COUTH, CULTURE AND CORRUPTION!

COUTH, CULTURE AND CORRUPTION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 17, 2008

“Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt, takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitutions.”

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesmen



MY GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:

Referring to Henry Ward Beecher:

Why don't we have people wise like him anymore in politics and economy?
Why are we corrupted by greed for money?

Manfred

Note: Manfred was referencing to this quote from my introduction to, "I'm a Fisherologist":

“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitude, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Manfred,

Incidentally, Henry Ward Beecher was the younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1852). The other title to this book was LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.

When President Abraham Lincoln greeted the author at the White House after the start of the Civil War, the six-four Lincoln said to the barely five-foot author, "So you're the little lady responsible for this war."

She was, indeed, by writing this polemical novel of slavery that alerted the nation, mainly the North, to the dire circumstances under which blacks suffered in the South.

I have become increasingly aware of this "nature versus nurture" debate, as I've gotten older. Harriet Beecher Stowe's father was the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Calvinistic Divine. I have concluded that genetics are crucial but of little consequence if not mobilized by passion and action.

Mrs. Stowe came from a fundamentally righteous home so morality and civic conscience were in her sociobiology (genes). It should therefore come as no surprise that her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, would become a clergyman.

Remarkably, and I know you didn't ask for all this information, a slave escaped to Canada, and wrote a book a few years before the publication of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, which contained many of the same themes. I find it highly unlikely that Mrs. Stowe was not aware of this work. I think it more likely she knew of this book and read it.

If you have not had an opportunity to read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, I should forewarn you that it is a sentimental novel of gothic proportions with loads of quotations from the Scripture.

Regarding your point about money and corruption, as I have said elsewhere, I don't think money, per se, is the corrupter -- Freud called money "filthy lucre" -- but the implications of power, status, prestige, respect, security, and social prominence with which money is identified. Herein, lies the conundrum.

Several years ago in a television episode of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone," a couple happened on a great deal of money, and thought they had achieved all the things mentioned above. Money was the answer to their prayers and they expected to be showered with happiness. Quite the opposite was to be their experience.

The only problem is that they lacked the required social amenity of couth and culture, and were dismally disappointed.

You can't buy couth or culture. You have to either be born into it, or earn it by a passion for it. The nouveau riche know this only too well, as do lottery winners.

Sudden wealth can destroy happiness without the concomitant preparation. It has often caused great trauma in families in the loss of identity and sense of place, as many lucky lottery winners can attest. These winners have encountered jealousy and envy among their own kind, and rejection by those with whom they would seek new identity: a lose-lose proposition. Sad.

More difficult to explain is that of Bernard Madoff, and his Ponzi scheme, bilking the so-called sophisticated community of bankers and investors of $50 billion.

One commentator claims "connections" and "reputation" greased the skids for him, as Madoff had been no less than chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Think of how many times we have ourselves been duped in small ways by not making the person with the information pass through our screen of skepticism. A Nobel Laureate in Physics, for example, may know squad little about life, but he says this or that and we think, "He has a point," when he has no point at all. This goes triple for celebrities, especially the screen film star type because they play a thinker in a film they are one.

I know of someone bilked out of $27,000 in cash by a guy who had a yacht and was supposed "to be rich," and if he was rich, "well, obviously, he could make others rich, too, right?" Wrong, dead wrong to the tune of $27,000.

Madoff was in the social register (Blue Book) and launched his schemes with relative impunity. In fact, the Security & Exchange Commission investigated him in 2004, and came up empty. You can imagine how thorough was the investigation of someone so prominent.

Then I thought of Sir Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Mount Everest. He answered, "Because it's there." Maybe, just maybe Madoff did it because he could, not for the money, not for the prestige -- he's infamous now -- but for the excitement, for the feeling of being alive!

Geed is complicated and corruption even more so. People with everything often appear to feel as if having nothing at all. They have lost the pleasure of a morning sunrise or an evening sunset, the moist spank of an ocean breeze against the face like an after shave lotion, the delight of encountering the unsure footsteps of a child with a smile as broad as Sunday, waddling uncertainly across the mall floor towards you, a stranger, and greeting you as if family.

When you lose that, when all life is about more, you are dead inside, and should be pitied not damned.

Merry Christmas!

Always be well,

Jim