RESPONSE TO A READER ON "CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD!" -- EXCERPT FROM CONFIDENT THINKING

RESPONSE TO A READER ON “CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD,” EXCERPT FROM DR. FISHER’S NEW BOOK, “CONFIDENT THINKING”!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 25, 2009

REFERENCE:

This reader created two compelling essays to, “Creativity In A Changing World.” He says in the first, “One thing I enjoy about reading you is your gift to send emotion through your words.” In the second, he has much to say about plagiarism. His comments throughout are thoughtful and reflective. It shows a beautiful mind as you will see when you read his two essays. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I suggest that we are all born wonderers and therefore philosophers. Allan W. Watts captured this sentiment: “A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares at what sensible people take for granted, a person who cannot get rid of the feeling that the barest of facts of everyday life are unbelievably odd. Aristotle put it best, the beginning of philosophy is wonder.” Michael is a wonderer and therefore a philosopher. I cherish the connection.

* * * * * *

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled, thenceforth, to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet, essayist and philosopher

* * * * * *

“What stubbing, plowing, digging, and barrowing are to land, that thinking, reflecting, examining are to the mind. Each has its proper culture; and as the land that is suffered to lie waste and wild for a long time will be overspread with brushwood, brambles, and thorns, which have neither use nor beauty, so there will not fail to sprout up in a neglected uncultivated mind, a great number of prejudices and absurd opinions, which owe their origin partly to the soil itself, the passions, and imperfections of the mind of man, and partly to those seeds which chance to be scattered in it by every wind of doctrine which the cunning of statesmen, the singularity of pedants, and the superstition of fools shall raise.”

George Berkeley (1685 – 1753), Irish Catholic Bishop and Philosopher

* * * * * *

DR. FISHER’S RESPONSE (The Reader’s Essays follow):

It was Solomon who said there was nothing new under the sun. You are correct in saying that includes the printed word. Plagiarism, as Emerson eludes above, is a touchy subject. I am not a lawyer. I have no training in the law. I know the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “To steel and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own, to use source material without due credit, to commit literary theft. “

Trained as an academic, the basis of Ph.D. scholarship, if you have occasion to read some scholarly journals, you know you can’t get past two words without sources listed. It is confusing and incomprehensible for the reader to make sense of writer’s point. So trained, I can tell you it takes hard work to get beyond this to express something of interest to the general reader. Were it not for the help of BB, I don’t know if I’d have made the turn. She’s not sure I have.

As you may note from the Bishop Berkeley quote above, someone who died in the eighteenth century, I have expressed similar ideas before. Now, you see the connection.

When I made reference to plagiarism, I did so with reference to president Kennedy’s use of “ask not” in his inaugural without giving credit to Kahlil Gibran, who first uttered the phrase forty years before to the Lebanese people.

My thought was that it would have been nice to give a Lebanese man who came to America his due. He wrote many inspiring books, including “The Prophet” (1923) to bridge the Islam with the American world. I believe I have read every one of his published books including his autobiography. I mention this to register my fascination with him. He touched a cord in me as a reader, writer, and citizen of the world.

The azimuth to where I am now from whence I came has encountered many bumps in the road; taken many false steps, stumble upon many surprises, while gaining insights, which have driven me to the printed word. It is always a danger to lift remarks from a body of work and expect them to stand on their own.

As I write, I find this book developing gravitas that wasn’t originally intended. That can happen. I wanted to provoke the reader “to think, to reflect, to examine the mind.” Given the way it is today, when thinking is a luxury, I find us tilling the same fields until they are fallow, and cannot stand by and say nothing.

Michael, my friend, we are stuck. Paul Krugman, a liberal Democrat, expresses this in his New York Times column (January 24, 2009):

“My real problem with the speech (Obama inaugural), on matters economic, was its conventionality. In response to an unprecedented economic crisis – or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedence is the Great Depression – Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: He spoke in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests. That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.”

It is what I call hesitation rhetoric based on critical thinking. My book is opposed to this thinking exclusive to creative thinking because the dog ends up always chasing its own tail.

The other day I told my daughter, a recent college graduate who cannot find a job, that anti-intellectualism is not endemic to the rank & file Americans, alone, but is pervasive in our hallow halls of ivy in academia to the paved streets of the rich and privileged across the land. How so?

I believe it goes back to William James and our pride in pragmatism. James was opposed to his brother Henry’s intellectualism, and said so often in print. Pragmatism is anti-intellectual and American. We take pride in shortcuts to insight to avoid the icy roads, sinkholes, washed out bridges and mudslides of life that still prove unavoidable. It is why self-help books, diet pills, personal trainers and liposuction are so in demand. We’ll do almost anything to avoid thought or action to register change.

President Obama went on to say: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week, last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions, that time has surely passed.”

It wasn’t plagiarism, per se, but the famous economist of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes, said practically the same thing then, and only World War II lifted the United States and the world out of the depression.

American workers are congratulated for their industry, productivity and creativity when it has been my experience at virtually all levels of organization that four people are standing around waiting for instructions while the fifth person is taking the initiative and doing most of the work.

As for plagiarism, I read others, as do you, and as they took from those who influenced them, I have taken from them who have influenced me. You are right. There is no originality only a different insight or elaboration on an idea. If you read the quotes ahead of my essays, you will note they give you a sense of what is to follow.

My intention is to provoke the reader to consider reexamining his views on subjects taken for granted. As a mature graduate student, taking all these academic courses, I was continually instructed it wasn’t good scholarship to slide back and forth from the particular to the general, from the individual to society as if a seamless network. I explained to my professors empirically why I was of such a mind. You would have thought I’d spoke heresy. They weren’t used to having a student question their discipline much less its methodology. You can imagine it wasn’t an especially happy courtship, or blissful marriage. Even today, I suspect few academics read me.

That said I would visit the four quadrants of a city, talk to citizens of various occupations, and have a profile of that city’s personality, demographics and geography.

People love a listener, and are uncommonly candid to a stranger. This results in an accurate assessment of how that community thinks, believes, values, and behaves, as well as how it perceives itself.

Joseph Wambaugh, the former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, and best selling author once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.” Indeed, it does. During the 1970s, I did police consulting from New York City to Miami on the east coast of the United States. My Ph.D. dissertation was based on that work. It was titled “The Police Paradox: Systematic Exploration in the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed” (1978). I found not only did police reflect the behavior of the community, but also the police community reflected the behavior of that wider community it served.

Earlier in my career, when I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company, steeped in technology, a world of jargon, and a tool kit of impressive laboratory toys, I quickly learned these were of secondary importance to reading the contact accurately. I would note the appearance, tone, temperament and cordiality of the receptionist as an index of what was to follow. I would also study how the reception lobby was laid out and what it was trying to tell me. I would observe how buyers treated other sellers, and whether they were invited to their offices or not. It never occurred to me I was doing a social psychological study, but I was.

It worked for me to such an extent it would change my life. When I was in graduate school, I attempted to share this with my professors, only to be reminded “they had the power of the grade,” and so I left it at that. Yet, my experience tells me:

(1) Everything is connected to everything else;
(2) Everything has to go somewhere to mean something;
(3) Nature knows best and is expressed in our nature; we cannot change that fact.
(4) There is no such thing as a free lunch, free ride, or action without consequences.

My arsenal has always been my mind, not my company, not my products, but my perception of the data received through my senses. My writing is empirical based on the lessons learned, which I feel may be of some use to the reader.

The persistent theme is for the reader to recognize how we have been programmed by our society, and how it has failed to work for either society or us. Our leaders are hesitant to take calculated risks, personal, professional, economic and social. They often mouth the right words but their actions seem to always lag.

Our society tries desperately to stuff us back in the box, close the lid, and label us, “content.” I have resisted that, climbed out of the box only to be pushed back in, as have many others. It has been the nature of my life. If others can identify with this, and learn from what I have done, all the better. If they are content in the box, as it has labeled them, so be it. They will not find my writing relevant much less useful.

At this late date in my life, I have a surprising reservoir of energy to keep climbing out. Society would prefer I read my books, listen to my music, do a spot of travel to dissipate my energy, and wait for the Great Reaper to come and close the lid permanently on me. Somehow I resist. Somehow I think there is more to life. Somehow I believe we were not meant to be content but to be engaged, not to go quietly into the night but to embrace the darkness for its last glimmer of light. I go back to Goethe to find my resonance. I hope I complete my novel before I die, but if I don’t, I don’t.

BB tells me that Brad Pitt confesses his greatest fear is death. I don’t fear death.

She asked me, “What then is your greatest fear?”

“I have no trouble with dying,” I said. “I've lived longer and better than I expected as a son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman. I do have one fear, though, and that is losing my mind to Alzheimer’s. It happened to a brilliant uncle when he was younger than I am now. His mind left him and it was a long goodbye.”

I believe it is easy to forget what good company the mind is, to write what you have written, to ponder the great and small questions. As bad as things may get, if you have your mind you have good company and blessed by the Almighty. I know I am.

Bill Livingston, a dear friend, published a piece on my uncle in his engineering newsletter. I suppose I should publish that on my website one day. It is a touching story dealing with my discovery of his Alzheimer’s. Yes, I think I shall do that.

I’ve wandered away from your two concerns: the fact that this piece was not as uplifting as expected, and my take on plagiarism was rather harsh. It was Voltaire who said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Discourse is not discursive although at times it may appear to be.

I posted this piece from CONFIDENT SELLING to assure my readers I am writing, as I write every day. It was taken out of context, which is always dangerous. I am thinking of posting another controversial piece about mythology, science and religion in the Information Age, which I have tentatively titled, “Extreme Unction: When Things Go From Bad To Worse.” I attempt to show science and society have killed the imagination and settled for innovation.

All the electronic wonders were imagined fifty to one hundred years ago. The Internet came out of the particle accelerator known as “CERN” on the Franco-Swiss border established in 1954. Much earlier, Einstein, Planck, Kirchhoff, and Bohr led the way to nuclear energy and quantum science.

Basic science has supplied the imagination, and technology the innovative platform for these wonderful gadgets. Technology has managed to draw us closer together while deepening the divide between us. In contrast, imagination was the primary tool in the laboratory of the mind for centuries. Even Einstein, who bridges the nineteenth and twentieth century, had only his magnets, a watch, pencil and paper to wonder beyond Newton’s Laws to his own. He lived in his imagination, as Carl Sagan puts it, “Such a man occurs only about every three or four hundred years.”

When he was my age, Einstein had second thoughts, but he had already stepped out of the box and published them, often in short mathematical equations. These were pondered, studied, eventually verified, and exploited in the world we live in. Mathematics has such a pristine order, such purity of language, and yet it has kept philosophers spinning in their soup ever since trying to make sense of the world they have created.

All of these men were mere mortals standing on each others shoulders down to our age, exploring and discovering and paying little heed to the consequences of their imaginings. Innovators have run with their ideas with equal disdain. Has anyone asked, at what price? Every time we cut ourselves further from the natural into the world of the synthetic, we pay a dear price, as we can never go back. We sacrifice “what was” for “what is. We never look back, consequently, we never see ahead.

We bumble, stumble and rumble along, and when we do look back, if we do, we always paint “what was” with a kind brush with no smears that might implicate us in our sonambulance, and then wonder at our fate.

Some see me as a pessimist as looking on the dark side of things. Perhaps a generation or so from this time will have to judge whether or not that is true. Certainly, the present generation or my generation has too much at stake to claim otherwise. We are programmed to get along by going along. We Americans have been placed in a comfortable box and have been content in that box until recent times.

Even now as the rhetoric is all about change, I see the $825 billion stimulus package president Barak Obama proposes, good intentions notwithstanding, being handled in much the same way as in the past, with bureaucrats, corpocracy and lobbyists protecting their self-interest, the country be damned!

That is how my mind sees things. It has been my best friend for these more than seven decades. I walked today thinking how much I cherish that mind, and how I hope it is stimulating to yours.

A final thought. As I concluded my walk, an image of a distant friend came to mind. When I was a boy not yet nine, playing baseball over at the courthouse, there was a young teenager that was one of my coaches. His name was Jack Dunmore. I write about him IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. Jack knew I was sensitive to things other guys took for granted. One day he said to me, “Rube,” that was my nickname, “it is okay.” He patted me on my head, and said, “Let me hit you some balls.” That was it. No lecture. No message. He accepted me as I was, and helped me accept myself as I was. He guided me in that early life, as his best friend, Gussie Witt helped me be a better baseball catcher and hitter.

I wonder if kids today have older kids they look up to who have such an impact on their lives. Here I am looking back more than sixty years and still appreciative what that experience meant to me. I pay tribute to him in these closing words, whose life ended far too early, “Thank you, Jack.”

THE READER’S COMMENT (Response No. One):

Hello Jim,

Wow! This is an emotionally charged piece. Much of what you send to the email list or post on your blog is typically presents your views as more positive and even forgiving in the way errors are used as teaching moments. One thing I enjoy about reading you is your gift to send emotion through your words. Another thing that keeps me coming back is its orientation toward solutions. Not that you always provide the answer but rather point in the direction of the answer, as any good teacher should, leading the reader to discover what's right for his or her situation.

The message received is, to a degree, dependent on the reader's state of mind. I'm feeling fairly positive right now. I had to check that before composing this. The CONFIDENT THINKING excerpt surprised me as an odd hybrid of disgust and despair with a glimmer of light in the penultimate paragraph. Is that how you felt or what you intended when writing it? Or, maybe it is presented as contrast to confident thinking.

Each of the institutions you mention - philosophical and physical - were commonly used as touchstones to gage and validate our actions. Is it the failure of the institutions that man has, over the last three decades, drifted from using morals and ethical standards as guides? While delivering training in the past, I would have fun talking about everyone's favorite radio station - WII FM - What's In It For Me. Not realizing it would become the new touchstone of our lives. This economic morass was born in greed. A majority of us were complicit in promoting the attitude and disguising it in the "noble" quest for the American dream. We forgot the dream is not realized through another's nightmare. It is not realized by climbing over others or capitalizing on their desperation (as sub-prime mortgage brokers did) or standing on the shoulders of laborers to be noticed (as all the "great" CEOs of the Eighties and Nineties did.)

But others, as yourself, rose above all this and refused to view the world through lime-tinted glasses. Their voices, muffled by the noise of the chase, will now be heard as the din dies down and people slow down. The voices must speak a positive message that draws in those looking for the new path. There is great appeal in that approach, the example - Obama.

One unsupported theory regarding why today's employees and populace do not respond to past bashing. They are all winners. Everybody played. Everybody got a trophy. Couldn't get an "A" in class, we'll put you in a slower group where you can compete. We won't call it slow; we'll call it "special." Losing and faulting is foreign. At least in a personal sense it is. They seldom had opportunities to introspectively review the why of personal failure because getting a trophy means you didn't fail. So, writing about the failures of institutions and leaders does not connect with this new breed.

Michael


READER’S COMMENT (Response No. 2):

Hello Jim,

I held this for a couple of days, just to make sure. The following is something I don't often engage in writing but save for oral discussion. The give and take is more fun that way.

At the end of this piece you touch on plagiarism and theft of intellectual property. The two quotes placed before your discussion heightens the conundrum presented by the concept of plagiarism. Same thought in different words, same words in a different light. To personalize the question, I have read many books and couldn't quote verbatim from any of them. I read then internalize the concepts. Some I dispute by formulating arguments in my head. Then both sides become internalized. It's all bouncing among the neurons waiting to be let out by some external stimulus.

Moving on, plagiarism is about the expression of original ideas and thoughts. The specter is often raised when the theft of original ideas or thoughts is literal. How granular does plagiarism get? I can understand whole articles. Phrases present a more gray area. Over time, every word has been used. Most pairs and triads of words that make sense have been written or uttered also. A combination of words that expresses a unique thought or idea can be rewritten and thus plagiarized. Yet, in any dictionary, nearly every word is followed by multiple definitions. The shorter the phrase use to express a thought, the more likely it can be interpreted differently.

I am not going to defend or condemn the statement, but use it as an example. I remember reading about attribution of the Kennedy statement decades ago. True to my practice, I couldn't tell you where. And, even then, my focus was on the meaning of the specific words and how, over time, they could have changed. A word intended to be specific still could have two interpretations in the same context. For example: Country, when acting on us, is perceived as the government and all of its bureaucracy. That which we do for the Country is not to support the bureaucrats, but references our fellow citizens. The same way a citizen might go to war for a government to support its aggression as opposed to going to war to defend one's neighbors. In this the question becomes, while the words are the same is the thought behind the words the same? Kennedy was a proponent of civil service that did not end at our borders. As a thought, initially expressed in a phrase, is expanded, justified and made specific through argument and explanation it becomes easier to claim as unique and original.

This dovetails a discussion of, "Who discovered America?" Was it Columbus, Erickson, or some obscure, prehistoric Asian who first crossed the Bering Sea? Or, even further, the "tree falling in the woods" philosophic banter. If a thought is expressed that no one hears, can it be plagiarized?

So, back to the conundrum. Could it be that everything I've ever written has been plagiarized? Everything I know I've learned from someone. Surely, at various points in time, I have expressed ideas and concepts picked up from your books and those of others. While in school I found being heretical in my arguments was helpful at avoiding plagiarism, but risky to earning good grades. But, heretics are authors too.

To close, Columbus "discovered" America because the trail he blazed was, in short time, followed and followed often. Kennedy "authored" the words, "Ask not...." because, framed as they were in the context of his inaugural address, they inspired a generation and spurred a nation to service and action.

Michael