FOOTPRINTS OF GREATNESS ON MY TURF!

FOOTPRINTS OF GREATNESS ON MY TURF!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2006



Frank Conroy, author of STOP-TIME (1977), and one of the writers who has participated at the University of Iowa's famous "writers workshop," a program I managed to take a few courses in despite being outside my chemistry major, writes in an anthology of "Writers on Writing" (2003) that he came across a passage in a book, and it sent him rushing to his home library.

It sounded vaguely familiar to something that he had written. Sure enough, he found the passage, and it was indeed similar. The passage was from his book STOP-TIME but it appeared in Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul's HALF A LIFE.

His first suspicion was that it had been lifted, but in further investigation he learned that in 1900 a very similar expression appeared in Henry James's SELECTED TALES.

"Stolen Words" is tricky territory as is "stolen ideas." There is little that can be said for either in the long run, other than that writers are readers, and readers are thinkers and invariably what comes out can and often is similar if not ironically nearly the same.

One time I was lecturing in Annapolis, and a man came up to me and showed me an illustration from a book, and said, "One of your illustrations appears here," then adding, "did you know that?" In fact, I didn't. The writer had given me credit without previously asking permission. It happens.

On another occasion, FORTUNE magazine had a cover story and featured article on my concept of "work without managers." This was also the title of one of my books. I wrote to the editor for an explanation why I was not given credit. I never heard back. Coincidence? Perhaps. Obviously, I wasn't in any position to pursue the matter and reluctantly chalked it up to imitation being the best form of flattery.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) had created a minor stir and sold wildly the first two months out, due largely to the efforts of an editor of INDUSTRY WEEK and a contributor to NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.

WWMs was published by THE DELTA GROUP FLORIDA, a small consulting firm, of which I am a senior partner. Unfortunately, the book lacked the sustainable publicity books require. An acknowledgment from FORTUNE would have helped. The book sold more than a thousand copies the first month out, nearly as many the second month, and then quickly died.

An "idea guy" is something like a songwriter. He gets these minor bumps of inspiration, commits them to print, and then allows the scavengers to pick up their essence in their larger digestive tracts with minimal nuance to their origin source.

It happens all the time. One cannot but be impressed to see songwriters and novelists, with their armies of copyright attorneys, handle with aplomb the flack of original producers. Dan Brown of "The Da Vinci Code" is currently in the midst of this attention, justifiably or not. Chances are he did some walking in someone else's footprints as writers and thinkers are bound to do. The problem is that people can become acrimonious when an author such as Dan Brown makes more than $20 million on a book in which large chunks first appeared elsewhere.

These thoughts came to me today as I read a syndicated columnist and a new book. It should be mentioned that the columnist has not stolen any of my words nor has the author of the book stolen any of my ideas. They both merely confirm ideas consistent with some of my themes, themes my Beautiful Betty says I repeat ad infinitum.

The first theme consistent with one of mine is from Thomas L. Friedman, author of THE WORLD IS FLAT (2005) fame, and seemingly ubiquitous as well as omniscient. He reports from India that both India and China are suddenly aware that they have become nations of engineers and MBAs programmed to conform to the dictates of an acquisitive culture, a culture they find terribly lacking in innovative or creative production.

Some years ago, I published an essay titled "The Soul of the Engineer," stating that engineering was a conformist discipline and reflected a conforming culture that lacked perspective on the nature of man and where man was going, and therefore was blindly engaging the future.

I suggested also that we were part of that same engineering culture and had an aversion to greatness. The unintended consequence of that aversion was that we had produced a one-dimensional society, taking comfort in all the toys we had created for justifying the respite from the demands and struggles of three-dimensionalism.

This theme was repeated in WWMs, indicating that engineers in quest for more filthy lucre added MBAs to their curriculum vitae. Because their singular focus was making money, I suggested that MBAs were the quintessential anathema to creativity and three-dimensionalism. I saw them as looking for someone to punch their ticket to the "good life."

The irony is that I get anywhere from two to five CVs each week from this sort believing, I suspect, because I am widely published that I am a "rich man," and am looking for someone to make me richer, and they of course have the credentials. I have an urge, which I have not yet expressed, to suggest that they consult my humanities reading list in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) to budge them out of their one-dimensional status.

Now, it appears according to Friedman that both India and China are terrified of their growing armies of engineers and MBAs who do not have these what I have called "vocational degree skills" leavened with an appreciation of art, literature, music and the humanities.

India and China find their people with a growing dullness while failing to be good innovators, something that I experienced as an internal and external consultant to the complex organization in the United States and Europe.

It is no accident that an MBA is running the United States. Nor is it an accident that engineers are running our dual wars of Afghanistan and Iraq with little sense of innovation, culture, or the nature of common people whatever their religion or ethnicity.

An MBA mentality views the world as a "thing" to be managed, mobilized, motivated, and manipulated. It is a pincushion that has the "right buttons" to push to acquire the desired response. That simple.

What's more, nor is it an accident that most of our major American corporations are run by engineers and MBAs, who remain befuddled as foreigners invade their playground and their toys and perks are taken from them.

People are never one-dimensional, but often their rulers are. As a consequence, we have had a series of leaderless leaders in every aspect of our institutional life. What we sow, shall we reap.

In a spate of books, first mentioned in WWMs, and again in other books and articles, I could see where one-hundred-year-old companies were likely to bite the dust because of the debilitating weight of entitlement programs.

Twenty years ago these programs were approaching levels of the national debt. And what were companies getting for this attention? They were certainly not getting productive employees, but were in the process of creating welfare companies.

Today, this is a Western society problem across the United States and Europe. Those first insights as ideas came to me in the form of warnings some sixteen years ago. They are in print in books and articles from that time hence. Yet, I take no comfort in this for now they are the bitter fruit of that prophecy, which has turned rancid in my mouth.

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Regarding another one of my ideas -- I am speaking of my Near Journey's End project, now being reworked as Technology the New Religion of Nowhere Man -- Michael Grunwald has written a watershed work titled THE SWAMP: THE EVERGLADES, FLORIDA AND THE POLITICS OF PARADISE (2006).

Not surprisingly, as with my book project, he quotes Genesis, and the verse: "And they shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

It is the "conquest of nature" theme that makes "progress are most important product." Progress has killed the environment, which I see as an evil with which we refuse to deal. Grunwald is more diplomatic, but only barely. His book, like mine, is about the raping of the environment or about hubris and its unintended consequences.

My project is more directly about our "cut and control" philosophy of progress where every gain loses something in the process that can never be retrieved.

THE SWAMP deals only with the Everglades, but it is a theme repeated ad nauseam across time and the world. Look at what is happening in India and China, where more than forty percent of the world's population live, and tears come to the eyes. Look at Russia and Eastern Europe, and many of the same sins are being repeated. Hubris is a disease many times more threatening than bird flu because it is treated as political rhetoric rather than as ecological reality.

It was and is the belief of Western man that nature could and should be conquered. Now, in the case of the Everglades, the state of Florida and the federal government are having second thoughts. They are in fact attempting to reverse a policy of 130 years of draining what was considered a wasteland instead of an ecological paradise.

Can you imagine who has raped this environment with the greatest of efficiency?

Engineers! It was not until the late 1940s that the Everglades would finally be subjugated to near extinction. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- the same engineers that misconstructed the levies of New Orleans - became what Grunwald refers to as "America's shock troops against nature."

These engineers were given the job to drain the swamp after a 1947 flood that wiped out homes, farms, and businesses in South Florida.

These doyens of efficiency created the most elaborate water control system ever built, in fact the largest earth-moving project since the Panama Canal. Through an elaborate system of canals, dikes, spillways, and pumps, the corps of engineers transformed the upper Glades into an agriculture district, the central Glades into giant reservoirs, and the eastern Glades into suburbs and farms.

The project ensured the success of the sugar industry, and enabled the massive post-WWII population growth in South Florida.

It was also an ecological "cut and controlled" disaster. Polluted waters from sugar cane fields and cattle ranches have replaced the Glades' native saw grasses with cattails and other invasive species of plants.

To control flooding, massive amounts of polluted fresh water are now pumped out to brackish St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers estuaries. These once prolific aquatic nurseries are in ecological meltdown.

So, those who once were commissioned to destroy -- the U.S. Corps of Engineers -- are invited back 50 years later to undo what they have done. Grunwald is an optimist and thinks it is possible. I do not. If anything, I see the corps's meddling will make matters worse as they are politically in bed with sugar producers and cattle ranchers, not to mention urban developers.

Then today in THE TAMPA TRIBUNE appears the headline story, "Florida's Vanishing Heartland."

Suburbia is cutting into the farmland of Hillsborough County, and pushing the cattle into smaller and smaller grazing areas along side housing developments. My daughter, who lives in the county, fears the orange groves, which grace hundreds of acres, may be turned into housing developments. The county has grown 133,000 in the past five years. As one farmer puts it, "We can plant tomatoes, or we can plant Yankees." The reality is already apparent and it's not tomatoes.

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Last night on the television news, an elderly woman, who lives in a mobile home park, tells the reporter her park is being sold to make way for condominiums. Mobile home owners never own the land upon which these dwellings sit. These postage stamp sites are going up and up in value to the delight of park owners, but not to their residents. "Where will I live," this lady wonders, her voice under control, but her eyes telling a different tale, "when there is no place for less than $100,000?" Good question.

In a separate story, like a giant predatory animal creeping close to the ground, homeowners near downtown Tampa have reason to fear that the public good will supplant their private rights. In "cut and control" justification "to become a great city," yet another downtown Tampa developmental project is looking with lustful eyes at modest homes within its sights as condiment to their avarice dream of further expansion.

It is that old "eminent domain" statue which gave cities nearly carte blanche last year with the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo vs. City of New London.

The unforgiving excess of eminent domain has happened in my hometown in the neighborhood of my birth, South Clinton, Iowa. The entire area has disappeared with "cut and control" efficiency as Clinton's major employer, ADM Corporation, stretches its corporate body across the land for yet another commercial venture. People have to have jobs to work and live, true, but one wonders where the humanity figures in the process.

In recent times, I have seen the death of my neighborhood, and the disappearance of my church, school and rectory of my formative years. The irony is that one hundred years from now perhaps the only knowledge of St. Patrick church, school and rectory may be preserved only in my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003). That gives one pause.

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This is my turf. I am a scribbler of a certain passion, and a few ideas. Some of them on occasion appear in others' works, but at least they are receiving attention. Yet, I see little change. So, why do I write? Good question.

AN IOWA BOY SURVEYS HIS NEW HOME IN THE 1940s

An Iowa Boy Surveys His New Home In The 1940s
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2006

Reference: This is an excerpt from Dr. Fisher’s book, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (AuthorHouse 2003). It is to appear in an anthology of American Neighborhoods to be published in late 2006 or early 2007. This is a project headed by Senator John Edwards of South Carolina.



Imagine coming of age in the middle of an industrial town in the middle of the country in the middle of the century, snuggled against the muddy banks of the Mississippi River during World War II.

We lived in a closely-packed neighborhood, struggling to understand the larger world and make ends meet IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (AuthorHouse 2003), while the United States struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

There were no televisions, no mega sports, no big automobiles, or manicured lawns, but we had radios, movies, high school sports, and the Clinton Industrial Summer Baseball League. We had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode bicycles.

The Clinton County Courthouse cast a shadow across our neighborhood of two-parent homes and stay-at-home moms, and the four faces of its magnificent clock chimed every half hour. Most of our parents had no education beyond grammar school, and nearly all of our fathers worked at factories in Clinton or on the railroad.

In the hot weather, families slept with windows left open, doors unlocked, and bicycles against the side of the house, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions.

In winter, schools never closed, even when snow banks mounted four feet high on both sides of the walks. This was my world against the backdrop of the courthouse – St. Patrick’s Elementary School, Riverview Stadium, Clinton downtown, and Mill Creek.

We kids ran around entertaining ourselves, as our parents were often too tired, too involved in the war effort, or too busy making a living to pay us much mind.

In the shadow of the courthouse there was an Irish grocer, Frank Cramm, a family physician, Dr. Joseph O’Donnell, an eyes, ears, nose and throat specialist, Dr. Ed Carey, a family dentist, Dr. John McLaughlin, a family barber, Robert “Ripper” Collins, family tavern keepers, Harvey Sullivan and Leon Cavanaugh, and even a family mortician, Johnny Dalton.

My da’ (Irish for dad) was never more at home than in the company of fellow Irishmen. At our place, the coffee pot was always perking on the gas burner. You could usually find my mother at the kitchen table singing to herself as she whipped up a chocolate fudge cake in preparation for the arrival of the clan.

On Wednesdays, the group included my da’s coworker at the railroad Bill Knight, my uncle Bill Clegg, saloonkeeper Leo Sullivan and his wife, Alice, my mother’s girlfriend Cleo Hyde, and my mother’s brothers and their wives.

I would peek down the stairs to listen to their conversation even though I was supposed to be in bed. When the storytelling began, my ears would perk up. My da’ was a listener, while my mother (who was hard of hearing) would busy herself cleaning the ashtrays and refilling coffee cups.

One reason I have never smoked is the memory of our tiny house filled with haze as the smoke struggled in vain against the walls and ceiling to escape.

Uncle Bill would clear his throat and the room would grow quiet. Methodically, he would pack his pipe, light it, take a slow deliberate drag on it, and then theatrically launch into his latest story, invariably relating to his misgivings about the war effort. His thoughtful confidence mesmerized me, as did his crusty voice and a gaze that seemed to look over everyone’s head like he was seeing beyond them.

No one ever interrupted Uncle Bill (even though to say something against President Roosevelt in my house was a sacrilege) out of respect, for his son, Jack, a US sailor, who was almost killed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
The house itself was a one-and-one-half story white clapboard box with a green-shingled pitched roof that we bought for $3,000.

My da borrowed the $300 down payment from my Uncle Arne. My mother told me he was never able to repay it, but bachelor Uncle Arne didn’t mind – he received suitable compensation in coffee, chocolate cake, shared cigarettes, and a place to go every night after work.

The house was small, a little over a thousand square feet, but still divided into four bedrooms, a formal dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and full basement. The basement had a terribly low ceiling, and even at eight, already four-eleven, I could not stretch to my full height. It was damp and always cold, even in the summer.

There was a small bedroom on the first floor that adjoined the stairwell. For us, it was the radio room, occupied by a reading lamp, a large padded sofa, a love seat, and a small credenza.

My mother would read to us out of books checked out from the public library, or we would sit around the radio and listen to the high jinx of Amos and Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Fred Allen and "Allen's Alley," or, more seriously, to the “Fireside Chats” of President Roosevelt.

The master bedroom was off limits to us kids, but the glass door covered in lace curtains taunted us. I managed to sneak in a few times to find ashtrays everywhere: on both sides of the bed, on the dresser, and on a chair. What made the room special, however, were ceramic frescoes of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mother that my parents brought from Chicago.

Leo Cavanaugh, who owned the Silver Rail Saloon, repapered the walls of the living and dining room, in patterns that didn’t always mesh together. It was as if he created a wall montage and I loved it.

My favorite spot was the dining room table, a large, mahogany beauty that nearly filled the entire room. Its four chairs were jammed into the rooms four corners, along with a mahogany bureau stuffed against the back wall.

Here I would draw and write my little stories, imagining myself the hero of whatever tale I spun. When I tired of this, I would study the dictionary and try my new words on my mother in often inappropriately constructed sentences with something approaching religious zeal. “Language is the tool of the mind,” she would often say, “and since you must think with words, you must master them if you are to think clearly.”

Our courthouse neighborhood house was our first real home. For the first eight years of my life, we moved constantly from one rental place to another, always having to leave because my da’ couldn’t come up with the rent.

Once we were in our new home, my mother said, “Go and explore the house, then write it down, and I’ll read it, and grade you on it.” With her, school was never out, but she probably also wanted me out of her hair and besides, exploring was part of my nature.

I paced off the distance from the house next door, to the property line on the other side in three-foot steps: sixty-four feet. Then I walked from front curb to the back of our property: one hundred and ten feet. The house, I found, was forty feet wide, and thirty feet long. I took my pencil out and wrote it down in my little notebook.

Next I surveyed the property. A delicious apple tree sat outside the dining room window and currant berry bushes, a small asparagus patch, and a crab apple tree were all just behind the house. A crumbling cement walk divided the backyard symmetrically, with intertwined vines on the edges, and ending at a three-tiered chicken coop to the west of the walk and a small garage to the east, but since we had no automobile, these were mostly just eyesores. A plum tree was directly in front of the chicken coop, and a pear tree in front of the garage, creating a kind of orchard.

The chicken coop fascinated me, and I envisioned it as my secret place, which it soon became. I kept my comic books there and put pictures of my heroes on the walls. I even made a small altar to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It took a lot of work to cleanup, but I knew it would be “my place” and no one else’s.

Now, more than seventy years after the house was first built, it stands proudly and defiantly against time, but without the chicken coop, the garage, the grapevines, fruit trees, or the garden.

Luckily, I took all the important things with me in my mind. I took to heart my mother’s words at that dining room table and trained my imagination in that chicken coop. Today I’m a published author of eight books and hundreds of articles. I may not remain in that house anymore, but that house remains in me.

GRANDPA, WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?

Grandpa, what is the most important word in the English language?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2006

The other day I was playing tennis with my eleven-year-old grandson. I sometimes have to pinch myself to realize this big strapping boy is only eleven because he is blond, blue-eyed, six foot one, wears a size fourteen shoe, and weighs nearly two hundred pounds. I, too, am blond, blue-eyed, and only three inches taller, but also wear a size fourteen shoe, but weigh about ten pounds less than he does. So, there are discrete genetic similarities as well as decades of separation.

The unfortunate thing is that it is easy to forget that he is a boy and not a man. Like his peers, he loves game boys, video games, Yu-Gi-Oh, and is lazy and insouciant like others his age. He is also bright especially in mathematics and problem solving games. He often uses me as a sounding board.

We were taking a break from our tennis, and after he toweled himself down, emptied a bottle of water, he said, “Grandpa, what is the most important word in the English language?” Now, from a more mature person, you might think that a trick question, but Ryan is not that kind of a boy. He is innocence personified, and I’ve never talked down to him.

I came back without hesitation, “Control.”

“Control? I thought you would say love. Your book was all about love, wasn’t it?” He was referring to IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL. True, the book was about my love of baseball, Bobby Witt, my parents, my siblings, the nuns at school, and my Irish heritage growing up in Clinton, Iowa during World War Two.

“Love is important,” I answered, “but love is a different thing in the context of the question you asked. We live in a mechanized society and you’re very much a product of that society, even more than your grandfather. You have your iPod, BlackBerry, your computer and computerized games, all your game boys. Just looking at the instructions to your Yu-Gi-Oh games is incomprehensible to me.

“Much as grandparents are somewhat concerned if not puzzled by such activities it is clear to me it takes a great deal of pondering, memorizing, classifying, categorizing, coordinating, and that magic word, 'controlling,'to master these electronic creatures.”

“But these are games, grandpa, fun to play. I don’t think about control, don’t know what you mean.”

“Let me put it another way. You asked me what was the most important word. I said control because if you’re not in control, let’s say of your game, then control is in charge of you.”

“I know that, but that’s not what you mean, is it?”

“No, not exactly. I was thinking in the larger context. You are a boy. You don’t drink, smoke, do drugs, but you do have a certain likeness for food, am I right?”

“Yes. I guess.”

“Would you say you are in control of food or is food in control of you?

He fidgeted, looked down, and said nothing.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Yes.”

“Do you eat only when you’re hungry or do you eat whenever you think of food?”

He smiled. “Both.”

“That’s my point. Food is something you think about even when your body has no special need for it. Food is something that can fill the void when you’re tired, anxious, disappointed, or bored. You’re only eleven but food will probably be a challenge to your control when you’re my age. Now, as you keep growing taller, and with your metabolism being as such, you can be a veritable food-consuming-machine, and get away with it. But when you get my age, you need very little food to maintain your weight.

"On the other hand, there is good nutrition and bad nutrition. It is not only how much you eat, then, but what you eat. Of course, schools have pop and candy machines. This defeats balance and control, and makes matters more difficult for you. Then the school cafeterias serve junk food to make matters even worse.”

“What do you consider junk food?”

“Pizzas, French fries, all fried foods, and empty calories such as candy, cookies and cakes.”

“That’s because you don’t like those things.”

“Did you ever think that I don’t like these things because they are not good for me, and I’m in control?”

“You don’t care about food maybe, but look at your study. There is hardly a space where there aren’t books. Your house is a library.”

I started to laugh, and couldn’t stop. Oh my! It was a perfect, “gotcha!” Here I was lecturing him about control and one could say I was out of control in the buying and reading of books. Momentarily, my mind flashed back to when I was a boy, and starved for reading material at home while other students had libraries in theirs. It was true. I was out-of-control when it came to books. As far back as I could remember, I would skip a meal to justify the purchase of a book. I still have that same mentality.

“What’s so funny, grandpa?”

“You know your grandfather, don’t you?”

“Yes. I know my dad, too. He has the same thing with cars.”

Don’t we know it, I thought, only his out-of-control is a bit more expensive than mine, which doesn’t make mine any less indicative.

“Ryan,” I continued, “you don’t have to be of any certain age to get out-of-control. It can sneak up on you like a snake in the grass. Then there are the innocent that come into the world out-of-control because their mothers are drug addicts, have AIDS, or an assortment of fetus changing chemical dependencies.”

“Why is that?”

“Why is what?”

“Why are mothers like that?”

“Well, first of all, besides sneaking up on them, chances are they are in surroundings that encourage such dependencies and behaviors. For example, smokers and drinkers like to be around smokers and drinkers. It justifies their behavior when they do it to excess.”

“I’ve never seen you smoke or drink, and my parents don’t, do they?”

“No, but I would imagine they have a drink on social occasions. I don’t know if your father ever smoked. I know your mother smoked at one time.”

“Did you ever?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t smoke because my parents both smoked and I hated it, plus I was an athlete and could justify not smoking. I never drank because I never wanted to be out-of-control.”

“But didn’t your friends smoke and drink?”

“The short answer, Ryan, is that I grew up in an age when it was manly to smoke and drink. Boys couldn’t wait to be old enough to go to a bar and order a beer. They often snuck a cigarette as a sign of bravado. And practically all the girls I knew in college smoked. It was the in thing to do.”

“Yet you didn’t.”

“I said that was the short answer. The long answer was that I have never been particularly interested in what other people did or didn’t do. I saw my parents hacking the smoker’s cough, and I had enough uncles and aunts that imbibed too much and were different people when they did that I had no intentions of mimicking them.

“Imbibed?”

“Drank. Got drunk.”

“Oh.”

“You are growing up in a world out-of-control, where people are not content in shaming themselves; they want company. If you are in that kind of group, they will taunt you if you don’t drink or smoke or do drugs. And they will make fun of you behind your back until your ears burn.

“I was protected in my day because most grade school and high school athletes didn’t do those things because it wasn’t in and because it would hurt their performance. I don’t think you’re going to be an athlete despite your size. Chances are more likely you will be a scholar. Scholars aren’t type cast to look like you, which will perhaps double the scorn. In any case, your taunters are lucky. As strong as you are, you have your father’s temperament. God help anyone if you ever got mad because you have your father’s genetics and could crush them like a bug.”

Compliments are hard for Ryan to take. Abuse is more his normal fare. Boys his age (but half his size) use taunting as compensatory adjustment. So, it did not surprise me when he dodged my assessment with, “What do you mean by an out-of-control world?”

“I mean you are growing up in a mechanized world in which the mechanics are out-of-gear. And they are out-of-gear because they strive for perfection forgetting that everything is part of a single system. And if everything is working perfectly, then chances are the system isn't, and ours isn't.

"Systems research has shown that if everyone was perfect, and every gear in the system was working as well as it might, then society or the system would not behave as well as it could.”

His eyes glazed over. “I don’t understand.”

“Ryan, let me put it in terms of school work. Let us say that everyone in your class was striving for straight ‘A’s’ and that by some miracle everyone achieved straight ‘A’s’. Control theory would suggest that less learning was realized than was possible because the focus was on grades, or an artificial mechanism than on learning. This is counter to the way we are programmed to think but is essential to systems thinking.”

“Doesn’t that mean that grading is meaningless?”

“Ryan, you know it is meaningless. You don’t even have to ask the question. You have to comply because that is all we have to measure performance, but that doesn’t make it efficient or wise. The grading system is so archaic that courses are conducted to perform well in a series of academic achievement tests (FCAT’s, SAT’s, GRE’s, etc.).

"These tests classify students by arbitrary rankings. The tests are not about learning because students work for grades rather than learning, and for doing well on the tests rather than measuring their comprehension of the subject.

"Consequently, the more adept students fail to help the less skilled students because the system is one of competitive ranking rather than promoting general learning for all.

"No teacher is better than another student who has learned the material well. A competitive system is the opposite of control because each one is attempting to be as good as they can be, rather than working complementarily to make the system function as well as it might. It is a zero-sum game, meaning that if there are winners there must be losers; if there are ‘A’ students there must be ‘F’ students, and education should not work like that, nor any system for that matter.”

“But that’s the way it is.”

“I know. It is a control system out-of-control. That is my point. It mocks its intended function, which reminds me. There is a word I note in your games, ‘cybernetics,’ a word that you pronounce very easily but I wonder if you know what it means.”

“No.”

“Well, cybernetics is all about control theory, what I have just described. It is about the fact that our bodies, our automatic nervous systems, operate in such a way that no component operates at its maximum efficiency but in a complementary fashion with various other components. For example, if our hearts were operating at their maximum efficiency, they would increase our blood pressure and strain other components. The fact that there is so much stress in our lives, that many people burn the candle at both ends, drinking, smoking and eating too much, and not getting enough exercise or rest, creates this system’s strain, and its possible ultimate collapse. That is what a stroke or heart attack is all about.”

“But I’m still not clear on grades.”

“Well, continuing the analogy with cybernetics, if your focus is on grades, in doing well on the test, and everyone else’s focus is exclusively on that, the grades will materialize but little learning will take place because your curiosity, your wondering, your bridging the material being covered with what you already know and have experienced will be voided. I have known stupid ‘A’ students, and in my reading I have come across men who have changed our world who were not great students at all.”

“Who?”

“Albert Einstein and James Joyce; closer to your time, Steven Jobs and Bill Gates. Then there was Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who had practically no formal education at all. All of these people were learners, not knowers, and ‘A’ students are often simply knowers.

“Then are you saying it is not important to be smart?”

“I’m not saying that at all. Being smart and getting straight ‘A’s’ are not the same thing. I’m saying that it is important to have balance and to have balance, to be in control, you will not try to be smart at the expense of other things, such as growing socially, at learning about the world beyond your own narrow world, and in enjoying life in general, and being happy and healthy and wise.

“Wise?”

“Yes, a whole person is a functioning person. Such a person is self-directed, self-motivated, and most importantly of all, self-accepting. This makes the person a well-rounded person, who in turn is integrated into his community. The payoff is that when you are self-accepting you are tolerant of others as you find them. Then, anything is impossible.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Can you remember me saying that there is such a thing as athletic intelligence which differs from book-learning intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“Can you also remember me saying that it takes as much intelligence, however different, to be an NBA basketball player as it takes to be a nuclear physicist?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think I meant?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, the reason I said that is because a person who uses all his tools to become an effective athletic or nuclear physicist may do so at the expense of being an in-control-well rounded-human-being. Such driven people plan, direct, control, organize, manage, discipline, and drive themselves to a singular achievement. We applaud them for it and often make them celebrities. Yet, we are seemingly always surprised when they are found to be taking or selling drugs illicitly or being found guilty of some other socially unfavorable behavior.”

“Your point?”

“Control means that intellectual intelligence and athletic intelligence needs to be balanced with social intelligence and emotional intelligence if a person is to be functioning as well as he might. If one component of our intelligence gets all the attention at the expense of developing others, then the first moment of crisis, we fall apart. At the first disappointment, first rejection, first betrayal, or the first surprise, we’re going to have no reserve to put our system back on track. That’s what I mean.”

“Grandpa, if you are right, why are not more people in control, I mean, don’t others see things the same way you do?”

“Yes, others think as I do if all the books I read on the subject are any indication. But I don’t know how many people believe in living controlled lives.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes, as I know we are getting a little deep into this subject, it is easier to write books or preach as I’m doing here than to live a controlled life. We see many experts on control who have problems with control. Control is a very human phenomenon. A psychiatrist wrote a number of best selling books about living the controlled life when his own life was out-of-control. The typical view of excess is that medical science will ultimately rescue us from our out-of-control existence.”

“You don’t think much of medical science do you grandpa?”

“Well, I guess that’s fair to say. I think public health, public education of the dangers of certain excesses, and public sanitation has done more to improve health and reduce disease than medical science has.”

“What about these miraculous drugs?”

“Have you ever noticed that these miraculous drugs are trying to compensate for out-of-control lives? People have high cholesterol and plaque in their arteries from eating the wrong foods. They can’t breathe or function properly for drinking, smoking or doing drugs. Their teeth fall out, skin turns yellow, dries out, and wrinkles early, and they turn forty and look older than your grandfather.”

“I know some people like that.”

“I know you do. So do I. That’s what I mean. But the final reason I think control is so important is because there is one thing that God gave us, which separates us from all other creatures, and that is this magnificent brain. It is the psycho cybernetic connection to our body and its autonomous nervous system, where all these wonderful components either work together or don’t. This system works so miraculously and beautifully that I think we should remember it does that because we are paying attention, and when we pay attention we’re under control. And when we are under control we can accomplish things that we might not otherwise accomplish. That is why I think it is so important a word.”

Ryan didn’t say anything for a while. “Can I say something?”

“Grandpa, why do you talk to me like this whenever we’re playing tennis? I don’t understand a lot of it, and I don’t even know enough to disagree with you.”

“So, you feel like I’m badgering you? Well, I apologize. There’s a theory in psychology called ‘reaction formation,’ which is a defense mechanism. Mine is evident today. Before I came over, eating my lunch, I was watching the news and it was reported that a mother cut off the arms of her ten-month old baby. I turned the TV off, and sobbed like a baby myself until my eyes were dry. I don’t want to believe we are capable of such acts, and I came here today in that mood. I am sorry.”

“I still think the most important word is love, grandpa.”

I said, “Yes,” and that ended the break, and we went back to playing tennis.

___________________________________________________________________
Dr. Fisher is an industrial-organization psychologist. Check his website for related articles: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.

FUTURE PERFECT AT THE END OF WESTERN DOMINANCE

FUTURE PERFECT AT THE END OF
WESTERN DOMINANCE


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2006


NOTE: This is a segment from Dr. Fisher’s new book TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF NOWHERE MAN! It is copyrighted and is not to be photocopied or electronically transmitted or used in any way without permission of the author.


Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you
and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.
Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over
the earth and subdue it.

Genesis (The Bible)

Every important aspect of the life, organization, and the culture of Western society is in the extraordinary crisis. Its body and mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which is not sore, nor any nervous fiber which functions soundly. We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Sensate day. The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch. But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusions of the twilight. The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us, with its nightmares, frightening shadows, and heartrending horrors. Beyond it, however, the dawn of a new Ideational culture is probably waiting to greet the men of the future.

Pitrim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937)

Man is imperfect but perfectible.
This is a common adage that has become a meaningless cliché.

CONSTANT GARDNER THROUGH TIME

The West has cast the die for the world in the past six hundred years. It was the West that moved out of the sanctuary of Europe to explore, conquer and then colonize the world. It was European culture that attempted to proselytize that world in the Christian faith. It was European science that sought connection with the universe, and for it came to have a different interpretation of God and the destiny of man. It was Europe that invented capitalism and communism, using the conflict between to give rise to a creative contentious tomorrow. And it was European colonization that gave birth to, seeded, cultivated, energized and then came to be humbled by its own creation in the West, the United States of America.

The United States rose fractionally, uncertainly until early in the nineteenth century a general from humble beginnings rose out of the Carolina-Tennessee valley with muscular leadership heretofore not seen in America. His name was Andrew Jackson.

It was no accident. The climate, the culture, the primitive reality of a land rich in possibilities with a people no stranger to violence, and with deep roots on both sides of the Atlantic, was right to produce a leader native to its own. Jackson had little in common with European forebears. He was the genuine article of the Western frontier, an authentic American leader without coterie or apology.

Strains of his primitive raw character would reappear in Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon. This flawed but authentic archetype of temperament, contradictory in so many ways, was distinctly American, and would drive the nation to world dominance. Compared to the Founding Fathers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe, who all had elitist monarchist qualities, he was totally a commoner with a passionate antipathy for the monarchy.

One hundred years after his death in 1845, the United States reached its apogee with the victorious conclusion of World War II. Europe was in total recovery having lost nearly 20 million souls. Russia lost 24 million, more than half of whom were civilian, and was in total ruin. The United States, in comparison, suffered far less military casualties, and practically no civilian casualties.

As the lone possessor of the atomic bomb, no nation so dominated the world since the days of the Roman Empire.

The Union of the Soviet Socialistic Republic (USSR), or Russia would challenge this power dominance, but would ultimately collapse in 1989, break up, regroup, and become a quasi-democracy where it is today.

The complexion of the world is changing so rapidity it is difficult to imagine what it will resemble a generation away. The economic global village is a reality. India, with more than one and one-half billion people, has a middle class of 300 million, which is roughly the equivalent to the population of the United States. China is booming, a communist country practicing the economic religion of capitalism better than anywhere else on the globe. Japan has boomed and busted several times since the end of World War II, as has South Korea, and Indonesia in this frenetic climate of change, illustrating the uncertainty of the future.

Meanwhile, democracies are breaking out all over shedding their colonial shrouds and European cultures to seek and reestablish the roots of their historic and cultural traditions.

What Europe attempted to do three hundred years ago: spread the Christian-capitalistic culture as the true religion of civilized man is now being repeated by the United States. It endeavors to democratize the world by first ridding it of its totalitarian rule as we see in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq. The rationale for this policy is to take the war on terror to the sites of its alleged origins.

Where democracy is breaking out, however, it is not in accordance necessarily with the Western formula.

We have seem the terrorist group Hamas crush the Fatah Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the Middle East in democratic elections in 2006, while the democratic elections in South America in 2005 and 2006 brought socialists to power in Bolivia, Venezuela and Chile. Most stunning was the victory for the indigenous people of Venezuela.

South American societies are transitioning from agrarian reform to belated industrial revolutions in the climate of the Information Age.

We have seen South Africa, too, shed apartheid and Afrikaner rule to establish majority rule of the Bantu peoples. But we have also seen many African nations struggle desperately to find their way to peace and prosperity in the clash of native cultures with warlords or with neighboring nations.

More than four centuries after European explorers established their cultural presence in the New World, there is notable evidence that native cultures are reemerging and reconnecting with their vanquished pasts.

We are in a new day from uncertain beginnings forging into the future in a world that is mainly non-white, non-European, and non-Western.

Leadership matters. We easily forget our struggles and take comfort in our triumphs as if utopian. We do this now at our risk and peril.

“NOWHERE MAN” IN A NEW DAY

FUTURE PERFECT attempts to bridge this void by connecting two themes that are currently changing the United States, and by extension the world, two themes that flow into each other. Leadership is one, while the influence of amateurs is the other. Amateurs in the new context are not dilettantes, not dabblers without focus, but strenuous pursuers of specific interests outside the infrastructure of institutional authority.

Amateurs display a multiplicity of standards, dimensions, declensions, and variations. They emerge from the deep or the fringe to take hold in the center, and have been doing so from primitive to advanced societies across time and the world. The incipient rumble of the new amateur is chthonic but that should give “Nowhere Man” little comfort.

Long before Europeans came to the American continent, these two themes were in evidence. Now, they drive the future. The answers to these seismic shifts are seldom found in the Ivy halls of academia, in the scientific laboratories of cutting-edge research, or in the dominance of mega corporations with appetites for raw resources and virgin markets, but in the rising voices of abandoned peoples about the globe that speak and act under the radar of technocratic power.

There are two clashing frontiers prominently in evidence:

· Agrarian societies still dominate the globe. They are being forced through nineteenth and twentieth century industrialization and into the twenty-first century, painfully unshackling themselves from the remnants of feudalism, colonialism, and totalitarianism to find their definition of freedom and well being.

· The exploding Information Age is prominent in a handful of Western and Eastern societies. These societies show a rapacious hunger for economic dominance against the reality of delimiting natural resources, while showing a cavalier disregard for the other eighty percent living in poverty. Such people on the fringe have little to eat, even less likelihood of indoor plumbing, potable drinking water, electricity, access to health care, or any hope of relief from the drudgery of daily survival. Unfortunately, emerging third world industrial societies display the same cruel apathy toward environmental ecology or the needs of their less fortunate neighbors. They want economic parity at any cost, and they want it now.

World peace is never possible when twenty percent control eighty percent of all the amenities of life.

This invites unintended consequences with the “haves” and “have nots” displaying the same utopian hubris. Many third world societies have been under Western dominance for centuries, and want their chance at wealth, prosperity and power. Now, when they see it is their turn, they aren’t buying into an ecological morality of temperance. Instead, they personify Western narcissistic greed.

“Nowhere Man” has evolved unsuspectingly from college-trained professionals from New York City to Trinidad, from Johannesburg to Bangkok, from Berlin to Delhi. These players are actors on a stage with couth and cunning, where presence counts more than purpose, where one is judged more on the basis of polish and credentials than merit, and where symbolic interaction is more the focus than sober results.

David Riesman tells us we are living in the “cathedrals of learning” without the faith that built those cathedrals, indeed, without the faith that built that society. Nor is there ample conviction and dedication to sustain it. Thomas Sowell points out that in our most esteemed universities “A’s” are given to more than ninety percent of the undergraduates with nine out of ten likely to graduate with honors. He writes: “Students can graduate from some of the most prestigious colleges in the land without a clue as to what the Second World War or the Cold War was about.” Moral curiosity has failed to be stimulated in the curriculum as graduates measure their worth in dollars to be made, not in a difference to make. This cynicism then carries into their working life.

Education has become a two-dimensional process, an interruption in “life” to secure membership in the “good life,” which is interpreted in specific economic terms. Passion and heart have given way to an obsession with gain. Earning a degree is not a commencement but a meal ticket as education is an end. There is little fondness in “Nowhere Man” for raw courage, artless determination, inflexible fidelity to interests entrusted, and self-confidence founded in unwavering personal morality, integrity, and loyalty. The game is to stay fluid and go with the flow, as confrontation is anathema to a career. Authentic man has faded to the whimsical and therefore has drifted into oblivion.

When perfection becomes obsessive, filling all the boxes to becoming a CEO or whatever, that which is perfected is more real than the perfection. You have entered “Nowhere Land,” which is the home of “Nowhere Man.” He is product of the technological age and disciple of its disingenuous church. Analytical determinism has been the problem with institutions with virtually all streams of post-modern mainly Western societies. People as flawed human beings have been lost in the equation. It is our perfections that are on display, but it is our buried imperfections that make us human and connectible.

Societies on the fringe are moving back to their roots to rediscover the lost human soul.

The role of the specialist will gradually recede into history as the knowledge base rapidly flows into every segment of society, and no one is special anymore.

The once esteemed specialist, the compartmental bureaucrat, and ubiquitous technocrat are now being displaced by the amorphous amateur, the indigenous leader, while the complexion of society continues to change from rigid institutional life into free flowing enterprise where few of the traditional rules apply, and where leaders rise out of the tall grass and make up their own rules as they go along.

The ground is shifting under leadership’s sacred touchstones of power (property, wealth, clout, influence, connections) and taking on moral equivalents that cannot be measured materially, but can be only appreciated spiritually. Moral leadership is on the rise while material leadership is on the decline.

Material authority in government was evident in the preemptive war in Iraq and its half-hearted response to Hurricane Katrina. This was again on display in industry with wacky scandals from Enron to WorldCom with no one minding the store or concerned with the people’s business. It was also obvious in Homeland Security when an amber alert was issued on data months old, costing millions across the country for no perceptible threat. And it was painfully evident in Medicare’s 2006 Medicare Prescription Drug Entitlement Program, which would make Rube Goldberg chuckle in his grave. Corporate sin has come to define our times and our way of operating in “Nowhere Land.”

When everyone is in charge, no one is; when no one is in charge, capacious energy is expended after the fact and often to devious purpose. Conversely, when poll numbers governs leadership, than the majority rules and never well. When soldiers don’t wear uniforms but strap explosives to their chests, the enemy is everywhere and the stealth of terror turns the world into “Nowhere Land” and everyone into “Nowhere Man.”

Pitrim Sorokin suggests we are now ending a six hundred-year-long Sensate day, coming into an “Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow.” He continues: “The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch. But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusion of the twilight.” It has been so since the beginning of time.

The constant flow of experience from the hunter and gatherer, to the farmer, to the expansionistic warrior, to the industrialist, and now to the electronic agent has found the cost each time more inflated, the unintended consequences more deflating. The buffalo and North American Indian are gone, while the United States, still a young nation, dominates the world. This dominance is shifting as well. Americans cannot imagine much less fathom being less than the center of world attention. Greece, Rome, France, Spain, and Great Britain have had their day and have had to step off center stage. While the US continues to occupy it at the moment, its departure is likewise inevitable.

With this in mind, FUTURE PERFECT opens with a profile of a rank amateur and untrained leader, who moved the US out of its agrarian fixation and into the industrial age. He preserved America’s national integrity when the British, French and Spanish had not yet conceded the continent was lost to them. His predecessors in the American presidency, all cultured and eastern elitists scorned his commonness and lack of couth, yet he pulled the presidency of James Monroe from the jaws of disaster with his bold military exploits. He seldom asked permission to venture beyond his military authority, but was quick to repent after succeeding as he did in Florida and the Gulf Coast, when this was contested territory of interest to Spain, France and Great Britain.

The man was Andrew Jackson. Often called “the second George Washington” for his role in saving the union, while sowing the seeds that would lead to the Civil War, he is profiled here because leadership is not clean and neat; nor is it one-dimensional. It works when it carries the DNA of the people and understands their genetic code.

You will see there is something Machiavellian in Andrew Jackson. He played outside the rules because the rules generally did not take into account the way the world had spread itself before his eyes. For him, a government of reason did not always offer satisfactory means to deal with a range of perceived injustices. Consequently, he recurred to his own highly emotionalized inner sense of right and resolve without apology. He lacked subtlety and was a clear-cut, no-nonsense man with undisguised purpose. People seldom fooled him no matter how high their station, as he was comfortable with the emotive qualities of his own constitution.

Later, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google will be profiled as the new amateurs, or amateurs with credentials. They display many qualities similar to Jackson. While Jackson had little formal education, these thirty-something youngsters hold graduate degrees from fine institutions. Even so, like Jackson, their own lights did not blind them when they left the cave of “Nowhere Land” and the mindset of “Nowhere Man.”

PAST IMPERFECT will follow to show the price now being paid for stumbling in the recent past, only to come to punishing fruition in the PRESENT RIDICULOUS. The theme of the American conscience is “Nowhere Man,” not because Americans are running away from their problems, but because Americans fail to recognize they have such problems. They remain in the firm grip of utopia, confident in the belief that surrealistic progress in the future will take care of all challenges.

REVISITING JACKSONIAN LEADERSHIP: OUT OF THE VIRGIN SOIL RISES A LEADER

The battleground between people of property and the working class has been a contentious war from the earliest days of the American republic. It wasn’t until the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829 – 1837) that the credo of workingmen had a powerful advocate, not in rhetoric but in action.

Before, men such as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and John Marshall, among other Federalists, were convinced that common men could not govern themselves, that the common man with the vote would spell chaos and doom for the United States. Indeed, the key to stability and progress resided, according to their lights, in the landed gentry who would rule with compassion and prudence.

To a greater or lesser degree, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe, who preceded Andrew Jackson in the White House, were of a similar mind. They were all Easterners. Jackson was from the West (Tennessee) and South (North Carolina). He had a grass roots mentality leavened in violence where victory was surviving for another day.

They were idealists, dreamers, whereas Jackson was a man of action, who perceived the situation and wrestled it to his will. Jefferson envisioned a republic of small farmers living in idealized tranquility. This proved a gap between aspirations and reality as he presided over a massive expansion of the slaveholding plantation system.

Nothing happens in a vacuum; nothing of consequence is nice and tidy or is likely to make perfect sense. Nor do leaders come forward with impeccable credentials, incontrovertible personas, or faultless characters. Leaders of depth are authentic with inner strength, expressively resolved, defiantly focused, and decisively committed to action. They go where they must, choose their enemies with the precision of marksmen, and are untroubled if disengaged from the clamor beyond.

With Jackson, when the moment of action came, he made up his own mind. Once he crossed the bridge between thought and action, no threats, no warnings of catastrophe, no dictates of prudence, could sway him. “I care nothing about clamors, sir, mark me! I do precisely what I think just and right.”

Jackson spoke quickly and forcibly, often emphasizing his points by raising a clenched fist in a brief and sharp gesture. When his mind was made up, he would draw down the left corner of his mouth, giving his face the pugnacious glare of the fighter he was.

For superb self-sufficiency to be effective, it must be matched by an equally superb self-control. His towering rages, then, despite the Jacksonian myth, were a way of avoiding futile arguments. Jackson’s intelligence expressed itself in judgment rather than in analysis. One hundred and fifty years later, Edward de Bono would call such a man a “lateral thinker,” or a thinker outside the box.

Jackson had vigorous thoughts, intimates would say, but not the faculty of arranging them in a regular composition. Possessed of a mind that was ever dealing with the substances of things, he was not very careful in regard to the precise terms. John Quincy Adams dismissed this artless act as that of an “uncultured man.” Adams was cultured to the toes but a very ineffective leader.

The character of Jackson’s mind was that of judgment with a rapid almost intuitive perception followed by an instant and decisive action. To him, knowledge, per se, seemed entirely unnecessary. He saw intuitively into everything, and reached a conclusion by a shortcut while others were beating the bush for the game. His native strength, as well as intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within reach. The more cunning the individual served only to make him the sharper tool to Jackson's purposes.

Leadership is not only seeing the problem clearly but also husbanding resources effectively to meet the challenge. The highest administrative ability is intuitive, and precedes argument, and rises above it. It is the perception of the thing to be done, its propriety, and necessity that is so strongly felt that it cannot be disclosed or discussed, but must be acted upon posthaste that is the mantle of the leader. Jackson had this. He was not a man of reflection, not a dreamer, but a man of action. He created an age, and led the way from American agrarianism to working class industrialism. In the last analysis, his strength lay in his deep natural understanding of the common people.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. writes in The Age of Jackson (1945):

The America of Jefferson had begun to disappear before Jefferson himself had retired from the presidential chair. That paradise of small farms, each man secure on his own freehold, resting under his own vine and fig trees, was already darkened by the shadow of impending change. For Jefferson, Utopia had cast itself in the form a nation of husbandmen. “Those who labor in the earth,” he had said, “are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people”; and the American dream required that the land be kept free from the corruptions of industrialism. “While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.” Far better to send our materials to Europe for manufacture, than to bring workingmen to these virgin shores, “and with them their manners and principles.” “The mobs of great cities,” he concluded ominously, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”

An age is never ready for change, and even the most capable of leaders can be so committed to an age that they are unwilling to adapt to a new one. Often it takes a maverick to unshackle the “Nowhere Man” from his prison in “Nowhere Land.”

Jefferson and his Eastern colleagues were the former; Jackson was the latter. None of Jackson’s predecessors completely escaped the monarchist caste system of Great Britain, save Jefferson who saw gentleman plantation owners running the country. Even Jackson was called “King Jackson” for his authoritarian ways, especially his attack on the Bank of the United States, and disregard of the Supreme Court. He set the precedence and created the power of the presidency.

Jackson saw his role clearly as advocate of the people. He neither had the rhetoric nor oratorical style of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Clay, tall, brilliant, reckless, fascinating, indolent, was irresistibly attractive. He had broad and exciting vision, which took the place of ideas. He carried all, not by logic, not by knowledge, but by storm, by charm and courage and fire. Schlesinger claims his rhetoric was often tasteless and inflated, his matter often inconsequential, and the country may not have trusted him, but they loved him.

Daniel Webster, on the other hand, lacked precisely that talent for stirring the popular imagination as Clay could. That being said he was an awe-inspiring figure, but loved his comforts too much. He was considered “the great canon loaded to the lips,” who when inspiration lagged was merely pompous. The people, who trusted Jackson and loved Clay, could neither trust nor love Webster. He never won the people because he never gave himself to them. He had no instinct for the massive movement. Indeed, only Jackson of these giants did.


JACKSON AND THE PEOPLE

One of the early policies of President Jackson was to take on the Bank of the United States. It was not actually a national bank but a banking corporation located in Philadelphia privately controlled, but possessing unique and profitable relations with the government. Jackson was determined to kill it. His adversary was Nicholas Biddle a most astute banker at its head. It would be a war without conclusion during his administration.

As one member of Jackson’s administration put it regarding its relationship to the bank, “We know absolutely nothing. There is no consultation, no exchanges of sentiment, no production of correspondence, but merely a rapid, superficial, general statement. We are perfect ciphers.”

Biddle not only suppressed all communications but also insisted flatly that the Bank was not accountable to the government or the people. His chief supporters in government were Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Jackson told his vice president, “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!” It would be killed, but not in his administration, but in that of President Van Buren’s, who would create the Federal Reserve System, which we still enjoy today.

Jackson had the heart of the people and believed in the essential rights of the common man. He expressed this plainly:

“It is to be regretted, that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Human institutions cannot produce equality of talents, of education, or of wealth. In industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions . . . to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – the farmers, mechanics, and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government."

Such generalities did not suffice to win the day. He had to create a wedge between the hard-money arguments – the economic argument that the paper system caused periodic depressions and the social argument that it built up a financial aristocracy -- by submitting the Bank was unconstitutional, and then on the political argument that the Bank represented too great a centralization of power under private control.

Jackson led the people to see the Bank as a distinction between their humble status and the rich and powerful. He assumed the posture of taking on institutional authority and the eastern establishment. People saw this as expressing their will and forgave him his demagogic language.

The great media for the dissemination of information and the molding of public opinion fought him. Haughty and sterile intellectuals fought him. Musty reactionaries fought him. Hollow and outworn traditionalists shook a trembling finger at him. It seemed sometimes as if everyone was against him save the people of the United States.

Americans love to champion the underdog, and Jackson played the role with consummate skill. Over the years, this war with the Bank would go on, withdrawal of federal deposits would cripple the Bank, a depression would follow, and the bank war would continue into President Van Buren’s administration until the Federal Reserve was finally created.

Somewhere along the way, Nicholas Biddle, who represented not only the Bank, but symbolized the moneyed class, adopted a self-crippling dismissal attitude by inferring the “cracker president and his motley crew” couldn’t touch him. With this imperious stance, he lost his grip on reality. Ambition, vanity, and love of power had crossed the thin line to megalomania.

So little had he understood the will of the American people that he ordered the circulation of thirty thousand copies of the president’s Bank veto as a campaign document for Henry Clay. He completely misconceived the ground of the Jackson attack, which was to maintain the supremacy of the union and to serve the interests of the people. To the end, Biddle believed Jackson’s secret purpose was to found a new national bank of his own. Jackson won the election of 1832 in a landslide over Clay. Above all, the Bank War triumphantly established Jackson in the confidence of the people.

Jackson summed up his broad aims in this manner:

“The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer, all know that their success depends upon their industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil. These classes form the great body of the people of the United States; they are the bone and sinew of the country. Yet they are in constant danger of losing their fair influence in the Government. Why? The mischief springs from the power, which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency, which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges, which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different States. Unless you become more watchful you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations."

The credo for workingmen became equal universal education, abolition of imprisonment for debt, abolition of all licensed monopolies, a less expensive law system, equal taxation of property, effective lien laws for laborers, all officers of the workplace to be elected by the people, and no legislation on religion.

The Jacksonian policy moved the Western frontier from the fringe to the center changing the process from political liberty to economic liberty. Politicians and middle-class intellectuals, enlightened by Jeffersonian insights into the economic basis of democracy, now found Jackson bringing the working classes nearer the actual causes of their discontent. Again, Jefferson’s aspirations required the drive and cunning of Jackson to bring them to fruition.

Jackson understood American society was in transition; that the laws that governed the economic interests of men contributed more than government, more than morals, more than religion to make society what it ultimately becomes. The distinction was not between farmers and city dwellers, but between the productive and unproductive classes, between those whose labor increased the national wealth and those whose labor did not.

In primitive society, every man had enjoyed the fruits of his own industry. The advances of technology and the increasing division of labor had brought a great accession to the power of production, and this seemed, for a time, the remedy for the existing evils of society.

But the economic gain in productive power had on the whole injured the lot of the worker. Massive unemployment had occurred in Europe with production exceeding demand, pushing workers to the sidelines. This condition did not yet exist in the United States because of the expansion into the unsettled lands of the West with a constant demand for greater production, but Jackson could see it was only a matter of time before it would occur.

Already, the condition of poverty and plenty was evident, which was an artificial thing created not from a lack of productive capacity but from limits placed on production to enhance the price of goods.

A new class had been created in industrial society, a class that amassed wealth without creating it. Trade gave rise to a currency, and credit, and interest of money, and these, though they produced none of the objects of wealth, of themselves became the instruments of wealth accumulation. Stocks and bonds and mortgages became the paper currency with the risk falling on the productive classes of workers to suffer for the folly, and not the capitalists. This artificial state of society was a new reality, which could not conceal the new truth: he who does not raise his own bread, eats the fruits of another man’s labor.

Jackson designated this class the “financial aristocracy,” a race of men who are non-producers, and who render no equivalent to society for what they consume. Their power is founded on capital, not on land, without permanence, nationality, or sense of moral obligation. He saw this as a more uncompromising character than the feudal system or the landed aristocracy. The capitalist class had captured the state. Workingmen languished in oppression under its sway. The lament of the time: “All wealth is the product of labor and belongs by right to him who produces it, and yet how small a part of the products of its labor falls to the laboring class!”

The Workingmen Movement became a contest between two new classes in industrial society: the powerful moneyed class encroachment upon the weak working class, or the rich upon the poor.

The capitalistic trend, in Jackson’s view, was to ultimately reduce producers to a state of slavery. What was already apparent in the 1830s was that the stimulus to business enterprise by technological improvement, even more than from unrestricted competition, was driving small capitalism into ruin. It was oppressing the whole laboring class.

The banking system and paper money was proving a source of industrial oppression. The emerging what Jackson called the “professional aristocracy” of priests, lawyers, and politicians was seen to be using their power to cheat the people. Most fundamentally, Jackson believed a false system of education more germane to aristocratic Europe than to working class America was engulfing society. There was no attempt to make working people self-sufficient. Instead, there was a sense that the upper classes distinguished socially by exclusiveness, economically by wealth, and politically by mistrust of the people had grasped all the power of the state. It was in this climate of change that Jacksonian democracy took hold, forming the Democratic Party, and declaring the right of government came from the people, resided with the people, and with the people, alone.

It was a time when the powerful moved to increase its power by first charging the people who resisted with revolutionary designs. Unions attempted to form as a measure of self-defense only to be opposed by Congress. This placed employees at the mercy of their employers: that is, to have those whose interests it was to reduce wages set wage rates.

Critics claimed a public largely uninformed by ideas held the impression that the General was a friend of the American free enterprise, while they claimed he was not. They attributed Jackson’s popular support simply to people’s enthusiasm for his heroics at New Orleans. In this climate, radicals rose and fell on the frontier of an unstable society with extremes of poverty and wealth, but with easy access to riches, and quick turnover in the composition of the moneyed class, not unlike the frenetic opportunism that rules the new frontier of the twenty-first century.

It was Jackson’s constant agitation that changed society into a program, then a party, and then into a process that remains with us to this day. But as his second term was coming to an end, there were premonitions of catastrophe. The government was so corrupt, Henry Clay insisted, “the time had arrived when reformation or revolution must go on.” Many agreed, and for a time feelings ran so high that Van Buren took to wearing a brace of pistols when he presided over the Senate.

Hezekiah Niles noting the upsurge in popular violence was moved to report, “Society seems everywhere unhinged.” The character of his countrymen seemed suddenly to change. Foreign visitors noted the disorder. An admirer of the democratic experiment was moved to say, “farewell to Utopia.” The American experience was never taken seriously abroad as a sustainable idea, but only as a utopian ideal.

The presidency of Jackson accomplished a revolution in political values. It destroyed neo-Federalism as a public social philosophy where a ruling class dictated to the masses. It restated fundamentally the presuppositions of American political life. The Jacksonian revolution rested on the premise of a deep-rooted conflict in society between the “producing” and “non-producing” classes with farmers and laborers on the one hand, and the business community on the other. It was a system designed to strip the working classes of the fruits of their labor, or those who produced the wealth being themselves left poor. Jackson saw the role of government to redress this injustice.

Jackson made every effort to resist the concentration of wealth and power further into the hands of the few, pointing out that from the start of the century, first in banking, and insurance, then in transportation, canals, bridges, turnpikes, then in manufacturing, the corporation was gradually becoming the dominant form of economic organization.

The Jacksonian generation was the first to face and make a large-scale adjustment to this new economic mechanism. For owners and large investors, the adjustment presented no particular problem. But for those outside of the wealth creators there existed a feeling of deep misgiving and betrayal. What Jackson succeeded in doing, which caught his opponents by surprise, was to declare that economic and political adjustment was not the primary issue, but moral betrayal of the average citizen’s sense of security, trust, identity, well being, and satisfaction in work and life under the US constitution.

The new industrial order of the early nineteenth century stirred up deep currents of discontent through the laboring classes. The tensions of adjustment to new modes of employment and production, as agriculture gave way to manufacturing and industrialization, created pervasive anxieties with people suffering under the new system. This led working people to fear for their self-respect and status in society.

Andrew Jackson broke the strangle hold of the presidency with the eastern aristocratic establishment (George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams) with a ringing statement of his belief in the essential rights of the common man, which has been echoed in these rising democracies across the globe:

“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – farmers, mechanics, and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”

Now, in the twenty-first century, an inexorable destiny seems to be pressing working people to unshackle themselves from a system that exaggerates these distinctions. The common man is rising from his world of “Nowhere Land” to unchartered territory in FUTURE PERFECT.

Our concepts of a free and democratic society place the emphasis on progress and perfection, which may differ with the non-Anglo-Saxon world. Unique cultural propensities are likely to dictate their version of a democratic society, which may or may not be especially free. Clearly, other cultures are not accepting the imposition of the technological West. God anoints no nation or society with the quintessential formula for meaning and cultural harmony of a society. Nor has any crusade successfully driven a people from their hereditary base. Between 1095 and 1291, there were Nine Christian Crusades against the Islam infidels of the East, ending in Western defeat and disgrace with Tripoli falling to the Moslems on the latter year. Now, nearly a thousand years later “Nowhere Man” still resides in the utopian Western intellect apparently learning little during the intervening millennium.

The focus of FUTURE PERFECT is on Western society’s mistaken belief that through “cut and control” progress on the wings of technology man would sore over his human deficiencies to the Promised Land. Instead, it has taken him to “Nowhere Land” where technology’s golden achievements may ultimately contribute to his planetary ruin. Man has used his mind, not to liberate him from his fears, but instead to drive him into its prison. Man’s story reads like a novel, and in a sense “Nowhere Land” is the fiction of an ideal state. But reality still haunts “Nowhere Man’s” as he attempts to bend Mother Nature to his will failing to realize he exists or dies at her pleasure.


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This is a segment of Dr. Fisher’s new book yet to be published titled TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF NOWHERE MAN. Check out his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com where his books and some articles are listed.