GREAT ELECTION -- LOVE & WILL IN A CLIMATE OF NOW -- AN EXCHANGE!

GREAT ELECTION – LOVE & WILL IN A CLIMATE OF NOW – AN EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 9, 2008

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”

Shakespeare

“Love really has nothing to do with wisdom or experience or logic. It is the prevailing breeze in the land of youth.”

Bruno Lessing, Nineteenth century American journalist

“The will of man is by his reason swayed.”

Shakespeare

“Prescribe no positive laws to the will; for you may be forced tomorrow to drink the same water you despised today.”

Thomas Fuller, Seventeenth century English clergyman


A WRITER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

You are a lightning rod. It's odd that bolts resulting from political discourse hold so much more voltage than those that challenge indictments of leadership in business.

Not to put words in your mouth, if asked to summarize your view, it seems to me poor leadership in business is a combination of manipulation from the top and the willingness of the worker to be manipulated.

In business, whether I have accurately summarized it or not, can be read impersonal. Rationalized away with a "that's not me" or "the leaders in my company are not like that," we convince ourselves that the environment in which we have chosen to maximize our potential is not the toxic environment described by scribes and philosophers. It is a different company and a different person who chooses to stay or ascribe to the leaderless environment.

Oddly, politics can be much more personal than work.

When in an unhealthy situation, from which one cannot leave, an easy defense is to become like an automaton, an emotionless, mechanical contributor void of drive, creativity and passion.

This is a contrived state of choice we opt to not exercise. Politics, on the other hand, is where we live. Because it takes place in the arena of our lives and impacts not only me but also my family (who I love) and neighbors (some of whom I love). We want our intensely personal choices from which we can't run to be reinforced.

When confronted with evidence to the contrary, we are shaken deeply - even down to our core values. Of course, one's core values can't be wrong. But, there might not be a rational way to refute the evidence. There are two choices left - both irrational, but self-preserving: Lash out at the source or ignore the source.

I don't always agree with everything you write. My education comes in the exploration of why. Why do I disagree? Why did you write that? How is this consistent with what you have written in the past?

Years ago you wrote a piece in support of President Bush. It set me off and I recall responding to it, probably in a disrespectful manner.

In retrospect, it contributed to my personal development. I learned that valuing opposing points of view is not accepting them.

If I had succumbed to an initial knee-jerk desire to stop reading your emails only I would lose shutting out a bright light that has helped illuminate my way through life.

Peace and wonder,

Michael

DR. FISHER RESPONDS

Michael,

Thanks for your perceptive and honest discussion. If in reading me, you introduce yourself to yourself in a new way, I have succeeded. I am an expert in nothing but curious about everything that touches my fancy.

My intention is not to proselytize but to provoke, to energize the reader to rethink, as you have done, that which imprisons us in the conventions of our mind, conventions often foisted upon us by our tradition with practices that often prove unreliable when dealing with the changing reality that confronts us. Theoreticians and media moguls, politicians and preachers know this and exploit it to advantage. They feed into the womb of our minds and corporate speak comes out of our mouths an echo of their will. As so it has been as long as man has been self-estranged.

With regard to president George W. Bush, you must remember I have been a lifelong Republican as well as a lifelong Irish Roman Catholic. I bought into ideas in my youth and put off thinking much about them. Age, time, experience and study find me no longer an ideologue in either instance, while recognizing we must have paradigms in order to have paradigm shifts.

So many things have impacted society in my lifetime. We quickly think of technology, but technology reinforces or improves essentially what already exists: information, transportation, socialization, communication, war, and religion. Technology is innovative rather than creative.

Science, on the other hand, is creative, pondering first principles and the mysteries of matter and the universe, developing theories and laws, which in one sense push back ignorance, but in another reinforce ambivalence about God, death, eternity, man's place in the cosmos, and how to harness science for the good of man. Einstein worried about the consequences of proving E = mc2, leading to the splitting of the atom and the Nuclear Age.

Technologists have used the laws of science to create weaponry that could introduce us to our last days which was the cry echoing throughout the Middle East 2,000 years ago.

There is one aspect of humanity where there has been no improvement. The most powerful weapon of society 2,000 years ago is equally powerful today. That weapon is love: love of life, love of our mates and siblings, love of our children, love of each other, love of our planet and all its beauty and mystery, love of God, whatever God may mean to us. The importance of love is that it emanates from within but is replenished by giving. The more love we give the more love we receive.

My wonder has always been why man with his extreme gifts of conscious intellect and cognitive intelligence cannot match the love of a child with Down's Syndrome.

Why does acuity so often corrupt rather than bless? Was it much different in the time of Jesus? I suspect not. I suspect the best educated then wouldn’t want to be seen by the dregs of society, much less be their constant companions. Yet the man of Nazareth surrounded himself with twelve such men.

I am a peripatetic reader, not an academic nor a scholar, not a theologian or historian, but a wanderer through the mind field of ideas.

Most recently I have been reading scores of books on early Christianity, Jesus the Son of Man, on the gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, Thomas, Peter, Paul and Mary.

Diligent scholars have prepared all these works mainly reading in and then translating them from the original Greek. I am now acquainted, for example, with Gnosticism and that particular heretic fringe. Moreover, once embarrassed by the Spanish Inquisition of Roman Catholicism, and well schooled in the martyrdom of early Christians, I was not aware of the murderous brutality of these early Christians towards nonbelievers. I've also reread Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, among others, and see them also in a new light.

What is apparent in such reading is the knowledge these men were creatures of their times, brilliant as they might be, but otherwise differing little with us in ours.

Take the gospels. Much if not most of what has survived was made up or improvised as it passed on generation after generation. Not a single original manuscript is extant. Add to this each page had to be recopied by hand of a text which was likely a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Additionally, the copiers in the process often couldn't read, or the copiers who could would slant the story in favor of their historic icon.

I'm writing an historical novel of my time in South Africa forty years ago, and I know it is romanticized and flavored with the mind of the writer forty years older. That is the case of the writings of early Christianity with those early text not written until long after the death of Jesus, the earliest being forty years after his death and that by St. Mark.

Take away all the miracles, the virgin birth, the resurrection and you have a monumental love story of a man speaking simply, poetically and dramatically of the meaning of love.

I've asked myself, why are we so preoccupied with the historical Jesus and so little concerned with “the so what of Jesus,” which was love. The answer comes back simply.

Corrupt and loveless as it was 2,000 years ago, when Jesus talked of the last days, the corruption and amorality of today with all its technology and literacy, with all its erudition of man’s place in an expanding universe, “the why” still remains more important than “the what” with the last days still in question should love not survive.

What I find remarkable is that Jesus, and others like him, stepped into that loveless void so long ago, and personified love and understanding, whereas today there seems little love or understanding of the plight of modern man. Have we learned nothing from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq not to mention earlier wars? Might not only fails to make right, but might spawns new hate and resolve.

I see little love or understanding in the Christian faith, little love or understanding in television evangelism, little love or understanding from the Papacy of Rome, little love or understanding of those who govern in Africa, Asia, Europe and dare I say it, the Americas, including these United States. Love has been supplanted by power.

Jesus was brought down not because he loved but because he was a threat to power. As the saying goes, the more things change the more they remain the same. Power is still the primary appetite of man. But power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Conversely, love is the antidote to power as it was in the beginning now and ever shall be.

It is almost inconceivable to understand that the followers of Jesus were illiterate neither being able to read nor write, including Peter. Only Paul, who came along later, was educated and comfortable in Greek, the language of progressive communication of the day. So, what is my point?

The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran three-quarters of a century ago wrote of love in his book "The Prophet" in connection with Jesus as the embodiment of love.

If not familiar with Gibran, he is responsible for the quote that John F. Kennedy's speechwriters lifted from him, spoken to his Lebanese countrymen nearly a half century before Kennedy. The quote?

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

I knew it was his words as soon as Kennedy spoke them, but of course that was never publicized. Most people don't read Lebanese writers, but speechwriters do.

There is a part of me that now appreciates Adam Smith's laissez-faire "invisible hand ruling the marketplace" is not sufficient. It promotes power not love.

For a long time, I believed that my progress from so little was of my own doing, not realizing how much help I got along the way because of the way I looked, thought, and behaved. I had seen people more able than myself literally perish because they lacked the specific attributes in demand. Either they were of the wrong color, wrong sex, wrong stature, wrong religion, wrong ethnicity, wrong orientation, wrong motivation, or just plain wrong as perceived by others. Neither noninterference nor incentives were enough to get them up and about. They needed a helping hand.

I have come to realize governance has a role that the power of the marketplace will not or cannot fulfill. I have also learned that while the marketplace describes itself in terms of capital or money, the marketplace is all about power.

It is naive to think of the marketplace in any other terms, although my critics choose to see the marketplace designed to optimize opportunity for everyone including the disadvantaged. Horsehockey!

The marketplace is all about power and the few. When it is all about power, there is little room for love. Love is considered weakness, not strength. The rationale: “People will take advantage if you don’t put a little fear in them.” Most philanthropists while creating their wealth were great practitioners of this fear. Read a biography of any “great man,” not an autobiography or one written by a lapdog publicist. Philanthropy is easy when you have power. It is real when you have no power but great love.

I have seen -- and the current financial meltdown confirms -- people need regulation, intervention and governance to a certain degree, as they are not ready, not able or not conditioned to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The original welfare state was not designed to uplift but to keep people in place. Lobbyists for unions didn’t want people learning a trade or glutting the market with skilled workers. It wanted to protect its own from competition, and it did.

Dignity is only realized with work. Work is love made visible. Handouts are a form of imprisonment. Those forced to take them know this only too well. When workers cannot compete, it is society's responsibility to provide them with the skills so that they can. It is not welfare. It is a form of collective love.

Not until I reached university did I encounter many African Americans, and then I was lucky to know those in science and engineering who understood the role and responsibility they had. I tutored black athletes as well. They saw university as mainly an opportunity to extend their athletic careers; professional football and basketball at the time were of only marginal significance. They were in it for the joy of the sport and weren't looking beyond. There were exceptions but that was the rule. Born too early to benefit from the lucrative payoffs in professional sport today, I've wondered how they have fared.

Bush's "compassionate conservatism" caught me in its web because I thought he was going to do some things that would fill the gaps I’ve described here. I still think he is a loving man who was ill advised and got caught in the web of these Neo Conservative (neocon) powerbrokers. I saw potential in "no child left behind," but was disappointed when Bush’s second term started with a drive for the privatization of Social Security.

Imagine the unintended consequences that might have caused had a fraction of laissez-faire policy become law. Consider where that would put many today in the present economic climate. The market was high (2004), then, and we were still in that optimistic Nirvana of "up, up and away" like Nietzsche's Superman. Time has corrected that hubris and euphoria.

The American people are wise as a people and they have spoken. Voters today are not doctrinaire as Liberals or Conservatives, but pragmatists between the two. I hope president Barak Obama heeds their message. We shall see.

Be always well,

Jim