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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Dr. Fisher’s latest book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007).