ALL PASSION SPENT -- AN EXCHANGE

ALL PASSION SPENT

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 16, 2009

“Alas! Too well, too well they know the pain, the penitence, the woe, that passion brings down on the best, the wisest, and the loveliest.”

Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852), Irish poet

REFERENCE: This is a reply to the essay that preceded Part Four of my October 30, 1984 speech, "Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View." The essay is attached here for your referral.


A WRITER WRITES (The writer as a young boy was forced to be a German soldier on the Eastern front in World War II. He is my colleague and dear friend.)

Jim,

From my point of view, it was rather that Churchill was the fox and Roosevelt was a hedgehog, but both were underestimating the hunger of Stalin as a bear.

Manfred

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

I don’t look forward to an avalanche of emails from readers insisting that Prime Minister Winston Church (1874 – 1965) was a fox, when I’ve suggested he was a hedgehog. Of course, there is a good case for making him a fox. There is for some of the others mentioned in this essay as well.

Time magazine named Churchill, “Person of the Twentieth Century” (2000), with Gandhi the runner up, a man who Churchill despised as a “half-naked fakir.” Churchill also won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his “History of the Second World War” and “History of the English Speaking People.”

But in many ways, and this is the irony, he was a nineteenth century Victorian passionately dedicated to preserving the British Empire. His attitude towards Gandhi and India, alone, is indicative of this.

That said he was a man of unbridled passion, an amateur painter of some talent, and an orator of the first rank who stuttered as a boy. Churchill was a war correspondent in South Africa in the Second Boer War of 1899, where he was captured and escaped. He was a soldier and showed bravery in battle. Only 36, he became Home Secretary, and the list of power positions and bold leadership moves from his early youth on reads like fiction.

For example, there is the disaster at Gallipoli in the Dardanelle’s (1915), which wiped out the Allied Campaign in that region in World War One. It was a plan conceived by Churchill to end the war. He was then Lord of the Admiralty and head of the British Navy. Allied casualties were over 200,000, many dying from disease, which was attributed to under estimating the strength of the Turkish army, which caught the Allies in a cross fire. Some historians see Churchill as a scapegoat for this fiasco.

As for being a hedgehog, I will remind the reader that Churchill was a single minded individual with a passionate hatred of Nazi Germany when there was real sympathy for Germany in the House of Commons prior to WWII. Neville Chamberlain thought he could appease Adolf Hitler, but Churchill was always of another mind. Historians show Hitler admired Anglo-Saxon Great Britain, and believed the two countries could be allies against the Soviet Union. Not so Churchill. He was from the beginning opposed to Hitler and Nazism. It is this passion and singular “big thing” for which I characterize him a hedgehog.

Be always well,

Jim


THE REFERENCED ESSAY

This is the fourth part of this March 30, 1984 speech, which was broken up into four segments because of its length. Why publish now?

I see us stuck in Machine Age thinking and a factory mentality we're unable to shed. Incongruity rules! We're stuck looking through our rearview mirrors constantly blinded by events ahead. It was why I wrote "A Look Back To See Ahead" (2007). Ordinary people, like this writer, were swept up in events as if they had no choice in the matter, spectators to their own destiny.

Twenty-five years ago, we were in a boom period with movie actor President Reagan at the helm. He read his lines with panache, and showed confidence in his symbolic role as leader of the free world. He trumped this with courage when nearly assassinated, showed his mettle negotiating the Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, then completed a histrionic trifecta in Berlin when he said, "Chairman Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

A midwesterner of common roots, Reagan was a man comfortable in his own skin, knew who he was and wasn't, had a moral compass and center, and put his indelible mark on his time with a presidency like a Hollywood premiere.

Now all life is surreal. Twenty-five years ago labor unions were in sharp decline, while management's union, Human Resources (HR) was soaring with cosmetic interventions.

Workers were first betrayed by labor unions as management's adversary, and then exploited by HR as management's advocate. The "best and brightest" became cynical and turned to making money rather than making a difference. That legacy has contributed to the present economic crisis.

The uncoupling of workers from managers has widened in the last quarter century as is shown here in Part Four: managers no longer can lead and workers can no longer follow.

Isaiah Berlin wrote a little book, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1953), which helps decipher this dilemma. Before the Age of Information and the Internet, leadership survived the insensitivities of managers and immaturities of workers because the Machine Age had not yet reached entropy. It has now. Enter a new leader.

The current White House is alleged to have the most competent people ever assembled around a head-of-state, but no one, including the president, has demonstrated an ability to be clear or plausible about what is going on. One wonders if they are not lost in the details failing to choose or unable to choose what can from what cannot be done.

President George Walker Bush was a cowboy: bold, decisive and misguided, a president with a poor command of the American language, seemingly indifferent to the deep mysteries of life and people. He had help from previous presidents to put the nation and the world in this economic and political slump.

Isaiah Berlin would call Bush a hedgehog, one who knows one big thing and that is America first, foremost and alone. His downfall was that he surrounded himself with other hedgehogs in Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney.

Berlin would call Obama a fox, one that knows many things. He writes like a world-class novelist, he speaks like a world-class orator, he thinks like a world-class professor, all of which he is and has been. He has the supreme confidence of his gifts, and herein lays the concern. He has surrounded himself with like-minded foxes, no hedgehogs in sight.

He has already a plausibility gap between his rhetoric and action, his thinking to choose, and choosing to do. The fox wants to do everything simultaneously. A hedgehog like Reagan follows a scrip, while a fox like Obama improvises making it up as he goes along; both are dangerous without the counterbalance of the other.

I have known many foxes among executives. I am thinking of one now who put heart into his subordinates with his courage and calm. His presence created the illusion that his skills were equal to what was happening; that his plans, authority and popularity would resolve the company's difficulties. Morale soared and almost everyone followed his lead without question. When things went awry, it was "his entire fault." His popularity dissolved as fast as it had formed.

This "hedgehog – fox" comparison may offend or confuse. I hope not. It is meant to show foxes are often popular because of their brilliance, hedgehogs tolerated for their tenacity, but neither succeeds without the other.

President Harry S. Truman, a hedgehog, had his foxes in General George Marshall, architect of the "Marshall Plan," and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, architect of the "Truman Doctrine," which kept Western Europe democratic during the "Cold War." And so it has been throughout history.

The hedgehog is impetuous and bold while the fox is calm and deliberate. The hedgehog stays the course with what he has chosen to do, while the fox is given to course corrections with improvisations hoping something will finally work out.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a fox who teamed up successfully with a hedgehog in Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain to win the Second World War.

The lesson to be learned here is that brilliance is never enough nor hardheaded determinism, but a suitable combination of both.

We have wallowed in dystopia the last quarter century as indicated in the mostly ignored writings of John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett among others.

I fear George Bush had too many hedgehogs and now Barak Obama too many foxes. More importantly, as this last segment indicates, a common sin of hedgehogs and foxes alike is that they tend to leave people out of the equation, spectators to their own destiny.

JRF