WHY CULTURE IS CRITICAL TO LEADERSHIP
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“Culture: 5 (a): the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations; (b) the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; (c) the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
“Don’t change corporate culture. What we need is to change organization behavior.”
Peter F. Drucker, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1991
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We suffer from the celebrity syndrome. This is not only true of the entertainment industry, but also across every walk of life.
Think about it. We accept the source as reliable because it has been reliable in another context. Such is the case with the esteemed management guru Peter Drucker. He failed to understand that culture dictates behavior; to change behavior without the appropriate culture is pure folly.
Yet, Drucker made such a statement in 1991 in the Wall Street Journal, and I know in my own consultancy work that many senior managers took comfort from it, seeing it as a license to do nothing about company culture.
Then there are cases where CEOs find suitable cultures for their enterprises. This is one.
THE HEDGEHOG PHILOSOPHY OF SOUTHWEST AIRLINES
Isaiah Berlin wrote a book on Tolstoy’s view of history. He based it on an ancient Greek story by the poet Archilochus called, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1978).
The book underlines a fundamental distinction between people (foxes) who have a fascination with, and an inclination towards an infinite variety of things, while another group of people (hedgehogs) relates everything they do to a central theme and all-embracing concept. Foxes are so busy trying to do everything well that they do nothing well. Not so hedgehogs.
Two relatively small airlines exemplify these two approaches. Both airlines had essentially the same business plan; the same market area, the same assets, the same complement of competent people, and nearly the same mission statements, yet they experienced decidedly different outcomes.
Southwest Air Lines became a great commercial success as a hedgehog, while Pacific North West Air Lines failed as a fox.
Pacific North West attempted to do everything well in the interest of satisfying its stockholders, customers and employees going like gangbusters in that pursuit.
Southwest Air Lines adopted the “hedgehog concept,” focusing on doing one thing very well, allowing the process to suitably gestate before expecting it take hold.
What was that one thing?
It was in identifying, developing and implementing the best workplace culture for its people. It assumed if that were done the rest would follow naturally. This was total front-end lateral thinking with a primary focus.
How was the “hedgehog concept” visualized?
The CEO visualized the workplace culture as being three interlocking spheres of influence and behavior: a passion for serving; a mission to be the best in the world, and an emphasis on equal service to customers and employees alike.
Culture was understood to be primarily a spiritual entity. Intangibles are the drivers of people much as many would prefer such drivers to be simply money. Tangibles are easily given without any personal involvement, not so with intangibles.
How can the "hedgehog concept" be measured?
The pervasive company spirit is visible and even palpable. A measure of intangibles is seeing how employees support each other, and respond to change and disruption.
The way to attain and sustain that spirit, the Southwest CEO decided, was to make it clear that Southwest employees came first, then the customers, and last but not the least the stockholders. This created a bond of trust.
He also made it clear that employees would not be subject to surprises, but instead would be informed of critical developments so that they could participate in the problem solving. Since change is constant, workers need to be flexible to meet such changes. Being well informed relative to company operations translates into flexibility because employees are never surprised and know always where they stand.
Not long ago, all company employees met in conference to discuss how to deal with ever increasing fuel costs. Currently, fuel costs represent an increase of $600 million over last year. To put this in perspective, employees were told, profits in all of 2005 were $485 million.
There was no panic, no finger pointing, but a genuine desire to look for new ways to increase productivity, improve gate turnaround, and to do more with less.
Employees know they are valued by the way they are treated. Consequently, they are constantly looking for ways to deal with increased competition, changing market demands, and the challenges of a volatile world. Periodic disruptions don’t sound the alarm for downsizing. On the contrary, they rally the troops to ratchet up their efforts.
Core values, passion and high spirits carry an enterprise through disruptive times because the culture has a singular focus and employees understand their mission. Put another way, core values are a constant to deal with that other constant, change.
ARCHITECTS OF CULTURE
The “hedgehog concept” took hold at Southwest Air Lines because the CEO and his senior management team decided business would be managed around guiding principles outlining this value system and attitudinal policy.
The workplace culture created was user friendly and accessible to all disciplines without exception and displayed in behavioral language.
The culture desired is manifested when the preferred values are on display without prompting. It is an "invisible hand" that puts everyone on the same page so that they can get off the dime.
CAN THIS WORK ANYWHERE?
It is a matter of will and involvement.
The nature of the complex organization is such that chronic problems are bound to occur. These problems disrupt work, create polarity, and often derail the collective effort away from rather than toward the mission.
So, the first thing that must be done is for senior management to understand that there is a problem, then what the problem is, where the problem is, why the problem exists, how long it has existed, what has been done about it in the past, what was the outcome of such intervention, and what are some more effective ways of dealing with it now?
You cannot concentrate on behavior, as Peter Drucker assumed, and disregard culture. Culture is the engine of work. It is the attitudinal machine of enterprise. Nor is culture something that you can copy but something that each enterprise must create from scratch.
To deal with a chronic problem of organization life takes the assistance of someone who is professionally trained to facilitate the problem solving process.
That would be the organizational development (OD) psychologist. OD deals directly with the CEO and senior management in an integrative effort.
Are there any words of caution?
There is one stipulation. Culture is not something the CEO and senior management can be committed to without also being totally involved.
After all, they are architects of the culture. They draft the blueprint of the core value system. If they are not involved, if they abdicate this role and delegate it to staff or consultants, then the prospects of success are limited, indeed.
Southwest Air Lines has shown that other companies can use the “hedgehog concept” to their advantage. Any troubled enterprise can resolve its difficulty by going back to the drawing board, examining its value system and culture, and redesigning it to a more compelling focus. Culture is not something you "search for" or attempt to copy the model successful somewhere else. Culture is the challenge of each enterprise and the key to a successful future.
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Dr. Fisher is author of several books in the OD discipline. His latest is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (2007).
Friday, November 30, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY!
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“REALITY: a real event, entity, or state of affairs; the totality of real things and events; something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
“Thanks in large measure to the state-provided public service and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance, the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sense of insecurity and fear that had dominated and polarized political life from 1914 through the early Fifties, and which was largely responsible for the appeal of both fascism and communism in those years.
“But we have good reason to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.”
Tony Judt, Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University
New York Review, December 6, 2007
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Dr. Judt is not an alarmist, far from it. He sees where a half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an “economic age” collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent in our economic calculations, our political practices, and our international strategies, even our educational priorities that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risk and opportunities are without precedence; there is no point in looking back to see ahead.
Judt continues, “Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.” When people count only in terms of statistical validity, and profits carry the day over people, the “soul of the city” flaps like a rag in the wind.
* * * * * * * * * * *
If over the last half-century, you have had an opportunity to work and live extensively across the globe, and have engaged in a study of human behavior and the workings of institutions, as I have had, it is difficult not to be moved by these words and this concern for the future.
We are programmed to be optimists; to believe whatever challenges lie ahead we will find the initiative and resources to meet them; to corral the science and develop the technology that forgive our lapses and absolve our indiscretions to allow us to sin another day.
We don’t like gadflies or pessimists that rain on our parade. We don’t like to look back and have little inclination to see ahead. We believe the future will take care of itself. Rearview window thinking dominates.
Against the absurdity of this reality, we have an army of apologists who occupy positions of power and influence, designations described as leadership positions, whose occupants are just as lost as we are. Like the Merry Pied Piper of literary myth, we march to their tune and toward the inevitable void.
It has happened throughout man’s history only the consequences today are light years more consequential. I take heart in that others are saying some of the same things I have been saying for decades, voices that are deeply entrenched in reality and dealing with its absurdity.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM TURNS INTO ALCHEMY
My generation of the Great Depression has ridden this golden tide for 50 years peaking in the 1970s. After WWII, now as a teenager, I would visit my uncle in Detroit who was a professor at the Jesuit University of Detroit, and play baseball with kids whose fathers and mothers worked in the automotive industry. They had fabulous homes and everyone over the age of sixteen had access to an automobile. My uncle was also a consultant with an office in the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit. His secretary, a former UD student, I remember was flush enough to buy a new Cadillac every year.
Automotive working families in this era made as much as Detroit MD’s. They were firmly and stably situated in the economic working middle class. Not a single member of any of these families attended college. Many parents hadn’t finished high school. Nor were any of the boys I played baseball with planning to go to college. They expected to work in the automotive industry beside their parents as skilled or unskilled workers with full benefits and the assurance of retiring on a comfortable pension.
My uncle, who had two Ph.D.’s (psychology and economics), and was head of his department, lived more modestly with much less security. When I asked about the affluence of these autoworkers, he said this was so because the automotive industry was protected from foreign competition under the guise of the US being a “free market economy.”
Another reason for this working class golden age was the more equitable distribution of wealth. After WWII, the CEOs in the automotive industry made only about 30 times the pay and benefits paid to typical automotive workers. By 1968, CEOs were now making about 60 to 70 times as much as the typical worker. This was true across the nation as well as in Detroit.
After the 1970s, manufacturing became a hollow industry in the United States with more and more manufacturing being done abroad, especially in the Far East. At the same time, the “rising sun” of Japan, Inc. was taking a major chunk out of the US economy, especially in the manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, appliances and other quality intensive products.
Panic set in and mahogany row and senior management no longer played to win but not to lose, a strategy that always trumps the practitioner. If any situation defined a moment, it was this. South East Asia was coming into its own as an economic power, and concomitantly, the distribution of wealth in the US commenced its widening separation.
America lost control of its character and with it the US’s competitive advantage. For the next thirty years, the rich would become richer and the poor poorer, and the poor had done nothing wrong. Avner Offer writes in “The Challenge of Affluence” (2007):
“The spread of affluence not only corrupts character, but has caused all these disorders and discontents: family breakdown, stress, road and landscape congestion, obesity, poverty, denial of health care, mental disorder, violence, economic fraud, and insecurity.”
Author Offer cites surveys in which today’s Americans declare themselves unhappier than their parents were. Young people who earlier heeded their elders are now prone to “intoxicating short-term dissipation.” He argues that advertising, by flaunting what we don’t have, is a major cause of this malaise. He continues, “By saturating the public domain with false sincerity, advertising makes genuine sincerity more difficult.”
Throughout history when a nation loses its perspective and confidence, it often goes to war to project its frustration and discontent to regain its momentum. The Vietnam War and its embarrassing conclusion indicate what happens when such plans go awry. It might have been a wake up call that something was wrong in paradise. Instead, it represented a shift from the common good to “personhood,” or from a sense of national and regional cooperation to everyone out for themselves while the getting was good.
Nowhere was this more evident than at the CEO and senior management level (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers: “Something is wrong with this picture,” pp 136 – 142). Massive wealth was created for a few that make the era of the Golden Age of the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century seem timid in comparison.
In 2005, the CEO of Wal-Mart earned 900 times the pay of his average employee. The Wal-Mart family that same year earned about $90 billion. That represents the equivalent of the earning of the bottom 40 percent of the US population; in other words, 120 million people.
The wealth gap now is the widest since the Great Depression of 1929 with 21.2 percent of the national income accruing to 1 percent of earners. The late management guru Peter Drucker was appalled with what he called “predatory corporate capitalism.” He was referring to the obscene salary and perks management bestowed upon itself without any regard to ethical performance criteria. Drucker judged such practices to be blatantly immoral and reminiscent of the robber baron mentality, and a major contributor to the loss of employee loyalty and allegiance (see Corporate Sin, p. 137).
Tony Judt sees this in a wider perspective as the incipient collapse of the core values and institutions of our society. The evidence? Congressional bills are written to private advantage; influential contributors determine the policies of presidential candidates; while individual voters have edged out of the public sphere. Overpaid executives and value obsessed shareholders have tilted the scales to short term growth and profit, obscuring and displacing the broader collective goals and common interests that once bound us together.
Robert Reich sees it differently. In his new book “Supercapitalism” (2007), the former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration claims the superrich are not at fault, CEOs have not become greedy, corporate boards are still highly responsible, and investors are not docile. The question of the “common good” is not relevant on his scales. He argues it isn’t the job of business to be moral. Corporations just do what they do. Technology and self-interest, alone, are deterministic. There are no heroes, no villains, and no one to blame. There is only economic man.
Let’s face it, Reich is saying, we live in an economic age and survival of the fittest is in play. Reich, like Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat 2006), is a technological determinist seeing an integrated system of global capitalism as our ineluctable destiny.
In this context, “growth is good” and “progress is good.” Social class has been rendered anachronistic with economic man filling the void in the worship of productivity. Global warming, pollution, and other expressions of self-indulgent man will be addressed and resolved by technology, have no fear.
The absurdity of this new faith in unimpeded wealth creation is not considered. On the contrary, these technology determinists are confident that more efficiency-induced productivity growth will deliver expanding opportunity, upward mobility, greater happiness and well being, as well as greater affluence and security. In other words, this is a new belief system, which seems quite similar to the old.
Yet, the absurdity of this reality is that the American working middle class has all but disappeared and it has done nothing wrong. Today in 2007, 94 percent of working class Americans earn less than $93,000 a year.
What we have produced in the last 50 years with increased growth is greater social resentment rather than alleviating it; greater fragmentation of society from the nuclear family to the school to the church to the community to the workplace and beyond. We have systematically destroyed what made America great and the envy of the world, a solid working middle class, and applied the wrecking ball of indefinite economic growth to the soul of society. No longer are we clear on what binds us together finding a strange parity in polarity where cooperation once resided.
We have drugs not only in drug cartels or guns on the battlefield, but in the homes and classrooms and playgrounds across the nation, as media report in bold headlines violent and sick behavior in everyday life: spouses killing their partners, parents killing offspring, siblings killing each other, students killing teachers and other students, teachers seducing students, and care givers abusing children. While higher purpose has been lost along the way, terror and murder rage in our cities unchecked and uncontrolled. Our commercial driven society has a hole in it.
What appears behind hard covers in a book (re: Supercapitalism) as sensible economic policy carries, as Tony Judt points out, implicit civic costs. If we have learned nothing from the fall of great societies of the past, we should at least note that neglect of the powerless inevitably sealed their fate. Here Reich tells us only people with jobs are full members of the community. Others are less so and a drain on the economy. There is little room for caring or lifting the lame up when self-interest is the exclusive mantra of civilized society.
Yet no society is healthy or cohesive that lacks a moral compass and moral center with room for everyone whatever their disposition or circumstances.
Tony Judt may not have read, “A Look Back To See Ahead,” but he captures the flavor of it in these remarks:
“But here (reference Reich’s economic policy), as with welfare reform, what purports to represent the future has actually begun to resemble the past, breaking up the public and collective agencies of the modern era into fragmented and privately held assets reminiscent of a much earlier age. With the advent of the modern state, transport, hospitals, schools, mails, armies, prisons, police forces, and affordable access to culture – all of them essential services not obviously well served by the workings of the profit motive – were taken under public regulation or control. They are now being handed back to private entrepreneurs . . . This is just old-fashioned subsidy under another name and a moral hazard, inviting irresponsibility and often corruption.”
Imagine the absurdity of this. Public services are not for profit and all the monies stipulated for a given purpose are meant to go into the design and delivery system. On the other hand, public-private partnerships are for profit operations and must cut cost in the design and delivery in order to accrue a profit. Since budgets for these necessary services at taxpayer expense are seldom adequate in the first place, where can the profit be excised, but at the expense of the function?
The “invisible hand” of the market place may be favorable to commercial operations but it cannot be reproduced with the same success in noncommercial institutions. Here relations and cohesion is the product of trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality and authority. This gives stability and functional security.
People who elect to serve in institutions in a democracy do not have the same sense of efficiency, growth or profit that exists in the private sector, as they are driven by continuity and consistency in the design and delivery of services. There is a clear spiritual dimension to public policy and service.
The English reformer John Stuart Mill was troubled to see a disproportionate of benefits of the private economy going to financial interests at the expense of the majority. He wrote, “I find it essentially repulsive. A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose. The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women.”
So that is the challenge, to recognize and deal with the absurdities of reality.
If you have any doubt, listen to those campaigning in this quadrennial madness of presidential politics. People are experiencing increased economic and physical insecurity: economic with the sub prime real estate fiasco and rising gasoline prices at the pump, and physical with crime in the streets. It finds people with a new appetite for political symbols and territorial imperatives.
There is a rising attraction of protectionism in American politics with the appeal for anti-immigration policies controlled with walls, barriers and tests, forgetting that the economy rides on the backs of many undocumented workers. This hypocrisy and many other conundrums have driven the United States into a Prozac nation.
THE SHRINKING OF AMERICA BACK INTO A PROZAC NATION
“A Look Back To See Ahead” was written to alert readers to the chronic myths that our culture perpetuates, myths we continue to swallow whole no matter how absurd. I stepped back thirty years to surface the drum roll that dominated a paranoid society then, which was perambulating to perdition. I asked readers in the present to make note of this, and to take control of their circumstances with due diligence.
How? By rediscovering that reliable governor from within. I made no attempt to write a definitive book on our consuming mania for drugstore therapy. I did indicate, however, that we were duped a generation ago into believing the 1970s was the “Age of Depression.” Today, soul engineers as advance representatives of pharmaceutical companies tell us this once again. What is bizarre about this is that we have been reduced to a psychological society in which common behavior has become a sickness.
To show you how this works, consider The Oprah Winfrey Show in the summer of 2002. She had Ricky Williams on her show, the Heisman Trophy holder, and an extraordinaire running back with the Miami Dolphins. He was on the show to confess his consuming anxiety, which was shyness. It so happens that the pharmaceutical corporation Glaxo-SmithKline was paying Williams for his appearance, and was in fact pushing its drug Paxil CR as a remedy for this condition.
There is nothing out of the ordinary about this except that most of us naively regard mental disturbances like physical ones with some drug a miraculous cure for them. Pharmaceutical companies know convictions obliterate perceived needs. So, they focus on our convictions and design products identified with them. This should come as no surprise as we manage our health care system with products that will match these convictions. Not convinced? Look at all the cold medicines, headache remedies, energy boosters, and so on. They emanate from and follow our convictions.
Nothing is left to chance. For what we believe ails us a plethora of drugstore products will appear. Major pharmaceutical corporations spend $25 billion worldwide on marketing, and employ an army of Washington lobbyists to see that legislation is passed that is drug company friendly. Drug makers’ power is so disproportionately huge that they even dictate how they are to be regulated. They also shape much of the medical research agenda, and spin the findings of such research in their favor. They conceal incriminating data, co-opt potential critics, and colonize both the minds of doctors and our own.
In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield cite that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2020 depression will become the second leading cause of disability, behind heart disease.
Unfortunately, WHO fails to distinguish major depression from genuine sadness. This is largely due to the influence of pharmaceutical companies who are less interested in answering a need but in turbo charging a conviction, such as depression. It is the tactic of exaggerating the problem and implying medication will easily fix it. Drug makers find there is no place for sadness. If we are in tears at the loss of a loved one, we must be depressed when actually we are dealing naturally with our sadness.
During the past half-century, with such tranquilizers as Miltown and Valium, Americans became convinced that medication would neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt.
Christopher Lane In “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness” (2007) shows how Madison Avenue promoted shyness as a social anxiety disorder and revved it up into a national emergency. With the right regiment of medication the individual yearning to be born again without the nuisance of subscribing to a creed could find his way to drugstore Nirvana.
Valium, some readers may recall, was said not to be addictive, but such promises were dashed when serious neurotic and psychotic episodes became common with its misuse. It was meant to calm anxiety but often led to mental fogginess and dependency.
Meanwhile, Prozac and its cousins were very different. They enhanced alertness and made users feel as if a better self were surfacing. Peter Kramer named this phenomenon, “cosmetic psychopharmacology” in “Listening to Prozac” (1993). Here utopian convictions raced well ahead of drug companies’ most optimistic predictions. America fell in love with Prozac.
By the 1990s not all was well in the Prozac nation. Users were being warned of the possibility of experiencing uncontrollable tremors, diminished sexual capacity, and a growing tolerance that might lead to noxious higher doses, an inclination to suicide, or other self-destructive tendencies.
These warnings were largely ignored, as users were willing to take the risks against the prospects of becoming self-assured and gregarious. As critic Frederick Crews points out, “One thing is certain: the antidepressant makers have exploited our gullibility, obfuscated known risks, and treated the victims of their recklessness with contempt.”
David Healy in “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007) acknowledges the legitimacy of this concern. He is a distinguished researcher and practicing psychiatrist, and has found major pharmaceutical companies close ranks against perceived troublemakers when damaging side effects of prescribed drugs are pointed out. As a psychopharmacologist, he saw drug firms were pushing a simplistic “biobabble” myth where depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established. Healy sees this as no more reasonable than claiming headaches arise from aspirin deprivation.
There is so much myth about the brain and serotonin. The idea that our brain needs a certain amount of serotonin, and when we run out, it’s like running out of gas is nonsense. Contrary to propaganda, the brain possesses no known “depression center,” and about 95 percent of our serotonin is found elsewhere in the body. Prozac, Soloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa – serotonin-boosting pills – are promoted as drugs, which will surely do the trick. Thus millions who might need only counseling expose themselves to these drugs and take incredible risks including horrific withdrawal symptoms, dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation.
“Let Them Eat Prozac” profiles a disturbing development. When a user dies and the bereave file a suit of negligence against the pharmaceutical company, the drug maker’s lawyers parry the suit by explaining the drug-induced stabbing, shooting, or self-hanging by a formerly peaceable individual was actually a manifestation of the not-yet-subdued depressive state of the user.
When Healy attempted to punch holes in this doubletalk by insisting on an extensive double-blind randomized trial to determine causal link to destructive behavior, he was denied a professorship at the University of Toronto Research Institute. Pfizer, maker of Zoloft, is a major supporter of the institute.
Healy further notes that the FDA is timid, understaffed and under funded. Worse yet, drug companies have infiltrated the FDA with friends of the pharmaceutical industry. Even respected medical journals are careful not to offend drug companies as they advertise widely in these journals and fund professional conferences and trade fairs. Then too, leading professors accept huge honorariums in return for venal research, while many “research” papers are actually ghostwritten by company-hired hacks. As Healy puts it, major drug makers don’t bend the rules; they buy the rulebook.
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY
Thirty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted in conferences on what was and wasn’t a mental disease. At the time, members voted that homosexuality was a mental illness. It has since been relegated to a lifestyle. That said the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) doesn’t give an automatic pass to drug makers.
So, can we rely on this guidebook for objective judgment, identification and treatment of mental illnesses?
Christopher Lane is not so sure. He notes that the DSM makes a case for such dubious pathognomonic symptoms of depression as “feeling low, worrying, bearing grudges, and smoking.” This differs little with the original subjective criteria of thirty years ago. In fact, today mental disorders are presented in bingo style and affixed to a patient who fits five out of a possible nine listed symptoms of a specific disorder. Not surprising, drug maker advertisers often use these lists. They tie the DSM checklist to a drug they are promoting asking readers to discuss the use of the drug with their physician.
It is scary when you stop to think about it, but unfortunately, few of us ever stop to do so. We take authority figures at their word. Seldom do we question the motivation of the source of the authority no matter how silly the criteria of the argument.
Advertisers exploit this vulnerability and no place more effectively than in matters of health, happiness and security.
The American Psychiatric Association since the 1970s has not been pushing drugs, but doing everything to lend greater scientific respectability to the psychiatric field. It has attempted to do this by improving validity and reliability in the more accurate identification of mental disorders.
What has happened instead is the APA has made a faint gesture toward this goal through the false concreteness of checklists. Psychologists have done it as well but they don’t have the weapon of prescribing drugs. Only medical doctors, and psychiatrists are medical doctors, have such power.
The reality is that the APA and DSM have attempted to imply that mental disorders are as sharply recognized as diabetes and tuberculosis when they are not. Psychiatrists when they prescribe drugs are often playing Russian roulette with the patient, emphasizing the benefits of a drug while failing to stress the side effects as well.
Attention Deficit Hypertension Disorder (ADHD) is a case in point. There is a whole regiment of drugs prescribed for hyperactive children, the most famous being Ritalin. This is not the approach of the Advent Home in Calhoun, Tennessee (see “Making A Difference Quietly,” www.fisherofideas.com, October 25, 2007).
Dr. Blondel Senior has found that ADHD is often misdiagnosed; that environmentally prompted mood swings, those responding to stress or hardship or sudden loss, create dysfunctional states that are receptive to drug free treatment. How so?
The person is placed in a controlled and reinforcing environment. Boys at the Advent Home receive a large dose of reality in work details, rigorous academic programs, creative pursuits and recreational sports. This is a simple and direct rational health care formula compared to the cumbersome and profit driven system of the APA.
Time will tell if psychiatry can escape bureaucratized psychological treatment, settle on a discrete list of disorders, and become less enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, and approach the success level of Dr. Senior’s Advent Home.
And finally, the reality is that economic man is not a replacement but the complement to social man. Why does it have to be either, or?
While pharmaceutical companies urge us to replace nature with drugs to cope with our shrinking world, their hired promoters would exonerate us from our self-indulgence and economic excess. These apologists would insist that technology and self-interest, not morality, drive postmodern man; that economics is not about ethics but about business. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed, “If people want morality, let them get it from their archbishop.”
They don’t get it! These global capitalists, capricious pharmaceutical companies, and ambivalent psychiatrists, all in leadership positions, are wheeling a wrecking ball at reality, forgetting that there is a common thread that connects us to each other and the same history.
Profits cannot be more important than people nor competition more an expression of humanity than cooperation. The absence of leadership in every endeavor has placed us in this predicament and jeopardy, noting it will change nothing, but it is a beginning.
References: Tony Judt, “The Wrecking Ball of Innovation,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 22-27; Robert Reich, “Supercapitalism” (2007); Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, “The Loss of Sadness” (2007); Christopher Lane, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007); David Healy, “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007); Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, “The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry” (`1992) and “Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders” (1997); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (1995) and “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Making A Difference Quietly” (www.fisherofideas.com, 2007); Frederick Crews, “Talking Back To Prozac,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 10 – 14; Andrew Hacker, “They’d Much Rather Be Rich,” NYR, October 11, 2007; Avner Offer, “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950” (2007); Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, “Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years” (2007); Edward Findlay, “Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in Thought of Jan Patocka (2002); Peter Kramer, “Listening to Prozac” (1993); Thomas Friedman, “The World Is Flat” (1993).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“REALITY: a real event, entity, or state of affairs; the totality of real things and events; something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
“Thanks in large measure to the state-provided public service and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance, the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sense of insecurity and fear that had dominated and polarized political life from 1914 through the early Fifties, and which was largely responsible for the appeal of both fascism and communism in those years.
“But we have good reason to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.”
Tony Judt, Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University
New York Review, December 6, 2007
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Dr. Judt is not an alarmist, far from it. He sees where a half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an “economic age” collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent in our economic calculations, our political practices, and our international strategies, even our educational priorities that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risk and opportunities are without precedence; there is no point in looking back to see ahead.
Judt continues, “Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.” When people count only in terms of statistical validity, and profits carry the day over people, the “soul of the city” flaps like a rag in the wind.
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If over the last half-century, you have had an opportunity to work and live extensively across the globe, and have engaged in a study of human behavior and the workings of institutions, as I have had, it is difficult not to be moved by these words and this concern for the future.
We are programmed to be optimists; to believe whatever challenges lie ahead we will find the initiative and resources to meet them; to corral the science and develop the technology that forgive our lapses and absolve our indiscretions to allow us to sin another day.
We don’t like gadflies or pessimists that rain on our parade. We don’t like to look back and have little inclination to see ahead. We believe the future will take care of itself. Rearview window thinking dominates.
Against the absurdity of this reality, we have an army of apologists who occupy positions of power and influence, designations described as leadership positions, whose occupants are just as lost as we are. Like the Merry Pied Piper of literary myth, we march to their tune and toward the inevitable void.
It has happened throughout man’s history only the consequences today are light years more consequential. I take heart in that others are saying some of the same things I have been saying for decades, voices that are deeply entrenched in reality and dealing with its absurdity.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM TURNS INTO ALCHEMY
My generation of the Great Depression has ridden this golden tide for 50 years peaking in the 1970s. After WWII, now as a teenager, I would visit my uncle in Detroit who was a professor at the Jesuit University of Detroit, and play baseball with kids whose fathers and mothers worked in the automotive industry. They had fabulous homes and everyone over the age of sixteen had access to an automobile. My uncle was also a consultant with an office in the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit. His secretary, a former UD student, I remember was flush enough to buy a new Cadillac every year.
Automotive working families in this era made as much as Detroit MD’s. They were firmly and stably situated in the economic working middle class. Not a single member of any of these families attended college. Many parents hadn’t finished high school. Nor were any of the boys I played baseball with planning to go to college. They expected to work in the automotive industry beside their parents as skilled or unskilled workers with full benefits and the assurance of retiring on a comfortable pension.
My uncle, who had two Ph.D.’s (psychology and economics), and was head of his department, lived more modestly with much less security. When I asked about the affluence of these autoworkers, he said this was so because the automotive industry was protected from foreign competition under the guise of the US being a “free market economy.”
Another reason for this working class golden age was the more equitable distribution of wealth. After WWII, the CEOs in the automotive industry made only about 30 times the pay and benefits paid to typical automotive workers. By 1968, CEOs were now making about 60 to 70 times as much as the typical worker. This was true across the nation as well as in Detroit.
After the 1970s, manufacturing became a hollow industry in the United States with more and more manufacturing being done abroad, especially in the Far East. At the same time, the “rising sun” of Japan, Inc. was taking a major chunk out of the US economy, especially in the manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, appliances and other quality intensive products.
Panic set in and mahogany row and senior management no longer played to win but not to lose, a strategy that always trumps the practitioner. If any situation defined a moment, it was this. South East Asia was coming into its own as an economic power, and concomitantly, the distribution of wealth in the US commenced its widening separation.
America lost control of its character and with it the US’s competitive advantage. For the next thirty years, the rich would become richer and the poor poorer, and the poor had done nothing wrong. Avner Offer writes in “The Challenge of Affluence” (2007):
“The spread of affluence not only corrupts character, but has caused all these disorders and discontents: family breakdown, stress, road and landscape congestion, obesity, poverty, denial of health care, mental disorder, violence, economic fraud, and insecurity.”
Author Offer cites surveys in which today’s Americans declare themselves unhappier than their parents were. Young people who earlier heeded their elders are now prone to “intoxicating short-term dissipation.” He argues that advertising, by flaunting what we don’t have, is a major cause of this malaise. He continues, “By saturating the public domain with false sincerity, advertising makes genuine sincerity more difficult.”
Throughout history when a nation loses its perspective and confidence, it often goes to war to project its frustration and discontent to regain its momentum. The Vietnam War and its embarrassing conclusion indicate what happens when such plans go awry. It might have been a wake up call that something was wrong in paradise. Instead, it represented a shift from the common good to “personhood,” or from a sense of national and regional cooperation to everyone out for themselves while the getting was good.
Nowhere was this more evident than at the CEO and senior management level (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers: “Something is wrong with this picture,” pp 136 – 142). Massive wealth was created for a few that make the era of the Golden Age of the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century seem timid in comparison.
In 2005, the CEO of Wal-Mart earned 900 times the pay of his average employee. The Wal-Mart family that same year earned about $90 billion. That represents the equivalent of the earning of the bottom 40 percent of the US population; in other words, 120 million people.
The wealth gap now is the widest since the Great Depression of 1929 with 21.2 percent of the national income accruing to 1 percent of earners. The late management guru Peter Drucker was appalled with what he called “predatory corporate capitalism.” He was referring to the obscene salary and perks management bestowed upon itself without any regard to ethical performance criteria. Drucker judged such practices to be blatantly immoral and reminiscent of the robber baron mentality, and a major contributor to the loss of employee loyalty and allegiance (see Corporate Sin, p. 137).
Tony Judt sees this in a wider perspective as the incipient collapse of the core values and institutions of our society. The evidence? Congressional bills are written to private advantage; influential contributors determine the policies of presidential candidates; while individual voters have edged out of the public sphere. Overpaid executives and value obsessed shareholders have tilted the scales to short term growth and profit, obscuring and displacing the broader collective goals and common interests that once bound us together.
Robert Reich sees it differently. In his new book “Supercapitalism” (2007), the former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration claims the superrich are not at fault, CEOs have not become greedy, corporate boards are still highly responsible, and investors are not docile. The question of the “common good” is not relevant on his scales. He argues it isn’t the job of business to be moral. Corporations just do what they do. Technology and self-interest, alone, are deterministic. There are no heroes, no villains, and no one to blame. There is only economic man.
Let’s face it, Reich is saying, we live in an economic age and survival of the fittest is in play. Reich, like Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat 2006), is a technological determinist seeing an integrated system of global capitalism as our ineluctable destiny.
In this context, “growth is good” and “progress is good.” Social class has been rendered anachronistic with economic man filling the void in the worship of productivity. Global warming, pollution, and other expressions of self-indulgent man will be addressed and resolved by technology, have no fear.
The absurdity of this new faith in unimpeded wealth creation is not considered. On the contrary, these technology determinists are confident that more efficiency-induced productivity growth will deliver expanding opportunity, upward mobility, greater happiness and well being, as well as greater affluence and security. In other words, this is a new belief system, which seems quite similar to the old.
Yet, the absurdity of this reality is that the American working middle class has all but disappeared and it has done nothing wrong. Today in 2007, 94 percent of working class Americans earn less than $93,000 a year.
What we have produced in the last 50 years with increased growth is greater social resentment rather than alleviating it; greater fragmentation of society from the nuclear family to the school to the church to the community to the workplace and beyond. We have systematically destroyed what made America great and the envy of the world, a solid working middle class, and applied the wrecking ball of indefinite economic growth to the soul of society. No longer are we clear on what binds us together finding a strange parity in polarity where cooperation once resided.
We have drugs not only in drug cartels or guns on the battlefield, but in the homes and classrooms and playgrounds across the nation, as media report in bold headlines violent and sick behavior in everyday life: spouses killing their partners, parents killing offspring, siblings killing each other, students killing teachers and other students, teachers seducing students, and care givers abusing children. While higher purpose has been lost along the way, terror and murder rage in our cities unchecked and uncontrolled. Our commercial driven society has a hole in it.
What appears behind hard covers in a book (re: Supercapitalism) as sensible economic policy carries, as Tony Judt points out, implicit civic costs. If we have learned nothing from the fall of great societies of the past, we should at least note that neglect of the powerless inevitably sealed their fate. Here Reich tells us only people with jobs are full members of the community. Others are less so and a drain on the economy. There is little room for caring or lifting the lame up when self-interest is the exclusive mantra of civilized society.
Yet no society is healthy or cohesive that lacks a moral compass and moral center with room for everyone whatever their disposition or circumstances.
Tony Judt may not have read, “A Look Back To See Ahead,” but he captures the flavor of it in these remarks:
“But here (reference Reich’s economic policy), as with welfare reform, what purports to represent the future has actually begun to resemble the past, breaking up the public and collective agencies of the modern era into fragmented and privately held assets reminiscent of a much earlier age. With the advent of the modern state, transport, hospitals, schools, mails, armies, prisons, police forces, and affordable access to culture – all of them essential services not obviously well served by the workings of the profit motive – were taken under public regulation or control. They are now being handed back to private entrepreneurs . . . This is just old-fashioned subsidy under another name and a moral hazard, inviting irresponsibility and often corruption.”
Imagine the absurdity of this. Public services are not for profit and all the monies stipulated for a given purpose are meant to go into the design and delivery system. On the other hand, public-private partnerships are for profit operations and must cut cost in the design and delivery in order to accrue a profit. Since budgets for these necessary services at taxpayer expense are seldom adequate in the first place, where can the profit be excised, but at the expense of the function?
The “invisible hand” of the market place may be favorable to commercial operations but it cannot be reproduced with the same success in noncommercial institutions. Here relations and cohesion is the product of trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality and authority. This gives stability and functional security.
People who elect to serve in institutions in a democracy do not have the same sense of efficiency, growth or profit that exists in the private sector, as they are driven by continuity and consistency in the design and delivery of services. There is a clear spiritual dimension to public policy and service.
The English reformer John Stuart Mill was troubled to see a disproportionate of benefits of the private economy going to financial interests at the expense of the majority. He wrote, “I find it essentially repulsive. A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose. The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women.”
So that is the challenge, to recognize and deal with the absurdities of reality.
If you have any doubt, listen to those campaigning in this quadrennial madness of presidential politics. People are experiencing increased economic and physical insecurity: economic with the sub prime real estate fiasco and rising gasoline prices at the pump, and physical with crime in the streets. It finds people with a new appetite for political symbols and territorial imperatives.
There is a rising attraction of protectionism in American politics with the appeal for anti-immigration policies controlled with walls, barriers and tests, forgetting that the economy rides on the backs of many undocumented workers. This hypocrisy and many other conundrums have driven the United States into a Prozac nation.
THE SHRINKING OF AMERICA BACK INTO A PROZAC NATION
“A Look Back To See Ahead” was written to alert readers to the chronic myths that our culture perpetuates, myths we continue to swallow whole no matter how absurd. I stepped back thirty years to surface the drum roll that dominated a paranoid society then, which was perambulating to perdition. I asked readers in the present to make note of this, and to take control of their circumstances with due diligence.
How? By rediscovering that reliable governor from within. I made no attempt to write a definitive book on our consuming mania for drugstore therapy. I did indicate, however, that we were duped a generation ago into believing the 1970s was the “Age of Depression.” Today, soul engineers as advance representatives of pharmaceutical companies tell us this once again. What is bizarre about this is that we have been reduced to a psychological society in which common behavior has become a sickness.
To show you how this works, consider The Oprah Winfrey Show in the summer of 2002. She had Ricky Williams on her show, the Heisman Trophy holder, and an extraordinaire running back with the Miami Dolphins. He was on the show to confess his consuming anxiety, which was shyness. It so happens that the pharmaceutical corporation Glaxo-SmithKline was paying Williams for his appearance, and was in fact pushing its drug Paxil CR as a remedy for this condition.
There is nothing out of the ordinary about this except that most of us naively regard mental disturbances like physical ones with some drug a miraculous cure for them. Pharmaceutical companies know convictions obliterate perceived needs. So, they focus on our convictions and design products identified with them. This should come as no surprise as we manage our health care system with products that will match these convictions. Not convinced? Look at all the cold medicines, headache remedies, energy boosters, and so on. They emanate from and follow our convictions.
Nothing is left to chance. For what we believe ails us a plethora of drugstore products will appear. Major pharmaceutical corporations spend $25 billion worldwide on marketing, and employ an army of Washington lobbyists to see that legislation is passed that is drug company friendly. Drug makers’ power is so disproportionately huge that they even dictate how they are to be regulated. They also shape much of the medical research agenda, and spin the findings of such research in their favor. They conceal incriminating data, co-opt potential critics, and colonize both the minds of doctors and our own.
In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield cite that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2020 depression will become the second leading cause of disability, behind heart disease.
Unfortunately, WHO fails to distinguish major depression from genuine sadness. This is largely due to the influence of pharmaceutical companies who are less interested in answering a need but in turbo charging a conviction, such as depression. It is the tactic of exaggerating the problem and implying medication will easily fix it. Drug makers find there is no place for sadness. If we are in tears at the loss of a loved one, we must be depressed when actually we are dealing naturally with our sadness.
During the past half-century, with such tranquilizers as Miltown and Valium, Americans became convinced that medication would neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt.
Christopher Lane In “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness” (2007) shows how Madison Avenue promoted shyness as a social anxiety disorder and revved it up into a national emergency. With the right regiment of medication the individual yearning to be born again without the nuisance of subscribing to a creed could find his way to drugstore Nirvana.
Valium, some readers may recall, was said not to be addictive, but such promises were dashed when serious neurotic and psychotic episodes became common with its misuse. It was meant to calm anxiety but often led to mental fogginess and dependency.
Meanwhile, Prozac and its cousins were very different. They enhanced alertness and made users feel as if a better self were surfacing. Peter Kramer named this phenomenon, “cosmetic psychopharmacology” in “Listening to Prozac” (1993). Here utopian convictions raced well ahead of drug companies’ most optimistic predictions. America fell in love with Prozac.
By the 1990s not all was well in the Prozac nation. Users were being warned of the possibility of experiencing uncontrollable tremors, diminished sexual capacity, and a growing tolerance that might lead to noxious higher doses, an inclination to suicide, or other self-destructive tendencies.
These warnings were largely ignored, as users were willing to take the risks against the prospects of becoming self-assured and gregarious. As critic Frederick Crews points out, “One thing is certain: the antidepressant makers have exploited our gullibility, obfuscated known risks, and treated the victims of their recklessness with contempt.”
David Healy in “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007) acknowledges the legitimacy of this concern. He is a distinguished researcher and practicing psychiatrist, and has found major pharmaceutical companies close ranks against perceived troublemakers when damaging side effects of prescribed drugs are pointed out. As a psychopharmacologist, he saw drug firms were pushing a simplistic “biobabble” myth where depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established. Healy sees this as no more reasonable than claiming headaches arise from aspirin deprivation.
There is so much myth about the brain and serotonin. The idea that our brain needs a certain amount of serotonin, and when we run out, it’s like running out of gas is nonsense. Contrary to propaganda, the brain possesses no known “depression center,” and about 95 percent of our serotonin is found elsewhere in the body. Prozac, Soloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa – serotonin-boosting pills – are promoted as drugs, which will surely do the trick. Thus millions who might need only counseling expose themselves to these drugs and take incredible risks including horrific withdrawal symptoms, dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation.
“Let Them Eat Prozac” profiles a disturbing development. When a user dies and the bereave file a suit of negligence against the pharmaceutical company, the drug maker’s lawyers parry the suit by explaining the drug-induced stabbing, shooting, or self-hanging by a formerly peaceable individual was actually a manifestation of the not-yet-subdued depressive state of the user.
When Healy attempted to punch holes in this doubletalk by insisting on an extensive double-blind randomized trial to determine causal link to destructive behavior, he was denied a professorship at the University of Toronto Research Institute. Pfizer, maker of Zoloft, is a major supporter of the institute.
Healy further notes that the FDA is timid, understaffed and under funded. Worse yet, drug companies have infiltrated the FDA with friends of the pharmaceutical industry. Even respected medical journals are careful not to offend drug companies as they advertise widely in these journals and fund professional conferences and trade fairs. Then too, leading professors accept huge honorariums in return for venal research, while many “research” papers are actually ghostwritten by company-hired hacks. As Healy puts it, major drug makers don’t bend the rules; they buy the rulebook.
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY
Thirty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted in conferences on what was and wasn’t a mental disease. At the time, members voted that homosexuality was a mental illness. It has since been relegated to a lifestyle. That said the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) doesn’t give an automatic pass to drug makers.
So, can we rely on this guidebook for objective judgment, identification and treatment of mental illnesses?
Christopher Lane is not so sure. He notes that the DSM makes a case for such dubious pathognomonic symptoms of depression as “feeling low, worrying, bearing grudges, and smoking.” This differs little with the original subjective criteria of thirty years ago. In fact, today mental disorders are presented in bingo style and affixed to a patient who fits five out of a possible nine listed symptoms of a specific disorder. Not surprising, drug maker advertisers often use these lists. They tie the DSM checklist to a drug they are promoting asking readers to discuss the use of the drug with their physician.
It is scary when you stop to think about it, but unfortunately, few of us ever stop to do so. We take authority figures at their word. Seldom do we question the motivation of the source of the authority no matter how silly the criteria of the argument.
Advertisers exploit this vulnerability and no place more effectively than in matters of health, happiness and security.
The American Psychiatric Association since the 1970s has not been pushing drugs, but doing everything to lend greater scientific respectability to the psychiatric field. It has attempted to do this by improving validity and reliability in the more accurate identification of mental disorders.
What has happened instead is the APA has made a faint gesture toward this goal through the false concreteness of checklists. Psychologists have done it as well but they don’t have the weapon of prescribing drugs. Only medical doctors, and psychiatrists are medical doctors, have such power.
The reality is that the APA and DSM have attempted to imply that mental disorders are as sharply recognized as diabetes and tuberculosis when they are not. Psychiatrists when they prescribe drugs are often playing Russian roulette with the patient, emphasizing the benefits of a drug while failing to stress the side effects as well.
Attention Deficit Hypertension Disorder (ADHD) is a case in point. There is a whole regiment of drugs prescribed for hyperactive children, the most famous being Ritalin. This is not the approach of the Advent Home in Calhoun, Tennessee (see “Making A Difference Quietly,” www.fisherofideas.com, October 25, 2007).
Dr. Blondel Senior has found that ADHD is often misdiagnosed; that environmentally prompted mood swings, those responding to stress or hardship or sudden loss, create dysfunctional states that are receptive to drug free treatment. How so?
The person is placed in a controlled and reinforcing environment. Boys at the Advent Home receive a large dose of reality in work details, rigorous academic programs, creative pursuits and recreational sports. This is a simple and direct rational health care formula compared to the cumbersome and profit driven system of the APA.
Time will tell if psychiatry can escape bureaucratized psychological treatment, settle on a discrete list of disorders, and become less enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, and approach the success level of Dr. Senior’s Advent Home.
And finally, the reality is that economic man is not a replacement but the complement to social man. Why does it have to be either, or?
While pharmaceutical companies urge us to replace nature with drugs to cope with our shrinking world, their hired promoters would exonerate us from our self-indulgence and economic excess. These apologists would insist that technology and self-interest, not morality, drive postmodern man; that economics is not about ethics but about business. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed, “If people want morality, let them get it from their archbishop.”
They don’t get it! These global capitalists, capricious pharmaceutical companies, and ambivalent psychiatrists, all in leadership positions, are wheeling a wrecking ball at reality, forgetting that there is a common thread that connects us to each other and the same history.
Profits cannot be more important than people nor competition more an expression of humanity than cooperation. The absence of leadership in every endeavor has placed us in this predicament and jeopardy, noting it will change nothing, but it is a beginning.
References: Tony Judt, “The Wrecking Ball of Innovation,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 22-27; Robert Reich, “Supercapitalism” (2007); Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, “The Loss of Sadness” (2007); Christopher Lane, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007); David Healy, “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007); Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, “The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry” (`1992) and “Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders” (1997); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (1995) and “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Making A Difference Quietly” (www.fisherofideas.com, 2007); Frederick Crews, “Talking Back To Prozac,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 10 – 14; Andrew Hacker, “They’d Much Rather Be Rich,” NYR, October 11, 2007; Avner Offer, “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950” (2007); Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, “Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years” (2007); Edward Findlay, “Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in Thought of Jan Patocka (2002); Peter Kramer, “Listening to Prozac” (1993); Thomas Friedman, “The World Is Flat” (1993).
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
WHAT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO RETIRE?
WHAT IF YOU DON'T EVER WANT TO RETIRE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
"Folks who never do any more than they get paid for never get paid for any more than they do.”
Albert Hubbard (1859 - 1915), American author
"We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living."
Dean Charles R. Brown (1862 - 1950), American educator
"Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. There is no work so rude, that he may not exalt it; no work so impassive, that he may not breathe a soul into it; no work so dull that he may not enliven it."
Henry Giles (1809 - 1882), American clergyman
"Work is love made visible."
Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931), poet and philosopher from Lebanon
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When I was in my mid-thirties, after completing an assignment in South Africa, drained beyond what I had ever experienced before, and reasonably well off, I decided to retire. I first thought of moving to Spain and becoming a writer, but my wife vetoed that. My four children were too young to have a vote but were amenable to wherever we wished to go. We decided on Florida where my wife's parents lived in Pinellas County on the West coast of the state.
For more than two years I did little more than read, play tennis, and write, producing one book (Confident Selling 1970), which became a national best seller and was in print for twenty years. It seemed so easy as I wrote the book in six weeks, one draft, and sent it to Prentice-Hall in New York without an agent or protocol. It was accepted within two weeks. The book would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies.
It seemed too easy, but it was not the kind of writing I wanted to do. I wanted to write books on ideas of meaning to me and out of my experience. I wrote one on the Roman Catholic Church titled A Plebian View of the Church in Transition: The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out. It has never found a publisher. I wrote a novel called Harry: The Triple Foole the title derived from John Donne's poem. It failed to find a publisher. The Catholic book took eighteen months to write, researching and writing every day, and the novel years on and off.
My next attempt was to find an agent contacting a major New York City firm and telling them of my background and that I had retired to write. I still have the letter in response. It was from the senior partner of the agency, and he stated, "I thought I had experienced everything, and then you come along, a person highly successful, traveling the world, and you stop off it to become a writer. I've never known of a more hare brain idea. My advice is to rush to your family doctor and get help."
This advice was more a surprise than discouragement, but now with the perspective of these many decades I can see his point. I couldn't then. I also know it was a blessing these books were never published. They demonstrate a man in search of himself, uneasy with what society suggested were the staples of success but were meaningless to him, and his sense of being betrayed by his culture, society, church and profession. Nearly forty years later these themes are finding their way into his South Africa novel Green Island In A Black Sea.
After more than two years of this retirement sabbatical with my funds dwindling, and my sense of connection fraying, I didn't go back to work; I went back to school.
Presumably my motivation was to attain a Ph.D., but actually it was to find some answers to my dilemma, which was why the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing, and why duplicity, chicanery, back stabbing, gamesmanship, and endless charades were the constant diet of work at the executive level in the complex organization.
I acquired the Ph.D. after six years of continuous study -- I had to take several under graduate courses because my training was in chemistry not psychology -- and first looked into the possibility of becoming a therapist with a colleague.
But after only short exposure to this, I could see the people that needed help couldn't afford it and those that could afford it were willing to pay to talk to someone who would listen.
I next went into macro-psychology (organizational development) never to consider again micro-psychology (clinical psychology) by having the organization as my client and not the individual.
Remarkably, actually perhaps not, I found the problem was not dissimilar to that initially experienced with individuals in a clinical setting.
Senior management never asked operating personnel, who had the answers, for them. It believed since it possessed the power and the ability to execute at its pleasure it must possess the wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi.
So, for six years while pursuing my Ph.D. studies, I consulted on the side being able to make a living working only twenty weeks a year while going to school full-time year around by simply listening to operating personnel and feeding back their answers to senior management, and often receiving bonuses for the effort. Eventually, I would join a client as an OD psychologist, and work for that high tech firm for ten years again retiring for good in my fifties.
That was seventeen years ago. The irony and the reason I share this with you is that I work harder now than I ever did before, reading and writing every day of the week, and often receive no pay at all.
In fact, if I were to calculate my earnings for this 17-year-period, I would be making the equivalent of workers in the Third World, the difference being that I don't work to make a living I live to work, and will do so until I am unable or should die.
I never found retirement in the flush of my youth that enjoyable, but I have found work that I love a reason for living for the future.
We are in a culture that makes such a big deal about retirement treating work as something we have to do, or something we would rather avoid than do if we could.
My grandson, Ryan, told me the other day that he is bored. When I didn't reply, he asked me, "Are you ever bored?"
I thought for a minute and then answered. "I suppose I once was bored when I was forced to do something that I thought idiotic or wasteful."
He interrupted, "But you said you only listen to your own drummer. How do you explain that?"
I pushed him on the shoulder and said, "Let's play some more basketball."
How do you explain to a grandson without seeming arrogant that your bane of life was that you have never stayed long where that was the case?
He will have to find out for himself that boredom is only a case of not being interested in something and having the courage to pursue it come hell or high water. Most people don't, and look for Nirvana in retirement, when most of their life is over.
The great Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) understood this. He, unfortunately, lived such a short live, but left us a treasure trove of classics (Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped).
He once said, "If a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him."
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Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (Author
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
"Folks who never do any more than they get paid for never get paid for any more than they do.”
Albert Hubbard (1859 - 1915), American author
"We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living."
Dean Charles R. Brown (1862 - 1950), American educator
"Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. There is no work so rude, that he may not exalt it; no work so impassive, that he may not breathe a soul into it; no work so dull that he may not enliven it."
Henry Giles (1809 - 1882), American clergyman
"Work is love made visible."
Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931), poet and philosopher from Lebanon
* * * * * * * * * * *
When I was in my mid-thirties, after completing an assignment in South Africa, drained beyond what I had ever experienced before, and reasonably well off, I decided to retire. I first thought of moving to Spain and becoming a writer, but my wife vetoed that. My four children were too young to have a vote but were amenable to wherever we wished to go. We decided on Florida where my wife's parents lived in Pinellas County on the West coast of the state.
For more than two years I did little more than read, play tennis, and write, producing one book (Confident Selling 1970), which became a national best seller and was in print for twenty years. It seemed so easy as I wrote the book in six weeks, one draft, and sent it to Prentice-Hall in New York without an agent or protocol. It was accepted within two weeks. The book would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies.
It seemed too easy, but it was not the kind of writing I wanted to do. I wanted to write books on ideas of meaning to me and out of my experience. I wrote one on the Roman Catholic Church titled A Plebian View of the Church in Transition: The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out. It has never found a publisher. I wrote a novel called Harry: The Triple Foole the title derived from John Donne's poem. It failed to find a publisher. The Catholic book took eighteen months to write, researching and writing every day, and the novel years on and off.
My next attempt was to find an agent contacting a major New York City firm and telling them of my background and that I had retired to write. I still have the letter in response. It was from the senior partner of the agency, and he stated, "I thought I had experienced everything, and then you come along, a person highly successful, traveling the world, and you stop off it to become a writer. I've never known of a more hare brain idea. My advice is to rush to your family doctor and get help."
This advice was more a surprise than discouragement, but now with the perspective of these many decades I can see his point. I couldn't then. I also know it was a blessing these books were never published. They demonstrate a man in search of himself, uneasy with what society suggested were the staples of success but were meaningless to him, and his sense of being betrayed by his culture, society, church and profession. Nearly forty years later these themes are finding their way into his South Africa novel Green Island In A Black Sea.
After more than two years of this retirement sabbatical with my funds dwindling, and my sense of connection fraying, I didn't go back to work; I went back to school.
Presumably my motivation was to attain a Ph.D., but actually it was to find some answers to my dilemma, which was why the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing, and why duplicity, chicanery, back stabbing, gamesmanship, and endless charades were the constant diet of work at the executive level in the complex organization.
I acquired the Ph.D. after six years of continuous study -- I had to take several under graduate courses because my training was in chemistry not psychology -- and first looked into the possibility of becoming a therapist with a colleague.
But after only short exposure to this, I could see the people that needed help couldn't afford it and those that could afford it were willing to pay to talk to someone who would listen.
I next went into macro-psychology (organizational development) never to consider again micro-psychology (clinical psychology) by having the organization as my client and not the individual.
Remarkably, actually perhaps not, I found the problem was not dissimilar to that initially experienced with individuals in a clinical setting.
Senior management never asked operating personnel, who had the answers, for them. It believed since it possessed the power and the ability to execute at its pleasure it must possess the wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi.
So, for six years while pursuing my Ph.D. studies, I consulted on the side being able to make a living working only twenty weeks a year while going to school full-time year around by simply listening to operating personnel and feeding back their answers to senior management, and often receiving bonuses for the effort. Eventually, I would join a client as an OD psychologist, and work for that high tech firm for ten years again retiring for good in my fifties.
That was seventeen years ago. The irony and the reason I share this with you is that I work harder now than I ever did before, reading and writing every day of the week, and often receive no pay at all.
In fact, if I were to calculate my earnings for this 17-year-period, I would be making the equivalent of workers in the Third World, the difference being that I don't work to make a living I live to work, and will do so until I am unable or should die.
I never found retirement in the flush of my youth that enjoyable, but I have found work that I love a reason for living for the future.
We are in a culture that makes such a big deal about retirement treating work as something we have to do, or something we would rather avoid than do if we could.
My grandson, Ryan, told me the other day that he is bored. When I didn't reply, he asked me, "Are you ever bored?"
I thought for a minute and then answered. "I suppose I once was bored when I was forced to do something that I thought idiotic or wasteful."
He interrupted, "But you said you only listen to your own drummer. How do you explain that?"
I pushed him on the shoulder and said, "Let's play some more basketball."
How do you explain to a grandson without seeming arrogant that your bane of life was that you have never stayed long where that was the case?
He will have to find out for himself that boredom is only a case of not being interested in something and having the courage to pursue it come hell or high water. Most people don't, and look for Nirvana in retirement, when most of their life is over.
The great Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) understood this. He, unfortunately, lived such a short live, but left us a treasure trove of classics (Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped).
He once said, "If a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him."
_______________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (Author
Thursday, November 08, 2007
CONTEXT & CONTENT OF A THINKER & HIS THOUGHTS!
CONTEXT & CONTENT OF A THINKER & HIS THOUGHTS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 7, 2007
“We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egoists in the noblest meaning of the word. It is from them only that the world learns wisdom. For only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), German philosopher
__________
We are all thinkers but too often we accept the thoughts of others as our own feeling they are better qualified because they are better connected, and after all, that is their business, thinking; our business is doing with little time for such luxury.
There is danger in this for the magnitude of such dependence can be more life changing than you can imagine. The Scottish-American educator James McCosh (1811 – 1894) states it well:
“In the end, thought rules the world. There are times when impulses and passions are more powerful, but they soon expend themselves; while mind, acting constantly, is ever ready to drive them back and work when their energy is exhausted.”
McCosh is addressing the context of thinking. We have drifted precariously toward second-hand minds with our mind vat filled with second-class content, largely because our experience is limited.
One of the limits of experience is language.
In my sophomore year in college, I was quite moved with my introduction to Dostoyevsky in “Notes from the Underground” (1864). I was reading him of course in translation. One day I came across an essay by Vladimir Nabokov on this book, and realized I wasn’t reading Dostoyevsky at all but the distortions of the translator.
Nabokov, the author of the popular novel “Lolita” (1959) was born in St. Petersburg and a careful scholar of his native language, Russian. Missing in translation, Nabokov claimed, was Dostoyevsky’s convulsive nervous trembling style, his syntax of frenzied piercing diction and malicious irony mixed with sorrow and despair.
This made perfect sense to me because somehow the book didn’t compute with my mind hungry for purchase in the confusion of youth. After all, I was a chemistry major with a solid foundation in mathematics and science, but no reference point in the dizzy world of literary genius.
That said Dostoyevsky touched cords previously hidden to me. I sensed the madness and the longing for clarity of the narrator in his story, but had no gauge with which to measure either. The context was wrapped in a misleading content in translation, as I was to learn latter reading his other works. He was hinting at the limits of science in labeling man’s perverse rush to sameness against the stupendous force of individuality in his nature. This work serves as an arrow to point the direction of his latter novels and would influence me in my perspective.
Deception is not limited to translation of language.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confesses in his “Journals” (2007) that he purposely left out president Andrew Jackson’s draconian treatment of Native Americans in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, “The Age of Jackson” (1945). He did so to win favor with FDR’s administration and the Democratic Party. This embarrassing chapter in American history with American Indian relations is known as the “trail of tears.” Tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced from their sacred lands and resettled in the Pacific North West. Many died on the way.
Translators are not the only ones who indulge in the practice of safe bland script.
This brings me to an article I read sent to me by a friend, a successful academic and international consultant in organizational development. He was moved to share this upon learning of “The Naples Institute,” a think tank that I was recently invited to join. He found the group’s slogan, “fighting for social justice,” especially inspiring.
To put what follows in context making certain this is no bland script in disguise, I am disclosing up front that my critique of the article was greatly influenced by my state of mind when I wrote it. I say this to illustrate that what is accepted as scholarship or astute observation is often if not always influenced by this frame of reference.
For the past several days I have been in intense pain, a bone or gum pain in my jaw.
Many years ago, my da goes to his dentist complaining of such a gum and bone pain. He is forty-eight-years-old. The dentist examines his gums, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to your physician. I’d like him to take a look at this.”
So, he goes to his family doctor who takes one look at his gums and the x-rays from the dentist, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to a specialist.”
The specialist sees him, takes a biopsy of his sternum, and says, “The results will be sent to your doctor who will then contact you.”
About two weeks later, he finds himself sitting across from his friend and doctor. “Joe,” he says, “how long do I have?”
His doctor, a gentle and kind man, answers, “Ray, it’s a bad actor. We don’t know a lot about it.” Then he takes off his glasses, rubs them clean, puts them back on, and says, “A year, fourteen months at the outside.”
That was late 1957. My da lived fourteen more months with excruciating pain reduced to weighing 65 pounds with every bone in his body collapsing to putty.
He suffered from a bone disease and form of leukemia known as multiple myeloma. It is the same disease that killed Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, in the 1980s.
This past summer when I was in Russia I suffered a terrible gum and bone pain where a molar had been removed. I thought it was the toothpaste on sensitive gums. I changed toothpastes and the pain vanished.
Then this past week the pain came back with a vengeance, so great that I thought I would pass out. I have a capacity to endure pain. It might be associated with the fact of being a lifelong sufferer of migraine headaches, as was the case with my da.
Anyway, when the pain would not let up, I thought of my da, and made an emergency appointment with my dentist, wondering if this would be déjà vu.
At the same time, things were breaking for me. I was invited to be an enrichment lecturer on a culturally oriented cruise liner, asked to participate in a new think tank on leadership, and my books are selling. The world couldn’t look brighter.
My first thought was, God, this is not good timing. Then, I experienced pangs of guilt for procrastinating on my South Africa novel. I felt God was punishing me for this.
My discomfort became incapacitating last Friday. My Beautiful Betty couldn’t get me in for an emergency appointment until last Tuesday, or four days of agony and doomsday thinking.
Once at the dentist’s office, it being an emergency or unscheduled appointment, I had to sit in the waiting room for well over an hour. During that time, I read the article BB had downloaded from my professor friend, and wrote the remarks, which follow.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I have just read an article from the REVIEW OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMICS written by Tim Koechlin and titled “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways.”
Now, this article is actually a review of three books, what the reviewer calls “ambitious books.” The books are Jeffrey Sachs’s “The End of Poverty” (2005), William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” (2002), and Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” (2004).
A colleague of mine sent this article to me. Every time I send him something of my thoughts I can rest assured that he would send me something of his or from someone within his bailiwick. He has such a generous mind, and has done so much but he gives me no indication of whether I make or fail to make sense to him, so I have absolutely no sense of what value my remarks have to him.
When I read someone I don’t think of sending them an article of mine or reference some other’s work, but hit them between the eyes with what I think and feel about what they have to say. If I like it, I tell them and why. If I don’t like it, I tell them why not.
Life is so short. Why do we have to be so devious and self-deceiving? I derive no pleasure in talking about people when they are not present, but I won’t hesitate to tell them how I feel when they are. It has allowed me great freedom this inability to have self-serving tact.
Often, that is the end of it. I never hear from them again. Why doesn’t that bother me? Do I think I am God? My Baltimore Catechism in the first grade informed me that the cruelest loss in the world is never to see God again, to have Him abandon you, cut you off from His light, love and warmth, and leave you out in the cold.
Do I see myself in such terms? What could be more despicable? Is this hiding my insecurity? I think it is. I think I’ve been lying to myself and it is finally catching up with me. Who am I to write and think and act as if what I have to say has any merit? Where is my humility?
These thoughts come to mine after reading this article. It is crafted in Western lies, lies that I know so well because I am well schooled in them. What makes us think Western philosophical thought, Western perception and perspective are superior to that nomad in the desert on his camel wandering across the sand?
Why do we assume that he wants indoor plumbing, air conditioning, chlorinated drinking water, for us to save him from himself?
These books are from the perspective of the “savior” in the bland script of the West even though a native of India writes one.
The authors belch out the statistics:
1. Nearly one-fifth of the world’s population lives in “extreme poverty,” or on less than a dollar a day;
2. Another 1.5 billion live in “moderate poverty,” or on less than two dollars a day.
Let’s give everyone $100 a day, put them in a suburban home with a three car garage and fenced in yard with all the social and economic amenities of Western society, and as a bonus give them our schizophrenic self-indulgent lifestyle and chronic anxiety for free. Have we created a better world with less war, less conflict and less social injustice? I don’t think so.
If there is anything I’ve learned in my long life, it is that you can’t see the problem clearly from the outside in, and you are never going to see the problem from the inside out because you are not “them” and they are not “you.”
Sachs in “The End of Poverty” argues that “extreme poverty” is as a rule a consequence of factors beyond the control of the poor and their government. Now, how does that sound if you are that nomad on that camel wandering across the desert?
What’s more, he sees people sullied with “extreme poverty” as experiencing an impediment to prosperity, that wonderful word of the West, “prosperity,” how it has become our god and the answer to all dilemmas. It is the Holy Grail to health, wealth and happiness.
Precisely, how does Sachs’s see this impediment?
He sees it in terms of an ungenerous climate and physical landscape, debt, overpopulation, and political and social unrest. That is the “disease” in his book, failing to realize the people he would “save” has survived tens of thousands of years in this climate. It has been the imposition of the West and its mania for prosperity that has sunk them into the despair of the Western disease. Then Sachs goes on to see “extreme poverty” a consequence of corruption, ill-advised government policies, backward cultural practices, bad choices, and bad incentives.
I find it incredible that this learned man, this superstar of academia (he was a full professor at Harvard at age 29), who is sought after by such "do gooder" celebrities as Angelina Jolie and Bono, and such bleeding heart liberals as George Soros, and ineffective leaders such as the UN’s Kofi Annan cannot see the arrogance of his zeal. My wonder is this how he directs Columbia University’s Earth Institute, or acts as an advocate of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Somehow I don’t think making the world into our image and likeness is the answer.
William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” is appropriately titled, as his quest is anything if not elusive. A professor of economics at New York University after a long career at the World Bank, he tells a slightly different story about development and poverty in his book.
Easterly doesn’t see the problem a shortage of aid but a shortage of incentives. Reading the quotations from this work I am reminded of how ineffective “incentives” have been for American enterprise. I give page, chapter and book on the subject of incentives in “Six Silent Killers” (1998), showing that incentives have too often killed initiative only to generate passive and counterdependent workers. But wait! Easterly sees there are “good” and “bad” incentives.
Bad incentives are aid, credit and debt forgiveness. They discourage saving, investment and growth, while encouraging corruption, rent seeking and counterproductive government policies. So far we are on the same page. Then he says a curious thing: education provides little payoff for the typical citizen in a poor country because once he becomes educated he moves on to greener pastures in some Western country.
Unfortunately, the author of this article goes on and on about “right incentives” without giving a single clue what Easterly proposes they are. He covers his tracks as a reviewer by saying this: “Easterly’s conclusions are essentially an elaboration of the basic principle that people respond to incentives rather than an elaboration of his particular understanding of the world. The alleviation of poverty requires growth, and growth requires that we get the incentives right.” Say again?
These great social thinkers are something else. It is a little like Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think therefore I am.” Only Easterly says, “If we have the incentives right, development will happen.” Do you ever wonder why Third World people think we have a screw loose?
Where Easterly is on safe turf is when he insists that the poor fall into vicious cycles of cumulative poverty and stagnation where there are low concentrations of capital, skill and knowledge.
Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society, this phenomenon is perpetuated because capital doesn’t go where there is the promise of a low rate of return on investment.
Thus the dilemma, history has proven the answer is not in socialism or communism, or for that matter totalitarianism of any hue, so capitalism is there to fill the void, or is it? Easterly says, and I think rightly, that people who live among people with few skills are less likely to make the sacrifices necessary to accumulate knowledge and skills because the expected payoff is low. So, he catches me back in his incentive net, or does he?
Remember the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith used to explain how markets encourage people to act in a given fashion, and that efficiency and satisfaction grow out of the sense of well being that is consistent with how people see themselves. Smith called this “self-interest.”
I think that nomad on the camel is operating as he perceives self-interest, selling his sparse wears in the tourist marketplace, but not wanting to abandon his lifestyle for Western ways because he is told it is better for his health and well being. What the Western mind conceives as “extreme poverty” or “moderate poverty” is itself a poverty trap because it views the problem from Western eyes and a Western mindset. When we take the desert away from the nomad, when we play havoc with his water holes through climate change, and stream pollution, when the animals that feed him disappear, and when he is seen as ignorant because he lacks Western skills, then we are, indeed, in a poverty trap, not his, but our own.
Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” attempts to rescue the Western mind from the poverty trap. He sees the answer in globalization.
Globalization is seen through the eyes of a true believer. It is good for the body and soul. It is the Holy Grail. It is good for workers in rich and poor nations; good for women as well as men; good for the poor, good for children and good for immigrants.
Corporate God is withdrawing his punishment of Adam and Eve and opening the gates of Paradise to everyone.
Globalization is therefore good for the environment; good for democracies; and provides new cultural opportunities for all. Multinational corporations are good; free trade agreements are good; sweatshops are good. Globalization represents a direction along a continuum not of two or more possibilities but of an all encompassing one.
Bhagwati cuts through everything with Occam’s razor. The simplest definition of the problem is the most reasonable one to accept. International trade and investment promote higher incomes; higher incomes create better opportunities for everyone – the poor, women, children, wageworkers, peasants and government.
He reminds the reader of Adam Smith’s most powerful insight; the selfish pursuit of profit can promote the greater good. Somehow I don’t feel this has much truck with the nomad and his camel.
To suggest Bhagwati’s scheme as madness personified would earn you the tag of being an antiglobalist, a know nothing ignoramus, a nihilist and liar, an immoral person, a devil worshiper.
Perhaps “radical political economics” is a fitting name for this august publication. In a curious way, I have found in reading this piece some measure of how I must sound at times. I wonder if these authors have the same sense. I hope so. We that write have good intentions but sometimes it is best to give us a pass.
Author Sachs reminds me of the pyramid climbers in corpocracy. Climbing the ladder of academia doesn’t seem a lot different from those executive climbers that I rubbed elbows with for so many years, filling all the right boxes to win membership in the club’s next tier higher.
Easterly seems lost in his own confusion, a place I’ve been so I have empathy for his predicament.
Ghagwati’s certainty is another matter. He is the most dangerous because he is no longer in a state of discovery. He has arrived. He believes he has found the answer whereas the other two authors are fairly aware they are skating on thin ice sensing that at any time they could be up to their necks in icy water. Not Ghamati, for him the pond is six inches thick with ice safe enough to drive a tank over.
My wonder is if it ever occurs to these authors that impoverishment is a relative word and not an index of societal existence; that not everyone wants to live in a city, work in a factory, have a posh home in the suburbs, or be immersed in Western culture.
Most of us like to be left alone to our own miseries and designs, which might include living miles from anyone else, or living close to nature with all its hardships and demands in an unforgiving climate. We have become weary of social engineers who would fix us, and this goes double for people outside the Western experience.
Does it ever occur to social engineers that their designs are what have impoverished people by bleeding the land of its rich resources and leaving lakes and river to dry up, and the air these impoverished people are forced to breathe filled with pollutants; that progress is the great impoverishing mechanism of all?
Then ask yourself what gave birth to the januweed, to these renegade bandits on horseback who rape and pillage and burn the humble villages of nomads on camels with impunity? Or who sponsors the corrupt politicians that allow the West to take the rich resources from the earth, and then look the other way when payment never reaches the people?
It is a travesty and tragedy when this is allowed which rips the soul from the heart. Colonialism disgusted me when I experienced it in South America and South Africa. “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways” doesn’t disgust me because I know these authors are well meaning. It saddens me nonetheless because it reminds me what a mess we have made of the Third World by trying to save it from itself. The medical term comes to mine, iatrogenic, the cure is worse than the disease.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Finally, the hygienist said my dentist could see me. I looked at my watch. I had been reading and writing for 72 minutes.
The hygienist takes two x-rays; another wait follows of fifteen minutes. I am too nervous to read my notes. I had spent the previous evening checking google and had found 61 different cancers that described such bone pain. I thought what a wonderful life I have had, how BB has made it so complete and fulfilling, and then the dentist was there.
It wasn’t my dentist, whom I learned was moving to Virginia, but a pleasant looking fortyish woman who introduced herself, and then said, “Let’s have a look at your mouth.”
I thought my heart would stop. Such an innocuous statement, one I’ve heard often and in the same words.
“As I thought,” she said, but not to me, but to the hygienist.
“You have one of your roots on molar #21 that is infected, and it has leaked a great deal of infection into the bone cavity where molar #22 had been. You have quite an abscessed tooth. Are you in a lot of pain?”
Am I in a lot of pain? I had been and was up to that point, but now I was experiencing no pain at all. I was delirious with relief. ‘I have an abscessed tooth, not leukemia,’ I wanted to jump up and hug her but I was strapped in.
“You have to have a root canal and then a new crown put on that tooth.”
What beautiful words. I found my head nodding, and yes, right away, I’ll do it right away, stuttering as I do when I am excited. She was clearly taken back by this response.
“Well,” she said, “the hygienist will take your chart up front and make arrangements, nice meeting you.” And she was gone, on to her next patient.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 7, 2007
“We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egoists in the noblest meaning of the word. It is from them only that the world learns wisdom. For only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), German philosopher
__________
We are all thinkers but too often we accept the thoughts of others as our own feeling they are better qualified because they are better connected, and after all, that is their business, thinking; our business is doing with little time for such luxury.
There is danger in this for the magnitude of such dependence can be more life changing than you can imagine. The Scottish-American educator James McCosh (1811 – 1894) states it well:
“In the end, thought rules the world. There are times when impulses and passions are more powerful, but they soon expend themselves; while mind, acting constantly, is ever ready to drive them back and work when their energy is exhausted.”
McCosh is addressing the context of thinking. We have drifted precariously toward second-hand minds with our mind vat filled with second-class content, largely because our experience is limited.
One of the limits of experience is language.
In my sophomore year in college, I was quite moved with my introduction to Dostoyevsky in “Notes from the Underground” (1864). I was reading him of course in translation. One day I came across an essay by Vladimir Nabokov on this book, and realized I wasn’t reading Dostoyevsky at all but the distortions of the translator.
Nabokov, the author of the popular novel “Lolita” (1959) was born in St. Petersburg and a careful scholar of his native language, Russian. Missing in translation, Nabokov claimed, was Dostoyevsky’s convulsive nervous trembling style, his syntax of frenzied piercing diction and malicious irony mixed with sorrow and despair.
This made perfect sense to me because somehow the book didn’t compute with my mind hungry for purchase in the confusion of youth. After all, I was a chemistry major with a solid foundation in mathematics and science, but no reference point in the dizzy world of literary genius.
That said Dostoyevsky touched cords previously hidden to me. I sensed the madness and the longing for clarity of the narrator in his story, but had no gauge with which to measure either. The context was wrapped in a misleading content in translation, as I was to learn latter reading his other works. He was hinting at the limits of science in labeling man’s perverse rush to sameness against the stupendous force of individuality in his nature. This work serves as an arrow to point the direction of his latter novels and would influence me in my perspective.
Deception is not limited to translation of language.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confesses in his “Journals” (2007) that he purposely left out president Andrew Jackson’s draconian treatment of Native Americans in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, “The Age of Jackson” (1945). He did so to win favor with FDR’s administration and the Democratic Party. This embarrassing chapter in American history with American Indian relations is known as the “trail of tears.” Tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced from their sacred lands and resettled in the Pacific North West. Many died on the way.
Translators are not the only ones who indulge in the practice of safe bland script.
This brings me to an article I read sent to me by a friend, a successful academic and international consultant in organizational development. He was moved to share this upon learning of “The Naples Institute,” a think tank that I was recently invited to join. He found the group’s slogan, “fighting for social justice,” especially inspiring.
To put what follows in context making certain this is no bland script in disguise, I am disclosing up front that my critique of the article was greatly influenced by my state of mind when I wrote it. I say this to illustrate that what is accepted as scholarship or astute observation is often if not always influenced by this frame of reference.
For the past several days I have been in intense pain, a bone or gum pain in my jaw.
Many years ago, my da goes to his dentist complaining of such a gum and bone pain. He is forty-eight-years-old. The dentist examines his gums, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to your physician. I’d like him to take a look at this.”
So, he goes to his family doctor who takes one look at his gums and the x-rays from the dentist, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to a specialist.”
The specialist sees him, takes a biopsy of his sternum, and says, “The results will be sent to your doctor who will then contact you.”
About two weeks later, he finds himself sitting across from his friend and doctor. “Joe,” he says, “how long do I have?”
His doctor, a gentle and kind man, answers, “Ray, it’s a bad actor. We don’t know a lot about it.” Then he takes off his glasses, rubs them clean, puts them back on, and says, “A year, fourteen months at the outside.”
That was late 1957. My da lived fourteen more months with excruciating pain reduced to weighing 65 pounds with every bone in his body collapsing to putty.
He suffered from a bone disease and form of leukemia known as multiple myeloma. It is the same disease that killed Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, in the 1980s.
This past summer when I was in Russia I suffered a terrible gum and bone pain where a molar had been removed. I thought it was the toothpaste on sensitive gums. I changed toothpastes and the pain vanished.
Then this past week the pain came back with a vengeance, so great that I thought I would pass out. I have a capacity to endure pain. It might be associated with the fact of being a lifelong sufferer of migraine headaches, as was the case with my da.
Anyway, when the pain would not let up, I thought of my da, and made an emergency appointment with my dentist, wondering if this would be déjà vu.
At the same time, things were breaking for me. I was invited to be an enrichment lecturer on a culturally oriented cruise liner, asked to participate in a new think tank on leadership, and my books are selling. The world couldn’t look brighter.
My first thought was, God, this is not good timing. Then, I experienced pangs of guilt for procrastinating on my South Africa novel. I felt God was punishing me for this.
My discomfort became incapacitating last Friday. My Beautiful Betty couldn’t get me in for an emergency appointment until last Tuesday, or four days of agony and doomsday thinking.
Once at the dentist’s office, it being an emergency or unscheduled appointment, I had to sit in the waiting room for well over an hour. During that time, I read the article BB had downloaded from my professor friend, and wrote the remarks, which follow.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I have just read an article from the REVIEW OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMICS written by Tim Koechlin and titled “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways.”
Now, this article is actually a review of three books, what the reviewer calls “ambitious books.” The books are Jeffrey Sachs’s “The End of Poverty” (2005), William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” (2002), and Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” (2004).
A colleague of mine sent this article to me. Every time I send him something of my thoughts I can rest assured that he would send me something of his or from someone within his bailiwick. He has such a generous mind, and has done so much but he gives me no indication of whether I make or fail to make sense to him, so I have absolutely no sense of what value my remarks have to him.
When I read someone I don’t think of sending them an article of mine or reference some other’s work, but hit them between the eyes with what I think and feel about what they have to say. If I like it, I tell them and why. If I don’t like it, I tell them why not.
Life is so short. Why do we have to be so devious and self-deceiving? I derive no pleasure in talking about people when they are not present, but I won’t hesitate to tell them how I feel when they are. It has allowed me great freedom this inability to have self-serving tact.
Often, that is the end of it. I never hear from them again. Why doesn’t that bother me? Do I think I am God? My Baltimore Catechism in the first grade informed me that the cruelest loss in the world is never to see God again, to have Him abandon you, cut you off from His light, love and warmth, and leave you out in the cold.
Do I see myself in such terms? What could be more despicable? Is this hiding my insecurity? I think it is. I think I’ve been lying to myself and it is finally catching up with me. Who am I to write and think and act as if what I have to say has any merit? Where is my humility?
These thoughts come to mine after reading this article. It is crafted in Western lies, lies that I know so well because I am well schooled in them. What makes us think Western philosophical thought, Western perception and perspective are superior to that nomad in the desert on his camel wandering across the sand?
Why do we assume that he wants indoor plumbing, air conditioning, chlorinated drinking water, for us to save him from himself?
These books are from the perspective of the “savior” in the bland script of the West even though a native of India writes one.
The authors belch out the statistics:
1. Nearly one-fifth of the world’s population lives in “extreme poverty,” or on less than a dollar a day;
2. Another 1.5 billion live in “moderate poverty,” or on less than two dollars a day.
Let’s give everyone $100 a day, put them in a suburban home with a three car garage and fenced in yard with all the social and economic amenities of Western society, and as a bonus give them our schizophrenic self-indulgent lifestyle and chronic anxiety for free. Have we created a better world with less war, less conflict and less social injustice? I don’t think so.
If there is anything I’ve learned in my long life, it is that you can’t see the problem clearly from the outside in, and you are never going to see the problem from the inside out because you are not “them” and they are not “you.”
Sachs in “The End of Poverty” argues that “extreme poverty” is as a rule a consequence of factors beyond the control of the poor and their government. Now, how does that sound if you are that nomad on that camel wandering across the desert?
What’s more, he sees people sullied with “extreme poverty” as experiencing an impediment to prosperity, that wonderful word of the West, “prosperity,” how it has become our god and the answer to all dilemmas. It is the Holy Grail to health, wealth and happiness.
Precisely, how does Sachs’s see this impediment?
He sees it in terms of an ungenerous climate and physical landscape, debt, overpopulation, and political and social unrest. That is the “disease” in his book, failing to realize the people he would “save” has survived tens of thousands of years in this climate. It has been the imposition of the West and its mania for prosperity that has sunk them into the despair of the Western disease. Then Sachs goes on to see “extreme poverty” a consequence of corruption, ill-advised government policies, backward cultural practices, bad choices, and bad incentives.
I find it incredible that this learned man, this superstar of academia (he was a full professor at Harvard at age 29), who is sought after by such "do gooder" celebrities as Angelina Jolie and Bono, and such bleeding heart liberals as George Soros, and ineffective leaders such as the UN’s Kofi Annan cannot see the arrogance of his zeal. My wonder is this how he directs Columbia University’s Earth Institute, or acts as an advocate of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Somehow I don’t think making the world into our image and likeness is the answer.
William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” is appropriately titled, as his quest is anything if not elusive. A professor of economics at New York University after a long career at the World Bank, he tells a slightly different story about development and poverty in his book.
Easterly doesn’t see the problem a shortage of aid but a shortage of incentives. Reading the quotations from this work I am reminded of how ineffective “incentives” have been for American enterprise. I give page, chapter and book on the subject of incentives in “Six Silent Killers” (1998), showing that incentives have too often killed initiative only to generate passive and counterdependent workers. But wait! Easterly sees there are “good” and “bad” incentives.
Bad incentives are aid, credit and debt forgiveness. They discourage saving, investment and growth, while encouraging corruption, rent seeking and counterproductive government policies. So far we are on the same page. Then he says a curious thing: education provides little payoff for the typical citizen in a poor country because once he becomes educated he moves on to greener pastures in some Western country.
Unfortunately, the author of this article goes on and on about “right incentives” without giving a single clue what Easterly proposes they are. He covers his tracks as a reviewer by saying this: “Easterly’s conclusions are essentially an elaboration of the basic principle that people respond to incentives rather than an elaboration of his particular understanding of the world. The alleviation of poverty requires growth, and growth requires that we get the incentives right.” Say again?
These great social thinkers are something else. It is a little like Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think therefore I am.” Only Easterly says, “If we have the incentives right, development will happen.” Do you ever wonder why Third World people think we have a screw loose?
Where Easterly is on safe turf is when he insists that the poor fall into vicious cycles of cumulative poverty and stagnation where there are low concentrations of capital, skill and knowledge.
Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society, this phenomenon is perpetuated because capital doesn’t go where there is the promise of a low rate of return on investment.
Thus the dilemma, history has proven the answer is not in socialism or communism, or for that matter totalitarianism of any hue, so capitalism is there to fill the void, or is it? Easterly says, and I think rightly, that people who live among people with few skills are less likely to make the sacrifices necessary to accumulate knowledge and skills because the expected payoff is low. So, he catches me back in his incentive net, or does he?
Remember the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith used to explain how markets encourage people to act in a given fashion, and that efficiency and satisfaction grow out of the sense of well being that is consistent with how people see themselves. Smith called this “self-interest.”
I think that nomad on the camel is operating as he perceives self-interest, selling his sparse wears in the tourist marketplace, but not wanting to abandon his lifestyle for Western ways because he is told it is better for his health and well being. What the Western mind conceives as “extreme poverty” or “moderate poverty” is itself a poverty trap because it views the problem from Western eyes and a Western mindset. When we take the desert away from the nomad, when we play havoc with his water holes through climate change, and stream pollution, when the animals that feed him disappear, and when he is seen as ignorant because he lacks Western skills, then we are, indeed, in a poverty trap, not his, but our own.
Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” attempts to rescue the Western mind from the poverty trap. He sees the answer in globalization.
Globalization is seen through the eyes of a true believer. It is good for the body and soul. It is the Holy Grail. It is good for workers in rich and poor nations; good for women as well as men; good for the poor, good for children and good for immigrants.
Corporate God is withdrawing his punishment of Adam and Eve and opening the gates of Paradise to everyone.
Globalization is therefore good for the environment; good for democracies; and provides new cultural opportunities for all. Multinational corporations are good; free trade agreements are good; sweatshops are good. Globalization represents a direction along a continuum not of two or more possibilities but of an all encompassing one.
Bhagwati cuts through everything with Occam’s razor. The simplest definition of the problem is the most reasonable one to accept. International trade and investment promote higher incomes; higher incomes create better opportunities for everyone – the poor, women, children, wageworkers, peasants and government.
He reminds the reader of Adam Smith’s most powerful insight; the selfish pursuit of profit can promote the greater good. Somehow I don’t feel this has much truck with the nomad and his camel.
To suggest Bhagwati’s scheme as madness personified would earn you the tag of being an antiglobalist, a know nothing ignoramus, a nihilist and liar, an immoral person, a devil worshiper.
Perhaps “radical political economics” is a fitting name for this august publication. In a curious way, I have found in reading this piece some measure of how I must sound at times. I wonder if these authors have the same sense. I hope so. We that write have good intentions but sometimes it is best to give us a pass.
Author Sachs reminds me of the pyramid climbers in corpocracy. Climbing the ladder of academia doesn’t seem a lot different from those executive climbers that I rubbed elbows with for so many years, filling all the right boxes to win membership in the club’s next tier higher.
Easterly seems lost in his own confusion, a place I’ve been so I have empathy for his predicament.
Ghagwati’s certainty is another matter. He is the most dangerous because he is no longer in a state of discovery. He has arrived. He believes he has found the answer whereas the other two authors are fairly aware they are skating on thin ice sensing that at any time they could be up to their necks in icy water. Not Ghamati, for him the pond is six inches thick with ice safe enough to drive a tank over.
My wonder is if it ever occurs to these authors that impoverishment is a relative word and not an index of societal existence; that not everyone wants to live in a city, work in a factory, have a posh home in the suburbs, or be immersed in Western culture.
Most of us like to be left alone to our own miseries and designs, which might include living miles from anyone else, or living close to nature with all its hardships and demands in an unforgiving climate. We have become weary of social engineers who would fix us, and this goes double for people outside the Western experience.
Does it ever occur to social engineers that their designs are what have impoverished people by bleeding the land of its rich resources and leaving lakes and river to dry up, and the air these impoverished people are forced to breathe filled with pollutants; that progress is the great impoverishing mechanism of all?
Then ask yourself what gave birth to the januweed, to these renegade bandits on horseback who rape and pillage and burn the humble villages of nomads on camels with impunity? Or who sponsors the corrupt politicians that allow the West to take the rich resources from the earth, and then look the other way when payment never reaches the people?
It is a travesty and tragedy when this is allowed which rips the soul from the heart. Colonialism disgusted me when I experienced it in South America and South Africa. “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways” doesn’t disgust me because I know these authors are well meaning. It saddens me nonetheless because it reminds me what a mess we have made of the Third World by trying to save it from itself. The medical term comes to mine, iatrogenic, the cure is worse than the disease.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Finally, the hygienist said my dentist could see me. I looked at my watch. I had been reading and writing for 72 minutes.
The hygienist takes two x-rays; another wait follows of fifteen minutes. I am too nervous to read my notes. I had spent the previous evening checking google and had found 61 different cancers that described such bone pain. I thought what a wonderful life I have had, how BB has made it so complete and fulfilling, and then the dentist was there.
It wasn’t my dentist, whom I learned was moving to Virginia, but a pleasant looking fortyish woman who introduced herself, and then said, “Let’s have a look at your mouth.”
I thought my heart would stop. Such an innocuous statement, one I’ve heard often and in the same words.
“As I thought,” she said, but not to me, but to the hygienist.
“You have one of your roots on molar #21 that is infected, and it has leaked a great deal of infection into the bone cavity where molar #22 had been. You have quite an abscessed tooth. Are you in a lot of pain?”
Am I in a lot of pain? I had been and was up to that point, but now I was experiencing no pain at all. I was delirious with relief. ‘I have an abscessed tooth, not leukemia,’ I wanted to jump up and hug her but I was strapped in.
“You have to have a root canal and then a new crown put on that tooth.”
What beautiful words. I found my head nodding, and yes, right away, I’ll do it right away, stuttering as I do when I am excited. She was clearly taken back by this response.
“Well,” she said, “the hygienist will take your chart up front and make arrangements, nice meeting you.” And she was gone, on to her next patient.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007).
Friday, November 02, 2007
EDUCATION, THE FACTORY OF OUR LIVES!
EDUCATION, THE FACTORY OF OUR LIVES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
"Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and at the same time cuts the sinews at the wrists."
H. L. Wayland (1796 - 1865), American educator
"I may safely predict that the education of the future will be inventive-minded. It will believe so profoundly in the high value of the inventive or creative spirit that it will set itself to develop that spirit by all means within its power."
Harry A. Overstreet, The Mind Alive (1954)
* * * * * * * * * * *
It was bound to happen sooner rather than later that some researcher would study American education and conclude that it is little more than a factory, and that this factory of education is in trouble.
More than fifty years ago, the entering class with me my freshman year had 30 percent less students my sophomore year than started with me, and when it came time to graduate it had been reduced by another 30 percent, or around 40 percent actual stood the course of the four years to graduate.
Now, that was off the radar of public concern for many reasons. A college education was then something of a novelty for many of us of working class families. So, if we failed, it was no big deal.
Virtually everyone with a high school diploma from an Iowa high school was immediately eligible for acceptance into one of the land grant state institutions.
To give you a sense of the times, the US Selective Service Military Draft was on and many were pulled out of the university and drafted into the US Army to fight in the police action that never became a declared war known as "the Korean War."
Only six years before or 1945, WWII had ended and anyone that wanted a good job with only a high school education or less was set for the pickings. Indeed, in cities such as Detroit and Chicago nearby, you could get a good job without a diploma. You might find yourself working beside your mother or father, uncle or aunt, or even grandparents.
The factory became a cradle to grave economic institution especially for the "Big Three" in the automotive industry. My uncle was a professor at the University of Detroit in Detroit, and I saw this first hand as a boy, visiting him every summer, and playing baseball with kids from such families. They all had better homes than doctors in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, and few of their parents had finished high school.
It wasn't until the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 that all hell broke loose and education became totally a vocational experience from grammar school to high school and through college. The new math was born and the frantic of panic invaded education.
We had to compete with the Russians and we had to produce soldiers of the mind that were technically programmed to produce a finished product that could compete with and then surpass the Russians.
The purely intellectual aim of education to endeavor to make us see and imagine the world as it is without the distorting programming of a specific end product got lost in the shuffle.
Education, which at one time was the true analgesic to certain diseases the modern world engendered, such as stress and anxiety, has lost sight of the diseases so that all remedies are now superfluous.
So, it should come as little surprise that a Johns Hopkins University researcher, Bob Balfanz, has come to find U.S. high schools "dropout factories" and source of the social-cultural problem of our time.
In his study of 1,700 regular and vocational high schools nationwide, he found only 60 percent of the freshman classes graduated. In my state of Florida, it is less than 50 percent. I live in Hillsborough County, Florida where ten high schools are listed as "dropout factories."
What is not surprising but which has become typical of such studies is that there is much data on what and who but a shortage of data on why or the nature of the disease.
The study suggests the culprit being the draconian demands of testing, the concentration of students in metropolitan areas with large minority populations, poor tracking of racial, ethnic and other subgroups, and the lack of vigilance to the husbanding of such statistics.
The answers or solutions he proposes are ironic because they have the ring of the modern factory mentality:
· Make high schools report graduation rates.
· Get states to build data system to track students.
· Make states count graduation rates in a systematic and uniform way.
· Create progress reports.
We have had the program of "No Child Left Behind," and we have had our Florida schools from grammar through high school rate on an "A through F" scale, with those with "A" ratings receiving positive funding, and those with "F" ratings being punished with funding withheld, when clearly it might be best to have it the other way around, but that does not fit our factory mentality programming of motivating for positive performance through incentives.
Incentives, as I point out in my book "Work Without Managers" (1990), have driven workers from a culture of comfort to a culture of complacency in the workplace, bypassing the culture of contribution. Why should it be any different in the classroom?
We still believe, and this is the factory mentality oozing out of our pores, that you can legislate passion and morality with the appropriate programming, when clearly we continue to fail on both fronts over and over and over again.
The spark of curiosity is in the soul of every child as it embraces its environment. Why is this so often killed before it takes a hold on a nascent life?
The student is not a box to fill with goodies. The student is a person with a soul and potential to approach the essence of his or her possibilities. This does not make us equal. This makes us unique. There is no satisfaction greater than finding the spark to energize our potential and then discover some small victory which has nothing to do with anyone else, but engenders the pure pleasure of feeling alive and good about ourselves. Everyone is born with this, but not everyone reaches consciousness before it expires.
We have lost the foundation of what it is to be educated in the liberal tradition. This has been understood more or less since the time of Aristotle. Education is not primarily utilitarian or sentimental; education is to be open to life in the pursuit of building a moral and responsible character. Edmund Burke stated it bluntly, "Education is the cheap defense of nations."
American high schools have become dropout factories because education has produced corporate soldiers that are programmed to march to the corporate song, and most students do not want to join that army or rat race. It is a terrible thing to see the problem of education reduced to being the student's fault or simply the failure of administrivia to track the product of its purpose with more acumen.
Why do you think students are bored in school? School has become boring. Teachers enter a war zones where survival from day to day is the most accomplished task of their purpose. Emerson said, "The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil," but what about the student respecting the teacher?
Emerson was speaking of the nineteenth century when the classroom was not a combat zone. He assumed something that cannot be assumed today. That education was a garden in which fragile seeds might be cultivated in fertile ground by accomplished horticulturists of the human heart.
What this Johns Hopkins University report tells us is that our garden is full of weeds in which only half of the planted seeds will mature into flowers. English psychologist Havelock Ellis used this metaphor with more than passing clarity when he said, "Instead of trying to suppress the weeds that can never be killed, they may be cultivated into useful and beautiful flowers. For it is impossible to conceive any impulse in a human heart which cannot be transformed into Truth or into Beauty or into Love."
Young people, all young people have the capacity to become weeds or flowers. It is a matter of attention and intention. They are far more aware than any cunning politician or educator might think. They know when they are being treated as statistics with this hidden agenda for building brownie points by having an "A" school rating, or turning the corner and having "more than 60 percent of freshmen making it to graduation."
This is not the place to go into it but as I've said repeatedly it is a problem with the problem solving. Linear logic is like the dog chasing its own tail, and this study, as well intended as it is, appears to be no different.
We know the harm we have done to our environment with synthetic fertilizers and insecticides to rid us of menacing pest. Now the bees are gone that pollinate our plants. Many fruits and vegetables are in jeopardy.
This is not an accidental metaphor. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, as it is a nation's greatest resource. It is sad to report H. L. Wayland of the nineteenth century appears to have been prophetic, while Harry A. Overstreet of the twentieth century overly optimistic as quoted in this opening piece. What will the future be? It starts with each of us, as we are all students' first teachers.
______________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
"Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and at the same time cuts the sinews at the wrists."
H. L. Wayland (1796 - 1865), American educator
"I may safely predict that the education of the future will be inventive-minded. It will believe so profoundly in the high value of the inventive or creative spirit that it will set itself to develop that spirit by all means within its power."
Harry A. Overstreet, The Mind Alive (1954)
* * * * * * * * * * *
It was bound to happen sooner rather than later that some researcher would study American education and conclude that it is little more than a factory, and that this factory of education is in trouble.
More than fifty years ago, the entering class with me my freshman year had 30 percent less students my sophomore year than started with me, and when it came time to graduate it had been reduced by another 30 percent, or around 40 percent actual stood the course of the four years to graduate.
Now, that was off the radar of public concern for many reasons. A college education was then something of a novelty for many of us of working class families. So, if we failed, it was no big deal.
Virtually everyone with a high school diploma from an Iowa high school was immediately eligible for acceptance into one of the land grant state institutions.
To give you a sense of the times, the US Selective Service Military Draft was on and many were pulled out of the university and drafted into the US Army to fight in the police action that never became a declared war known as "the Korean War."
Only six years before or 1945, WWII had ended and anyone that wanted a good job with only a high school education or less was set for the pickings. Indeed, in cities such as Detroit and Chicago nearby, you could get a good job without a diploma. You might find yourself working beside your mother or father, uncle or aunt, or even grandparents.
The factory became a cradle to grave economic institution especially for the "Big Three" in the automotive industry. My uncle was a professor at the University of Detroit in Detroit, and I saw this first hand as a boy, visiting him every summer, and playing baseball with kids from such families. They all had better homes than doctors in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, and few of their parents had finished high school.
It wasn't until the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 that all hell broke loose and education became totally a vocational experience from grammar school to high school and through college. The new math was born and the frantic of panic invaded education.
We had to compete with the Russians and we had to produce soldiers of the mind that were technically programmed to produce a finished product that could compete with and then surpass the Russians.
The purely intellectual aim of education to endeavor to make us see and imagine the world as it is without the distorting programming of a specific end product got lost in the shuffle.
Education, which at one time was the true analgesic to certain diseases the modern world engendered, such as stress and anxiety, has lost sight of the diseases so that all remedies are now superfluous.
So, it should come as little surprise that a Johns Hopkins University researcher, Bob Balfanz, has come to find U.S. high schools "dropout factories" and source of the social-cultural problem of our time.
In his study of 1,700 regular and vocational high schools nationwide, he found only 60 percent of the freshman classes graduated. In my state of Florida, it is less than 50 percent. I live in Hillsborough County, Florida where ten high schools are listed as "dropout factories."
What is not surprising but which has become typical of such studies is that there is much data on what and who but a shortage of data on why or the nature of the disease.
The study suggests the culprit being the draconian demands of testing, the concentration of students in metropolitan areas with large minority populations, poor tracking of racial, ethnic and other subgroups, and the lack of vigilance to the husbanding of such statistics.
The answers or solutions he proposes are ironic because they have the ring of the modern factory mentality:
· Make high schools report graduation rates.
· Get states to build data system to track students.
· Make states count graduation rates in a systematic and uniform way.
· Create progress reports.
We have had the program of "No Child Left Behind," and we have had our Florida schools from grammar through high school rate on an "A through F" scale, with those with "A" ratings receiving positive funding, and those with "F" ratings being punished with funding withheld, when clearly it might be best to have it the other way around, but that does not fit our factory mentality programming of motivating for positive performance through incentives.
Incentives, as I point out in my book "Work Without Managers" (1990), have driven workers from a culture of comfort to a culture of complacency in the workplace, bypassing the culture of contribution. Why should it be any different in the classroom?
We still believe, and this is the factory mentality oozing out of our pores, that you can legislate passion and morality with the appropriate programming, when clearly we continue to fail on both fronts over and over and over again.
The spark of curiosity is in the soul of every child as it embraces its environment. Why is this so often killed before it takes a hold on a nascent life?
The student is not a box to fill with goodies. The student is a person with a soul and potential to approach the essence of his or her possibilities. This does not make us equal. This makes us unique. There is no satisfaction greater than finding the spark to energize our potential and then discover some small victory which has nothing to do with anyone else, but engenders the pure pleasure of feeling alive and good about ourselves. Everyone is born with this, but not everyone reaches consciousness before it expires.
We have lost the foundation of what it is to be educated in the liberal tradition. This has been understood more or less since the time of Aristotle. Education is not primarily utilitarian or sentimental; education is to be open to life in the pursuit of building a moral and responsible character. Edmund Burke stated it bluntly, "Education is the cheap defense of nations."
American high schools have become dropout factories because education has produced corporate soldiers that are programmed to march to the corporate song, and most students do not want to join that army or rat race. It is a terrible thing to see the problem of education reduced to being the student's fault or simply the failure of administrivia to track the product of its purpose with more acumen.
Why do you think students are bored in school? School has become boring. Teachers enter a war zones where survival from day to day is the most accomplished task of their purpose. Emerson said, "The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil," but what about the student respecting the teacher?
Emerson was speaking of the nineteenth century when the classroom was not a combat zone. He assumed something that cannot be assumed today. That education was a garden in which fragile seeds might be cultivated in fertile ground by accomplished horticulturists of the human heart.
What this Johns Hopkins University report tells us is that our garden is full of weeds in which only half of the planted seeds will mature into flowers. English psychologist Havelock Ellis used this metaphor with more than passing clarity when he said, "Instead of trying to suppress the weeds that can never be killed, they may be cultivated into useful and beautiful flowers. For it is impossible to conceive any impulse in a human heart which cannot be transformed into Truth or into Beauty or into Love."
Young people, all young people have the capacity to become weeds or flowers. It is a matter of attention and intention. They are far more aware than any cunning politician or educator might think. They know when they are being treated as statistics with this hidden agenda for building brownie points by having an "A" school rating, or turning the corner and having "more than 60 percent of freshmen making it to graduation."
This is not the place to go into it but as I've said repeatedly it is a problem with the problem solving. Linear logic is like the dog chasing its own tail, and this study, as well intended as it is, appears to be no different.
We know the harm we have done to our environment with synthetic fertilizers and insecticides to rid us of menacing pest. Now the bees are gone that pollinate our plants. Many fruits and vegetables are in jeopardy.
This is not an accidental metaphor. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, as it is a nation's greatest resource. It is sad to report H. L. Wayland of the nineteenth century appears to have been prophetic, while Harry A. Overstreet of the twentieth century overly optimistic as quoted in this opening piece. What will the future be? It starts with each of us, as we are all students' first teachers.
______________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
Thursday, November 01, 2007
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- Does the body move the spirit or does the spirit move the body?
FRAGEMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY – Does the body move the spirit or does the spirit move the body?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“He that loseth wealth, loseth much; he that loseth friends, loseth much; but he that loseth his spirits loseth all.”
Spanish Maxim
Many of us are of such an age that we were born and matured during the middle of the last century, a century in constant war and rebellion in which more than 100 million immortal souls perished on battlefields, in concentration camps, or were the innocent victims of collateral damage.
We have seen Nazism and Communism rise and fall; totalitarian dictators come to power and wreak havoc on everything they touched, and we have seen misguided republics attempt to put their stamp on people of other persuasions, all equally damaging to our individual as well as collective soul
We have seen democracy return to Western Europe and be born again in Eastern Europe, while the rest of the planet has remained in various states of war and deprivation, where dictators come to power by the will of the people having tired of the exploitation by countries such as the United States who installed puppet regimes for economic advantage. I have seen this first hand in my working life in South America.
Then there are the sins and transgressions of lingering colonialism that still play havoc with South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East.
History has not been kind to the native and cultural peoples across the globe of this small planet.
Poland disappeared from the map of the world in the nineteenth century; was born again after WWI, only to be overrun in WWII first by the Germans and then the Russians. Descendents of the Portuguese oligarchy still dominate Brazil while the Native Brazilian Indians remain the peasant class. The jury is still out on Argentina. This is also true to various degrees throughout South and Central America. Five hundred years of colonialism leave permanent scars on the national psyche.
Even in the United States Native Americans are still treated as second-class citizens so the US is hardly one to cast the first stone.
Look at the legacy of the midget nation of Belgium and its colonial exploitation of the Belgium Congo, a nation larger in area than most in the world, but still poor although rich in natural resources with a population the majority of which does not make a dollar a day.
The world’s attention is on the Sudan and Darfar and the tragedy of that civil war in which millions of displaced, dying and starving people are casualties in a forgotten land. Someone dies in Africa every five seconds from malnutrition, AIDS or warfare. When relief is received, it seldom gets to its intended destination as corruption reaches yet another level. Too often rapacity has no specific color or conscience.
Meanwhile, religion has entered the fray on every continent of this planet taking to militant and military means to bring about what is perceived as change and social justice.
Fear and foreboding has become the diet of a global society that has lost its way. Its moral compass is faulty, and now it believes that the only way for peace is to annihilate all nonbelievers, as there is little room for differences.
The case can be made that I am speaking exclusively of fanatics of Islam, but the same charge is equally true of fanatics of all religious persuasions. Fear finds these fanatics feeling justified in attempting to annihilate those that would harm them, thinking that those of such a persuasion think differently than they do when they think and believe the same. They are both equally without a guidance system.
We have seen China in the short span of twenty years move from Godless communism to Godless capitalism combining communism with capitalism as the diet in its future quest for superpower status, believing that a high standard of living is the ultimate in spiritual fulfillment.
Have they failed to see what has happened to the lone superpower and the richest and most progressive nation of the world?
The United States has moved beyond a transcendental spirit guiding it to a handheld gadget to take its mind off the fact. Indeed, it would appear the US would rather solve the problems of the world in nation building than face its own, a common psychological ploy of a schizophrenic personality.
The world has enthusiastically embraced technology as its god seeing no limits to what science can do as it solves the mysteries of the universe. But it is not science and technology that makes us human, but regard for and connection with nature and each other that does.
We spring from the earth and go back into it as a natural phenomenon called a life span, but our immortal spirit lives on through our family and friends and through our common connection to something surreal, beyond our language and comprehension that connects us all into one race and one nationality and one common soul that goes on for eternity.
__________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“He that loseth wealth, loseth much; he that loseth friends, loseth much; but he that loseth his spirits loseth all.”
Spanish Maxim
Many of us are of such an age that we were born and matured during the middle of the last century, a century in constant war and rebellion in which more than 100 million immortal souls perished on battlefields, in concentration camps, or were the innocent victims of collateral damage.
We have seen Nazism and Communism rise and fall; totalitarian dictators come to power and wreak havoc on everything they touched, and we have seen misguided republics attempt to put their stamp on people of other persuasions, all equally damaging to our individual as well as collective soul
We have seen democracy return to Western Europe and be born again in Eastern Europe, while the rest of the planet has remained in various states of war and deprivation, where dictators come to power by the will of the people having tired of the exploitation by countries such as the United States who installed puppet regimes for economic advantage. I have seen this first hand in my working life in South America.
Then there are the sins and transgressions of lingering colonialism that still play havoc with South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East.
History has not been kind to the native and cultural peoples across the globe of this small planet.
Poland disappeared from the map of the world in the nineteenth century; was born again after WWI, only to be overrun in WWII first by the Germans and then the Russians. Descendents of the Portuguese oligarchy still dominate Brazil while the Native Brazilian Indians remain the peasant class. The jury is still out on Argentina. This is also true to various degrees throughout South and Central America. Five hundred years of colonialism leave permanent scars on the national psyche.
Even in the United States Native Americans are still treated as second-class citizens so the US is hardly one to cast the first stone.
Look at the legacy of the midget nation of Belgium and its colonial exploitation of the Belgium Congo, a nation larger in area than most in the world, but still poor although rich in natural resources with a population the majority of which does not make a dollar a day.
The world’s attention is on the Sudan and Darfar and the tragedy of that civil war in which millions of displaced, dying and starving people are casualties in a forgotten land. Someone dies in Africa every five seconds from malnutrition, AIDS or warfare. When relief is received, it seldom gets to its intended destination as corruption reaches yet another level. Too often rapacity has no specific color or conscience.
Meanwhile, religion has entered the fray on every continent of this planet taking to militant and military means to bring about what is perceived as change and social justice.
Fear and foreboding has become the diet of a global society that has lost its way. Its moral compass is faulty, and now it believes that the only way for peace is to annihilate all nonbelievers, as there is little room for differences.
The case can be made that I am speaking exclusively of fanatics of Islam, but the same charge is equally true of fanatics of all religious persuasions. Fear finds these fanatics feeling justified in attempting to annihilate those that would harm them, thinking that those of such a persuasion think differently than they do when they think and believe the same. They are both equally without a guidance system.
We have seen China in the short span of twenty years move from Godless communism to Godless capitalism combining communism with capitalism as the diet in its future quest for superpower status, believing that a high standard of living is the ultimate in spiritual fulfillment.
Have they failed to see what has happened to the lone superpower and the richest and most progressive nation of the world?
The United States has moved beyond a transcendental spirit guiding it to a handheld gadget to take its mind off the fact. Indeed, it would appear the US would rather solve the problems of the world in nation building than face its own, a common psychological ploy of a schizophrenic personality.
The world has enthusiastically embraced technology as its god seeing no limits to what science can do as it solves the mysteries of the universe. But it is not science and technology that makes us human, but regard for and connection with nature and each other that does.
We spring from the earth and go back into it as a natural phenomenon called a life span, but our immortal spirit lives on through our family and friends and through our common connection to something surreal, beyond our language and comprehension that connects us all into one race and one nationality and one common soul that goes on for eternity.
__________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
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