WHY THE REVEREND JERRY FALWELL'S LEADERSHIP LEGACY IS IMPORTANT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2006
"Early on, a leader learns that he is in essence the complete follower. He comes to understand that no leader can lead anyone where they haven't already decided to go; that leadership is not all about the leader, but all about the led."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007)
AN UNSTUCK MAN IN A PERIOD OF STUCKNESS: 1956 - 2006
We live in an era without leaders or demonstrable leadership, stumbling along in the palaver of rhetoric against the constant torment of violence. This is driving us deeper and deeper into an irrevocable abyss.
This pathology has become so ingrained that it is not recognized. It has come to be considered normalcy, contaminating not only American institutions but also that of our entire Western society. Everyone and everything appears to be accelerating while nothing is moving at all. We are stuck with our toys and tools but without the motivation to move forward.
We have lost our moral compass and thus our way, that is, with the possible exception of one man, whom some saw as a buffoon and others as a joke while he was on his way to creating a leadership legacy that cannot be denied, and which we would be well to study.
The critics and supporters of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell are lining up now to sing his fulsome praises or vent their passionate anger.
The critics suggest he was homophobic, xenophobic, and an intolerant religious extremist if not also a racist -- he claimed sympathy for South Africa's apartheid policy. They see him as having formed an unholy alliance with Reagan and then the Bush father and son presidencies, placing him at the door of this triumvirate responsible for most of our current problems. No question he has made it easy for his enemies to justify their enmity.
Supporters are of another mind. They don't dodge his damning evidence, as he often confused and confounded them, yet they have never wavered in their belief that we as a people are most like him, as he is most like us. In a word, he made connection.
Obviously, there is merit to both these views as he was not an icon but a man who understood what leadership was and wasn't and for that it would be well to pay attention to his leadership legacy.
Recently, on the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," there was a discussion of the reverend's legacy with a graduate of his university and an evangelical Christian critic. The latter agreed with much of Falwell's theology but not his politics, while the former student claimed Falwell had changed his life.
The most interesting comment made during this exchange, however, was that by his critic. "Falwell's success," he suggested, "could be attributed to the fact that many, who would not openly want to admit it, shared his sentiments on same sex marriages, miscegenation, abortion, gay rights, homosexuality and lesbianism and other moral concerns." This connection with the silent majority commenced fifty years ago.
A MODEST BEGINNING
In 1956, the Reverend Jerry Falwell opened the Thomas Road Baptist Church with only thirty-five members. He quickly saw the advantage of spreading The Word via radio and then moving into television with the "Old Time Gospel Hour." Ironically, he was preaching to white middle and lower class Americans a message that had already been created and resonated with African Americans, which he borrowed from observing their ministries.
Unlike many leaders in the exploding evangelical movement, he never suffered from the belief that "it was all about him." To the very end, friend and foe alike, found him a gentleman, courteous and humorous, never taking himself too seriously, or his leadership role for granted, or as a right unto himself.
He let nothing diminish from his focus or his mission. It remained crystal clear to him to the end as he combined vision with service.
In 1971, he didn't build a religious village as Jim Bakker did, but Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Today, the university serves a community of twenty-thousand students. Currently, a member of the US Congress is a graduate of this university.
In 1979, he founded the lobbyist group the "Moral Majority" with the goal of "exerting significant influence on the spiritual and moral direction of our nation."In 1983, US News & World Report, a newspaper not known to take shortcuts to the story, deemed him one of the 25 most influential Americans.
When Jim Bakker's PTL Ministry collapsed in 1986 consumed in scandal and debt, he didn't turn away from the problem but guided it through bankruptcy. He was much more charitable than was I:
"Only in America," I wrote, "could two otherwise ordinary people rise and fall so quickly as did Jim and Tammy Bakker. Their 'Praise the Lord' (PTL) television club was a resounding success, largely due to their commonplace familiarity. They were like the couple next door. But somewhere between their house and the homes of million of Americans, Tammy's mascara and war paint and Jim's cherubic grin became diabolical. Essentially nice people, they got caught in the war of ratings and the insatiable appetite of television for dollars. Long before Jim's sex scandal surfaced, the PTL Club had become 'show biz,' departing from its religious and spiritual intent. It became entertainment with a capital 'E.' When that happened; the Bakker's commenced to behave like superstars with other people's money. The mansions, the Mercedes, Tammy's shopping sprees -- all became part of the scam that led to Jim dalliance with Jessica Hahn. When that happened, they became a born again disaster."
(Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 121)
The fall from grace of the Bakker's has happened again and again, not only to the religious, but also to virtually every other institution in these United States without exception. Scandal has become commonplace especially to those in leadership roles.
VARIATIONS OF FAUST AND MEPHISTOPHELES
People in leadership roles have repeatedly misread their role demands being often flummoxed by their self-demands. The desire is not so much for knowledge, as it was with Goethe's Faust, but for power. It would appear they have come to see leadership as all about affluence, influence and celebrity, or all about them when leadership is always all about the led.
Such leaders would lead on the sense of how people should be not as they are, and as an instrument to the leader's will and not necessarily that of the people's. This is a universal problem impossible to place in a locale or time, as it exists today as it has always existed with self-indulgent leadership.
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has seldom fallen into this trap.
He lost his appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1988 when he challenged the 1983 parody of him in the adult magazine, Hustler. This came at a time when his broad base "Moral Majority" had already been galvanized into a political movement. So successful was this movement that it was given credit for the rebirth of the Republican Party, and conservatism, as well as the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency for two terms.
Smarting from this Supreme Court defeat, what does he do in 1989, or ten years after the Moral Majority was founded, and now a force to be reckoned with? He dissolves it, saying, "Our mission is accomplished." He never confused role demands with self-demands. His personal angst was not allowed to contaminate his leadership mandate.
No doubt Falwell appreciated the wisdom in Lord Acton's remark, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He would have no part of such corruption.
ALL TOO HUMAN
That said it seems equally apparent that his life was consistent with Nietzsche's suggestion that we are "all too human." This was displayed in his inability to save himself from being used, or, indeed, to save himself from himself.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says it is not inconceivable to imagine Christian fundamentalists, evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics ever mobilizing into a voting block without his leadership; nor can Thomas see Reagan being elected twice, father Bush once, and son Bush twice without his "Moral Majority."
But what so often happens to good intentions is that the means become the ends, in this case, as the focus was shifted from theology to politics, from moral renewal to getting Republicans elected to congressional office. The good reverend allowed himself unfortunately to be used.
On the other hand, he correctly identified the rage of the rank and file middle Americans in the 1980s with the liberal intrusion on their sacred traditions. Americans had had enough of the Hippies, Yuppies, X and Y generations and the "me" self-indulgence that accompanied narcissistic consumerism. In the midst of this mania, he, alone, cut black from white and attacked the gray, as America was stuck in crass materialism and Teflon spiritualism.
FALWELL'S FAUX PAS
Where he overstepped the mark was when he got obsessed with the Tinky Winky. This character of the Teletubbies on children's television, according to him, displayed a veiled homosexuality. Then he made matters worse with his outrageous statement that pagans, homosexuals, abortionists, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other groups were partly responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. He later would apologize but the damage was already done.
His failure on a personal basis was not recognizing when his views were laced with nonsense; his failure on a corporate basis was not recognizing when his movement and the church were being perceived and used as an appendage to the Republican Party. Thus, unwittingly, his influence was interpreted as yet another instrument to pamper and forgive a special group for its excesses. He proved in the process that leadership is human and not always heroic, that a leader's fragility is forgivable if not his dalliance with the truth.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM FALWELL LEGACY
Leading is a lonely profession, and the temptation to exceed the role and responsibility is always with the leader. Remember how the devil attempted Jesus on the mount. No leader is ever immune to possible corruption.
The second thing is that a leader can never get heady with his power, influence, impact or success. He is an instrument of the will of the people and never rises above that ground level.
The third thing is that the goodness that resonates with the people must make connection with the goodness in the leader's own heart. If goodness has been cauterized from his soul in his rise to leadership, once he gets there, he is doomed. There is no help for him for there is nothing left in him. He cannot see the motivation and requirements of the led because he is walking in a desert in which his own heat is already destroying him, and will in turn destroy the people.
The fourth thing is to recognize people think in terms of their own satisfaction, which is often at the expense of that of others. The leader must recognize and weigh through this to discover the crystal of commonality because he cannot be swayed by special interests.
The reason is clear; the majority is often wrong. It is wrong because it does not think but often acts like a mob. The mob never considers or thinks about the minority, except in terms of bias and stereotypes. The leader can ill afford for the majority to get too locked into self-interests. Human combustion is a function of this locked in-ness, fueled by a leader's weakness of will and vacillation in crisis.
A leader can be guided by, but not become summarily trusting of polls, pundits, personal advisers, or loved ones because they have a vested interest and limited vision of the now. The leader must consider his decisions in the more encompassing framework of the not yet now.
The fifth element of leadership is courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but the embrace of it in body of instinct. A legion of a hundred thousand voices of the past will visit the leader, not in his ear, but through his bones because he is an evolutionary phenomenon. Leaders have struggled before him with the same riddles and questions.
Every leader who is in touch with himself knows of what I am speaking.
These voices of the past are schooled in experience, culture, history, success, failure, salvation and damnation, death and resurrection, defeat and renewal.
Courage is the recognition when to advance, when to fall back, and when to do nothing. Courage is the quality of embracing apprehension when fear is the leader's only companion.
Courage is the recognition that no situation is ever impossible or as improbable as it may seem; nor is any situation exactly like any other before it, and therefore must be judged with naked eyes and an open mind.
The sixth thing is that the leader walks with destiny. In his every action, he is writing his and his people's history, and therefore can never have the luxury of worrying about what people think, say, or write about him in the immediate, or even threaten to do to him.
A leader is as likely to generate as many enemies as friends, as many who hate him as love him, as many who see him as their destroyer as their champion, making all such preoccupations meaningless and counterproductive.
And finally, the leader who leads establishes and leaves a legacy, something upon which to build into the future.
LEADERSHIP REDUX
The most fatal flaw in current leadership is that it is all about the leader, all about the charismatic pretense of his character. The leader has become a media performer.
Unfortunately, leadership is not a beauty contest, not about a glib or anecdotal mind with sound byte fluidity; nor is it necessarily in our prevailing image and likeness.
A leader has the presence, knowledge, will, courage, and decisiveness to make the strategic moves with the most telling long-term consequences that the well-defined problem demands. This is not likely to happen when role and self demands are confused, or when history is misread, misused, or ignored.
We are moving out of a half century of stuckness caused by this lack of leadership and we have called it everything but leaderless leadership.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, flawed as he was as a human being, never became confused about leadership, and his legacy of Liberty University is proof of that fact. He never forgot leadership is all about the led. His goodness drove him and it made connection with the common good.
_______________
Preorder information: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: checks in the amount of $20 to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
OUR CLICHE CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
OUR CLICHÉ CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
WHO AMONG PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES WOULD MAKE A GOOD PRESIDENT – A READER’S QUESTION CONSIDERED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"It is not enough to have great qualities, we must also have the management of them."
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French Seventeenth Century Moralist
A reader of my piece, "THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP," asked the question whom among the presidential candidates do you think would make a good president?
In my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), I claimed we were a one-dimensional society with an aversion to greatness, which was best demonstrated in our leadership. I see no reason to change that assessment now.
This aversion is first demonstrated in our educational system. I have a grandson who is going to an exclusive prep school in which it sets his parents back about $17,000 a year, and he is just finishing the seventh grade.
From what I've seen during "Grandparents Day" it isn't the equivalent of what I got at St. Patrick's Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa decades ago for nothing. I examined the workbooks, the lesson plans, the posted materials on the board, and witnessed the exercises presented to us, and I was under whelmed in all instances.
Education today is geared to impress. It is geared to tests, not to learning, to high SAT scores and not to conceptual understanding, to high GPAs whether than insight into the material covered and the world beyond where everyday experience complements the classroom.
Curiosity in school isn't pricked, but appetites and status are. Children go to school “because they have to” not “because they want to.” They take education as a right, which they can accept or reject, and not the privilege that it is, and therefore not appreciated, as it should be. Politicians demonstrate every day precisely this characteristic of our society. They not only fail to speak with clarity but with little sense of learning.
The best and the brightest are not the equivalent of decades ago even though they have wondrous electronic facilities and consummate skills at manipulating these electronic wonders. Thinking is not a text message.
Technology is not education. It is a tool too often used as a toy. Consequently, the equivalent of comprehension is not necessarily a subset of problem solving skills. That is why we keep repeating the same problems as if discovering them for the first time.
Education should not be boring but stimulating, yet it is both boring and iterative, which would appear to commence with a hard wiring process that results in cheating.
A one-dimensional society is a cheating society, and the greatest sufferers for the cheating are the cheaters. Kids will do anything to have high SAT scores and impressive GPAs. Cheating has become a cultural dimension of our society in its one-dimensional inclination. When artificial indexes, such as IQ and SAT scores, are taken to be the measure of intelligence then man is truly mismeasured to the extreme.
The other night on a TV program a father saw the SAT envelop of his daughter empty, and assumed her scores were low, immediately going to her head of school to see if she could take a review course to bump up her scores. Actually, the daughter had impressive scores but had taken it out of the envelope to show her mother. The idea that a parent would do anything to bump up an artificial index of his child speaks to one-dimensionalism.
NUMBER ONE
SO THE FIRST QUALITY OF A GOOD PRESIDENT WOULD BE HONESTY AND INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY AS A LEARNER AND NOT A KNOWER, AS A LISTENER AND NOT A TELLER, AS A THINKER AND NOT AN IMPRESSOR.
Leadership is not an egalitarian pursuit, but a quest to develop one's house of intellect to become a mansion of many rooms, rooms that are amply furnished with diverse and varied cultural artifacts.
To be able to converse with and understand everyman a leader must first converse with and understand him or herself. This takes the combination of a quest for “knowledge building” leavened by incrementally sound supportive and corroborating experience. School is never out for a leader and often he or she doesn't get passing grades, but accepts the occasional shortfall as the price for leadership.
NUMBER TWO
SO THE SECOND THING IS THAT A PRESIDENT HAS TO GET BEYOND OUR VOCATIONALLY ORIENTED MATRICULATION. THIS IS AS EVIDENT IN THE IVY LEAGUE AS IT IS IN THE MOST MODEST OF CITADELS OF LEARNING. THE CONSEQUENCE OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING IS VOCATIONAL THINKING AND LEADERSHIP. THIS TRANSLATES INTO SHORT TERM UTILITY THINKING INSTEAD OF LONG TERM TERMINAL ASSESSMENT.
Leadership is impossible if the culture is organized against leadership and our society is so organized.
We are systemically committed to and depended on wealth creation. Progress is our most important product and no one seems to questions the insanity of this quest, especially with the reality of diminishing resources, disappearing specimens of wildlife, and all the consequences of an increasingly overcrowded planet.
We think of value in terms of wealth rather than the wealth of values. There is little room for trust, sacrifice, love, compassion, virtue, and kindness when they are all subsumed under competitive advantage.
In a one-dimensional society, the people most likely to rise to leadership positions may have little talent or aptitude for leadership other than wealth creation. They can be glib but glibness requires no depth, and leadership does. They can be physically attractive but leadership is not identified with surface beauty but inner quality. They may have great physical courage but leadership is more a function of moral courage, which is not the same as physical courage.
In this one-dimensional orientation, the person or persons who are most successful at raising money are the most likely to win elected office, which includes the presidency.
This is because in a wealth creation society the king and queen of worth are media in all its forms bombarding the senses until one is senseless, and finally capitulates to the poll posters and votes what is believed to be his or her conscience when all it is is their respective fatigue.
NUMBER THREE
SO THE THIRD THING IS FOR A PRESIDENT TO EMERGE ABOVE AND BEYOND THE POPULAR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE AND TO DEMONSTRATE THE VISION TO SEE AND CAPACITY TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF ALL, NOT SIMPLY IN THE NARROW CONTEXT OF NATIONAL INTERESTS BUT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL REALITY.
Preparation for this role of leadership is not likely to be found in one of the more prestigious business schools, nor is it likely to be found in law, engineering or science, but in a person that has the foundation of a liberal and therefore liberating education.
This person would be fluent in the culture and language of his or her own culture and language as well as that of at least two other prominent cultures and languages of the international world with an affinity to grow in that comprehension and beyond. If this suggests a “liberal scholar,” it would be in the lower case.
Business schools are consumed with wealth creation; law with order; engineering with conformity; and science with value free analysis.
To a considerable degree, these are all one dimensional disciplines and orientations. Liberal arts leadership has enough acquaintance with these disciplines to see that they are integrated into multidimensional service.
NUMBER FOUR
THE FOURTH QUALITY A PRESIDENT SHOULD DEMONSTRATE IS THAT OF THE READER, A STUDENT OF HISTORY AND SCIENCE, MYTH AND RELIGION, AND GREAT MOMENTS OF GREAT MEN.
I provided a shortlist in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS that would aid in the development of a multidimensional international perspective:
(1) Homer's THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSESY
(2) THE BIBLE
(3) THE TROJAN WARS
(4) THE TORAH
(5) THE KORAN
(6) Aristophanes THE BIRDS
(7) Euripides CYCLOPS
(8) THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(9) Sophocles OEDIPUS REX
(10) THE HOLY CRUSADES
(11) ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(12) Julius Caesar THE GALLIC WARS
(13) St. Paul THE EPISTLES
(14) Marcus Aurelius MEDITATIONS
(15) Edward Gibbons THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
But perhaps the most evasive characteristic of leadership whose absence has plagued American society throughout its history is the lack of a secure moral center and moral compass of that leader to guide and direct the leader through the inevitable chaos that accompanies a leader’s time.
Sycophants and sybarites can sense this lack and provide the leadership with flattery and debauchery. They are essentially invisible for when history writes of the debacles of leaders it seldom finds cause to mention them. Yet it was their presence and manipulation of that leadership that forced the fiascos or disasters that became manifested.
NUMBER FIVE
SO, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS THE PRESIDENT MUST HAVE A STRONG INTUITIVE SENSE THAT CUTS THROUGH THE NONSENSE OF ADVISERS AND SELF INTERESTS TO STEER THE PROPER COURSE FOR THE GREATER GOOD. HE OR SHE MUST HAVE A DECISIVE MIND AND LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PROCRASTINATORS OR PROCRASTINATION.
PREORDER INFORMATION:
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: $20 with checks made to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"It is not enough to have great qualities, we must also have the management of them."
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French Seventeenth Century Moralist
A reader of my piece, "THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP," asked the question whom among the presidential candidates do you think would make a good president?
In my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), I claimed we were a one-dimensional society with an aversion to greatness, which was best demonstrated in our leadership. I see no reason to change that assessment now.
This aversion is first demonstrated in our educational system. I have a grandson who is going to an exclusive prep school in which it sets his parents back about $17,000 a year, and he is just finishing the seventh grade.
From what I've seen during "Grandparents Day" it isn't the equivalent of what I got at St. Patrick's Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa decades ago for nothing. I examined the workbooks, the lesson plans, the posted materials on the board, and witnessed the exercises presented to us, and I was under whelmed in all instances.
Education today is geared to impress. It is geared to tests, not to learning, to high SAT scores and not to conceptual understanding, to high GPAs whether than insight into the material covered and the world beyond where everyday experience complements the classroom.
Curiosity in school isn't pricked, but appetites and status are. Children go to school “because they have to” not “because they want to.” They take education as a right, which they can accept or reject, and not the privilege that it is, and therefore not appreciated, as it should be. Politicians demonstrate every day precisely this characteristic of our society. They not only fail to speak with clarity but with little sense of learning.
The best and the brightest are not the equivalent of decades ago even though they have wondrous electronic facilities and consummate skills at manipulating these electronic wonders. Thinking is not a text message.
Technology is not education. It is a tool too often used as a toy. Consequently, the equivalent of comprehension is not necessarily a subset of problem solving skills. That is why we keep repeating the same problems as if discovering them for the first time.
Education should not be boring but stimulating, yet it is both boring and iterative, which would appear to commence with a hard wiring process that results in cheating.
A one-dimensional society is a cheating society, and the greatest sufferers for the cheating are the cheaters. Kids will do anything to have high SAT scores and impressive GPAs. Cheating has become a cultural dimension of our society in its one-dimensional inclination. When artificial indexes, such as IQ and SAT scores, are taken to be the measure of intelligence then man is truly mismeasured to the extreme.
The other night on a TV program a father saw the SAT envelop of his daughter empty, and assumed her scores were low, immediately going to her head of school to see if she could take a review course to bump up her scores. Actually, the daughter had impressive scores but had taken it out of the envelope to show her mother. The idea that a parent would do anything to bump up an artificial index of his child speaks to one-dimensionalism.
NUMBER ONE
SO THE FIRST QUALITY OF A GOOD PRESIDENT WOULD BE HONESTY AND INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY AS A LEARNER AND NOT A KNOWER, AS A LISTENER AND NOT A TELLER, AS A THINKER AND NOT AN IMPRESSOR.
Leadership is not an egalitarian pursuit, but a quest to develop one's house of intellect to become a mansion of many rooms, rooms that are amply furnished with diverse and varied cultural artifacts.
To be able to converse with and understand everyman a leader must first converse with and understand him or herself. This takes the combination of a quest for “knowledge building” leavened by incrementally sound supportive and corroborating experience. School is never out for a leader and often he or she doesn't get passing grades, but accepts the occasional shortfall as the price for leadership.
NUMBER TWO
SO THE SECOND THING IS THAT A PRESIDENT HAS TO GET BEYOND OUR VOCATIONALLY ORIENTED MATRICULATION. THIS IS AS EVIDENT IN THE IVY LEAGUE AS IT IS IN THE MOST MODEST OF CITADELS OF LEARNING. THE CONSEQUENCE OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING IS VOCATIONAL THINKING AND LEADERSHIP. THIS TRANSLATES INTO SHORT TERM UTILITY THINKING INSTEAD OF LONG TERM TERMINAL ASSESSMENT.
Leadership is impossible if the culture is organized against leadership and our society is so organized.
We are systemically committed to and depended on wealth creation. Progress is our most important product and no one seems to questions the insanity of this quest, especially with the reality of diminishing resources, disappearing specimens of wildlife, and all the consequences of an increasingly overcrowded planet.
We think of value in terms of wealth rather than the wealth of values. There is little room for trust, sacrifice, love, compassion, virtue, and kindness when they are all subsumed under competitive advantage.
In a one-dimensional society, the people most likely to rise to leadership positions may have little talent or aptitude for leadership other than wealth creation. They can be glib but glibness requires no depth, and leadership does. They can be physically attractive but leadership is not identified with surface beauty but inner quality. They may have great physical courage but leadership is more a function of moral courage, which is not the same as physical courage.
In this one-dimensional orientation, the person or persons who are most successful at raising money are the most likely to win elected office, which includes the presidency.
This is because in a wealth creation society the king and queen of worth are media in all its forms bombarding the senses until one is senseless, and finally capitulates to the poll posters and votes what is believed to be his or her conscience when all it is is their respective fatigue.
NUMBER THREE
SO THE THIRD THING IS FOR A PRESIDENT TO EMERGE ABOVE AND BEYOND THE POPULAR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE AND TO DEMONSTRATE THE VISION TO SEE AND CAPACITY TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF ALL, NOT SIMPLY IN THE NARROW CONTEXT OF NATIONAL INTERESTS BUT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL REALITY.
Preparation for this role of leadership is not likely to be found in one of the more prestigious business schools, nor is it likely to be found in law, engineering or science, but in a person that has the foundation of a liberal and therefore liberating education.
This person would be fluent in the culture and language of his or her own culture and language as well as that of at least two other prominent cultures and languages of the international world with an affinity to grow in that comprehension and beyond. If this suggests a “liberal scholar,” it would be in the lower case.
Business schools are consumed with wealth creation; law with order; engineering with conformity; and science with value free analysis.
To a considerable degree, these are all one dimensional disciplines and orientations. Liberal arts leadership has enough acquaintance with these disciplines to see that they are integrated into multidimensional service.
NUMBER FOUR
THE FOURTH QUALITY A PRESIDENT SHOULD DEMONSTRATE IS THAT OF THE READER, A STUDENT OF HISTORY AND SCIENCE, MYTH AND RELIGION, AND GREAT MOMENTS OF GREAT MEN.
I provided a shortlist in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS that would aid in the development of a multidimensional international perspective:
(1) Homer's THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSESY
(2) THE BIBLE
(3) THE TROJAN WARS
(4) THE TORAH
(5) THE KORAN
(6) Aristophanes THE BIRDS
(7) Euripides CYCLOPS
(8) THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(9) Sophocles OEDIPUS REX
(10) THE HOLY CRUSADES
(11) ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(12) Julius Caesar THE GALLIC WARS
(13) St. Paul THE EPISTLES
(14) Marcus Aurelius MEDITATIONS
(15) Edward Gibbons THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
But perhaps the most evasive characteristic of leadership whose absence has plagued American society throughout its history is the lack of a secure moral center and moral compass of that leader to guide and direct the leader through the inevitable chaos that accompanies a leader’s time.
Sycophants and sybarites can sense this lack and provide the leadership with flattery and debauchery. They are essentially invisible for when history writes of the debacles of leaders it seldom finds cause to mention them. Yet it was their presence and manipulation of that leadership that forced the fiascos or disasters that became manifested.
NUMBER FIVE
SO, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS THE PRESIDENT MUST HAVE A STRONG INTUITIVE SENSE THAT CUTS THROUGH THE NONSENSE OF ADVISERS AND SELF INTERESTS TO STEER THE PROPER COURSE FOR THE GREATER GOOD. HE OR SHE MUST HAVE A DECISIVE MIND AND LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PROCRASTINATORS OR PROCRASTINATION.
PREORDER INFORMATION:
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: $20 with checks made to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504
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