represents his attempt to cultivate our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought, something we still struggle with to this day.
In the Republic and Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as divided into three parts: sensual (appetite), spiritual, and rational. He explains our psychological complexity partly to provide justification for philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, and being representative of the highest part of the soul, the rational part.
Psychology grew out of philosophy. What is interesting is that psychology has never found a more comfortable home since leaving its philosophical roots. At various times in the past century, psychology has mimicked mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and science, never quite leaving religion. There are more than sixty disciplines and sub-disciplines in psychology today. Small wonder the expression “homeless mind” has come into prominence in recent decades.
Plato acknowledges and seeks to explain the fact that we all experience inner conflict. This is the basis of his psychology. But his theory seeks not only to explain this inner conflict but also to present the rational part of the soul as superior. Philosophy, according to Plato, is essentially the practice of refining our rationality.
Another contribution of Plato is that he recognized the importance of education as an aspect of community health and well being. He would be appalled to see that education has become essentially job training instead of life enhancing.
Perhaps hard to believe, but Plato was into pre-natal care with exercises for pregnant women to ensure the healthy birth of their babies.
Plato grew to maturity in a transitional society in which corruption was rampant, moral standards had been discarded, and people were easily inflamed by seductive and hollow sophist rhetoric. He saw his fellow Athenians eating, drinking, and indulging in unrestrained sexual hedonism and concluded his generation was hopelessly corrupt. He recognized a society with a corrupt soul is not inclined to listen to arguments of the efficacy of virtue, or that a virtuous life is a better life. So, he redirected his energies.
Instead, he turned his attention to children. His focus was on teaching children from an early age to live virtuous lives and to seek wisdom. That was the aim of his Academy. Education, he insisted, provides the child with a tolerant as well as discriminating mind, a mind that can be molded into embracing rather than denying reality with the goal to make for a better world. No one has ever improved on this idea, or indeed, on this agenda.
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Author’s note: This is one of a series of Dr. Fisher’s essays on “Ideas Control the World.”
OUR DEBT TO PLATO
Ideas control the world.
James Abram Garfield (1831 – 1881)
Twentieth President of the United States of America
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
If you want to identify the source of the joy and sorrow, the pleasure and the pain, beauty and ugliness in the world, you would do well to see the connection of these emotions to ideas that have spawned them, ideas once born were doomed to be interpreted and reinterpreted until they often meant the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean. Take the idea of brotherly love.
Religion for all its assertions that it is the righteous possessor of truth is at root an idea. This was brought home to me in Time magazine (December 12, 2005). Andrew Sullivan, in his interesting article, points out that the new German Pope Benedict XVI’s draconian measures against gays for being or becoming priests are inconsistent with the idea advocated by Jesus to hate the sin but never the sinner; that “he who would be without sin cast the first stone.”
It would seem that ideas like everything else erode with time and are reduced to acronyms such as, “WWJT?” – or – “What Would Jesus Think?”
Author Sullivan reminds us that Jesus wasn’t into stereotypes. Take Mary Magdalene. She was a sinner in the biblical sense, but Jesus did not reject her, but embraced her as a person worthy of love. Jesus believed pigeonholing people into categories was not only wrong, but also not useful.
People of ideas don’t have to write books, be revered by the public or courted by people in power. People such as Socrates and Jesus captured the spirit and weaved the invisible themes of their times into a tapestry of thought that would grow in prominence far after their parting.
WESTERN THOUGHT AND AN UGLY LITTLE MAN
Socrates was an ugly little man in the physical sense, but beautiful in a soulful sense. He wandered about Athens engaging his fellow citizens in debate without portfolio or prominence. Plato, on the other hand, was tall and handsome and born around 427 B.C., when Socrates was 42.
In his late teens, Plato became enraptured of this peculiar man, as did several of his aristocratic friends. They followed Socrates through the streets of Athens, accepting with good humor as he reduced their patrician arrogance to students lost in a wilderness, a wilderness that he understood and walked every day.
The importance of ideas is as much on how they arrive in the fabric of society as to whoever becomes the personification of their expression. You will see in this series of little essays that the men of ideas may have relevance to our time, but it is also important to note that their ideas were created out of the world they inhabited, a world that often misunderstood them as well as their ideas.
PLATO’S TIME
Plato came of age during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war in which Athens suffered a total and humiliating defeat in 404 B.C. He was twenty-three when the war ended.
Sparta then imposed a dictatorship of thirty tyrants, some of whom were Plato’s relatives and Socrates’ fellow students. This led to corruption, chaos, confusion, and rebellion with democracy eventually being restored.
The irony is that it was the new democratic government of Athens that tried Socrates for religious heresy and corrupting of the youth of Athens. He was executed in 399 B.C. by choosing not to recant his ways or to admit the charges of corruption by swallowing hemlock. Plato was then twenty-eight, and never held democracy in much esteem thereafter.
This wrenching event found Plato turning his back on public life, inspiring him instead to turn to philosophy. But first, after the execution of Socrates, he had to flee to safety with other followers. Plato took temporary refuge in Megara in Greece with the philosopher Euclides. He then traveled widely in Greece, Egypt and Italy and commenced to write his dialogues in the format of the conversations Socrates had had with his fellow Athenians.
A decade later, now thirty-eight, he traveled to Syracuse in Sicily to study Pythagorean philosophy, eventually returning to Athens in 387 B.C. at the age of forty, founding his Academy. Aristotle was among his young students with whom we will learn more in a later essay. The Academy discussed philosophy and mathematics and lasted until A.D. 527, or nearly a thousand years.
He returned to Syracuse in 367 B.C. at the age of sixty in an attempt to mold the city’s young tyrant, Dionysus II, into a philosopher-king, which was his utopian idea of governance. It failed to take hold. He revisited Syracuse six years later in 361 B.C. to attempt the process again. It failed so miserably that it placed him in personal danger and he had to flea for his life.
He never made such an attempt again, but turned his complete attention to the dialogues that featured Socrates as the protagonist. These secured his reputation. He died at the age of eighty in Athens in 347 B.C.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME
Plato lived in a transitional period both for Athens and for the Greek civilization. There was a literary boom in his time as histories and philosophies of the past were recorded and critically studied.
Meanwhile, religious rituals and myths of the gods and titans were coming under greater scrutiny after the death of Socrates, as scholars and philosophers were adopting a more worldview compared to Greece’s more relaxed ethnocentrism.
A whole set of traditional values had fallen into doubt led by itinerant philosophers known as sophists. They preached that morals were relative and not specific. For a fee, sophists provided instruction in rhetoric and debate selling people with the idea the only measure of what is right or true is who comes out of the debate on top.
Sophists capitalized on the vulnerable void left by the disenchantment of citizens with ancient myths and religion, as the Greek world moved toward a more rational aspect.
Old values no longer computed with what people were experiencing in their own lives, and therefore these values were losing their relevance. With no new values to replace them, moral relativism became popular with sophist bravado being taken as wisdom.
It was a time when man was searching for understanding of the world and his place in it. This thirst for knowing would give birth to Western mathematics, science, psychology and ethics, as well as Western philosophy.
Sophists were relatively new in Plato’s day, but he considered them from the first the enemy of virtue. His Republic is his answer to sophist relativism, using dialogue to find a solid grounding for moral values posing questions of popular positions, and then using dialectics to cross-examine these positions to recognize and refute sophist errors and assist readers in making positive discoveries in rational principles.
Plato perfected this style over time by the systematic process of dividing a position into parts and then making generalizations that would advance the idea.
For example, Plato’s “theory of forms” maintains there are two levels of reality: the visible world of sight and sound. We can recognize beauty in a painting or hear it in a voice, and therefore have a general sense of beauty whichever form it takes.
This capacity to recognize beauty is abstract and therefore invisible and lives in the mind. We take the conceptual beauty with us as memory and it lives in our minds as an extension of us.
Plato, however, does not develop this theory of forms, as he apparently felt no such need. It was self-evident. In essence, the “theory of forms” represents his attempt to cultivate our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought, something we still struggle with to this day.
In the Republic and Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as divided into three parts: sensual (appetite), spiritual, and rational. He explains our psychological complexity partly to provide justification for philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, and being representative of the highest part of the soul, the rational part.
Psychology grew out of philosophy. What is interesting is that psychology has never found a more comfortable home since leaving its philosophical roots. At various times in the past century, psychology has mimicked mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and science, never quite leaving religion. There are more than sixty disciplines and sub-disciplines in psychology today. Small wonder the expression “homeless mind” has come into prominence in recent decades.
Plato acknowledges and seeks to explain the fact that we all experience inner conflict. This is the basis of his psychology. But his theory seeks not only to explain this inner conflict but also to present the rational part of the soul as superior. Philosophy, according to Plato, is essentially the practice of refining our rationality.
Another contribution of Plato is that he recognized the importance of education as an aspect of community health and well being. He would be appalled to see that education has become essentially job training instead of life enhancing.
Perhaps hard to believe, but Plato was into pre-natal care with exercises for pregnant women to ensure the healthy birth of their babies.
Plato grew to maturity in a transitional society in which corruption was rampant, moral standards had been discarded, and people were easily inflamed by seductive and hollow sophist rhetoric. He saw his fellow Athenians eating, drinking, and indulging in unrestrained sexual hedonism and concluded his generation was hopelessly corrupt. He recognized a society with a corrupt soul is not inclined to listen to arguments of the efficacy of virtue, or that a virtuous life is a better life. So, he redirected his energies.
Instead, he turned his attention to children. His focus was on teaching children from an early age to live virtuous lives and to seek wisdom. That was the aim of his Academy. Education, he insisted, provides the child with a tolerant as well as discriminating mind, a mind that can be molded into embracing rather than denying reality with the goal to make for a better world. No one has ever improved on this idea, or indeed, on this agenda.
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Author’s note: This is one of a series of Dr. Fisher’s essays on “Ideas Control the World.”
Thursday, December 08, 2005
NEAR JOURNEY'S END & HORNS OF THE DILEMMA!
My book NJE & The Horns of the Dilemma!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Reference: an email to a concerned friend regarding the state of the planet with reference to my book, not yet published, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
Ned,
Last night the spokeswoman for the Inuit Eskimos was on Jim Lehrer. She was talking about how climate change at the polar cap is negatively impacting the whole lifestyle of the natives, as well as the animals. She was one of the delegates at the Montreal Conference on Global Warming. She also was quite gracious finding satisfaction that her people's situation managed to get on the agenda. But she expected little satisfaction beyond that. Sad.
Then I happened on a segment on the BBC concerning a small nation in the Himalayas called "Butan." People of this nation have suffered similar plight to that of New Orleans. When lakes formed by melting snow, snow that never before used to form such lakes, the security the communities below are put in jeopardy.
What happens is that the walls of these lakes overflow their weak natural barriers, and cascade down the mountainside. One city was nearly wiped away in the 1990s.
A statistic was thrown out that startled me. A diplomat from this country said that there are over 200,000 such lakes in these mountains, and the possibility exists that his entire country could one day be wiped out.
Mention was made also on this program that US accounts for one-quarter of the CO2 pollution of the planet. This was not new, and of course the US leads in leaderless leadership, and there is little sense that this will change. On the contrary, the US has become the Pied Piper to oblivion, as if everyone is marching to the end of the earth and falling off in merry cadence.
But what was most astounding of all was to see, while France and Germany are reducing their emissions in double digits, countries such as Portugal and Spain and Ireland are increasing theirs in double digits.
I experienced this directly when I was with Honeywell Europe in the 1980s as these countries were then on the initial phase of their late Industrial Revolutions. And then of course there is China, our imitative twin, which is the second greatest polluter on the face of the earth, and doing everything it took us a century to do in a score or so of years.
I had a modest agenda for my book, Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
I am neither a crusader nor even a well-informed scientist on global warming or pandemics for that matter.
What I am, at least I thought I was, was capable of framing a problem and how its nascent incipiency has developed into what it is today with my "cut & control" explanations over the past few thousand years.
My book was not meant to be a compact "WOW!!!" book nor was it meant to be, but an opportunity for the reader to see how religion, politics, government, culture, history, science and man's eternal solipsism measured his superiority in a gauge called "progress." The book is peopled with the heroes of our Western civilization, which might be the planet's greatest enemies.
As much as self-interest dominates man, I know that chances for him to wake up are not good. One pandemic won't be enough, but a series of pandemics and "natural disasters" -- disasters created naturally by man's artificial disruption of nature -- will have to hit him again and again and again.
When they do, and I have no doubt that they will, I would like for this book to be available so the reader can see where man has been, where he is now, and where he is going, and why.
I don't expect man to wise up and make the major sacrifices because I think it is going to take a series of major disasters to get his attention.
Just as Catholicism and the Inquisition kept man in the Dark Ages, science and its dogmatic hubris has put man into a Dream World.
President Bush is right. Had the US imposed the Kyoto Accords; tens of thousands of American jobs would be lost, threatening the American economy. I think it would be closer to millions of jobs and possibly throw the country into a major depression.
As one scientist said from this conference in Montreal, being somewhat empathic with the president, "Fossil fuels will have to be replaced by other sources such as solar energy and nonpolluting other means. Science and technology have to find the answer, and they will." I wish I were so confident.
Not only the US but also the world sits on the horns of the dilemma.
Be well and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Reference: an email to a concerned friend regarding the state of the planet with reference to my book, not yet published, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
Ned,
Last night the spokeswoman for the Inuit Eskimos was on Jim Lehrer. She was talking about how climate change at the polar cap is negatively impacting the whole lifestyle of the natives, as well as the animals. She was one of the delegates at the Montreal Conference on Global Warming. She also was quite gracious finding satisfaction that her people's situation managed to get on the agenda. But she expected little satisfaction beyond that. Sad.
Then I happened on a segment on the BBC concerning a small nation in the Himalayas called "Butan." People of this nation have suffered similar plight to that of New Orleans. When lakes formed by melting snow, snow that never before used to form such lakes, the security the communities below are put in jeopardy.
What happens is that the walls of these lakes overflow their weak natural barriers, and cascade down the mountainside. One city was nearly wiped away in the 1990s.
A statistic was thrown out that startled me. A diplomat from this country said that there are over 200,000 such lakes in these mountains, and the possibility exists that his entire country could one day be wiped out.
Mention was made also on this program that US accounts for one-quarter of the CO2 pollution of the planet. This was not new, and of course the US leads in leaderless leadership, and there is little sense that this will change. On the contrary, the US has become the Pied Piper to oblivion, as if everyone is marching to the end of the earth and falling off in merry cadence.
But what was most astounding of all was to see, while France and Germany are reducing their emissions in double digits, countries such as Portugal and Spain and Ireland are increasing theirs in double digits.
I experienced this directly when I was with Honeywell Europe in the 1980s as these countries were then on the initial phase of their late Industrial Revolutions. And then of course there is China, our imitative twin, which is the second greatest polluter on the face of the earth, and doing everything it took us a century to do in a score or so of years.
I had a modest agenda for my book, Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
I am neither a crusader nor even a well-informed scientist on global warming or pandemics for that matter.
What I am, at least I thought I was, was capable of framing a problem and how its nascent incipiency has developed into what it is today with my "cut & control" explanations over the past few thousand years.
My book was not meant to be a compact "WOW!!!" book nor was it meant to be, but an opportunity for the reader to see how religion, politics, government, culture, history, science and man's eternal solipsism measured his superiority in a gauge called "progress." The book is peopled with the heroes of our Western civilization, which might be the planet's greatest enemies.
As much as self-interest dominates man, I know that chances for him to wake up are not good. One pandemic won't be enough, but a series of pandemics and "natural disasters" -- disasters created naturally by man's artificial disruption of nature -- will have to hit him again and again and again.
When they do, and I have no doubt that they will, I would like for this book to be available so the reader can see where man has been, where he is now, and where he is going, and why.
I don't expect man to wise up and make the major sacrifices because I think it is going to take a series of major disasters to get his attention.
Just as Catholicism and the Inquisition kept man in the Dark Ages, science and its dogmatic hubris has put man into a Dream World.
President Bush is right. Had the US imposed the Kyoto Accords; tens of thousands of American jobs would be lost, threatening the American economy. I think it would be closer to millions of jobs and possibly throw the country into a major depression.
As one scientist said from this conference in Montreal, being somewhat empathic with the president, "Fossil fuels will have to be replaced by other sources such as solar energy and nonpolluting other means. Science and technology have to find the answer, and they will." I wish I were so confident.
Not only the US but also the world sits on the horns of the dilemma.
Be well and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Jim
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER'S DILEMMA!
The Philosopher’s Dilemma
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
A philosopher and an oyster have each their respective stations. The oyster fulfills the law of his existence (whatever it be) as long as he lives, and at length for the nourishment of the philosopher. The philosopher leads a life of learned ease, which he employs in ingeniously arguing (or attempting to argue) away the first instinctive principles of nature, reason, faith, and religion.
Charles Moore (1790)
Philosophers, unlike scientists in general, tend to show rather than to hide their feelings, that is, in the era of Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Robeck, Montaigne and Donne. When mathematicians and scientists moved from their respective disciplines into philosophy, in the era of Russell, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, in other words in more recent times, feelings were there but disguised in arguments that drifted far from these sensory moorings. Feelings connect us to community, not intellect, and when feelings are well disguised, and intellect is celebrated as if some magic wand we may wave at a problem, situation or condition, we have the world that we experience today in all its contradictions.
A philosopher, if he is to be of any moment to his age, it would seem to me should not only know but acknowledge a distinction between the general laws of nature and the human powers of matter and motion, and the particular movements of an individual body in that climate, culture and time.
The philosophers who were more openly expressive of their feelings lived in a more believing although increasingly skeptical climate, where man was not so highly and hastily exalted. These philosophers communicated by a sense of the Deity, while the latter, the philosophers in more recent times, saw matters were more within the compass of man’s agency, and the discharge and satisfaction of these matters, more depended on the individual’s free will for their direction.
No matter what the argument, if you go deeply enough, and ferret through all the claimers and disclaimers to the core expression of value, and philosophy no matter how much the philosopher may insist it is “value free” philosophy is forever value laden, you will see that the doctrine of local good, otherwise better known as the “common good,” has all but disappeared from the consciousness of postmodern Western man, replaced, as it were, by a doctrine of the private good, better understood as “personhood.”
In the quote above of Charles Moore, it is taken from his book titled A FULL ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBJECT OF SUICIDE. So, while Western man believes that in his God-centered universe life is precious, and has always been so, think again.
Man has been moving away from the consensus belief in self-preservation and towards the justification of self-murder for centuries, and nearly on the same schedule as man has moved away from a centrifugal Deity.
Long ago, argument was given that “a man’s life is his own property, and therefore may be disposed of at a man’s own pleasure.”
Such arguments were more common in academia in the last few centuries than in general society, but eventually shop talk finds its way into the fabric of social existence.
Fore example, in most recent times, it has not been the physical deed but spiritual death that has been the instrument of self-murder. This has been epitomized in a lifestyle that has created a scourge of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lung cancer, stomach cancer, genital cancer, AIDS, workaholism, ambition, exhibitionism, celebrity worship, mental illness, jealousy, envy, sloth and rage.
Things have become more important than persons, and persons equate and justify their station and existence on the basis of things accumulated at the expense of a dying soul. The will is a nobler power of the soul than is the intellect. And the will, in Freudian terminology, no longer has the superego as a “lid on the id.” Intellect has surrendered to the child of the universe.
Put otherwise, we have lost our capacity to distinguish voluntary, violent, and mixed actions, having no standard by which to measure them other than a drive in which no one is at the controls.
The success of voluntary actions depends on having a good or a bad will on check. Violent action is action that has an external principle which, when opposing cannot be resisted by the active or suffering man. A tsunami may sweep a man up without recourse, while a man may voluntarily walk away from a fight that has no purpose other to fuel his pride.
Mixed actions arise externally by force, and internally from the will, which find us wavering and vacillating. Recently, a young lady while driving home from work at dusk in Tampa hit and killed two young boys in an African American neighborhood. The right thing to do was to stop, and render aid, and comfort, but she went home. Her parents in collusion with her attempted to hide the act, justifying it in the belief that she, being a white woman, was in danger for her life having killed the children in a black area. This is the private good taking precedence over the local good.
What prompted this discourse is that I have had an interesting reaction to a recent missive of mine (“When did God make color a sign of quality?”). I attempted in the piece to understand why an African American businessman was treated as a criminal by Wal-Mart when he attempted to purchase $13,600 worth the Holiday gift certificates for employees, when his company had been doing business with Wal-Mart for years. My question: was it only because he was black?
Most of my respondents were from white people, as I am white, and all of them were reasonable, intelligent and perceptive of the situation. Missing was an expression of feelings for the man and what he experienced. I can’t imagine, myself, ever being treated this way and not being seriously injured, but I am a feeling philosopher.
The responses were overwhelmingly intellectual but not one of them implied an understanding or what it must have felt like to be black and so treated. One African American respondent admitted that he had never been so treated, and considered being lucky. But was it luck, or something deeper? That is what I hoped to learn.
As always, I am appreciative of people willing to share their views, and I always learn from them.
But my point, and the reason for the philosopher’s dilemma is that the question goes beyond simple argument to a mindset of the private good versus the mindset of the local good that I feel is endemic to our times.
The young lady mentioned above was tried and put on house arrest for two years, meaning she will serve no prison time but will remain at home. Only a year ago, a black man and immigrant to this country, driving a truck in my area of Tampa Bay, hit and killed a youngster. He did not leave the scene of the accident, but attempted to render aid. He was tried for vehicular homicide and sentenced to ten years in prison, which he is now serving. I might add that he had no police record, was not emotionally or physically impaired, in other words, had no drugs or alcohol in his system, and yet he begs the question of my earlier piece, which I sense is not soon to come. My hope is that virtue wins out for this young woman and young man and that they find solace in their souls for embracing the future even though the hand of justice was not blind.
© December 2005 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., the Peripatetic Philosopher.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
A philosopher and an oyster have each their respective stations. The oyster fulfills the law of his existence (whatever it be) as long as he lives, and at length for the nourishment of the philosopher. The philosopher leads a life of learned ease, which he employs in ingeniously arguing (or attempting to argue) away the first instinctive principles of nature, reason, faith, and religion.
Charles Moore (1790)
Philosophers, unlike scientists in general, tend to show rather than to hide their feelings, that is, in the era of Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Robeck, Montaigne and Donne. When mathematicians and scientists moved from their respective disciplines into philosophy, in the era of Russell, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, in other words in more recent times, feelings were there but disguised in arguments that drifted far from these sensory moorings. Feelings connect us to community, not intellect, and when feelings are well disguised, and intellect is celebrated as if some magic wand we may wave at a problem, situation or condition, we have the world that we experience today in all its contradictions.
A philosopher, if he is to be of any moment to his age, it would seem to me should not only know but acknowledge a distinction between the general laws of nature and the human powers of matter and motion, and the particular movements of an individual body in that climate, culture and time.
The philosophers who were more openly expressive of their feelings lived in a more believing although increasingly skeptical climate, where man was not so highly and hastily exalted. These philosophers communicated by a sense of the Deity, while the latter, the philosophers in more recent times, saw matters were more within the compass of man’s agency, and the discharge and satisfaction of these matters, more depended on the individual’s free will for their direction.
No matter what the argument, if you go deeply enough, and ferret through all the claimers and disclaimers to the core expression of value, and philosophy no matter how much the philosopher may insist it is “value free” philosophy is forever value laden, you will see that the doctrine of local good, otherwise better known as the “common good,” has all but disappeared from the consciousness of postmodern Western man, replaced, as it were, by a doctrine of the private good, better understood as “personhood.”
In the quote above of Charles Moore, it is taken from his book titled A FULL ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBJECT OF SUICIDE. So, while Western man believes that in his God-centered universe life is precious, and has always been so, think again.
Man has been moving away from the consensus belief in self-preservation and towards the justification of self-murder for centuries, and nearly on the same schedule as man has moved away from a centrifugal Deity.
Long ago, argument was given that “a man’s life is his own property, and therefore may be disposed of at a man’s own pleasure.”
Such arguments were more common in academia in the last few centuries than in general society, but eventually shop talk finds its way into the fabric of social existence.
Fore example, in most recent times, it has not been the physical deed but spiritual death that has been the instrument of self-murder. This has been epitomized in a lifestyle that has created a scourge of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lung cancer, stomach cancer, genital cancer, AIDS, workaholism, ambition, exhibitionism, celebrity worship, mental illness, jealousy, envy, sloth and rage.
Things have become more important than persons, and persons equate and justify their station and existence on the basis of things accumulated at the expense of a dying soul. The will is a nobler power of the soul than is the intellect. And the will, in Freudian terminology, no longer has the superego as a “lid on the id.” Intellect has surrendered to the child of the universe.
Put otherwise, we have lost our capacity to distinguish voluntary, violent, and mixed actions, having no standard by which to measure them other than a drive in which no one is at the controls.
The success of voluntary actions depends on having a good or a bad will on check. Violent action is action that has an external principle which, when opposing cannot be resisted by the active or suffering man. A tsunami may sweep a man up without recourse, while a man may voluntarily walk away from a fight that has no purpose other to fuel his pride.
Mixed actions arise externally by force, and internally from the will, which find us wavering and vacillating. Recently, a young lady while driving home from work at dusk in Tampa hit and killed two young boys in an African American neighborhood. The right thing to do was to stop, and render aid, and comfort, but she went home. Her parents in collusion with her attempted to hide the act, justifying it in the belief that she, being a white woman, was in danger for her life having killed the children in a black area. This is the private good taking precedence over the local good.
What prompted this discourse is that I have had an interesting reaction to a recent missive of mine (“When did God make color a sign of quality?”). I attempted in the piece to understand why an African American businessman was treated as a criminal by Wal-Mart when he attempted to purchase $13,600 worth the Holiday gift certificates for employees, when his company had been doing business with Wal-Mart for years. My question: was it only because he was black?
Most of my respondents were from white people, as I am white, and all of them were reasonable, intelligent and perceptive of the situation. Missing was an expression of feelings for the man and what he experienced. I can’t imagine, myself, ever being treated this way and not being seriously injured, but I am a feeling philosopher.
The responses were overwhelmingly intellectual but not one of them implied an understanding or what it must have felt like to be black and so treated. One African American respondent admitted that he had never been so treated, and considered being lucky. But was it luck, or something deeper? That is what I hoped to learn.
As always, I am appreciative of people willing to share their views, and I always learn from them.
But my point, and the reason for the philosopher’s dilemma is that the question goes beyond simple argument to a mindset of the private good versus the mindset of the local good that I feel is endemic to our times.
The young lady mentioned above was tried and put on house arrest for two years, meaning she will serve no prison time but will remain at home. Only a year ago, a black man and immigrant to this country, driving a truck in my area of Tampa Bay, hit and killed a youngster. He did not leave the scene of the accident, but attempted to render aid. He was tried for vehicular homicide and sentenced to ten years in prison, which he is now serving. I might add that he had no police record, was not emotionally or physically impaired, in other words, had no drugs or alcohol in his system, and yet he begs the question of my earlier piece, which I sense is not soon to come. My hope is that virtue wins out for this young woman and young man and that they find solace in their souls for embracing the future even though the hand of justice was not blind.
© December 2005 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., the Peripatetic Philosopher.
Monday, December 05, 2005
WHEN DID GOD MAKE COLOR A SIGN OF QUALITY?
When Did God Make Color A Sign of Quality?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English critic
When I was in graduate school as a mature adult, having gone back for my doctorate after a career spanning the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa, I thought I had experienced the ultimate in societal prejudice in South African apartheid.
For those of you not familiar with this policy, the Afrikaner government of white South Africans, after coming to power in 1948, created this policy of “separate development of the races.” It was designed to send the majority of South African Bantu or blacks into several different homelands, homelands that were outside the urban-industrial wealth bearing regions of the country, while expecting the Bantu and Coloreds, or those of mix races to carry identity cards to validate their presence in the white areas.
Moreover, the policy was such that a person of race could be held ninety days without charges, and this could be extended another ninety days should the courts so desire. When I lived there, the white population was about 3.5 million mainly of Dutch, French Huguenot and British ancestry, while 14 million were Bantu and Coloreds.
I lived there in 1968 when apartheid was being fully enforced. It is gone today with the majority Bantu population now in power. What made the policy especially disconcerting to an American is that I was in South Africa at the same time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being assassinated, which made it hard to defend our American policy of tolerance and freedom.
Still, at the time a young man in my thirties, the South African experience was so wrenching that I resigned my executive position with a chemical company, and did little more than read, write a little, and try to understand what I had experienced for a period of more than two years. At the end of that period, I went back to school.
During this self-imposed sabbatical, I wrote some articles on South Africa attempting to create a balanced view, but abandoned a project of writing a South Africa novel. Now more than a quarter century later, I still haven’t written the novel, and I still try to understand how my company, and my fellow Americans with whom I worked were not as deeply wounded by the incongruity of my company’s principles and actual policy in the field.
Some of my colleagues accused me of being an idealist, others a romantic, and still others of being a breast-thumping liberal. I saw myself as none of these, but only as a person growing confused seeing the company playing games of duplicity, while purporting to being upstanding and holding to the beliefs that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Then only the other day I read of Reginald Pitts, a black man, who carries out an assignment of a white colleague, who wasn’t available, to buy season holiday gift cards from Wal-Mart, something that his company has done for years to the tune of $50,000 per year, and he is subjected to the nightmare of being treated as if a criminal attempting to pass a bogus check of $13,600, something that had never happened before to anyone in his company on a similar assignment. And I was outraged. South Africa came back with a vengeance.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman stated, “Our company is built upon respect for the individual and we have no tolerance for discrimination of any type.”
The statement made me think of my company in South Africa. It not only made such statements but put out brochures to that same effect. But in practice, and I know directly from experience, if you were too familiar, too relaxed, and too accommodating to Bantu, as I was my driver, and the servants in my home, you were called on the carpet with a statement to the effect, “This is not your country. Do you want to get deported?”
My point is that the offending party in this case, the Wal-Mart person who might be reprimanded or possibly even fired for this prejudicial behavior, is not the boogeyman.
It goes far higher up the tree, if it is anything like my own experience. The rhetoric, the official policy, and all the company’s talking heads when the mike is on will serenade the listener with the same melody of tolerance. It is, however, the casual conversation one hears among executives or employees during relaxed periods on the job, or in the privacy of their homes far away from the crowd that you are reminded from the highest to the lowest in the pecking order what is the prevalent mindset. Then there are those sidebar conversations, like the one that I alluded to, where you are told the lay of the land, but “don’t quote me on that.”
We have seen it with Katrina in a most blatant way, but we see it every day in little ways, ways that irritate but are not life threatening as they were with Katrina. Reginald Pitts, who experienced this shopping nightmare, sadly, may speak to the rule rather than the exception.
Curtis Stokes, who is a 37-year-old Tampa vice president with the Fifth Third Bank, a member of the private University Club, an exclusive Tampa business and professional organization, and a father, and first vice president of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) chapter of the NAACP, said he isn’t surprised at what happened to Mr. Pitts. He says people see him first as black, and stare at him with fear in their eyes, why he doesn’t know. He has had undercover security officers trail him in department stores, cops pull him over when he’s driving a block from his Tampa Palms home, one of the upscale neighborhoods in Tampa. “It’s one of those things no matter how you dress or act, you’re a black guy at the end of the day.”
What is especially sad about Mr. Stokes’s remarks is that he is now teaching his seven-year-old son to dress and act in non-confrontational ways, to act essentially invisible so that no harm will come to him. I heard about the same words from my driver in South Africa for his son. “You’re a Kaffir,” he told his child, “remember that, don’t look them (whites) in the eye, just go about your business.”
A few years ago, when Barry Bonds had yet another tremendous year, a Tampa businessman said to me, “He’s one hellava black player.” I corrected him, “He’s one hellava player who happens to be black.” He looked at me as if I were tilted, turned away and said, “Whatever.”
This problem is not one of color but culture, and it is deep in our society’s veins, and cannot be changed without a cultural value transfusion, especially now that Caucasians are increasingly the minority in the world’s population. Ignorance is no longer bliss.
The referenced articles appeared in The Tampa Tribune, Nation/World section, December 3, 2005.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English critic
When I was in graduate school as a mature adult, having gone back for my doctorate after a career spanning the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa, I thought I had experienced the ultimate in societal prejudice in South African apartheid.
For those of you not familiar with this policy, the Afrikaner government of white South Africans, after coming to power in 1948, created this policy of “separate development of the races.” It was designed to send the majority of South African Bantu or blacks into several different homelands, homelands that were outside the urban-industrial wealth bearing regions of the country, while expecting the Bantu and Coloreds, or those of mix races to carry identity cards to validate their presence in the white areas.
Moreover, the policy was such that a person of race could be held ninety days without charges, and this could be extended another ninety days should the courts so desire. When I lived there, the white population was about 3.5 million mainly of Dutch, French Huguenot and British ancestry, while 14 million were Bantu and Coloreds.
I lived there in 1968 when apartheid was being fully enforced. It is gone today with the majority Bantu population now in power. What made the policy especially disconcerting to an American is that I was in South Africa at the same time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being assassinated, which made it hard to defend our American policy of tolerance and freedom.
Still, at the time a young man in my thirties, the South African experience was so wrenching that I resigned my executive position with a chemical company, and did little more than read, write a little, and try to understand what I had experienced for a period of more than two years. At the end of that period, I went back to school.
During this self-imposed sabbatical, I wrote some articles on South Africa attempting to create a balanced view, but abandoned a project of writing a South Africa novel. Now more than a quarter century later, I still haven’t written the novel, and I still try to understand how my company, and my fellow Americans with whom I worked were not as deeply wounded by the incongruity of my company’s principles and actual policy in the field.
Some of my colleagues accused me of being an idealist, others a romantic, and still others of being a breast-thumping liberal. I saw myself as none of these, but only as a person growing confused seeing the company playing games of duplicity, while purporting to being upstanding and holding to the beliefs that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Then only the other day I read of Reginald Pitts, a black man, who carries out an assignment of a white colleague, who wasn’t available, to buy season holiday gift cards from Wal-Mart, something that his company has done for years to the tune of $50,000 per year, and he is subjected to the nightmare of being treated as if a criminal attempting to pass a bogus check of $13,600, something that had never happened before to anyone in his company on a similar assignment. And I was outraged. South Africa came back with a vengeance.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman stated, “Our company is built upon respect for the individual and we have no tolerance for discrimination of any type.”
The statement made me think of my company in South Africa. It not only made such statements but put out brochures to that same effect. But in practice, and I know directly from experience, if you were too familiar, too relaxed, and too accommodating to Bantu, as I was my driver, and the servants in my home, you were called on the carpet with a statement to the effect, “This is not your country. Do you want to get deported?”
My point is that the offending party in this case, the Wal-Mart person who might be reprimanded or possibly even fired for this prejudicial behavior, is not the boogeyman.
It goes far higher up the tree, if it is anything like my own experience. The rhetoric, the official policy, and all the company’s talking heads when the mike is on will serenade the listener with the same melody of tolerance. It is, however, the casual conversation one hears among executives or employees during relaxed periods on the job, or in the privacy of their homes far away from the crowd that you are reminded from the highest to the lowest in the pecking order what is the prevalent mindset. Then there are those sidebar conversations, like the one that I alluded to, where you are told the lay of the land, but “don’t quote me on that.”
We have seen it with Katrina in a most blatant way, but we see it every day in little ways, ways that irritate but are not life threatening as they were with Katrina. Reginald Pitts, who experienced this shopping nightmare, sadly, may speak to the rule rather than the exception.
Curtis Stokes, who is a 37-year-old Tampa vice president with the Fifth Third Bank, a member of the private University Club, an exclusive Tampa business and professional organization, and a father, and first vice president of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) chapter of the NAACP, said he isn’t surprised at what happened to Mr. Pitts. He says people see him first as black, and stare at him with fear in their eyes, why he doesn’t know. He has had undercover security officers trail him in department stores, cops pull him over when he’s driving a block from his Tampa Palms home, one of the upscale neighborhoods in Tampa. “It’s one of those things no matter how you dress or act, you’re a black guy at the end of the day.”
What is especially sad about Mr. Stokes’s remarks is that he is now teaching his seven-year-old son to dress and act in non-confrontational ways, to act essentially invisible so that no harm will come to him. I heard about the same words from my driver in South Africa for his son. “You’re a Kaffir,” he told his child, “remember that, don’t look them (whites) in the eye, just go about your business.”
A few years ago, when Barry Bonds had yet another tremendous year, a Tampa businessman said to me, “He’s one hellava black player.” I corrected him, “He’s one hellava player who happens to be black.” He looked at me as if I were tilted, turned away and said, “Whatever.”
This problem is not one of color but culture, and it is deep in our society’s veins, and cannot be changed without a cultural value transfusion, especially now that Caucasians are increasingly the minority in the world’s population. Ignorance is no longer bliss.
The referenced articles appeared in The Tampa Tribune, Nation/World section, December 3, 2005.
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