EPILOGUE -- PART TWO: "Unintended Consequences!"

EPILOGUE
PART TWO
“Unintended Consequences!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2006

NOTE: This is the second part of the epilogue to my new book, “NOWHERE MAN” IN “NOWHERE LAND!”

* * * * *

It is a very different world than the one I entered. There is massive disconnect between people and society. It wasn’t a perfect world, when I was young. But the ties of family, friendship, and neighborhood bound us together. They have snapped under the pressures of economic, technological, and cultural change. No longer do people routinely chat across the backyard fence, or sit on the front porch and keep a disciplinary eye on the mischief-plotting kid down the block. The mom and pop grocery, the doctor making house calls, the locally owned department store, and the full service corner gas station have all left the landscape. Instead of gathering for a church supper social or high school football game, parents huddle around the family entertainment center, alone, while their children have their own private sanctuaries with video games, computers, televisions, cell phones, iPods, and MP3s isolated from them and resentful of any intrusion.

Many of these young people are more connected to their modems in Internet cyberspace with synthetic icons as substitutes for human contact, thus avoiding the messy complexity of person-to-person communication, where body language, voice inflections, irritating personal tics and give-and-take conflict must be managed. For all the miracles of technology, it hasn’t proven a fitting substitute for human development. In fact, it has proven quite the reverse. High tech gadgets have increased students’ inclination to cheat. Today’s cheaters use cell phone cameras to take pictures of test questions, MP3 players, and iPods with wireless earpieces to listen to recorded notes and, of course, the Internet to find answers.

In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, conducted the survey. David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (2004), suggests students feel pressured to do well to get into graduate and professional schools and secure good jobs. I don’t buy it. It is further evidence that “Nowhere Man” is very much a presence in the current college-age crowd, and headed straight for “Nowhere Land,” as it is something of a ruse for at least two reasons: many don’t belong and would be better off doing something else; and education is not on the agenda, getting a college degree is.

This cheating is a continuation of the utopian idea that SAT scores measure anything. Prospective college students attend crash courses in this test to satisfy entrance requirements, which reduces the test to a mock screening device and nothing more. The examination was created originally to measure academic readiness for college and university study. It would appear college students want the degree, but are little interested in the process of acquiring an education. Consequently, many leaders and achievers of this process are simply actors on a stage playing a role with no more substance to their performance than the lies and lines they have memorized. It has turned our society and culture into “Nowhere Land,” the Land of Oz.

If cheating wasn’t bad enough, many young people in college are so despairing that in a survey 17 percent admitted to self-abusing themselves to the point of serious bodily injury either by cutting or burning themselves. These results were of a survey at Cornell and Princeton reported in The Chicago Tribune (June 5, 2006). Cornell psychologist Janis Whitlock, the study’s main author, analyzed the responses of 2,875 randomly selected males and female undergraduates and graduate students at Cornell and Princeton who completed an Internet-based mental health survey. Counselors claim this behavior is happening at colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country. Of the nearly one in five students that self-injured themselves at these Ivy League schools, 70 percent admitted doing it multiple times. Why? For some young people, self-abuse apparently is an extreme coping mechanism that seems to help relieve stress. For others, it’s a way to make deep emotional wounds more visible. More disturbing is that separate research has found more than 400 Web sites devoted to self-abuse, including many that glorify self-injury. Mental health professionals worry that many sites are actually serving as an online subculture that fuels the behavior.

Too many young people are attending college with little interest in an academic or professional career, believing the myth that without college there is no life after high school. It is the constant mantra that bombards their senses since they came into the world, while society doesn’t have enough carpenters, plumbers, electricians, homemakers, church workers, and other craftsmen and social workers to fill society’s needs. There are many good schools to train people for a job they love that doesn’t require them going into debt for years, or indeed, to spend most of their youth in a lecture hall. Small wonder that deviant and masochistic behavior are common adolescent responses of college-age young people who feel they have little control over their lives and are reduced to confusion, anxiety, tension, stress, depression and despair.

The irony is that many of them would be much happier in craftsmen like pursuits. As matters stand, they endure the masochistic tension and constant stress of attempting to measure up to somebody else’s agenda doing what they would have them do rather than what they want to do.

The question whether the planet earth can survive this high-octane entropy madness and self-indulgent wastefulness and still survive is a moot one. I am not talking about Armageddon. I’m talking about man keeping his body and soul strapped together to the same being. In any case, I think T. S. Eliot has it about right,

This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The cultural breakdown of community is global. We may speak English, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Finish, Polish, Czech, Russian, or some other language, and may or may not live in these wonderful places, but it is certain that the same monsters are gaining on their future leaders that are gaining on ours.

Allan Bloom wrote a surprising bestseller in 1987 about universities with a lack of purpose, their students with a lack of learning or even curiosity about expanding their world other than acquiring credentials. He called the book The Closing of the American Mind. It applied as much to the Western mind as to the American mind, which he found condemned to loneliness and isolated in self-pity. Bloom writes:

(This is so because) it has no common object, no common good, no natural complementarity . . . The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.

The loss of self-discipline and the erosion of community have contributed to this self-indulgent utopia. Fortunately, Bloom didn’t stop there. He wrote Love & Friendship (1993), which was published posthumously in 1992. Here he argues the power of the spirit to reconcile all our transgressions. It isn’t a Norman Rockwell idealized canvas but a portrait of what separates human beings from beasts – the power of the imagination, which transforms sex into Eros. Bloom claims love is the key and the trait that nourishes community, that our impoverished feelings are rooted in our impoverished language of love.

In this short journey to “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” which I have attempted to show the folly and heresy of self-indulgence, I have stayed away from being as direct as Bloom in regard to love. As you see, I have no magic solution to the planetary catastrophe that seems on the horizon, no profound wisdom to dispense. I do know that loving Nature means we will not destroy it, loving each other means we will not direct our frustrations to hurting each other, loving means we will use our minds to increase common understanding not punish others with our special knowledge, and loving means we will accept our flawed self with humor and good will and not destroy our soul to realize our Faust. Psychiatrist Smiley Blanton writes in Love or Perish (1956):

Love teaches us that we must go forward and embrace what we would possess. Happiness does not come to us of its own accord. Neither is it a prize to be won only through lucky lotteries. The capacity for joy resides in the constant use of our senses, our muscles, our minds. It comes within ourselves, and must be made a habitual part of our daily activity. In a sense, we can all be in a constant state of love! Let a man dedicate himself to hunting out all the new things that his eyes can see, and he will find fascination throughout the years. There is delight in listening to the whine of the wind, the humming of insects, the echo of the waterfall, the ripple of the lake. There is joy in the smooth texture of a leaf, the crunching of earth under foot. There is humor in the snoring of a dog, the twist of a bird’s head, the flick of a cat’s tail. These and a thousand and one other things make the world a marvelous place, filled with ceaseless wonders that a man may love to the end of his days.

Aldous Huxley says in The Perennial Philosophy (1950) “the nature of selfness is such that one person cannot be a part of another person.” I sense that many reading this would agree. But I have found him to be wrong because in marriage two selves overlap and intermingle with one another in the most intricate and complicated manner. This makes marriage and other meaningful partnerships not 50 – 50 propositions, but 100 percent giving and receiving. Nor is it wrong to say we always act out of self-interest. Of course we do. There is no other way to act. But the critical questions are: What sort of self is it that prescribes the self-interest? Is it the self-indulgent self? I don’t think so.

American educator John Dewey (1859 – 1952) concludes in Human Nature and Conduct (1922) that loves and interests make up that self, which distinguish self-interest when the “generous self” is on display, and self-indulgence when the “narrow self” dominates. It is the generous self that will save the planet from “Nowhere Man” and direct our exit from “Nowhere Land,” and to that end this work is dedicated.
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James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., is a chemist and organizational/industrial psychologist, and a former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. He is also author of several books and articles in this and related genres. Email address: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com; Web site: www.fisherofideas.com: check out his blog.