HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES” – A RESPONSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 28, 2009
“The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.”
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesman
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim:
Powerful. THIS type of issue is why I started a think tank. Our preliminary steps may take us a while before we are in a position to address issues of global importance, but we'll get there!
Haiti is heartbreaking. While he is far from an idol of mine, I have cautious hope that Bill Clinton's appointment this week as UN representative to Haiti will help shed light on that troubled land, and bring it greater aid. Last year, I was on the board for a time with a nonprofit that was bringing laptops and education to orphans at a poor school in Haiti. I know the argument well that they don't need computers, they need food that isn't mud, but I counter that they need both - metaphorically speaking, they need fish to eat today, right now, but also fishing lessons so they can feed themselves with high-wage participation in the global economy in 10 years when these children are old enough to work in a meaningful career.
Anyway, I digress. My reply today is not about education, but fixing a broken culture - and I ask, is it even possible, and if so, where would "we" start? (I put "we" in quotes because, as you'll see below, one of my questions is, can well-meaning outsiders give freedom as a gift?)
I read recently that Haiti has been gauged by international bodies that monitor such things to siphon over 99% of its foreign aid to corrupt government officials and criminals. Basically, when a country or nonprofit gives money to Haiti's government, that money ends up in Switzerland and the Caymans, not with the poor it is intended to help. Direct aid to grass roots groups on the ground in Haiti, for instance from a US Rotary club to a Haitian Rotary club, seems to be the only effective method of delivery.
First question for an (amateur) armchair economist: Is corruption culturally based, and so inescapable?
Next, to address your comments on the failings of Democracy in Haiti. This same problem seems endemic to nations to which participative government is new, and not culturally based. Modern Democracy started in England in the 12th Century. The American Colonies were steeped in it from the very beginning. When the French gave it a try in 1789, they had much less luck - there was no tradition of Democracy there at all, on any level in their society. They finally have it down, but it took them most of a century. Russia is exhibiting the same growing pains today: from the Czars to the Communists, they never had one minute of freedom or participative government on any level of their society until 1989-91, when all of a sudden: ta-da! The communists closed up shop. In the case of Haiti, they may have had some form of so-called Democracy for generations, but the reality is that when the population is uneducated and cowed by violence and the officials corrupt, Democracy is a sham.
I believe firmly that the only legitimacy in government comes from the people. To probably misquote Churchill (sorry, Jim - I know he's not your favorite), Democracy is the worst possible system - except for all the others. So question #2, something I have wondered about my entire life: Is there a bridge form of government that can step in to introduce a nation to Democracy slowly and less painfully, or do Peoples simply need to take their lumps and experience all the horrors of fledgling Democracy on their own? We Anglo cultures had close to a millennium to ease into it, and there was still a lot of strife along the way. The fact may be that modern nations don't have that luxury. I honestly don't have an answer for this dilemma.
This brings us to a question (#3) that has been in the media plenty in recent years: can the UN or the US or anyone successfully "impose" freedom and Democracy on a nation that it "liberates?" We haven't had much luck in the past, but occasionally it has worked. We set up Democracy in our three defeated adversaries, the Axis nations, after WWII - Germany and Japan especially were authoritarian cultures as well as autocracies, and yet they have taken to Democracy quite well. South Korea is another example.
I don't believe it possible to help a nation such as Haiti in any meaningful way through aid alone, although they desperately need that so people do not continue to die of starvation, malnutrition, and disease. In order to have real impact, Haiti needs to free itself of corruption in its society - not just its government, but also its culture, which (as in many Third World cultures) tolerates graft, nepotism, and the like.
I think the long-term cure to Haiti's ills lie in Democracy and fairly regulated Capitalism. You don't get those in a cultural vacuum.
Ted
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I am off to Alaska so I cannot give a long reply to your thoughtful response to this missive.
Edmund Burke is quoted as he had it right. I’ve often thought of Burke’s reflection with regard to the Post-WWII work of General Douglas McArthur in Japan and South Korea.
Imagine what the world would be like today if the good general had acted after that bloody war, which the Empire of Japan precipitated with its bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, as the Bush Administration has acted after 9/11.
General MacArthur was first in his class at West Point; George W. Bush was a “gentlemen ‘C’ student” at Yale. Intelligence is a powerful problem solving toolkit. Brains recognize problems can be controlled but not solved, as they are constantly maturating into new challenges. MacArthur put this mechanism in place.
MacArthur was arrogant, self-absorbed, opinionated, difficult, stubborn, a visionary, and a loner. We don’t elect people to high office like him. If you are thinking of General Eisenhower, think again, as Eisenhower was a similar student to Bush, and a personality and a presence.
Emperor Hirohito’s people treated him as a god. General MacArthur, who had spent much of his career in the Far East, was aware of that precedence and the subtleties in the Japanese culture. He used this knowledge, building a democratic republic infrastructure while maintaining the emperor as the titular head of the government and of the Japanese people.
This was 1945, a time of reconstruction of a defeated and decimated people and nation. The young emperor had already been on the throne for more than 20 years.
In 1921, at the age of twenty, he had already broken with tradition by being the first crown prince to leave his native shores, having been recalled from a six-month European tour in which he spent time with Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales to take control of the government from his mentally unstable father.
While touring Europe, Hirohito developed a taste for Western golf and bacon-and-egg breakfasts. In his 63-year reign, Japan went from a xenophobic nation and insular island kingdom to a modern world power, interrupted of course by the terrible defeat in WWII.
MacArthur, who professed always to be his own man, resisted the many voices who were calling for having Emperor Hirohito tried as a war criminal. He fortunately prevailed.
MacArthur didn’t change the culture he used it. He didn’t subjugate the Japanese people to draconian restrictions but introduced them to Western ways, including baseball. He systematically and strategically brought them along incrementally, not shutting down their war producing factories, but transforming them by bringing in American and European experts to convert them to peacetime purposes.
It was MacArthur, after all, who set in place the climate for W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker to make Japan, Inc. the most powerful and most quality driven manufacturing center in the world.
To be fair, the Japanese were a vigorous people, and after a fashion, became responsive to this general’s vision, perception, understanding, and natural affinity for all things Japanese. He even spoke the language, which is the only way to truly enter another’s culture.
As I’ve said often, we are in a time of leaderless leaders. We were fortunate to have such leaders as General Douglas MacArthur, General George Marshall, and General Omar Bradley, as well as General Eisenhower, and of course, FDR during that challenging time.
You are correct. You build from within, not from without, and you build in the people’s timeframe, not yours, and the infrastructure that is created is natural to the people, not an imposition or denial of what is natural to them. Japan is a group culture. MacArthur epitomized individualism to the nth degree, and yet he adapted his intervention to accommodate the Japanese to what was natural for and to them, and not to his own lights.
* * *
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
HAITI'S "DIRT COOKIES"
HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 28, 2009
* * *
“Values, everyone has values, some are quite honorable, others quite despicable, but we all have values. Values dictate the way we behave or misbehave. Some values are of the brave, others of the bully, and some are of people who simply don’t give a shit.
“Sociologists tell us in South America the chief crimes are against property, especially that of the church and the oligarchy. The majority in many of these countries has little and feels the church is complicit with the ruling class in this state of affairs, and so it wreaks havoc on both.
“The chief crimes in the United States are against people. America is the murder capitol of the world with the largest per capita incarceration of murderers of any country on the globe. The trend in this melting pot of cultures is to intra-ethnic violence, that is, Blacks murdering Blacks, Hispanics murdering Hispanics, Orientals murdering Orientals, and Whites murdering Whites. Whatever we may hate, it is apparent we take it out on our own kind.
“In the land of plenty, wholesale murder has become epidemic as loose federations of young people commonly known as “gangs” are on the attack. Gang Wars are common in our major cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, Seattle and San Francisco where killing is an incidental affair. Chicago, alone, has more than 100,000 in gangs with more than 2,000 gang style murders to date in the last decade. Gangs are active in selling and distributing illegal drugs, prostitution, brutalizing neighborhoods, fighting over street corners for drug traffic, and terrorizing the general population.
“Meanwhile, there are millions, who lack the luxury of any kind of crime as their chief value is to find something to eat to stave off hunger and live for one more day. Values are not always a theme of justice.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., from, "Fragments of a Philosophy”
* * *
Sometimes I am saddened, not because readers are critical of some of my missives but because they take umbrage at my lack of optimism. “Were you born pessimistic,” as one person wrote, “or did you take an oath of pessimism?”
The answer of course is “no, I did not,” but what is apparent is that my missive ran into that reader’s value system, as my missive put the reader on the defensive about her values. Life is not a bowl of cherries, especially when people don’t even have cherries to eat to keep them alive.
* * *
Visit one of the worst slums in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti at lunchtime, and you are likely to see the people eating “dirt cookies” to keep them alive. People here control their hunger pangs with these cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau, seasoned with butter or vegetable shortening and salt.
The mud has been long prized by women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium, as the dirt is alleged to be rich in minerals. Children like the buttery, salty taste of the “dirt cookies,” but when they have them three times a day often complain of stomach cramps after living on such a constant diet.
Food prices have soared in Haiti because of high oil prices, while the land is often parched with need of fertilizer and irrigation, which has resulted in this island nation being mainly dependent on imports. To register a sense of this, at the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice sell for 60 cents, beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up a similar rate, even the price of the yellow dirt or clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now cost $5. Still, at 5 cents a piece the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples.
Eighty percent of the people of Haiti live on less than $2 a day as a tiny elite controls the economy, as has in perpetuity. Making and selling these cookies is the only income for the majority of the Haitian women who commonly have five or more mouths to feed at home.
The “dirt cookie” industry is a simple one. Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline marketplace, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies stand next to Haitians bagging mounds of the dirt into cloth bags. Women buy the dirt, and then process it into “dirt cookies” in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shantytown.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out the rocks and clumps on a sheet, and then stir the dirt and water into a sludge adding shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave it to dry under the scorching hot midday sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to the market or sold on the streets. What is not sold is brought home to feed the many children of these women.
Haitians are so poor and have so little real food that they make and eat “dirt cookies” without another thought, as it holds off starvation. The “dirt cookies” have a smooth consistency, but suck up all the moisture in the mouth as it touches the tongue and then leaves an unpleasant taste of dirt that lingers.
While the dirt may contain parasites and deadly toxins, it can strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb of women to certain diseases claims a study of “geophagy,” which is the scientific name for dirt eating.
* * *
I can remember when I was a boy of five or six, after a hard summer rain, playing in the soft soil and making mud pies, and even tasting them, and spitting out the slimy mud and shaking my head in disgust. Ugh!
Imagine my reaction when learning seven decades later that “dirt cookies” is a food source and viable industry in this poorest country in our hemisphere. This is not a hoax. This is real, and this is going on today in Haiti. (World Focus, WUSF – PBS Television, May 27, 2009, and go to www.google.com and click on “Dirt Cookies of Haiti” for more detailed information).
* * *
Now, how can such poverty exist is this hemisphere with the United States of America the richest most powerful nation in the world?
Haiti is a country, which has been in constant civil strife and social turmoil for most of my life. It is a forgotten country. Meanwhile, American superpower has not been able to do anything about it. Pervasive starvation exists right under our very noses. This is our Darfur, our Somalia, and our Angola. We sit down to dinner, eat heartily, and throw more food away than we eat, while not so far away the breakfast, lunch and dinner in the slums of Haiti are “dirt cookies.” There go I but for the grace of God.
* * *
Do I have an answer? No.
But there are people in government that do, people with expertise in the area of starvation who could do something. But I know the reason why they don’t. Power deals with power to protect its power and the accretion of its power, entertaining nothing that might threaten the erosion of that power whether it be the power of a great or humble nation. Power is guided by quid pro quo, and power always bows to power but not necessarily to the needs of the people. Power dispenses its power only when the impact and most favorable consequences of that power are germane and consequential.
Read Haitian history on www.google.com, and you will see the United States has supported puppet Haitian dictators, only to be surprised how corrupt they turned out to be. The US has armed the police and army, and learned only to its chagrin how they in turn brutalized the people. The US has supported free elections of an electorate largely illiterate but cunningly escorted to the polls and manipulated to vote their benefactors’ conscience, which was the hunger for power. Former President Jimmy Carter has been duped into legitimizing this charade, as have other well-meaning idealists and humanitarians.
Elections are not free when the electorate is not a constitutional power base. Elections can be free but are reduced to being meaningless if there is no infrastructure to carry out the will of the people for civility, social justice, peace and prosperity.
Haiti is a colonial error of commission and omission, which has maintained a power elite studiously dedicated to a weak infrastructure. Consequently, Haiti is not the fabled Atlantis that allegedly sunk to the bottom of the sea. Haiti is real, palpable and observable. The problem is Haiti has simply disappeared from the radar of the world’s conscience, as if it never existed sharing something of the legacy of Atlantis.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 28, 2009
* * *
“Values, everyone has values, some are quite honorable, others quite despicable, but we all have values. Values dictate the way we behave or misbehave. Some values are of the brave, others of the bully, and some are of people who simply don’t give a shit.
“Sociologists tell us in South America the chief crimes are against property, especially that of the church and the oligarchy. The majority in many of these countries has little and feels the church is complicit with the ruling class in this state of affairs, and so it wreaks havoc on both.
“The chief crimes in the United States are against people. America is the murder capitol of the world with the largest per capita incarceration of murderers of any country on the globe. The trend in this melting pot of cultures is to intra-ethnic violence, that is, Blacks murdering Blacks, Hispanics murdering Hispanics, Orientals murdering Orientals, and Whites murdering Whites. Whatever we may hate, it is apparent we take it out on our own kind.
“In the land of plenty, wholesale murder has become epidemic as loose federations of young people commonly known as “gangs” are on the attack. Gang Wars are common in our major cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, Seattle and San Francisco where killing is an incidental affair. Chicago, alone, has more than 100,000 in gangs with more than 2,000 gang style murders to date in the last decade. Gangs are active in selling and distributing illegal drugs, prostitution, brutalizing neighborhoods, fighting over street corners for drug traffic, and terrorizing the general population.
“Meanwhile, there are millions, who lack the luxury of any kind of crime as their chief value is to find something to eat to stave off hunger and live for one more day. Values are not always a theme of justice.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., from, "Fragments of a Philosophy”
* * *
Sometimes I am saddened, not because readers are critical of some of my missives but because they take umbrage at my lack of optimism. “Were you born pessimistic,” as one person wrote, “or did you take an oath of pessimism?”
The answer of course is “no, I did not,” but what is apparent is that my missive ran into that reader’s value system, as my missive put the reader on the defensive about her values. Life is not a bowl of cherries, especially when people don’t even have cherries to eat to keep them alive.
* * *
Visit one of the worst slums in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti at lunchtime, and you are likely to see the people eating “dirt cookies” to keep them alive. People here control their hunger pangs with these cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau, seasoned with butter or vegetable shortening and salt.
The mud has been long prized by women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium, as the dirt is alleged to be rich in minerals. Children like the buttery, salty taste of the “dirt cookies,” but when they have them three times a day often complain of stomach cramps after living on such a constant diet.
Food prices have soared in Haiti because of high oil prices, while the land is often parched with need of fertilizer and irrigation, which has resulted in this island nation being mainly dependent on imports. To register a sense of this, at the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice sell for 60 cents, beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up a similar rate, even the price of the yellow dirt or clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now cost $5. Still, at 5 cents a piece the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples.
Eighty percent of the people of Haiti live on less than $2 a day as a tiny elite controls the economy, as has in perpetuity. Making and selling these cookies is the only income for the majority of the Haitian women who commonly have five or more mouths to feed at home.
The “dirt cookie” industry is a simple one. Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline marketplace, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies stand next to Haitians bagging mounds of the dirt into cloth bags. Women buy the dirt, and then process it into “dirt cookies” in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shantytown.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out the rocks and clumps on a sheet, and then stir the dirt and water into a sludge adding shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave it to dry under the scorching hot midday sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to the market or sold on the streets. What is not sold is brought home to feed the many children of these women.
Haitians are so poor and have so little real food that they make and eat “dirt cookies” without another thought, as it holds off starvation. The “dirt cookies” have a smooth consistency, but suck up all the moisture in the mouth as it touches the tongue and then leaves an unpleasant taste of dirt that lingers.
While the dirt may contain parasites and deadly toxins, it can strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb of women to certain diseases claims a study of “geophagy,” which is the scientific name for dirt eating.
* * *
I can remember when I was a boy of five or six, after a hard summer rain, playing in the soft soil and making mud pies, and even tasting them, and spitting out the slimy mud and shaking my head in disgust. Ugh!
Imagine my reaction when learning seven decades later that “dirt cookies” is a food source and viable industry in this poorest country in our hemisphere. This is not a hoax. This is real, and this is going on today in Haiti. (World Focus, WUSF – PBS Television, May 27, 2009, and go to www.google.com and click on “Dirt Cookies of Haiti” for more detailed information).
* * *
Now, how can such poverty exist is this hemisphere with the United States of America the richest most powerful nation in the world?
Haiti is a country, which has been in constant civil strife and social turmoil for most of my life. It is a forgotten country. Meanwhile, American superpower has not been able to do anything about it. Pervasive starvation exists right under our very noses. This is our Darfur, our Somalia, and our Angola. We sit down to dinner, eat heartily, and throw more food away than we eat, while not so far away the breakfast, lunch and dinner in the slums of Haiti are “dirt cookies.” There go I but for the grace of God.
* * *
Do I have an answer? No.
But there are people in government that do, people with expertise in the area of starvation who could do something. But I know the reason why they don’t. Power deals with power to protect its power and the accretion of its power, entertaining nothing that might threaten the erosion of that power whether it be the power of a great or humble nation. Power is guided by quid pro quo, and power always bows to power but not necessarily to the needs of the people. Power dispenses its power only when the impact and most favorable consequences of that power are germane and consequential.
Read Haitian history on www.google.com, and you will see the United States has supported puppet Haitian dictators, only to be surprised how corrupt they turned out to be. The US has armed the police and army, and learned only to its chagrin how they in turn brutalized the people. The US has supported free elections of an electorate largely illiterate but cunningly escorted to the polls and manipulated to vote their benefactors’ conscience, which was the hunger for power. Former President Jimmy Carter has been duped into legitimizing this charade, as have other well-meaning idealists and humanitarians.
Elections are not free when the electorate is not a constitutional power base. Elections can be free but are reduced to being meaningless if there is no infrastructure to carry out the will of the people for civility, social justice, peace and prosperity.
Haiti is a colonial error of commission and omission, which has maintained a power elite studiously dedicated to a weak infrastructure. Consequently, Haiti is not the fabled Atlantis that allegedly sunk to the bottom of the sea. Haiti is real, palpable and observable. The problem is Haiti has simply disappeared from the radar of the world’s conscience, as if it never existed sharing something of the legacy of Atlantis.
* * *
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
"TORTURE" -- GUILT & SHAME AND IMBECILIC ADOLESCENCE!
“TORTURE” – GUILT & SHAME AND IMBECILIC ADOLESCENCE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 24, 2009
“Though it sleep long, the venom of great guilt, when death or danger, or detection comes, will bite the spirit fiercely.”
Shakespeare
“I regard that man as lost, who has lost his sense of shame.”
Plautus (427 – 184), Roman comic poet
* * *
REFERENCE:
Responses keep coming in on my missive on “Torture.” This is such a case.
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
Another hit! I have "enjoyed" a lifelong love/hate relationship with guilt - in Freudian terms, I'm sure I have an overdeveloped Superego. Whenever I speak on this topic with Jews or Catholics, they seem to believe that their religion/subculture invented guilt. I explain it to them thus:
The Jews invented guilt. The Catholics institutionalized it. The Puritans turned it into a national pastime.
The problem may be that it is no longer most Americans' pastime - guilt, and its neurotic motivating power, has left our national psyche.
We're better adjusted as individuals - people like me who feel guilty despite having done little wrong and plenty right: what's healthy about that? But as a collective whole?
Possibly not so good. Look at Wall Street. Look at the Bush Administration's patent lack of remorse, as evinced by Cheney on national TV lately. I think a good, healthy dose of guilt might indeed be good form, to paraphrase Mr. Salvater.
Ted
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
When guilt is rationalized categorically, referencing Jews, Catholics and Puritans in terms of guilt, my wonder is if it doesn’t take the sting out of personal identification, and therefore meaningful reflection.
I can see the advantage of such usage as a seminar leader, public speaker, indeed, as an intellectual entertainer, but does the effort register with any moral impact? Or does such reference simply distance the intended audience from a sensitivity to personal guilt and shame?
My sense is it disperses guilt and shame and nullifies the personal impact. When I’m making such references, I want the reader to reflect, “Is he speaking to me?” I am indeed!
My missives are an invitation for the reader to ponder what I am pondering, but from his perspective, not mine. I am self-engaged but addressing him.
Someone wrote that “you are always talking about yourself,” as if I should apologize or be self-conscious for doing so. My predilection has precedence.
In the Irish Roman Catholic Church, the priest reads the Epistle before he reads the Gospel at Sunday Mass. The Epistle is a moral missive in support of the Gospel. Since a little boy, Epistles have given me conceptual understanding of moral principles, and have dictated the style of my missives.
I tell empirical stories, and that is what Epistles are, stories, not to pump up my sails, but to put wind in the reader’s. What follows is consistent with that practice.
GUILT AND ITS REPRIEVE -- A PERSONAL INCIDENT!
When quite young, highly successful, but also naïve, I had a vision of building a medical and professional complex in Marion County, Indianapolis, where I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company. I was also active in community affairs, among which was Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals for Lawrence Township, appointed by the mayor of the City of Lawrence, a personal friend.
The City of Lawrence was a burgeoning suburb of Indianapolis on the northeast side of the county with a 27-acre parcel of land that I thought ideal for my project. I shared the idea with a Nalco veteran, who had been with the company in its early days, and was relatively affluent.
“I’ve never taken a chance in my life. I want to get in on this,” he said passionately. "Secure the deal and I'll write a check for the balance." Naively, I took him at his word.
The land was owned by one of the major real estate developers in Indianapolis, and had a sales price of $30,000. I had previously commissioned an architect and had complete drawings of how the project would look when completed. I contacted the developer's attorney, gave him a deposit of $3,000 on Friday, and signed papers to pay the remaining $27,000 on the following Monday, once my partner released the funds.
Over the weekend, my partner got cold feet, and backed out. It was January 1964, and that $3,000 in 2009 dollars would be more than $30,000 today. It was my complete savings at the time. What to do?
On Monday, I went to the offices of the attorney for the developer located on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis, and immediately became weak in the knees once inside its imposing mahogany walls. A secretary ushered me into an even more impressive sanctuary where the attorney sat.
The secretary brought in all the documents I was to sign and gave them to the attorney, a well-dressed man, who waved me to sit down across from him, and said with a broad smile, “Let’s do it!”
“I don’t have the money,” I blurted out without preamble. The two of them looked at me as if I was joking. They could tell by my expression I was in deep agony and sincere. Without saying a word, they waited for me to explain. “My partner backed out,” I said matter-of-factly as if this was sufficient explanation.
“You know this is a serious breach of contract?” the attorney said.
“Yes sir.”
He looked at me a long time, dismissed the secretary, and then dialed a number. He was calling the developer. The attorney explained the situation. He turned his chair so that his back was toward me as he talked. Then he spun around. “Is there any chance you can raise the money?”
Two things kicked into my mind simultaneously. They expected I had a backup plan, which I didn’t, but they wanted to get rid of the land! “Could I talk to the developer?” I asked. The attorney handed me the phone.
The developer said, “You’re out $3,000, son, and you’re wasting everybody’s time.” He then went on to vent his spleen. I listened. I didn’t interrupt. He was obviously not having a very good day, and I had made it worse. Then what I expected came. “That is, you’re out the three grand if you don’t have another proposal.”
To this day, I hate talking on the phone. I screen all my calls, and only answer about 5 percent of them. If I can’t see you, I can’t read you. I was reduced to thinking with my gut, but boldly. “Sir,” I said, “I made this contract in good faith, but my partner got cold feet. I don’t think you want to take my $3,000. I think you want to sell the land.”
I could hear his breathing. “Here is my proposition,” I said off the top of my head breathing equally hard myself. “I would like you to give me a year’s extension and . .”
“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not giving any goddamn extension much less a year.”
“Sir, hear me out," I said evenly. He was breathing hard again. Somehow that increased my boldness. “I get paid every three months. I will send you a check for $2,000 each quarter over the next four quarters, or until I find a buyer for the land. If I don’t sell the land by that time, you will have $11,000, and I will be out that amount.” I thought for sure he’d say you have a month, take or leave it, but to my surprise he said,
“You’re willing to take that risk?”
“Sir, I’m a salesman, and a very good one. I am if you’re willing to trust me.” He was.
* * *
Over the next three quarters, there were several bites on the land but no one could come up with the amount needed – I was selling the land for $33,000 and wouldn’t budge on the price.
Then early in the fourth quarter a buyer materialized who needed the land immediately. He was an industrialist with a major contract from Korea, and had to build a facility with a railroad spur and easy access to metropolitan suppliers for components. He agreed to the $33,000 price, but we quickly ran into a glitch. His lawyers discovered the land was zoned suburban commercial (SC), not suburban industrial (SI). A road had to be cut through the property and “SC” required a 15-foot setback on either side of the road whereas “SI” required 5 feet. They needed the latter or the deal was off.
There was no time to go through the lengthy process of rezoning, but I was in a position to cut through red tape and have the Director of the Marion County Zoning Board, whom I knew rather well, change the land’s zoning from “SC” to “SI,” for an “honorarium,” as he put it.
Once again, I was on the horns of a dilemma. I confess I considered paying him the bribe, justifying it on the basis of what a huge loss it would be to my family if I didn't. My wife knew nothing of this whole business, so I agitated alone. In those days, before they locked up Catholic churches, I would sit in their musty dark silence wherever I was, and think. I did that now.
Part of my mind thought, no one will ever know, as I was aware of how poorly records were kept in 1964 in the county’s archives, as on occasion as Secretary of Zoning Board of Appeals for Lawrence Township I had researched them.
Then, it dawned on me. “I would know,” and I would know that my success was a fraud. I went back to the industrialist that day and told him it was not possible to change the zoning.
* * *
If matters were not complicated enough, they became more complicated. I was promoted area manager in the Industrial Division for Nalco heading up the office in Louisville, and forced to relocate almost immediately, meaning leaving Indianapolis where the land I was attempting to sell was located.
Depressed, and nearly certain that I had not only lost my initial investment in this land deal of $3,000, but compounded that loss with an additional $6,000 already, and possibly, a total of $8,000 if I didn’t find a buyer in final two weeks before Christmas. No one I was certain would be thinking of buying land during the Christmas holidays.
I was wrong. A week before Christmas, I had to leave Louisville and return to Indianapolis to meet a horse breeder from Ocala, Florida, who wanted to take a look at the land.
My heart sunk when I met this man. He was tall, round, scruffy and disheveled with rough hands, ruddy complexion, and the look of an out of work farmer. It was his eyes, however, that were different. They were executive eyes, decisive eyes, eyes that had no time for small talk.
I still remember his reaction when he saw the land. “I’ll take it,” and then he asked, “What you asking for it?” I told him. “Fine," he said, "Got to be back in Lexington tomorrow, can we do this today?”
I called the developer’s attorney, and surprised him once again. “I’ve got a buyer, and I’m bringing him to the office now.” We did the deal. It was the week before Christmas.
The rest of the story is equally bizarre and provides another instance of my naiveté. I was so overwhelmed with the whole affair that in January 1965, I received an additional check for $3,000 having overpaid the builder for the land. I had forgotten that I had charged $33,000 and only contracted to pay $30,000 for the land.
SHAME AND ITS VICISSITUDES
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), I expressed my confusion as a boy with the jubilation that followed the hundreds of thousands of civilians who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the dropping of the atomic bomb. I wrote:
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday ‘President Truman reveals a U. S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.’ I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
“Thank God for that!” they echo as one.
“Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities?” I ask innocently, seeing the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that?
"I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, “It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.” (pp 301 – 302)
Six decades later, I am still perplexed at the demonstration of such glee. Silently, I sought refuge then at the Clinton Public Library to read about these two cities. I didn’t understand shame but I think my young mind embodied it.
My da caught me crying, shook his head in disgust, and told my mother to handle me. War before that incident was like a game, like playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, not real, but the pictures in the newspapers made it real.
* * *
There was an Indian Reservation not far from my home called “Tama,” which my da took me to a couple of times. I considered us poor, but I couldn’t understand how Indians could live in even more deplorable conditions. When I asked my da, he simply answered, “They’re Indians,” as if that explained the situation.
All my growing up period I never read about Indians except the romanticized version of the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, and later, the many triumphs of Americans over Indians in battle, and the atrocities of Indians against settlers. Even “Custer’s Last Stand” had the dramatic appeal of a fallen hero, a possible presidential candidate cut down in the full flush of life, and not that of an incompetent leader.
Then, too, the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez was romanticized in the books I read in my growing up period, failing to mention how he ruthlessly destroyed the Aztec culture in the sixteenth century, and laid to waste Aztec cities and temples of exquisite architecture. Little note was taken of Aztec advances in such fields as astronomy and the arts.
One of my early hero’s was President Andrew Jackson, who soared to prominence on the battlefield and as advocate of the common man. Yet, it wasn’t until my college student days that I became aware of the Indians’ “trail of tears” as he moved Indian nations east of the Mississippi River to the far west, thus destroying their ancient homelands and culture while desecrating their sacred grounds.
President after president throughout American history have signed and broken treaties with Indians, at will, because they could. Yet, there have been no national monuments to this shame.
We have essentially erased the Indian culture from the face of the United States. So, today, there is no Indian tradition, only Indian reservations like “Tama,” and Indian casinos spread across the length and breadth of the country. There is no national holiday dedicated to the Indian culture, yet this continent belonged to the American Indians long before Europeans made it their home.
We are all well aware that six million European Jews perished in Nazis concentration camps during WWII. We also know that more than 58 million perished in that war launched by Hitler six years after the Reichstag fire, which gave the Nazis a pretext to destroy the government and impose its will on the German people.
Nazis did this with democratic elections, elections that for the first time used modern technology and the media to manipulate the will of the people with the invention of contrived scapegoats of the Jews and the WWI Treaty of Versailles.
It is more than sixty years since that shameful period in human history. Since then Germany has been working through its past, attempting to conquer the past through painful self-examination, which has dominated political and cultural life in Germany since the end of World War II.
If you have had the opportunity to visit Germany in recent years, you have seen, as I have, the monuments to the Holocaust in Berlin. The German people are just now, more than six decades later, beginning to come to terms with the Nazis, while imploring the world to believe the genuine sincerity of their shame.
It is time for Americans to get started on what we have done to American Indians and to African Americans. President Harry S. Truman would not outlaw lynching in his administration because he didn’t believe it was prudent to do so at the time. Monuments and museums to the Holocaust are everywhere in Germany, especially in the major cities. Where are the monuments and museums to lynching, or to the eradication of Indian culture in the United States?
It is time for the Roman Catholic Church to apologize for its laxity in World War II for the behavior of Pope Pius XII with regard to the Jewish Question. The oblique apologies of Pope Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are not sufficient. Where is the shame?
We know of the scandals of American Catholic priests and their sexual abuse of children, and the millions of dollars the church have had to pay the victims. We also know there was massive cover-up for decades. Not until the problem could no longer be contained did the Church act, and then reluctantly. Prior to that sex offending priests were rotated and cavalierly placed in harm’s way of children with imperious contempt. Where is the shame?
Now we learn that tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests, and others over sixty years in hundreds of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released from Dublin last week. The New York Times reports:
“The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th century schools, characterized by privation, and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed. A climate of fear, created by pervasive punishment, permeated most of the institutions, the report says. In the boys’ schools, it says, sexual abuse was endemic.”
Where is the shame?
Sometimes I wonder if we have traveled through all these centuries into modernism and post modernism only to find ourselves in Paradise Lost chasing money until it has no meaning, experiencing discomfort with society which has no substance, feeling psychological urges for a strong father figure, when he has long ago abandoned us, retreating into our primal desires with reckless abandon, which makes heaven a hell, and a hell of heaven, as Milton might say.
Without guilt and shame, conscience and caring, there is no sensitivity to our common humanity as these are its boundaries.
Viewed from that context, I fear we Americans are inclined to intellectualize our pain and shame, dissipating it into rhetoric rather than action. We are an unusual society. You say we are more mature. I flinch at that suggestion, as I couldn’t imagine us to be more imbecilic adolescent.
We cower in the cave of fear and paint it with our faint hopes. Not until we face and absorb our negative history can we count ourselves among the grown ups. If there is no sensitivity to evil, then there is no place for good. There is only room for hollow men.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 24, 2009
“Though it sleep long, the venom of great guilt, when death or danger, or detection comes, will bite the spirit fiercely.”
Shakespeare
“I regard that man as lost, who has lost his sense of shame.”
Plautus (427 – 184), Roman comic poet
* * *
REFERENCE:
Responses keep coming in on my missive on “Torture.” This is such a case.
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
Another hit! I have "enjoyed" a lifelong love/hate relationship with guilt - in Freudian terms, I'm sure I have an overdeveloped Superego. Whenever I speak on this topic with Jews or Catholics, they seem to believe that their religion/subculture invented guilt. I explain it to them thus:
The Jews invented guilt. The Catholics institutionalized it. The Puritans turned it into a national pastime.
The problem may be that it is no longer most Americans' pastime - guilt, and its neurotic motivating power, has left our national psyche.
We're better adjusted as individuals - people like me who feel guilty despite having done little wrong and plenty right: what's healthy about that? But as a collective whole?
Possibly not so good. Look at Wall Street. Look at the Bush Administration's patent lack of remorse, as evinced by Cheney on national TV lately. I think a good, healthy dose of guilt might indeed be good form, to paraphrase Mr. Salvater.
Ted
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
When guilt is rationalized categorically, referencing Jews, Catholics and Puritans in terms of guilt, my wonder is if it doesn’t take the sting out of personal identification, and therefore meaningful reflection.
I can see the advantage of such usage as a seminar leader, public speaker, indeed, as an intellectual entertainer, but does the effort register with any moral impact? Or does such reference simply distance the intended audience from a sensitivity to personal guilt and shame?
My sense is it disperses guilt and shame and nullifies the personal impact. When I’m making such references, I want the reader to reflect, “Is he speaking to me?” I am indeed!
My missives are an invitation for the reader to ponder what I am pondering, but from his perspective, not mine. I am self-engaged but addressing him.
Someone wrote that “you are always talking about yourself,” as if I should apologize or be self-conscious for doing so. My predilection has precedence.
In the Irish Roman Catholic Church, the priest reads the Epistle before he reads the Gospel at Sunday Mass. The Epistle is a moral missive in support of the Gospel. Since a little boy, Epistles have given me conceptual understanding of moral principles, and have dictated the style of my missives.
I tell empirical stories, and that is what Epistles are, stories, not to pump up my sails, but to put wind in the reader’s. What follows is consistent with that practice.
GUILT AND ITS REPRIEVE -- A PERSONAL INCIDENT!
When quite young, highly successful, but also naïve, I had a vision of building a medical and professional complex in Marion County, Indianapolis, where I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company. I was also active in community affairs, among which was Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals for Lawrence Township, appointed by the mayor of the City of Lawrence, a personal friend.
The City of Lawrence was a burgeoning suburb of Indianapolis on the northeast side of the county with a 27-acre parcel of land that I thought ideal for my project. I shared the idea with a Nalco veteran, who had been with the company in its early days, and was relatively affluent.
“I’ve never taken a chance in my life. I want to get in on this,” he said passionately. "Secure the deal and I'll write a check for the balance." Naively, I took him at his word.
The land was owned by one of the major real estate developers in Indianapolis, and had a sales price of $30,000. I had previously commissioned an architect and had complete drawings of how the project would look when completed. I contacted the developer's attorney, gave him a deposit of $3,000 on Friday, and signed papers to pay the remaining $27,000 on the following Monday, once my partner released the funds.
Over the weekend, my partner got cold feet, and backed out. It was January 1964, and that $3,000 in 2009 dollars would be more than $30,000 today. It was my complete savings at the time. What to do?
On Monday, I went to the offices of the attorney for the developer located on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis, and immediately became weak in the knees once inside its imposing mahogany walls. A secretary ushered me into an even more impressive sanctuary where the attorney sat.
The secretary brought in all the documents I was to sign and gave them to the attorney, a well-dressed man, who waved me to sit down across from him, and said with a broad smile, “Let’s do it!”
“I don’t have the money,” I blurted out without preamble. The two of them looked at me as if I was joking. They could tell by my expression I was in deep agony and sincere. Without saying a word, they waited for me to explain. “My partner backed out,” I said matter-of-factly as if this was sufficient explanation.
“You know this is a serious breach of contract?” the attorney said.
“Yes sir.”
He looked at me a long time, dismissed the secretary, and then dialed a number. He was calling the developer. The attorney explained the situation. He turned his chair so that his back was toward me as he talked. Then he spun around. “Is there any chance you can raise the money?”
Two things kicked into my mind simultaneously. They expected I had a backup plan, which I didn’t, but they wanted to get rid of the land! “Could I talk to the developer?” I asked. The attorney handed me the phone.
The developer said, “You’re out $3,000, son, and you’re wasting everybody’s time.” He then went on to vent his spleen. I listened. I didn’t interrupt. He was obviously not having a very good day, and I had made it worse. Then what I expected came. “That is, you’re out the three grand if you don’t have another proposal.”
To this day, I hate talking on the phone. I screen all my calls, and only answer about 5 percent of them. If I can’t see you, I can’t read you. I was reduced to thinking with my gut, but boldly. “Sir,” I said, “I made this contract in good faith, but my partner got cold feet. I don’t think you want to take my $3,000. I think you want to sell the land.”
I could hear his breathing. “Here is my proposition,” I said off the top of my head breathing equally hard myself. “I would like you to give me a year’s extension and . .”
“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not giving any goddamn extension much less a year.”
“Sir, hear me out," I said evenly. He was breathing hard again. Somehow that increased my boldness. “I get paid every three months. I will send you a check for $2,000 each quarter over the next four quarters, or until I find a buyer for the land. If I don’t sell the land by that time, you will have $11,000, and I will be out that amount.” I thought for sure he’d say you have a month, take or leave it, but to my surprise he said,
“You’re willing to take that risk?”
“Sir, I’m a salesman, and a very good one. I am if you’re willing to trust me.” He was.
* * *
Over the next three quarters, there were several bites on the land but no one could come up with the amount needed – I was selling the land for $33,000 and wouldn’t budge on the price.
Then early in the fourth quarter a buyer materialized who needed the land immediately. He was an industrialist with a major contract from Korea, and had to build a facility with a railroad spur and easy access to metropolitan suppliers for components. He agreed to the $33,000 price, but we quickly ran into a glitch. His lawyers discovered the land was zoned suburban commercial (SC), not suburban industrial (SI). A road had to be cut through the property and “SC” required a 15-foot setback on either side of the road whereas “SI” required 5 feet. They needed the latter or the deal was off.
There was no time to go through the lengthy process of rezoning, but I was in a position to cut through red tape and have the Director of the Marion County Zoning Board, whom I knew rather well, change the land’s zoning from “SC” to “SI,” for an “honorarium,” as he put it.
Once again, I was on the horns of a dilemma. I confess I considered paying him the bribe, justifying it on the basis of what a huge loss it would be to my family if I didn't. My wife knew nothing of this whole business, so I agitated alone. In those days, before they locked up Catholic churches, I would sit in their musty dark silence wherever I was, and think. I did that now.
Part of my mind thought, no one will ever know, as I was aware of how poorly records were kept in 1964 in the county’s archives, as on occasion as Secretary of Zoning Board of Appeals for Lawrence Township I had researched them.
Then, it dawned on me. “I would know,” and I would know that my success was a fraud. I went back to the industrialist that day and told him it was not possible to change the zoning.
* * *
If matters were not complicated enough, they became more complicated. I was promoted area manager in the Industrial Division for Nalco heading up the office in Louisville, and forced to relocate almost immediately, meaning leaving Indianapolis where the land I was attempting to sell was located.
Depressed, and nearly certain that I had not only lost my initial investment in this land deal of $3,000, but compounded that loss with an additional $6,000 already, and possibly, a total of $8,000 if I didn’t find a buyer in final two weeks before Christmas. No one I was certain would be thinking of buying land during the Christmas holidays.
I was wrong. A week before Christmas, I had to leave Louisville and return to Indianapolis to meet a horse breeder from Ocala, Florida, who wanted to take a look at the land.
My heart sunk when I met this man. He was tall, round, scruffy and disheveled with rough hands, ruddy complexion, and the look of an out of work farmer. It was his eyes, however, that were different. They were executive eyes, decisive eyes, eyes that had no time for small talk.
I still remember his reaction when he saw the land. “I’ll take it,” and then he asked, “What you asking for it?” I told him. “Fine," he said, "Got to be back in Lexington tomorrow, can we do this today?”
I called the developer’s attorney, and surprised him once again. “I’ve got a buyer, and I’m bringing him to the office now.” We did the deal. It was the week before Christmas.
The rest of the story is equally bizarre and provides another instance of my naiveté. I was so overwhelmed with the whole affair that in January 1965, I received an additional check for $3,000 having overpaid the builder for the land. I had forgotten that I had charged $33,000 and only contracted to pay $30,000 for the land.
SHAME AND ITS VICISSITUDES
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), I expressed my confusion as a boy with the jubilation that followed the hundreds of thousands of civilians who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the dropping of the atomic bomb. I wrote:
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday ‘President Truman reveals a U. S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.’ I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
“Thank God for that!” they echo as one.
“Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities?” I ask innocently, seeing the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that?
"I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, “It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.” (pp 301 – 302)
Six decades later, I am still perplexed at the demonstration of such glee. Silently, I sought refuge then at the Clinton Public Library to read about these two cities. I didn’t understand shame but I think my young mind embodied it.
My da caught me crying, shook his head in disgust, and told my mother to handle me. War before that incident was like a game, like playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, not real, but the pictures in the newspapers made it real.
* * *
There was an Indian Reservation not far from my home called “Tama,” which my da took me to a couple of times. I considered us poor, but I couldn’t understand how Indians could live in even more deplorable conditions. When I asked my da, he simply answered, “They’re Indians,” as if that explained the situation.
All my growing up period I never read about Indians except the romanticized version of the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, and later, the many triumphs of Americans over Indians in battle, and the atrocities of Indians against settlers. Even “Custer’s Last Stand” had the dramatic appeal of a fallen hero, a possible presidential candidate cut down in the full flush of life, and not that of an incompetent leader.
Then, too, the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez was romanticized in the books I read in my growing up period, failing to mention how he ruthlessly destroyed the Aztec culture in the sixteenth century, and laid to waste Aztec cities and temples of exquisite architecture. Little note was taken of Aztec advances in such fields as astronomy and the arts.
One of my early hero’s was President Andrew Jackson, who soared to prominence on the battlefield and as advocate of the common man. Yet, it wasn’t until my college student days that I became aware of the Indians’ “trail of tears” as he moved Indian nations east of the Mississippi River to the far west, thus destroying their ancient homelands and culture while desecrating their sacred grounds.
President after president throughout American history have signed and broken treaties with Indians, at will, because they could. Yet, there have been no national monuments to this shame.
We have essentially erased the Indian culture from the face of the United States. So, today, there is no Indian tradition, only Indian reservations like “Tama,” and Indian casinos spread across the length and breadth of the country. There is no national holiday dedicated to the Indian culture, yet this continent belonged to the American Indians long before Europeans made it their home.
We are all well aware that six million European Jews perished in Nazis concentration camps during WWII. We also know that more than 58 million perished in that war launched by Hitler six years after the Reichstag fire, which gave the Nazis a pretext to destroy the government and impose its will on the German people.
Nazis did this with democratic elections, elections that for the first time used modern technology and the media to manipulate the will of the people with the invention of contrived scapegoats of the Jews and the WWI Treaty of Versailles.
It is more than sixty years since that shameful period in human history. Since then Germany has been working through its past, attempting to conquer the past through painful self-examination, which has dominated political and cultural life in Germany since the end of World War II.
If you have had the opportunity to visit Germany in recent years, you have seen, as I have, the monuments to the Holocaust in Berlin. The German people are just now, more than six decades later, beginning to come to terms with the Nazis, while imploring the world to believe the genuine sincerity of their shame.
It is time for Americans to get started on what we have done to American Indians and to African Americans. President Harry S. Truman would not outlaw lynching in his administration because he didn’t believe it was prudent to do so at the time. Monuments and museums to the Holocaust are everywhere in Germany, especially in the major cities. Where are the monuments and museums to lynching, or to the eradication of Indian culture in the United States?
It is time for the Roman Catholic Church to apologize for its laxity in World War II for the behavior of Pope Pius XII with regard to the Jewish Question. The oblique apologies of Pope Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are not sufficient. Where is the shame?
We know of the scandals of American Catholic priests and their sexual abuse of children, and the millions of dollars the church have had to pay the victims. We also know there was massive cover-up for decades. Not until the problem could no longer be contained did the Church act, and then reluctantly. Prior to that sex offending priests were rotated and cavalierly placed in harm’s way of children with imperious contempt. Where is the shame?
Now we learn that tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests, and others over sixty years in hundreds of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released from Dublin last week. The New York Times reports:
“The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th century schools, characterized by privation, and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed. A climate of fear, created by pervasive punishment, permeated most of the institutions, the report says. In the boys’ schools, it says, sexual abuse was endemic.”
Where is the shame?
Sometimes I wonder if we have traveled through all these centuries into modernism and post modernism only to find ourselves in Paradise Lost chasing money until it has no meaning, experiencing discomfort with society which has no substance, feeling psychological urges for a strong father figure, when he has long ago abandoned us, retreating into our primal desires with reckless abandon, which makes heaven a hell, and a hell of heaven, as Milton might say.
Without guilt and shame, conscience and caring, there is no sensitivity to our common humanity as these are its boundaries.
Viewed from that context, I fear we Americans are inclined to intellectualize our pain and shame, dissipating it into rhetoric rather than action. We are an unusual society. You say we are more mature. I flinch at that suggestion, as I couldn’t imagine us to be more imbecilic adolescent.
We cower in the cave of fear and paint it with our faint hopes. Not until we face and absorb our negative history can we count ourselves among the grown ups. If there is no sensitivity to evil, then there is no place for good. There is only room for hollow men.
* * *
Friday, May 22, 2009
"TORTURE" -- A CONVERSATION & COMMENT!
"TORTURE" – A CONVERSATION & COMMENT!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 22, 2009
“Ethics is a matter of good taste.”
Fernando Savater, Spanish philosopher, author of “Amador” (1994)
* * *
REFERENCE:
Manfred, my German friend, with whom I worked with in the late 1980s for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., told me to hold his email, as he will be traveling in the States for a month. He lives near Frankfurt, Germany.
We had often discussed such sensitive subjects, when we worked together, and I wanted him to have access to my take on “Torture.”
Manfred was recruited as a fledgling soldier in the closing days of WWII to fight for Germany against the Russians on the Eastern front, while I of a similar age quietly attended St. Patrick Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa.
Somehow he survived that traumatic experience, and had a successful executive career, completing that career as a Vice President of Human Resources, Honeywell International.
His three children were educated in Germany and the United States with his daughter acquiring a Ph.D. in pharmacology from a major university in the United States, and his two sons, MBAs from Ivy League Business Schools. Manfred and Gerda’s children have all chosen to live and work in the United States, but have a worldview that they might otherwise lack.
What follows is our clipped conversation and a comment.
MY MESSAGE:
(This is what I wrote in sending Manfred the “Torture” missive)
Manfred,
I'm afraid I'm going to get some hate mail from this. Considering that possibility, I almost didn't post it, but I have, and so it is too late to express remorse. I wanted you to have it because if anyone understands the convoluted psychodrama regarding torture, it is you.
Be always well and have a wonderful visit with your children and grandchildren.
Jim
PS Love to Gerda from both BB and me.
* * *
MANFRED’S RESPONSE:
Jim,
I'm also afraid that an unreasonable reaction may follow, but I trust you to accept it as a confirmation of your message.
In Germany we say, “A dog will presumably bark at you when you catch him with a chicken he has killed in your yard.” It confirms his mistake by becoming the aggressor to you, the accuser.
It may be part of our ancient heritage to be inclined to torture our enemies or people we fear. After what has happened on both sides in WWII, however, we should know better and avoid such inhumane action.
Otherwise, we have to recognize it will create hatred and backlash. It would appear as a consequence of Guantanamo that terrorism has increased significantly, and has enhanced support for its jihad with more volunteers. Was that intended?
Yesterday, I flew from Frankfurt to Minneapolis and had to experience how the terrorists have silently paralyzed us. All the security imposed on us costs enormous amounts of time and money and makes traveling a disagreeable event. Do we really take this as a good expression of patriotism?
Be always well and stay strong with your opinions,
Manfred
* * *
MY FINAL COMMENTS ON "TORTURE":
We live in a time of “urban legends,” when devious if not diabolical people can fan the flames of hatred by tormenting us in the most vulnerable sanctuaries of our private thoughts. They offer a convenient if bizarre palliative to guilt and shame.
Rather than have us wrestle with guilt and shame for the excesses of the spirit performed in our behalf at such places as Guantanamo, we say, “Aren’t there worse forms of torture than were practiced at Abu Graib?” Without a doubt, there are! But should we take our standards from what other people do?
We live in an increasingly desensitized world of electronic wonders in which we text message scores perhaps hundreds of times a day to people connected to us if remotely. Intimacy has faded to infantile sex comedies, or an occasional PBS special of the works of Jane Austen on television.
We are so self-estranged that we think sex is funny, not fun, not uplifting, not a jubilation of the human spirit in the miracle of creating life, not an expression of intimacy, but funny. Being "funny" has become an expression of self-consciousness and the antithesis of intimacy. Funny, as it has been ratcheted down, is banal to the point of nonsense. Nonsensical sells!
If anything, there is not enough guilt and shame left in the world.
Guilt is the internal sense that we have done something wrong even though no one might ever discover it.
Shame records our consciousness before our peers whose values we honor, and whose esteem we desire. Guilt goes deep, but shame leaves its mark once it is made public. Fernando Savater is right, “Ethics is a matter of good taste.”
I don’t find television comedies in good taste, but banal, treating as they do people as sex objects in the most degrading manner, but, alas, such programs get the ratings, and remain on television. Good taste is apparently neither fashionable nor profitable.
What has this to do with my discussion of “Torture”? Susan Neiman puts it best:
“Shame and guilt often stand and fall together, but they are quite distinct. The absence of shame is critical, for shameless is not just a term of abuse. We have lost a sense of moral clarity.”
After a century of war in which nearly a quarter billion people perished as direct participants or collateral damage in those many wars, evil has become benign and good has taken a holiday.
We run on moral energy and our tank is low if not close to empty. So, in a sense, our retreat from reality into cyberspace and virtual reality as therapy for an anxious age is not inconceivable, but is it healthy? Do we still have the resilience to face the future? That is my wonder.
A decade and a half ago, I claimed in “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996) “we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.” I see little evidence that we have found it or our way.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 22, 2009
“Ethics is a matter of good taste.”
Fernando Savater, Spanish philosopher, author of “Amador” (1994)
* * *
REFERENCE:
Manfred, my German friend, with whom I worked with in the late 1980s for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., told me to hold his email, as he will be traveling in the States for a month. He lives near Frankfurt, Germany.
We had often discussed such sensitive subjects, when we worked together, and I wanted him to have access to my take on “Torture.”
Manfred was recruited as a fledgling soldier in the closing days of WWII to fight for Germany against the Russians on the Eastern front, while I of a similar age quietly attended St. Patrick Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa.
Somehow he survived that traumatic experience, and had a successful executive career, completing that career as a Vice President of Human Resources, Honeywell International.
His three children were educated in Germany and the United States with his daughter acquiring a Ph.D. in pharmacology from a major university in the United States, and his two sons, MBAs from Ivy League Business Schools. Manfred and Gerda’s children have all chosen to live and work in the United States, but have a worldview that they might otherwise lack.
What follows is our clipped conversation and a comment.
MY MESSAGE:
(This is what I wrote in sending Manfred the “Torture” missive)
Manfred,
I'm afraid I'm going to get some hate mail from this. Considering that possibility, I almost didn't post it, but I have, and so it is too late to express remorse. I wanted you to have it because if anyone understands the convoluted psychodrama regarding torture, it is you.
Be always well and have a wonderful visit with your children and grandchildren.
Jim
PS Love to Gerda from both BB and me.
* * *
MANFRED’S RESPONSE:
Jim,
I'm also afraid that an unreasonable reaction may follow, but I trust you to accept it as a confirmation of your message.
In Germany we say, “A dog will presumably bark at you when you catch him with a chicken he has killed in your yard.” It confirms his mistake by becoming the aggressor to you, the accuser.
It may be part of our ancient heritage to be inclined to torture our enemies or people we fear. After what has happened on both sides in WWII, however, we should know better and avoid such inhumane action.
Otherwise, we have to recognize it will create hatred and backlash. It would appear as a consequence of Guantanamo that terrorism has increased significantly, and has enhanced support for its jihad with more volunteers. Was that intended?
Yesterday, I flew from Frankfurt to Minneapolis and had to experience how the terrorists have silently paralyzed us. All the security imposed on us costs enormous amounts of time and money and makes traveling a disagreeable event. Do we really take this as a good expression of patriotism?
Be always well and stay strong with your opinions,
Manfred
* * *
MY FINAL COMMENTS ON "TORTURE":
We live in a time of “urban legends,” when devious if not diabolical people can fan the flames of hatred by tormenting us in the most vulnerable sanctuaries of our private thoughts. They offer a convenient if bizarre palliative to guilt and shame.
Rather than have us wrestle with guilt and shame for the excesses of the spirit performed in our behalf at such places as Guantanamo, we say, “Aren’t there worse forms of torture than were practiced at Abu Graib?” Without a doubt, there are! But should we take our standards from what other people do?
We live in an increasingly desensitized world of electronic wonders in which we text message scores perhaps hundreds of times a day to people connected to us if remotely. Intimacy has faded to infantile sex comedies, or an occasional PBS special of the works of Jane Austen on television.
We are so self-estranged that we think sex is funny, not fun, not uplifting, not a jubilation of the human spirit in the miracle of creating life, not an expression of intimacy, but funny. Being "funny" has become an expression of self-consciousness and the antithesis of intimacy. Funny, as it has been ratcheted down, is banal to the point of nonsense. Nonsensical sells!
If anything, there is not enough guilt and shame left in the world.
Guilt is the internal sense that we have done something wrong even though no one might ever discover it.
Shame records our consciousness before our peers whose values we honor, and whose esteem we desire. Guilt goes deep, but shame leaves its mark once it is made public. Fernando Savater is right, “Ethics is a matter of good taste.”
I don’t find television comedies in good taste, but banal, treating as they do people as sex objects in the most degrading manner, but, alas, such programs get the ratings, and remain on television. Good taste is apparently neither fashionable nor profitable.
What has this to do with my discussion of “Torture”? Susan Neiman puts it best:
“Shame and guilt often stand and fall together, but they are quite distinct. The absence of shame is critical, for shameless is not just a term of abuse. We have lost a sense of moral clarity.”
After a century of war in which nearly a quarter billion people perished as direct participants or collateral damage in those many wars, evil has become benign and good has taken a holiday.
We run on moral energy and our tank is low if not close to empty. So, in a sense, our retreat from reality into cyberspace and virtual reality as therapy for an anxious age is not inconceivable, but is it healthy? Do we still have the resilience to face the future? That is my wonder.
A decade and a half ago, I claimed in “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996) “we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.” I see little evidence that we have found it or our way.
* * *
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
TORTURE -- AN EXCHANGE!
TORTURE – AN EXCHANGE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 20, 2009
“Action is not about results, not about having or even winning. It is, surprisingly, about being, or about not deadening ourselves to the cruelty around us. Thus, being alive, one takes a stand.”
David Shulman, “Dark Hope” (2007)
A READER RESPONDS:
Especially good today, Jim, though I patently disagree with your assessment of the Japanese willingness to surrender before the first A-bomb dropped.
When in high school and college, reading of Milgram and Zimbardo, and having been raised a jingoist gringo and deutchophobe as well, I resisted the lessons of their experiments, that evil is indeed banal.
I've matured a bit since then. Now, I understand the real lesson of value to be taken from these insights into the weakness of the human soul is this: that the very knowing of our moral frailty can protect us from ourselves. Because of these and other lessons from social psychology on a myriad of subjects, students can discuss and explore meaning and options and thus be ready for when situations like this arise - when, for instance, they are assigned to work in an Abu Ghraib or write a memo for the President justifying torture, rendition, etc.
Stay well,
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your quick response. I’ve come across both the claim Japan was willing to surrender before the dropping of the atomic bomb, and also the same data that you put forth. Historians I’ve read hedge on the point, which may be moot because the bombs were dropped and we now live in the Nuclear Age with weapons of mass destruction which can erase us from the planet. We must be alive to take a stand. That is the purpose of my little missives – to get people to think.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 20, 2009
“Action is not about results, not about having or even winning. It is, surprisingly, about being, or about not deadening ourselves to the cruelty around us. Thus, being alive, one takes a stand.”
David Shulman, “Dark Hope” (2007)
A READER RESPONDS:
Especially good today, Jim, though I patently disagree with your assessment of the Japanese willingness to surrender before the first A-bomb dropped.
When in high school and college, reading of Milgram and Zimbardo, and having been raised a jingoist gringo and deutchophobe as well, I resisted the lessons of their experiments, that evil is indeed banal.
I've matured a bit since then. Now, I understand the real lesson of value to be taken from these insights into the weakness of the human soul is this: that the very knowing of our moral frailty can protect us from ourselves. Because of these and other lessons from social psychology on a myriad of subjects, students can discuss and explore meaning and options and thus be ready for when situations like this arise - when, for instance, they are assigned to work in an Abu Ghraib or write a memo for the President justifying torture, rendition, etc.
Stay well,
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your quick response. I’ve come across both the claim Japan was willing to surrender before the dropping of the atomic bomb, and also the same data that you put forth. Historians I’ve read hedge on the point, which may be moot because the bombs were dropped and we now live in the Nuclear Age with weapons of mass destruction which can erase us from the planet. We must be alive to take a stand. That is the purpose of my little missives – to get people to think.
Be always well,
Jim
TORTURE
TORTURE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 19, 2009
“Americans have always been a people with marked genocidal proclivities: our systematic extermination of the Indian, the casual killing of American blacks during and after slavery, and our indifference to dropping an atomic bomb on a large civilian populace – we are, after all, the only people ever to have used such a weapon – reflect this attitude.”
Philip Slater, “The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point,” 1970,
“You can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners.”
Winston Churchill
“Would you rather do evil and be regarded as good, or do good but be regarded as evil?”
Plato
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made their minds up to be or do evil at all.”
Hannah Arendt, “Thinking” (1964)
* * *
TORTURE AT THE MIND’S LIMIT
Our focus at the moment may be on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and interrogating techniques associated with torture in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but torture is quite indigenous to our society.
Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a famous experiment at Stanford University, “Pathology of Imprisonment” (1972), in which he took a group of healthy young college men and randomly assigned half of them to act as prisoners, and the other half as guards in a makeshift jail in the basement of a university laboratory.
Within forty-eight hours each group was transformed with an extraordinary vicious cycle set in motion. The student guards degraded prisoners through verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, hours spent in stress positions, as well as repeating mindless physical and mental exercises. As the prisoners became increasingly dehumanized, the guards were found it increasingly easy to degrade them even further. They were no longer play-acting. They had become their sadistic roles.
Another researcher social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted a “Behavioral Study of Obedience” (1963) at Yale University. In this experiment, the subjects were forty males selected at random from newspaper advertisements. The subjects were paid $4.50 for their participation and told the payment was simply for coming to the laboratory. One naïve subject and victim (an accomplice of the experimenter) performed in each experiment. A pretext was devised that would justify the administration of electric shock by the naïve subject.
The subjects drew slips of paper from a hat to determine who would be the teacher and who would be the learner in the experiment. The drawing was rigged so that the naïve subject was always the teacher and the accomplice always the learner. The two moved to an adjacent room where the learner was strapped into an “electric” chair apparatus.
The subject was told to administer a shock to the learner each time he gave a wrong response. Moreover, the subject was instructed to move the level higher on the shock generator each time the learner flashed the wrong answer. The teacher was advised to announce the increased voltage level before administering the shock. A series of prods were given the teacher or subject to ensure that he would constantly increase the voltage.
What were the results of the experiment?
The tension levels in the subjects grew extreme with the subjects sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, and digging their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment. Exceptional responses went the gambit from nervous laughter and smiling to uncontrollable seizures as they increased the voltage. One subject became so violently convulsive that it was necessary to halt the experiment. Still, only five out of the forty subjects refused to obey the experimenter’s command beyond the 300-volt level, four administered one further shock, two broke off at the 330-volt level, and one each at 345, 360, and 375 volts.
Milgram found the experiment not only confirmed obedience and conformity, but cruelty and destructiveness as well. The shocks like the screams of the actors were all fake who were pretending to be learners in the next room.
But the results were not bogus: 65 percent of subjects tested were willing to cause electric shocks they believed would cause unconsciousness in the learner, and possibly death. Milgram’s conclusion: “If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”
Who were the naïve participants in this experiment? Subjects ranged from one who had not finished elementary school, to those who had doctorates and other professional degrees. There were also postal clerks, high school teachers, salesmen, engineers and laborers.
Zimbardo’s research expanded the conclusions of Milgram’s study. Milgram’s experiments set out to explore how ordinary Germans became accomplices to mass murder. Zimbardo argues from the results of his study that we underestimate our vulnerability to the toxic effect of bad systems and other situational forces. He cautioned that we should be aware of our frailty realizing that any of us might collude in evil or equally oppose it. No one is intrinsically good or intrinsically evil, he adds, but vulnerable to either given the right circumstances.
THE MUNDANE CRUCIBLE OF TORTURE – A SURVIVOR’S STORY
Nearly forty years ago, a physician friend, who knew I was a writer, told me of a man who would be a good subject for a book. I interviewed this man for more than one hundred hours, but never wrote the book. The man’s name was Billy Yates, and I became very fond of him and subsequently a friend. He was six foot tall and weighed about 360, and was built like a fireplug with muscles to match.
Early in my acquaintance with Billy, he invited me to his home to meet his wife, Molly, who was older than he was, his daughter, and the couples’ four foster children. As I approached his house, I found him carrying a grand piano on his back into the house. If you can imagine that scene, it gave me a sense of his massive physical power.
Billy grew up in foster homes. His birth mother attempted to raise him to the age of five, and his little brother, three. She was a single parent and prostitute. On one occasion, she brought a customer home, and Billy and his brother were making too much noise, and the drunken customer went after the boys. Billy hid his brother in a closet and faced the man. It was a mistake. The man beat him to an inch of his life. He was taken to the hospital unconscious on life support. His little body suffered multiple fractures as well as a severe concussion. After more than a month in the hospital, he was returned to foster care through social services, while his little brother was adopted.
Often in foster care, he was not given enough to eat and grew so thin at one point that he was hospitalized suffering from malnutrition. As a consequence, he became somewhat obsessed with food once he was on his own, and grew to his enormous size. From five years on, he was passed from one foster family to another foster family, and eventually quit school after the sixth grade at the age of fourteen.
Once on his own, now fifteen, he got in with a gang that did petty crimes including breaking into warehouses and business offices and robbing the vending machines of their coin. The gang liked Billy because he was strong as an ox and could rip open the machines with his bear hands with the coins spilling out. Of course, he left his fingerprints, and so was eventually caught.
The judge said he was going to do Billy a favor – he was now eighteen – and send him to Raiford, the maximum-security prison in Florida.
I said to Billy, “Why did you get in with this gang?”
He answered, “They were the only ones who would accept me.”
One time when he was hitchhiking, he said, a minister and his wife picked him up and stopped at a motel. They both abused him. He was only sixteen. Thereafter he never trusted anyone in the adult world.
The horror stories he told about Raiford were as menacing as the stuff of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the interrogating techniques of prisoners held at Guantanamo. He was on a chain gang in the field while at Raiford, not working fast enough, and a guard came over and hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle. Billy picked the man up and threw him across the road, which resulted in a host of guards descending on and subduing him in his compromising state of being chained to other prisoners.
He ended up in the hospital infirmary, and from there was place in solitary confinement. “I was something of a bad ass, I guess,” he said, “but they had no right to treat me like an animal.” Even in solitary, he admitted, he got into trouble with the guards. He was not yet twenty.
One day a guard spit at him through the bars when Billy said something that angered him. Billy grabbed his shirt through the bars and cold cocked him, knocking the guard across the room, and unconscious.
For that he was chained to his bed, and hit with a fire hose until his body was covered with welts and bruises. “I ended up in the infirmary, again,” he said, and then confessed. “I guess I had a quick trigger when I was young.”
“Did you learn your lesson?”
“I guess not because I was hit with the fire hoses five or six more times.”
He said there were worse things that happened to other guys such as being confined to a room with the lights on all the time, day and night, deprived of sleep, chained to a chair naked with the temperature low enough to produce shivering, putting you on bread and water, filling the isolated room with noise that gritted on your nerves, or simply eliminating access to television, radio or mail, books or writing materials, or any association with other inmates.
“What disturbed me the most,” he said, “was to see people at Raiford that should have been in mental institutions. Why a judge would commit mentally ill people to such a place is beyond me. They needed treatment not punishment.”
“Guys like that who didn’t know no better were tied down naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication wasn’t working. For what? For as little as pissing their pants in the chow line. Hell, they even executed people like that who didn’t know whether they were coming or going.”
Billy did his time, married Molly, and led a reasonably productive life, and never returned to prison. One time, however, he got in a fight at a work, and his boss called the police. He threw police officers off him like confetti, but was eventually subdued by several officers, who kept hitting him with their nightsticks. For that altercation, he spent some time in jail.
“Did you end up in the hospital?”
He shook his head. “No, they were amateurs compared to prison guards.”
When I first met him, he was about thirty-years-old, very congenial and likable. He wanted to get into the military, but they would not have him. He did join the Masonic Lodge and took great pride in its membership. The camaraderie he found there he esteemed highly. He got into working with heavy equipment on road construction. It was in this period that we had the one hundred plus interviews.
The last time I saw Billy was when he was about forty-five, still working, still staying out of trouble, but having some medical problems. He had diabetes and eventually lost both his feet to the disease. Even so handicapped, he still was always glad to see me with a positive spin on current events, which he followed closely. In another life, he said, he would have loved to have been a police officer, and thought he would be a good one. He died of a heart attack not yet sixty in 1996. He loved his wife and children, and he loved America, a man who had three strikes against him before he ever got started.
ABU GHRAIB AND GUANTANAMO
I thought of Billy and Raiford and torture when I walked today, and about the American military personnel at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and their behavior in this context. I was not surprised at the abusive behavior of these young men and women, given my familiarity with the Zimbardo and Milgram studies.
I was surprised, however, at the inventiveness of the torture: sexual humiliation of a father with his son, pictures of naked Iraqi men forced to simulate sodomy, untold beatings and mock executions, kicks and electric shocks, the image of the wired-up hooded man teetering on a box, but above all, the clever even sophisticated array of practices whose goal was not simply physical pain but psychological degradation and terror. Susan Neiman notes in her book “Moral Clarity” (2008):
“The absence of shame in all these cases is critical, for shameless is not just a term of abuse. We have lost moral clarity.”
In a word, she is saying put people under indecent conditions, and most people will behave indecently.
Shamelessness isn’t new. The photos of torture at Abu Ghraib are similar to the postcards of lynching that were sold in the American South in the twentieth century. Shamelessness, or insensitivity to the abuse of fellow human beings points to a culture so debased as to be speeding towards its own ruin. If this episode has taught us anything, it is that society runs on its moral energy.
My wonder is how could low-ranking soldiers of little formal education be so diabolically creative. How could they know which forms of torture would cause the greatest cultural shock and pain to the prisoners? Imagine faking fellatio in a homophobic culture, or having a uniformed woman mock your naked genitals in a patriarchal way, or the use of trained dogs to terrify the prisoners who have a natural cultural fear of such animals.
The only conclusion I can make – which I cannot substantiate – is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his cohorts orchestrated this sophisticated torture by the use of intellectuals privy to the impact of such social psychological practices.
If good kids could turn sadistic, brutalizing guards under the best of conditions at Stanford, imagine what can happen to ordinary American kids thousands of miles from home, living and working in the hell called Abu Ghraib as prisoner guards.
Susan Neiman reports Zimbardo rejects the claim that the torture at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few bad apples. It was the barrel he insists that was rotten. Neiman goes further. She claims the torture dungeons at Abu Ghraib and the facilities at Guantanamo, and other military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq have been:
(1) Designed by the senior “architects” of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tenet;
(2) Justified by the lawyers who came up with the language and concepts that legalized torture in new ways and new means, citing Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, William Taft, and John Ashcroft;
(3) The foremen on the torture construction job were the military leaders of generals Miller, Sanchez, and Karpinski;
(4) The technicians or grunts in charge of carrying out the daily labor of coercive interrogation, abuse and torture were the soldiers in military intelligence, CIA operatives, civilian contractors, military interrogators, translators, medics, and military police, including Chip Frederick and his night shift buddies (“Moral Clarity,” p. 360)
Neiman points out the man sent to clean up operations after the scandal broke at Abu Ghraib was none other than the man in charge at Guantanamo.
THE NEED FOR DESENSITIZING TRAINING
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a military psychologist, set out to explain a puzzle in his book “On Killing” (1995), which bears on this discussion. Military studies show only 15 to 20 percent of soldiers in WWII actually fired their weapons in battle, even under conditions of the greatest danger. Grossman concluded that the psychic damage in wartime is primarily caused not by the fear of being killed, but the fear of becoming a killer.
The military noticed. So, starting with the Korean War, methods of desensitization or conditioning were introduced increasing the rate to 55 percent. Those methods were developed further increasing the rate in Vietnam to 95 percent. Grossman reports that in the second half of the twentieth century psychology has had an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.
Also noted, the farther you are from the person you kill, the easier it is to forget you are killing him. We know have flying unmanned robots in Afghanistan killing with immunity with someone back at headquarters manning a computer clicking a keyboard to release a missile. Grossman concludes: we are malleable with rather simple methods and common circumstances able to turn most of us into creatures who will torture and kill in obedience to our instructions.
WHAT ABOUT EVIL?
We have been a violent society since the Mayflower pilgrims. Violence is natural to us. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, a Japanese observer is alleged to have said, “We have awaken a sleeping giant.” The attack, indeed, gave the nascent violence in the American spirit permission to be unleashed.
There are well-documented cases of the many criminal acts of the Nazis, but less so of the Japanese or the Soviet Union in World War Two. The atrocities of Joseph Stalin where as many as 100 million people perished are just now appearing. On the other hand, the rape of Nanking was the forgotten holocaust of that war by the Japanese, as was the Bataan Death March. In that 60-mile march in 1942 of some 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners only 54,000 made it alive.
Iris Chang wrote “The Rape of Nanking” (1997), and received the National Book Award for her work but, alas, only a young lady, she committed suicide. I’ve often wondered if the horrors of that research put her over the edge.
To the victors go the spoils while we never truly learn of the war crimes of our own society. We know of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo only superficially and incompletely, and even now, President Barak Obama is not releasing the pictures of Abu Ghraib, and so we will probably never know the full extent of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in that part of the world.
President Harry S. Truman is venerated today but he turned a blind’s eye towards mob murders of Negroes refusing to sign a bill into law outlawing lynching. Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson headed a group of religious leaders urging Truman to sign the anti-lynching bill, but he said the timing for a bill was politically inadvisable. Likewise, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was his decision. It was said to be necessary to save lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. The claim proved to be false, since the Japanese were willing to surrender, but thousands of people believed it was necessary, not because they were bloodthirsty or nihilistic, but because Japan needed to be punished for Pearl Harbor.
Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (1964) claims under the wrong circumstances most of us are capable of the wrong sort of actions.
These researchers cited here are not justifying torture or evil, but explaining it so that we understand how vulnerable we are to it. Milgram demonstrated how little is required to command obedience to orders that otherwise clash with our conscience, and Zimbardo demonstrated that evil as well as good is in our nascent temperament with the balance, unfortunately, somewhat a matter of circumstances.
Susan Neiman writes:
“If evil actions don’t require evil motives, good actions don’t require good ones. Forget humanity or dignity. Sheer self-interest should have driven the occupying forces to treat the Iraqi population especially well.”
She concludes:
“Evil, I have argued, should be applied not to persons, but to actions, and the application should be a reason to start thinking, not to stop. Knowing how easily we can be drawn into evil must lead us to look for ways to understand it.”
Torture is inhuman, immoral, and counterproductive. That said it has been practiced down through history, and no institution with more passion than the Roman Catholic Church with The Inquisition. It is hard to imagine today that a person practicing Judaism in twelfth century Spain had a choice to become Catholic or suffer the consequences; how someone could be charged with heresy and burned at the stake for challenging church authority, or for believing Jesus was man but not God. It is beyond the pale to understand why the Roman Church would have its own assassins to get rid of people considered a threat to the church. Yet, no institution has perfected torture more cruelly than has the church of that period, putting people on the rack and stretching their limbs until they repented or died is but one method commonly then practiced.
When torture as interrogative technique is justified on the basis of the Machiavelian principle that the ends justify the means, we have aborted our democratic principles. When torture is justified on the basis of national security, we have much in common with the Inquisition. The Roman Catholic Church of the twelfth and thirteen century would understand that rationale.
We want it both ways. We want protection from evil while supporting evil that we find protective. We don’t want to know how information is gained from imprisoned combatants, but we do want to feel more secure. Paranoia is a fool’s dance.
This was the theme of John Le Carre’s recent novel, “A Most Wanted Man” (2008). A half starved young Russian Muslim, the son of a criminal father, is tortured, imprisoned, then escapes and it chased like keystone cops by the British, German and American secret service, yet the man is innocent of any crime. The point of Le Carre’s novel is in these hysterical times torture is routinely considered a legitimate method of gaining information even when the subject has no such information to give.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who is also a Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote this a few years ago, “Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they’ll have quite a mess to clean up.” Indeed.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 19, 2009
“Americans have always been a people with marked genocidal proclivities: our systematic extermination of the Indian, the casual killing of American blacks during and after slavery, and our indifference to dropping an atomic bomb on a large civilian populace – we are, after all, the only people ever to have used such a weapon – reflect this attitude.”
Philip Slater, “The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point,” 1970,
“You can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners.”
Winston Churchill
“Would you rather do evil and be regarded as good, or do good but be regarded as evil?”
Plato
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made their minds up to be or do evil at all.”
Hannah Arendt, “Thinking” (1964)
* * *
TORTURE AT THE MIND’S LIMIT
Our focus at the moment may be on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and interrogating techniques associated with torture in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but torture is quite indigenous to our society.
Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a famous experiment at Stanford University, “Pathology of Imprisonment” (1972), in which he took a group of healthy young college men and randomly assigned half of them to act as prisoners, and the other half as guards in a makeshift jail in the basement of a university laboratory.
Within forty-eight hours each group was transformed with an extraordinary vicious cycle set in motion. The student guards degraded prisoners through verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, hours spent in stress positions, as well as repeating mindless physical and mental exercises. As the prisoners became increasingly dehumanized, the guards were found it increasingly easy to degrade them even further. They were no longer play-acting. They had become their sadistic roles.
Another researcher social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted a “Behavioral Study of Obedience” (1963) at Yale University. In this experiment, the subjects were forty males selected at random from newspaper advertisements. The subjects were paid $4.50 for their participation and told the payment was simply for coming to the laboratory. One naïve subject and victim (an accomplice of the experimenter) performed in each experiment. A pretext was devised that would justify the administration of electric shock by the naïve subject.
The subjects drew slips of paper from a hat to determine who would be the teacher and who would be the learner in the experiment. The drawing was rigged so that the naïve subject was always the teacher and the accomplice always the learner. The two moved to an adjacent room where the learner was strapped into an “electric” chair apparatus.
The subject was told to administer a shock to the learner each time he gave a wrong response. Moreover, the subject was instructed to move the level higher on the shock generator each time the learner flashed the wrong answer. The teacher was advised to announce the increased voltage level before administering the shock. A series of prods were given the teacher or subject to ensure that he would constantly increase the voltage.
What were the results of the experiment?
The tension levels in the subjects grew extreme with the subjects sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, and digging their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment. Exceptional responses went the gambit from nervous laughter and smiling to uncontrollable seizures as they increased the voltage. One subject became so violently convulsive that it was necessary to halt the experiment. Still, only five out of the forty subjects refused to obey the experimenter’s command beyond the 300-volt level, four administered one further shock, two broke off at the 330-volt level, and one each at 345, 360, and 375 volts.
Milgram found the experiment not only confirmed obedience and conformity, but cruelty and destructiveness as well. The shocks like the screams of the actors were all fake who were pretending to be learners in the next room.
But the results were not bogus: 65 percent of subjects tested were willing to cause electric shocks they believed would cause unconsciousness in the learner, and possibly death. Milgram’s conclusion: “If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”
Who were the naïve participants in this experiment? Subjects ranged from one who had not finished elementary school, to those who had doctorates and other professional degrees. There were also postal clerks, high school teachers, salesmen, engineers and laborers.
Zimbardo’s research expanded the conclusions of Milgram’s study. Milgram’s experiments set out to explore how ordinary Germans became accomplices to mass murder. Zimbardo argues from the results of his study that we underestimate our vulnerability to the toxic effect of bad systems and other situational forces. He cautioned that we should be aware of our frailty realizing that any of us might collude in evil or equally oppose it. No one is intrinsically good or intrinsically evil, he adds, but vulnerable to either given the right circumstances.
THE MUNDANE CRUCIBLE OF TORTURE – A SURVIVOR’S STORY
Nearly forty years ago, a physician friend, who knew I was a writer, told me of a man who would be a good subject for a book. I interviewed this man for more than one hundred hours, but never wrote the book. The man’s name was Billy Yates, and I became very fond of him and subsequently a friend. He was six foot tall and weighed about 360, and was built like a fireplug with muscles to match.
Early in my acquaintance with Billy, he invited me to his home to meet his wife, Molly, who was older than he was, his daughter, and the couples’ four foster children. As I approached his house, I found him carrying a grand piano on his back into the house. If you can imagine that scene, it gave me a sense of his massive physical power.
Billy grew up in foster homes. His birth mother attempted to raise him to the age of five, and his little brother, three. She was a single parent and prostitute. On one occasion, she brought a customer home, and Billy and his brother were making too much noise, and the drunken customer went after the boys. Billy hid his brother in a closet and faced the man. It was a mistake. The man beat him to an inch of his life. He was taken to the hospital unconscious on life support. His little body suffered multiple fractures as well as a severe concussion. After more than a month in the hospital, he was returned to foster care through social services, while his little brother was adopted.
Often in foster care, he was not given enough to eat and grew so thin at one point that he was hospitalized suffering from malnutrition. As a consequence, he became somewhat obsessed with food once he was on his own, and grew to his enormous size. From five years on, he was passed from one foster family to another foster family, and eventually quit school after the sixth grade at the age of fourteen.
Once on his own, now fifteen, he got in with a gang that did petty crimes including breaking into warehouses and business offices and robbing the vending machines of their coin. The gang liked Billy because he was strong as an ox and could rip open the machines with his bear hands with the coins spilling out. Of course, he left his fingerprints, and so was eventually caught.
The judge said he was going to do Billy a favor – he was now eighteen – and send him to Raiford, the maximum-security prison in Florida.
I said to Billy, “Why did you get in with this gang?”
He answered, “They were the only ones who would accept me.”
One time when he was hitchhiking, he said, a minister and his wife picked him up and stopped at a motel. They both abused him. He was only sixteen. Thereafter he never trusted anyone in the adult world.
The horror stories he told about Raiford were as menacing as the stuff of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the interrogating techniques of prisoners held at Guantanamo. He was on a chain gang in the field while at Raiford, not working fast enough, and a guard came over and hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle. Billy picked the man up and threw him across the road, which resulted in a host of guards descending on and subduing him in his compromising state of being chained to other prisoners.
He ended up in the hospital infirmary, and from there was place in solitary confinement. “I was something of a bad ass, I guess,” he said, “but they had no right to treat me like an animal.” Even in solitary, he admitted, he got into trouble with the guards. He was not yet twenty.
One day a guard spit at him through the bars when Billy said something that angered him. Billy grabbed his shirt through the bars and cold cocked him, knocking the guard across the room, and unconscious.
For that he was chained to his bed, and hit with a fire hose until his body was covered with welts and bruises. “I ended up in the infirmary, again,” he said, and then confessed. “I guess I had a quick trigger when I was young.”
“Did you learn your lesson?”
“I guess not because I was hit with the fire hoses five or six more times.”
He said there were worse things that happened to other guys such as being confined to a room with the lights on all the time, day and night, deprived of sleep, chained to a chair naked with the temperature low enough to produce shivering, putting you on bread and water, filling the isolated room with noise that gritted on your nerves, or simply eliminating access to television, radio or mail, books or writing materials, or any association with other inmates.
“What disturbed me the most,” he said, “was to see people at Raiford that should have been in mental institutions. Why a judge would commit mentally ill people to such a place is beyond me. They needed treatment not punishment.”
“Guys like that who didn’t know no better were tied down naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication wasn’t working. For what? For as little as pissing their pants in the chow line. Hell, they even executed people like that who didn’t know whether they were coming or going.”
Billy did his time, married Molly, and led a reasonably productive life, and never returned to prison. One time, however, he got in a fight at a work, and his boss called the police. He threw police officers off him like confetti, but was eventually subdued by several officers, who kept hitting him with their nightsticks. For that altercation, he spent some time in jail.
“Did you end up in the hospital?”
He shook his head. “No, they were amateurs compared to prison guards.”
When I first met him, he was about thirty-years-old, very congenial and likable. He wanted to get into the military, but they would not have him. He did join the Masonic Lodge and took great pride in its membership. The camaraderie he found there he esteemed highly. He got into working with heavy equipment on road construction. It was in this period that we had the one hundred plus interviews.
The last time I saw Billy was when he was about forty-five, still working, still staying out of trouble, but having some medical problems. He had diabetes and eventually lost both his feet to the disease. Even so handicapped, he still was always glad to see me with a positive spin on current events, which he followed closely. In another life, he said, he would have loved to have been a police officer, and thought he would be a good one. He died of a heart attack not yet sixty in 1996. He loved his wife and children, and he loved America, a man who had three strikes against him before he ever got started.
ABU GHRAIB AND GUANTANAMO
I thought of Billy and Raiford and torture when I walked today, and about the American military personnel at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and their behavior in this context. I was not surprised at the abusive behavior of these young men and women, given my familiarity with the Zimbardo and Milgram studies.
I was surprised, however, at the inventiveness of the torture: sexual humiliation of a father with his son, pictures of naked Iraqi men forced to simulate sodomy, untold beatings and mock executions, kicks and electric shocks, the image of the wired-up hooded man teetering on a box, but above all, the clever even sophisticated array of practices whose goal was not simply physical pain but psychological degradation and terror. Susan Neiman notes in her book “Moral Clarity” (2008):
“The absence of shame in all these cases is critical, for shameless is not just a term of abuse. We have lost moral clarity.”
In a word, she is saying put people under indecent conditions, and most people will behave indecently.
Shamelessness isn’t new. The photos of torture at Abu Ghraib are similar to the postcards of lynching that were sold in the American South in the twentieth century. Shamelessness, or insensitivity to the abuse of fellow human beings points to a culture so debased as to be speeding towards its own ruin. If this episode has taught us anything, it is that society runs on its moral energy.
My wonder is how could low-ranking soldiers of little formal education be so diabolically creative. How could they know which forms of torture would cause the greatest cultural shock and pain to the prisoners? Imagine faking fellatio in a homophobic culture, or having a uniformed woman mock your naked genitals in a patriarchal way, or the use of trained dogs to terrify the prisoners who have a natural cultural fear of such animals.
The only conclusion I can make – which I cannot substantiate – is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his cohorts orchestrated this sophisticated torture by the use of intellectuals privy to the impact of such social psychological practices.
If good kids could turn sadistic, brutalizing guards under the best of conditions at Stanford, imagine what can happen to ordinary American kids thousands of miles from home, living and working in the hell called Abu Ghraib as prisoner guards.
Susan Neiman reports Zimbardo rejects the claim that the torture at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few bad apples. It was the barrel he insists that was rotten. Neiman goes further. She claims the torture dungeons at Abu Ghraib and the facilities at Guantanamo, and other military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq have been:
(1) Designed by the senior “architects” of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tenet;
(2) Justified by the lawyers who came up with the language and concepts that legalized torture in new ways and new means, citing Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, William Taft, and John Ashcroft;
(3) The foremen on the torture construction job were the military leaders of generals Miller, Sanchez, and Karpinski;
(4) The technicians or grunts in charge of carrying out the daily labor of coercive interrogation, abuse and torture were the soldiers in military intelligence, CIA operatives, civilian contractors, military interrogators, translators, medics, and military police, including Chip Frederick and his night shift buddies (“Moral Clarity,” p. 360)
Neiman points out the man sent to clean up operations after the scandal broke at Abu Ghraib was none other than the man in charge at Guantanamo.
THE NEED FOR DESENSITIZING TRAINING
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a military psychologist, set out to explain a puzzle in his book “On Killing” (1995), which bears on this discussion. Military studies show only 15 to 20 percent of soldiers in WWII actually fired their weapons in battle, even under conditions of the greatest danger. Grossman concluded that the psychic damage in wartime is primarily caused not by the fear of being killed, but the fear of becoming a killer.
The military noticed. So, starting with the Korean War, methods of desensitization or conditioning were introduced increasing the rate to 55 percent. Those methods were developed further increasing the rate in Vietnam to 95 percent. Grossman reports that in the second half of the twentieth century psychology has had an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.
Also noted, the farther you are from the person you kill, the easier it is to forget you are killing him. We know have flying unmanned robots in Afghanistan killing with immunity with someone back at headquarters manning a computer clicking a keyboard to release a missile. Grossman concludes: we are malleable with rather simple methods and common circumstances able to turn most of us into creatures who will torture and kill in obedience to our instructions.
WHAT ABOUT EVIL?
We have been a violent society since the Mayflower pilgrims. Violence is natural to us. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, a Japanese observer is alleged to have said, “We have awaken a sleeping giant.” The attack, indeed, gave the nascent violence in the American spirit permission to be unleashed.
There are well-documented cases of the many criminal acts of the Nazis, but less so of the Japanese or the Soviet Union in World War Two. The atrocities of Joseph Stalin where as many as 100 million people perished are just now appearing. On the other hand, the rape of Nanking was the forgotten holocaust of that war by the Japanese, as was the Bataan Death March. In that 60-mile march in 1942 of some 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners only 54,000 made it alive.
Iris Chang wrote “The Rape of Nanking” (1997), and received the National Book Award for her work but, alas, only a young lady, she committed suicide. I’ve often wondered if the horrors of that research put her over the edge.
To the victors go the spoils while we never truly learn of the war crimes of our own society. We know of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo only superficially and incompletely, and even now, President Barak Obama is not releasing the pictures of Abu Ghraib, and so we will probably never know the full extent of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in that part of the world.
President Harry S. Truman is venerated today but he turned a blind’s eye towards mob murders of Negroes refusing to sign a bill into law outlawing lynching. Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson headed a group of religious leaders urging Truman to sign the anti-lynching bill, but he said the timing for a bill was politically inadvisable. Likewise, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was his decision. It was said to be necessary to save lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. The claim proved to be false, since the Japanese were willing to surrender, but thousands of people believed it was necessary, not because they were bloodthirsty or nihilistic, but because Japan needed to be punished for Pearl Harbor.
Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (1964) claims under the wrong circumstances most of us are capable of the wrong sort of actions.
These researchers cited here are not justifying torture or evil, but explaining it so that we understand how vulnerable we are to it. Milgram demonstrated how little is required to command obedience to orders that otherwise clash with our conscience, and Zimbardo demonstrated that evil as well as good is in our nascent temperament with the balance, unfortunately, somewhat a matter of circumstances.
Susan Neiman writes:
“If evil actions don’t require evil motives, good actions don’t require good ones. Forget humanity or dignity. Sheer self-interest should have driven the occupying forces to treat the Iraqi population especially well.”
She concludes:
“Evil, I have argued, should be applied not to persons, but to actions, and the application should be a reason to start thinking, not to stop. Knowing how easily we can be drawn into evil must lead us to look for ways to understand it.”
Torture is inhuman, immoral, and counterproductive. That said it has been practiced down through history, and no institution with more passion than the Roman Catholic Church with The Inquisition. It is hard to imagine today that a person practicing Judaism in twelfth century Spain had a choice to become Catholic or suffer the consequences; how someone could be charged with heresy and burned at the stake for challenging church authority, or for believing Jesus was man but not God. It is beyond the pale to understand why the Roman Church would have its own assassins to get rid of people considered a threat to the church. Yet, no institution has perfected torture more cruelly than has the church of that period, putting people on the rack and stretching their limbs until they repented or died is but one method commonly then practiced.
When torture as interrogative technique is justified on the basis of the Machiavelian principle that the ends justify the means, we have aborted our democratic principles. When torture is justified on the basis of national security, we have much in common with the Inquisition. The Roman Catholic Church of the twelfth and thirteen century would understand that rationale.
We want it both ways. We want protection from evil while supporting evil that we find protective. We don’t want to know how information is gained from imprisoned combatants, but we do want to feel more secure. Paranoia is a fool’s dance.
This was the theme of John Le Carre’s recent novel, “A Most Wanted Man” (2008). A half starved young Russian Muslim, the son of a criminal father, is tortured, imprisoned, then escapes and it chased like keystone cops by the British, German and American secret service, yet the man is innocent of any crime. The point of Le Carre’s novel is in these hysterical times torture is routinely considered a legitimate method of gaining information even when the subject has no such information to give.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who is also a Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote this a few years ago, “Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they’ll have quite a mess to clean up.” Indeed.
* * *
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
THE POWER OF "DILBERT," THE EDITORIAL CARTOON!
REFERENCE:
I don't know if you have noticed but "Dilbert" on Sunday (May 17, 2009) took off on Dr. Fisher's theme of work being mainly non-doing doing of non-thing things (see SIX SILENT KILLERS), and Monday and Tuesday echoing similar sentiments of his on MBAs (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS and articles on this blog).
Dilbert appears on the business page of The Tampa Tribune, and, of course, newspapers across the land.
It took the sentiment twenty years to get attention, but who's counting? Since everyone reads Dilbert, maybe it will register finally that much of work is busy work, especially now with computers, and MBAs are a vocational degree that has seeded the economic meltdown.
JRF
I don't know if you have noticed but "Dilbert" on Sunday (May 17, 2009) took off on Dr. Fisher's theme of work being mainly non-doing doing of non-thing things (see SIX SILENT KILLERS), and Monday and Tuesday echoing similar sentiments of his on MBAs (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS and articles on this blog).
Dilbert appears on the business page of The Tampa Tribune, and, of course, newspapers across the land.
It took the sentiment twenty years to get attention, but who's counting? Since everyone reads Dilbert, maybe it will register finally that much of work is busy work, especially now with computers, and MBAs are a vocational degree that has seeded the economic meltdown.
JRF
Monday, May 18, 2009
DUSTY RHODES, AND ANOTHER AUTODIDACT!
DUSTY RHODES, AND ANOTHER AUTODIDACT!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2009
“Leaning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 42 B.C.), Roman orator
* * *
In my walk today, I thought some readers would be interested knowing a little bit more about Dusty. People called him “Dusty” as there was a Major League baseball player with the same sobriquet at the time.
Dusty loved mathematics and physics as math and science was a breeze for him. Somewhat of an impatient type, differential and integral calculus were so easy that he could hardly wait to get into differential equations and more sophisticated theoretical mathematics. The same was true with physics.
What really aggravated him were the core courses he had to take in order to earn his degree. He found them a waste of time. These were courses in English, Literature, and Social Science.
He knew that I liked those courses and had a natural affinity for them. So, over coffee after calculus one day, he asked me if I would tutor him for his final in literature. He found James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Dostoyesky well beyond the pale of his comprehension.
“Come by tonight and go over this stuff for the final. You can stay the night.”
It was hard to refuse as he had been my calculus mentor. Besides, I lived in the Hillcrest Dormitory and so it would be no problem. He shared an apartment right downtown in Iowa City with three other guys, all military veterans on the G.I. Bill.
We spent more than three hours going over the works they had covered in class. Meanwhile, he chained smoked one cigarette after another. He smiled through the haze. “You dig this shit!”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You should teach this stuff. It makes more sense coming out of your mouth than the professor's.”
I’ve thought many times about that comment and realized that students are the best teachers of other students because they connect. I’ve also learned that in teaching someone else you become more understanding of what you are teaching.
The next morning when I got up, and stumbled into the kitchen, Dusty put a bowl of cornflakes in front of me with a beer. The beer shocked me because I was not a drinker. All the other guys were drinking beers and smoking cigarettes, and not eating at all. I thought afterwards that maybe Dusty was eating something as a courtesy to me. I nursed the beer, and by the time we were ready to go to class I must have drank about two ounces. I could never understand how people could like beer, or anything alcoholic.
The mere thought of it gave me a migraine. Why I don’t know. It has never been a challenge not to drink because of headaches. Violent migraines could put me out of commission for days. Virtually anything that might contribute to these headaches would monitor my intake. That included food. For example, I’ve never liked greasy food or pork or bacon, or anything fatty.
I’ve had a very bland Irish pallet. On the other hand, I’ve naturally loved fresh fruits and vegetables, never liked carbonated beverages or anything salty. Even as a kid playing over at the Courthouse, the guys would buy Korn Kurls, which would make me gag. I didn’t like processed food with the exception of hotdogs. Now, I eat these hotdogs that are 99 percent fat free, which BB finds tasteless.
After WWII, I read Ernie Pyle’s biography, the war correspondent, who said he eat to live but didn’t live to eat, glad to find someone as odd as I was about food.
I hope you enjoyed the brief sketch of John Moffat as the “Ultimate Autodidact.” There is another autodidact I should mention. He is an author friend who lives and works in Alaska. He is the best writer I know, writing fiction and nonfiction, and is also a fine philosopher in his own right.
Like John Moffat, he never finished high school, but joined the U.S. Marines, then came home and was a police officer in Texas for a time, relocating to Alaska to work for British Petroleum. He writes like an angel, and was invited by the University of Alaska to give a lecture on his works.
In the audience was a provost of University of London, London, England. After the lecture, he asked Charles Douglas Hayes to come to Great Britain and be a Ph.D. candidate at the university.
Charles told him he wasn’t even a high school graduate. The provost told Charles he was well beyond a college graduate, and would do well in the graduate program.
Charles turned the opportunity down for a number of reasons, I’m sure, but I’ve always been saddened by his decision because there is no field more wanting than that of philosophy at the moment. It is ironic that in the rapid rise of technology in the twentieth century, philosophy has been lost in analytical and existential philosophy, both of which lack the staying power philosophies of centuries before. You may have noticed, I seldom quote twentieth century philosophers.
Occasionally, I offer “Fragments of a Philosophy,” but have never developed any philosophical system. I take courage in this stand from Einstein.
Einstein was the great artist of the “thought experiment” where he would devise a metaphor to transport his thinking, such as the idea of chasing a light beam, and then imagining intuitively what that experience would be like. We forget that there was a romantic notion to his genius which found him following his intuition to create a perfect theory.
We live in a cognitive age, which is increasingly analytical to the exclusion of intuition, and I have resisted it. Perhaps that is why Dusty Rhodes came to mind. Charles Hayes, philosophically speaking, to my mind is on the bubble between the cognitive and intuitive dimensions of ideas, whereas I see myself gestating patiently in the intuitive dimension. I wait for ideas to surface to reveal themselves rather than attempting to coax them into life cognitively.
Charles D. Hayes publishes through the Autodidactic Press. I would strongly recommend that you purchase or check out at your local library his novel, “Portals in a Northern Sky,” which is about Alaska. You won’t be disappointed.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2009
“Leaning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 42 B.C.), Roman orator
* * *
In my walk today, I thought some readers would be interested knowing a little bit more about Dusty. People called him “Dusty” as there was a Major League baseball player with the same sobriquet at the time.
Dusty loved mathematics and physics as math and science was a breeze for him. Somewhat of an impatient type, differential and integral calculus were so easy that he could hardly wait to get into differential equations and more sophisticated theoretical mathematics. The same was true with physics.
What really aggravated him were the core courses he had to take in order to earn his degree. He found them a waste of time. These were courses in English, Literature, and Social Science.
He knew that I liked those courses and had a natural affinity for them. So, over coffee after calculus one day, he asked me if I would tutor him for his final in literature. He found James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Dostoyesky well beyond the pale of his comprehension.
“Come by tonight and go over this stuff for the final. You can stay the night.”
It was hard to refuse as he had been my calculus mentor. Besides, I lived in the Hillcrest Dormitory and so it would be no problem. He shared an apartment right downtown in Iowa City with three other guys, all military veterans on the G.I. Bill.
We spent more than three hours going over the works they had covered in class. Meanwhile, he chained smoked one cigarette after another. He smiled through the haze. “You dig this shit!”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You should teach this stuff. It makes more sense coming out of your mouth than the professor's.”
I’ve thought many times about that comment and realized that students are the best teachers of other students because they connect. I’ve also learned that in teaching someone else you become more understanding of what you are teaching.
The next morning when I got up, and stumbled into the kitchen, Dusty put a bowl of cornflakes in front of me with a beer. The beer shocked me because I was not a drinker. All the other guys were drinking beers and smoking cigarettes, and not eating at all. I thought afterwards that maybe Dusty was eating something as a courtesy to me. I nursed the beer, and by the time we were ready to go to class I must have drank about two ounces. I could never understand how people could like beer, or anything alcoholic.
The mere thought of it gave me a migraine. Why I don’t know. It has never been a challenge not to drink because of headaches. Violent migraines could put me out of commission for days. Virtually anything that might contribute to these headaches would monitor my intake. That included food. For example, I’ve never liked greasy food or pork or bacon, or anything fatty.
I’ve had a very bland Irish pallet. On the other hand, I’ve naturally loved fresh fruits and vegetables, never liked carbonated beverages or anything salty. Even as a kid playing over at the Courthouse, the guys would buy Korn Kurls, which would make me gag. I didn’t like processed food with the exception of hotdogs. Now, I eat these hotdogs that are 99 percent fat free, which BB finds tasteless.
After WWII, I read Ernie Pyle’s biography, the war correspondent, who said he eat to live but didn’t live to eat, glad to find someone as odd as I was about food.
I hope you enjoyed the brief sketch of John Moffat as the “Ultimate Autodidact.” There is another autodidact I should mention. He is an author friend who lives and works in Alaska. He is the best writer I know, writing fiction and nonfiction, and is also a fine philosopher in his own right.
Like John Moffat, he never finished high school, but joined the U.S. Marines, then came home and was a police officer in Texas for a time, relocating to Alaska to work for British Petroleum. He writes like an angel, and was invited by the University of Alaska to give a lecture on his works.
In the audience was a provost of University of London, London, England. After the lecture, he asked Charles Douglas Hayes to come to Great Britain and be a Ph.D. candidate at the university.
Charles told him he wasn’t even a high school graduate. The provost told Charles he was well beyond a college graduate, and would do well in the graduate program.
Charles turned the opportunity down for a number of reasons, I’m sure, but I’ve always been saddened by his decision because there is no field more wanting than that of philosophy at the moment. It is ironic that in the rapid rise of technology in the twentieth century, philosophy has been lost in analytical and existential philosophy, both of which lack the staying power philosophies of centuries before. You may have noticed, I seldom quote twentieth century philosophers.
Occasionally, I offer “Fragments of a Philosophy,” but have never developed any philosophical system. I take courage in this stand from Einstein.
Einstein was the great artist of the “thought experiment” where he would devise a metaphor to transport his thinking, such as the idea of chasing a light beam, and then imagining intuitively what that experience would be like. We forget that there was a romantic notion to his genius which found him following his intuition to create a perfect theory.
We live in a cognitive age, which is increasingly analytical to the exclusion of intuition, and I have resisted it. Perhaps that is why Dusty Rhodes came to mind. Charles Hayes, philosophically speaking, to my mind is on the bubble between the cognitive and intuitive dimensions of ideas, whereas I see myself gestating patiently in the intuitive dimension. I wait for ideas to surface to reveal themselves rather than attempting to coax them into life cognitively.
Charles D. Hayes publishes through the Autodidactic Press. I would strongly recommend that you purchase or check out at your local library his novel, “Portals in a Northern Sky,” which is about Alaska. You won’t be disappointed.
* * *
THE ULTIMATE AUTODIDACT!
THE ULTIMATE AUTODIDACT!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2009
“Autodidact” – a self-taught person.”
* * *
Buried in Albert Einstein’s mail one spring day in 1953 lay a letter from a twenty-year-old high school dropout, who claimed to be a disciple named, John Moffat. He wanted to be an artist and was painting landscapes without much financial success. Moffat claimed in the letter that he was working on one of Einstein’s theories.
Einstein received daily scores of letters many of which he never found the time or inclination to read much less answer. Two more dissimilar correspondents would be hard to imagine: Moffat an impoverished artist and self-taught physicist who didn’t even have the benefit of a high school diploma, and Einstein an iconic mythic figure and the most celebrated scientist in the world.
Moffat was living with his British father and Danish mother in Copenhagen, while Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.
What both men had in common, however, was that they were both outsiders. This was two years before Einstein’s death, and he had become increasingly isolated from the physics community for his failure to support and embrace the theory of quantum mechanics, which he had himself discovered. Quantum Mechanics has to do with particles that are also waves and that exist in no specific place until they are observed. Einstein was adamant in his belief that Nature could never be so perverse as to be no more identifiable than by mere statistical verification. Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for research that showed that light consists of particles of energy, research that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics. He dismissed the theory out of hand although his colleagues embraced it enthusiastically.
He was deterministic and resolute in his goal to prove them wrong with a unified field theory, which would bring his general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics into clear mathematical certitude.
It was in this climate that Einstein received Moffat’s letter. Moffat was bold enough in his letter to suggest that he, who had no formal education in physics, could offer the great man some constructive criticism. “I am not happy with what you are doing,” Moffat wrote, “and have some suggestions that might help.”
Moffat’s boldness was not disturbing to Einstein. He received plenty of such correspondents, but not all of them so genuinely rational and sincere. Something unexpected happened in Moffat’s case, Einstein wrote back.
“Dear Mr. Moffat,” Einstein wrote, “Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open, and we try hard to discover about what is and is not in it.”
The closed box is the universe, and no one had done more to pry off the lid than Einstein, yet in the past twenty years or since 1935, in the eyes of his colleagues, he had contributed almost nothing important to physics.
The letter was written in German. Moffat ran down to his barbershop in Copenhagen to have his barber translate the letter for him. Through that summer and fall, Moffat and Einstein exchanged about half a dozen letters. The local press picked up on these stories, which then caught the attention of the great physicist Niels Bohr, and others. Suddenly doors of opportunity were opened to him.
Imagine John Moffat, a dropout, a failed painter, who to fill the time took an interest in cosmology by browsing through books in the Copenhagen library. To his surprise, although without any formal training, he found he could easily absorb the advanced mathematics and physics in popular science books and magazines. He plowed through four years’ worth of college level material in about a year without a tutor or any academic guidance, and then moved on to professional physics journals. “I got hold of some of Einstein’s papers,” he says, “and decided that there was some weakness in what he was doing. So, I wrote two papers and sent them to him at Princeton. I never thought I’d here anything from him.”
Moffat had identified a mistaken assumption in the mathematics Einstein was using to describe the electromagnetic force. Einstein conceded that Moffat had a point. They went on to exchange several letters over the next six months, inspiring Moffat to pursue a career in physics.
Although he lacked formal training in the field, Moffat knew that Einstein’s letters might earn him an audience with other physicists. So, he contacted Niels Bohr’s secretary at the University of Copenhagen and mentioned the letters. Bohr readily agreed to meet. “Einstein was confiding his problems in physics to me,” he says, “and Bohr wanted to know what Einstein was saying.”
It surprised Moffat how Bohr felt, “he claimed Einstein had become an alchemist.”
Moffat’s encounters with Einstein and Bohr and that story prompted the British consulate in Copenhagen to contact the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London to set up a meeting with Erwin Schrodinger at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin for an interview. Bedridden, Schrodinger, most famous for the wave equation that bears his name, an elegant mathematical description of one of the central mysteries of quantum theory, commenced to shout what a fool Einstein was. It quite overwhelmed Moffat on the level of his animosity.
Meanwhile, Moffat was accepted in the graduate program in mathematical and theoretical physics at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, due to a surprisingly strong recommendation from Schrodinger. In 1958, Moffat became the first student in the 800-year history of the school to earn his Ph.D. without first completing an undergraduate degree. He now works at the Perimeter Institute near Toronto, Canada.
During the past five decades, Moffat has established himself as a ranking world physicist working on a variety of subjects in theoretical physics, which includes particle physics, quantum field theory, quantum gravity and cosmology.
In the early 1990s, he proposed a radical alternative theory that the speed of light was as much as 30 orders of magnitude faster than its present value just following the big bang. He also has proposed a finite, non-local quantum field theory. He has devoted his career to completing the work of Einstein who was in search of a Unified Field Theory. Moffat departs from Einstein in proposing that the antisymmetric component is another form of gravity and not electromagnetism. In 2008, he published “Reinventing Gravity,” a popular science book that offers an account of his research into gravity theory.
In his long and productive life, now 77, he has remained devoted to his mentor, Einstein, believing his colleagues were wrong, and that history will prove Einstein ahead of the physics community today.
WHY TELL THIS STORY?
When I was in undergraduate school, I had an enlisted US Air Force classmate in my calculus class. He was brilliant, far more brilliant than my professor, and a great tutor of the intricacies of the discipline. After a semester, he asked to be reinstated in the Air Force because he didn’t like the drudgery of academic life. The Air Force, which had a transcript of his work in mathematics and physics, told him to stay on to his degree, and that they would prefer him stay on through his Ph.D. before returning to the military’s Research Institute. He did.
I once asked him how he was as a math student in high school. He said he didn’t take any math, but was a high school dropout, and got his high school diploma in the Air Force. He had worked on some advanced systems in the military, and had completed all the top applied courses offered. It was his instructors who had encouraged the academic sojourn. I don’t remember his real first name but we called him, “Dusty Rhodes.”
My wonder is how many potential brilliant autodidacts like Moffat and Rhodes never received such mentoring and encouragement. I sense that it is in the millions. Sad.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2009
“Autodidact” – a self-taught person.”
* * *
Buried in Albert Einstein’s mail one spring day in 1953 lay a letter from a twenty-year-old high school dropout, who claimed to be a disciple named, John Moffat. He wanted to be an artist and was painting landscapes without much financial success. Moffat claimed in the letter that he was working on one of Einstein’s theories.
Einstein received daily scores of letters many of which he never found the time or inclination to read much less answer. Two more dissimilar correspondents would be hard to imagine: Moffat an impoverished artist and self-taught physicist who didn’t even have the benefit of a high school diploma, and Einstein an iconic mythic figure and the most celebrated scientist in the world.
Moffat was living with his British father and Danish mother in Copenhagen, while Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.
What both men had in common, however, was that they were both outsiders. This was two years before Einstein’s death, and he had become increasingly isolated from the physics community for his failure to support and embrace the theory of quantum mechanics, which he had himself discovered. Quantum Mechanics has to do with particles that are also waves and that exist in no specific place until they are observed. Einstein was adamant in his belief that Nature could never be so perverse as to be no more identifiable than by mere statistical verification. Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for research that showed that light consists of particles of energy, research that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics. He dismissed the theory out of hand although his colleagues embraced it enthusiastically.
He was deterministic and resolute in his goal to prove them wrong with a unified field theory, which would bring his general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics into clear mathematical certitude.
It was in this climate that Einstein received Moffat’s letter. Moffat was bold enough in his letter to suggest that he, who had no formal education in physics, could offer the great man some constructive criticism. “I am not happy with what you are doing,” Moffat wrote, “and have some suggestions that might help.”
Moffat’s boldness was not disturbing to Einstein. He received plenty of such correspondents, but not all of them so genuinely rational and sincere. Something unexpected happened in Moffat’s case, Einstein wrote back.
“Dear Mr. Moffat,” Einstein wrote, “Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open, and we try hard to discover about what is and is not in it.”
The closed box is the universe, and no one had done more to pry off the lid than Einstein, yet in the past twenty years or since 1935, in the eyes of his colleagues, he had contributed almost nothing important to physics.
The letter was written in German. Moffat ran down to his barbershop in Copenhagen to have his barber translate the letter for him. Through that summer and fall, Moffat and Einstein exchanged about half a dozen letters. The local press picked up on these stories, which then caught the attention of the great physicist Niels Bohr, and others. Suddenly doors of opportunity were opened to him.
Imagine John Moffat, a dropout, a failed painter, who to fill the time took an interest in cosmology by browsing through books in the Copenhagen library. To his surprise, although without any formal training, he found he could easily absorb the advanced mathematics and physics in popular science books and magazines. He plowed through four years’ worth of college level material in about a year without a tutor or any academic guidance, and then moved on to professional physics journals. “I got hold of some of Einstein’s papers,” he says, “and decided that there was some weakness in what he was doing. So, I wrote two papers and sent them to him at Princeton. I never thought I’d here anything from him.”
Moffat had identified a mistaken assumption in the mathematics Einstein was using to describe the electromagnetic force. Einstein conceded that Moffat had a point. They went on to exchange several letters over the next six months, inspiring Moffat to pursue a career in physics.
Although he lacked formal training in the field, Moffat knew that Einstein’s letters might earn him an audience with other physicists. So, he contacted Niels Bohr’s secretary at the University of Copenhagen and mentioned the letters. Bohr readily agreed to meet. “Einstein was confiding his problems in physics to me,” he says, “and Bohr wanted to know what Einstein was saying.”
It surprised Moffat how Bohr felt, “he claimed Einstein had become an alchemist.”
Moffat’s encounters with Einstein and Bohr and that story prompted the British consulate in Copenhagen to contact the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London to set up a meeting with Erwin Schrodinger at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin for an interview. Bedridden, Schrodinger, most famous for the wave equation that bears his name, an elegant mathematical description of one of the central mysteries of quantum theory, commenced to shout what a fool Einstein was. It quite overwhelmed Moffat on the level of his animosity.
Meanwhile, Moffat was accepted in the graduate program in mathematical and theoretical physics at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, due to a surprisingly strong recommendation from Schrodinger. In 1958, Moffat became the first student in the 800-year history of the school to earn his Ph.D. without first completing an undergraduate degree. He now works at the Perimeter Institute near Toronto, Canada.
During the past five decades, Moffat has established himself as a ranking world physicist working on a variety of subjects in theoretical physics, which includes particle physics, quantum field theory, quantum gravity and cosmology.
In the early 1990s, he proposed a radical alternative theory that the speed of light was as much as 30 orders of magnitude faster than its present value just following the big bang. He also has proposed a finite, non-local quantum field theory. He has devoted his career to completing the work of Einstein who was in search of a Unified Field Theory. Moffat departs from Einstein in proposing that the antisymmetric component is another form of gravity and not electromagnetism. In 2008, he published “Reinventing Gravity,” a popular science book that offers an account of his research into gravity theory.
In his long and productive life, now 77, he has remained devoted to his mentor, Einstein, believing his colleagues were wrong, and that history will prove Einstein ahead of the physics community today.
WHY TELL THIS STORY?
When I was in undergraduate school, I had an enlisted US Air Force classmate in my calculus class. He was brilliant, far more brilliant than my professor, and a great tutor of the intricacies of the discipline. After a semester, he asked to be reinstated in the Air Force because he didn’t like the drudgery of academic life. The Air Force, which had a transcript of his work in mathematics and physics, told him to stay on to his degree, and that they would prefer him stay on through his Ph.D. before returning to the military’s Research Institute. He did.
I once asked him how he was as a math student in high school. He said he didn’t take any math, but was a high school dropout, and got his high school diploma in the Air Force. He had worked on some advanced systems in the military, and had completed all the top applied courses offered. It was his instructors who had encouraged the academic sojourn. I don’t remember his real first name but we called him, “Dusty Rhodes.”
My wonder is how many potential brilliant autodidacts like Moffat and Rhodes never received such mentoring and encouragement. I sense that it is in the millions. Sad.
* * *
Sunday, May 17, 2009
TOO LATE SMART -- FINALLY GETTING SOME THINGS RIGHT WHILE CONTINUING TO GET OTHER THINGS WRONG!
TOO LATE SMART – FINALLY GETTING SOME THINGS RIGHT WHILE CONTINUING TO GET OTHERS THINGS WRONG!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 17, 2009
“Throw away the briefcase: you’re not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won’t look much like your old one. There’s no ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there’s a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path. Ten lessons for succeeding in the new American workplace.”
Time, “The Future of Work,” May 24, 2009
REFERENCE:
For the past thirty years, I, among others, have been writing books and articles that journalists such as TIME magazine finally have subsumed to the point that perhaps someone will pay attention. The American workplace has been out of whack for more than a quarter century, and it has been during that period that the roof has fallen in on American industry and commerce, education and morality, confidence and relevance.
One of the things that confounded me when I returned to graduate school, as a mature adult was how much effort sociology and psychology spent to reify the obvious, or what everyday people in everyday situations knew to be true. I remember having to read a treatise in sociology on “Why Prisoners Attempt to Escape from Prison?” Several studies supported by complex statistical correlations were offered to corroborate this behavior, when I know for sure were I incarcerated that would be my motivation without the necessity for such verification.
Likewise, I puzzle why journalists are so far behind the curve and yet have the temerity to offer findings revealing few new clues to the subject at hand that had not been reported years ago by myself and others in several books and articles.
* * *
NUMBER ONE, JOBS – High Tech, High Touch, High Growth
I thought of this when Time offered a McKinsey &Company study that pointed out that nearly 85 percent of new jobs being created between 1998 and 2006 involved complex “knowledge work” like problem solving. Now, the majority of the workforce is in "knowledge type jobs," but yet problem solving remains the problem!
Sure, jobs are going to grow in computer software engineering, systems analysts, and so on, but that does not insure the problem solving. I wrote this in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):
“(The problem) is the American culture is deeply impaled in a deterministic approach, or the ‘Blitzkrieg School of Problem Solving' (i.e., assault the problem, spare no money or resource). Being only comfortable with nitty-gritty deductive reasoning, we expect the effect to the follow the cause. Rest assured medical science has spent most of its resources on trying to isolate the AIDS virus through research to develop a miraculous vaccine. Yet, the cause does not lie exclusively in the subatomic world of microbiology, but in the social psychology of human relationships.” (pp. 244 – 245)
NUMBER TWO: TRAINING MANAGERS TO BEHAVE
Time mentions that 77 percent of schools with full-time MBA programs found their enrollments increasing last year. It then lists changing the moral climate, dealing with greed, talking about developing a “license” for management as a profession, or posting ethical oaths.
Readers know how I feel about the MBA program so we can skip that consideration. The focus of this brief outline in Time is still on “the management of things” and using the same platform for "the motivation of people." It doesn't work! You can license managers. You can make the curriculum as rigorous as the licensing board for medical physicians, and it still will not matter. The mindset is all wrong.
Managers, per se, are atavistic. In a corporate environment, breaking down but still here, mega corporations are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. There has to be a change in psychology.
This is what I wrote in CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction:
“What’s in it for me is being displaced by what’s in it for us? This is not driven by altruism, but economics. Crossing the no man’s land between individualism and collective identity, admittedly, is a precarious one.
"You don’t change a one hundred year practice over night. With this in mind, consider these crystal ball reflections -- the I go into compensation, cooperation, communication, culture and end with celebration: a vision: the work week now requires only 30 – 32 hours. Employees may choose from a number of options – working at home, working split schedules, working five 6-hour days, four 8-hour days, three 10-hour days, or other variations. They keep their own time, and are not judged on number of hours worked but on the results of their work." (pp. 273 – 296)
Then in THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995):
“Managers as a profession, for the past fifty years, have been essentially expediters and paper pushers. The nostalgia of their role in WWII never was relinquished. Nostalgia for that mythic time simply grew like a cancer, metastasizing through every fissure of the organization’s body until it was bloated with disease, and on every kind of support system, chief of which was the Federal Government. For every ten workers, there was a supervisor, for every three supervisors, a manager, for every four managers, a director, for every five directors, a vice president, and so on. Workers were lost in the equation.” (pp. 98 – 99)
NUMBER THREE: THE SEARCH FOR THE NEXT PERK
Time reports that 57 percent of employers have stopped offering a traditional pension plan. For more than twenty years, I have reported it was a bit of insanity for corporations to give benefits and perks not tied to performance.
It has been a concern of which I have written often and passionately, not because I am against workers but because it is an expense that has never turned into positive performance.
It was the reason I identified three dominant cultures of the organization, COMFORT, COMPLACENCY and CONTRIBUTION with most corporations within my experience as an employee, executive and consultant, dominated by COMFORT.
When push came to shove, and the bottom started to fall out of the marketplace, corporations simply upped the perks and drove their operations into COMPLACENCY. This is precisely what led to the demise of the automotive industry.
I first covered this in great detail in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), became more specific with THE WORKER, ALONE (1995), then elaborated on it even more specifically in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), and pulled out all stops in CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP &DISSONANT WORKERS (2000), but, alas, to no avail.
NUMBER FOUR: WE’RE GETTING OFF THE LADDER
Time mentions that 80 percent of employees claim they would want flexible work schedules if it wouldn’t hurt their careers.
The mere fact that workers are still thinking of work in terms of “career” indicates that implicitly they are still envisioning a ladder in a corporation. If the ladder is gone, then career in that conventional context is meaningless. It was the reason I wrote THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995) The whole focus of the book was the worker as an independent contractor. This was the books imperative:
“Workers have no choice but TO GO AGAISNT THE GRAIN, for nothing changes until they do. The game of charades of empowerment continues because it is safe. It changes nothing and costs those in power even less. Workers absorb the costs. Not until THE WORKER, ALONE, realizes it is up to him to put his house in order, will change occur. Ventilation won’t do it, or pointing fingers. The worker must get off the dime and take charge of work, which is the only way to take charge of life.”
Workers cannot have it both ways: expect the ladder to disappear and expect to have a career in the traditional sense.
We are moving back in a sense to the pre-industrial revolution guilds where the driver of commerce was cooperation in small groups. Even with all the sophistication of an electronic age of computer networking among independent contractors, cooperation and teaming are necessary components on an intimate scale.
It was evident in 1992 that the "goose that laid the golden egg" had left the building, but it was also obvious that workers were reluctant to change no matter what. Now they have no choice, and consequently, it is too late for many.
NUMBER FIVE: WHY BOOMERS CAN’T QUIT
Time points out that among baby boomers only 13 percent have saved enough for retirement, and that most boomers will have to work until their dying days. I’ve written so much on baby boomers that suffice they chose not to grow up because they had no intentions of getting old. What is worse, their children now are the worse for wear for that indulgence, and it isn’t going to get any easier.
For fifty years Americans have been caught up in the hubris of being Numero Uno, as if that meant anything, consuming 25 percent of the world’s natural resources, keeping up with the Jones, spending more than they made, loving and buying bigger and bigger gas guzzlers, partying as if there were no tomorrow, and now that chicken has come to roost. The party is over. The world has caught up.
The nation as well as the individual American is fighting a bankruptcy of confidence as well as of coin. The world conceded the twentieth century to the United States, as the “American Century,” and then the United States fell prey to that notion in the twenty-first (see chapter six, “Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon” in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, pp 210 – 253).
NUMBER SIX: IT WILL PAY TO SAVE THE PLANET
Time estimates 2.5 million new jobs in the green job industry.
NUMBER SEVEN: WOMEN WILL RULE BUSINESS
Time mentions an 8 percent growth of women in the workforce over the next 10 years compared to 5 percent for men. This is not new data as this has been going on for more than forty years. I reported in THE TABOO (1996):
“Women who view life through the feminist prism imply a gender bias favors men, especially with regard to education. The facts paint a different picture:
(1) While boys get higher scores in mathematics and science, girls get higher scores in reading and writing.
(2) Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely to be held back a grade, and boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the special education population.
(3) 67 percent of female high school graduates go to college, compared to 58 percent of male high school graduates.
In 1970, women were only 41 percent of all college students. Today, women account for 55 percent of all undergraduates, and they receive 54 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States. Regarding graduate school in 1970:
(1) Women received 40 percent of all master’s degrees; today they are 59 percent of all master’s degree students and earn 53 percent of all master’s degrees.
(2) Women earned 6 percent of all professional degrees; by 1991, that figure was up to 39 percent.
(3) Only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women, but that figure is up to 39 percent today.
(4) The medical degree earned during that period by women jumped from 8 to 36 percent. In 1993, 42 percent of first-year medical students were women.
(5) 5 percent of women earned law degrees; today that figure is more than 40 percent.
(6) Women received only 1 percent of dental degrees, compared to 32 percent in 1991.
(7) Women today earn a majority of the degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.
"There is, however, a growing gender imbalance in higher education among minority students. Among black students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1990, fully 62 percent were; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female. Among white students, the imbalance is 53 percent to 47 percent in favor of women.” (pp. 14 – 15)
Women in 2009 are the majority in medical school and is the majority being licensed as physicians. Similar gains are to be noted in law, dentistry, and other disciplines among women. We are moving increasingly into a matriarchal society, as men of all ethnicities are too busy pounding their chests to risk embarrassment and do a little work in the classroom. THE TABOO was published in 1996 and every one of the categories mentioned above is more soundly in the favor of women over men.
NUMBER EIGHT: WHEN GENERATION X RUNS THE SHOW
Time predicts 40 percent of the workforce will be individual contractors. This is covered in some detail in all the books listed above, but not because “Generation X” is known for its flexibility but rather because of the flexibility of technology and improved education of workers, which makes it a competitive necessity.
NUMBER NINE: YES, WE’LL STILL MAKE STUFF
Time projects 15 percent of the total growth in jobs will be in manufacturing. The figure is based upon highly skilled workers, worker innovation, consumer demand, and adaptation to technology. I think it is overly optimistic as I see the United States leading the way in a totally different direction, the leisure industry. I envisioned that future in CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992):
“Company increasingly recognize themselves as microcosms of the community with companies commonly sponsoring projects in positive structuring of leisure. These include community service, creative workshops, speaking bureaus, new skills training programs, courses on becoming entrepreneurs, high school and college educational programs, vocational workshops, recreational activities, daycare centers, comparative religious exchanges, sponsoring educational trips within USA, and abroad, to mention a few.
“Leisure and work have become inseparable. Companies celebrate leisure because they have discovered it serves their mission. By participating in volunteer organizations – where rank, role, socioeconomic status are irrelevant – employees develop a collegial orientation. They come to appreciate the beauty of difference, and the challenges of diversity. It is refreshing to be accepted for what you are, not who you are. This celebration fosters self-enhancing collaboration. Work and life become a single joyful pursuit.
“Cultural pursuits – art, architecture, music, travel, history, theater, reading, participative sport, gardening, and leisure for itself – are more natural to other older societies. We appear reluctant to make the mental shift investment required to see work as the equivalent of play. We persist in seeing it as a duty – even while a real work ethic eludes us. We are the last advanced society that sees work this way.
“Technology offers more than comfort and play. It offers freedom from the drudgery of life, which has been misrepresented so long as work. With technology and society on a collision course most of the 20th century; the marriage of the two was inevitable. The consequences and possibilities of that marriage are now just beginning to be felt. It is clear they will change the world forever, altering the way we relate to each other as human beings. Those who do not understand history are destined to reinvent it. That may be the ultimate triumph in organizational learning.” (pp 294 – 296)
So, I see us less and less a “manufacturing society” and instead leading a renaissance into a new age of celebration through cooperation, making the United States an amusement park for the world.
NUMBER TEN: THE LAST DAYS OF CUBICAL LIFE
Time reports telecommunication has increased from 12 percent in 2000 to 28 percent today. It reports the increasing work in teams, another theme of CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992):
“The pressure to perform is real, but no longer draconian. The work climate is more relaxed because of the spirit of cooperation. Cooperation builds to success, which is measured in psychological as much as economic terms. What is different is that individual enterprise has given ground to group enterprise – two heads are better than one, and working that way is more fun, too – something which has to be experienced to be appreciated.
“Collegial support, the environment filled with good cheer and congeniality, is not a public relations gimmick. Teaming – vertical and horizontal integration – is crucial to organizational life.” (p. 285)
SO WHAT?
It simply proves once again why conventional media are years behind the curve. FORTUNE magazine featured a piece on “work without managers” several years after my book was published on the subject without acknowledgement. I wrote the publication, and never received the courtesy of a reply. During the Vietnam War, TIME magazine featured a piece, “What you should think about Vietnam.” I wrote TIME and told them I didn’t want them to tell me what to think, just report the news. To TIME magazine’s credit, they replied to my letter explaining that interpreting the news was its job.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 17, 2009
“Throw away the briefcase: you’re not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won’t look much like your old one. There’s no ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there’s a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path. Ten lessons for succeeding in the new American workplace.”
Time, “The Future of Work,” May 24, 2009
REFERENCE:
For the past thirty years, I, among others, have been writing books and articles that journalists such as TIME magazine finally have subsumed to the point that perhaps someone will pay attention. The American workplace has been out of whack for more than a quarter century, and it has been during that period that the roof has fallen in on American industry and commerce, education and morality, confidence and relevance.
One of the things that confounded me when I returned to graduate school, as a mature adult was how much effort sociology and psychology spent to reify the obvious, or what everyday people in everyday situations knew to be true. I remember having to read a treatise in sociology on “Why Prisoners Attempt to Escape from Prison?” Several studies supported by complex statistical correlations were offered to corroborate this behavior, when I know for sure were I incarcerated that would be my motivation without the necessity for such verification.
Likewise, I puzzle why journalists are so far behind the curve and yet have the temerity to offer findings revealing few new clues to the subject at hand that had not been reported years ago by myself and others in several books and articles.
* * *
NUMBER ONE, JOBS – High Tech, High Touch, High Growth
I thought of this when Time offered a McKinsey &Company study that pointed out that nearly 85 percent of new jobs being created between 1998 and 2006 involved complex “knowledge work” like problem solving. Now, the majority of the workforce is in "knowledge type jobs," but yet problem solving remains the problem!
Sure, jobs are going to grow in computer software engineering, systems analysts, and so on, but that does not insure the problem solving. I wrote this in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):
“(The problem) is the American culture is deeply impaled in a deterministic approach, or the ‘Blitzkrieg School of Problem Solving' (i.e., assault the problem, spare no money or resource). Being only comfortable with nitty-gritty deductive reasoning, we expect the effect to the follow the cause. Rest assured medical science has spent most of its resources on trying to isolate the AIDS virus through research to develop a miraculous vaccine. Yet, the cause does not lie exclusively in the subatomic world of microbiology, but in the social psychology of human relationships.” (pp. 244 – 245)
NUMBER TWO: TRAINING MANAGERS TO BEHAVE
Time mentions that 77 percent of schools with full-time MBA programs found their enrollments increasing last year. It then lists changing the moral climate, dealing with greed, talking about developing a “license” for management as a profession, or posting ethical oaths.
Readers know how I feel about the MBA program so we can skip that consideration. The focus of this brief outline in Time is still on “the management of things” and using the same platform for "the motivation of people." It doesn't work! You can license managers. You can make the curriculum as rigorous as the licensing board for medical physicians, and it still will not matter. The mindset is all wrong.
Managers, per se, are atavistic. In a corporate environment, breaking down but still here, mega corporations are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. There has to be a change in psychology.
This is what I wrote in CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction:
“What’s in it for me is being displaced by what’s in it for us? This is not driven by altruism, but economics. Crossing the no man’s land between individualism and collective identity, admittedly, is a precarious one.
"You don’t change a one hundred year practice over night. With this in mind, consider these crystal ball reflections -- the I go into compensation, cooperation, communication, culture and end with celebration: a vision: the work week now requires only 30 – 32 hours. Employees may choose from a number of options – working at home, working split schedules, working five 6-hour days, four 8-hour days, three 10-hour days, or other variations. They keep their own time, and are not judged on number of hours worked but on the results of their work." (pp. 273 – 296)
Then in THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995):
“Managers as a profession, for the past fifty years, have been essentially expediters and paper pushers. The nostalgia of their role in WWII never was relinquished. Nostalgia for that mythic time simply grew like a cancer, metastasizing through every fissure of the organization’s body until it was bloated with disease, and on every kind of support system, chief of which was the Federal Government. For every ten workers, there was a supervisor, for every three supervisors, a manager, for every four managers, a director, for every five directors, a vice president, and so on. Workers were lost in the equation.” (pp. 98 – 99)
NUMBER THREE: THE SEARCH FOR THE NEXT PERK
Time reports that 57 percent of employers have stopped offering a traditional pension plan. For more than twenty years, I have reported it was a bit of insanity for corporations to give benefits and perks not tied to performance.
It has been a concern of which I have written often and passionately, not because I am against workers but because it is an expense that has never turned into positive performance.
It was the reason I identified three dominant cultures of the organization, COMFORT, COMPLACENCY and CONTRIBUTION with most corporations within my experience as an employee, executive and consultant, dominated by COMFORT.
When push came to shove, and the bottom started to fall out of the marketplace, corporations simply upped the perks and drove their operations into COMPLACENCY. This is precisely what led to the demise of the automotive industry.
I first covered this in great detail in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), became more specific with THE WORKER, ALONE (1995), then elaborated on it even more specifically in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), and pulled out all stops in CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP &DISSONANT WORKERS (2000), but, alas, to no avail.
NUMBER FOUR: WE’RE GETTING OFF THE LADDER
Time mentions that 80 percent of employees claim they would want flexible work schedules if it wouldn’t hurt their careers.
The mere fact that workers are still thinking of work in terms of “career” indicates that implicitly they are still envisioning a ladder in a corporation. If the ladder is gone, then career in that conventional context is meaningless. It was the reason I wrote THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995) The whole focus of the book was the worker as an independent contractor. This was the books imperative:
“Workers have no choice but TO GO AGAISNT THE GRAIN, for nothing changes until they do. The game of charades of empowerment continues because it is safe. It changes nothing and costs those in power even less. Workers absorb the costs. Not until THE WORKER, ALONE, realizes it is up to him to put his house in order, will change occur. Ventilation won’t do it, or pointing fingers. The worker must get off the dime and take charge of work, which is the only way to take charge of life.”
Workers cannot have it both ways: expect the ladder to disappear and expect to have a career in the traditional sense.
We are moving back in a sense to the pre-industrial revolution guilds where the driver of commerce was cooperation in small groups. Even with all the sophistication of an electronic age of computer networking among independent contractors, cooperation and teaming are necessary components on an intimate scale.
It was evident in 1992 that the "goose that laid the golden egg" had left the building, but it was also obvious that workers were reluctant to change no matter what. Now they have no choice, and consequently, it is too late for many.
NUMBER FIVE: WHY BOOMERS CAN’T QUIT
Time points out that among baby boomers only 13 percent have saved enough for retirement, and that most boomers will have to work until their dying days. I’ve written so much on baby boomers that suffice they chose not to grow up because they had no intentions of getting old. What is worse, their children now are the worse for wear for that indulgence, and it isn’t going to get any easier.
For fifty years Americans have been caught up in the hubris of being Numero Uno, as if that meant anything, consuming 25 percent of the world’s natural resources, keeping up with the Jones, spending more than they made, loving and buying bigger and bigger gas guzzlers, partying as if there were no tomorrow, and now that chicken has come to roost. The party is over. The world has caught up.
The nation as well as the individual American is fighting a bankruptcy of confidence as well as of coin. The world conceded the twentieth century to the United States, as the “American Century,” and then the United States fell prey to that notion in the twenty-first (see chapter six, “Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon” in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, pp 210 – 253).
NUMBER SIX: IT WILL PAY TO SAVE THE PLANET
Time estimates 2.5 million new jobs in the green job industry.
NUMBER SEVEN: WOMEN WILL RULE BUSINESS
Time mentions an 8 percent growth of women in the workforce over the next 10 years compared to 5 percent for men. This is not new data as this has been going on for more than forty years. I reported in THE TABOO (1996):
“Women who view life through the feminist prism imply a gender bias favors men, especially with regard to education. The facts paint a different picture:
(1) While boys get higher scores in mathematics and science, girls get higher scores in reading and writing.
(2) Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely to be held back a grade, and boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the special education population.
(3) 67 percent of female high school graduates go to college, compared to 58 percent of male high school graduates.
In 1970, women were only 41 percent of all college students. Today, women account for 55 percent of all undergraduates, and they receive 54 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States. Regarding graduate school in 1970:
(1) Women received 40 percent of all master’s degrees; today they are 59 percent of all master’s degree students and earn 53 percent of all master’s degrees.
(2) Women earned 6 percent of all professional degrees; by 1991, that figure was up to 39 percent.
(3) Only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women, but that figure is up to 39 percent today.
(4) The medical degree earned during that period by women jumped from 8 to 36 percent. In 1993, 42 percent of first-year medical students were women.
(5) 5 percent of women earned law degrees; today that figure is more than 40 percent.
(6) Women received only 1 percent of dental degrees, compared to 32 percent in 1991.
(7) Women today earn a majority of the degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.
"There is, however, a growing gender imbalance in higher education among minority students. Among black students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1990, fully 62 percent were; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female. Among white students, the imbalance is 53 percent to 47 percent in favor of women.” (pp. 14 – 15)
Women in 2009 are the majority in medical school and is the majority being licensed as physicians. Similar gains are to be noted in law, dentistry, and other disciplines among women. We are moving increasingly into a matriarchal society, as men of all ethnicities are too busy pounding their chests to risk embarrassment and do a little work in the classroom. THE TABOO was published in 1996 and every one of the categories mentioned above is more soundly in the favor of women over men.
NUMBER EIGHT: WHEN GENERATION X RUNS THE SHOW
Time predicts 40 percent of the workforce will be individual contractors. This is covered in some detail in all the books listed above, but not because “Generation X” is known for its flexibility but rather because of the flexibility of technology and improved education of workers, which makes it a competitive necessity.
NUMBER NINE: YES, WE’LL STILL MAKE STUFF
Time projects 15 percent of the total growth in jobs will be in manufacturing. The figure is based upon highly skilled workers, worker innovation, consumer demand, and adaptation to technology. I think it is overly optimistic as I see the United States leading the way in a totally different direction, the leisure industry. I envisioned that future in CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992):
“Company increasingly recognize themselves as microcosms of the community with companies commonly sponsoring projects in positive structuring of leisure. These include community service, creative workshops, speaking bureaus, new skills training programs, courses on becoming entrepreneurs, high school and college educational programs, vocational workshops, recreational activities, daycare centers, comparative religious exchanges, sponsoring educational trips within USA, and abroad, to mention a few.
“Leisure and work have become inseparable. Companies celebrate leisure because they have discovered it serves their mission. By participating in volunteer organizations – where rank, role, socioeconomic status are irrelevant – employees develop a collegial orientation. They come to appreciate the beauty of difference, and the challenges of diversity. It is refreshing to be accepted for what you are, not who you are. This celebration fosters self-enhancing collaboration. Work and life become a single joyful pursuit.
“Cultural pursuits – art, architecture, music, travel, history, theater, reading, participative sport, gardening, and leisure for itself – are more natural to other older societies. We appear reluctant to make the mental shift investment required to see work as the equivalent of play. We persist in seeing it as a duty – even while a real work ethic eludes us. We are the last advanced society that sees work this way.
“Technology offers more than comfort and play. It offers freedom from the drudgery of life, which has been misrepresented so long as work. With technology and society on a collision course most of the 20th century; the marriage of the two was inevitable. The consequences and possibilities of that marriage are now just beginning to be felt. It is clear they will change the world forever, altering the way we relate to each other as human beings. Those who do not understand history are destined to reinvent it. That may be the ultimate triumph in organizational learning.” (pp 294 – 296)
So, I see us less and less a “manufacturing society” and instead leading a renaissance into a new age of celebration through cooperation, making the United States an amusement park for the world.
NUMBER TEN: THE LAST DAYS OF CUBICAL LIFE
Time reports telecommunication has increased from 12 percent in 2000 to 28 percent today. It reports the increasing work in teams, another theme of CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992):
“The pressure to perform is real, but no longer draconian. The work climate is more relaxed because of the spirit of cooperation. Cooperation builds to success, which is measured in psychological as much as economic terms. What is different is that individual enterprise has given ground to group enterprise – two heads are better than one, and working that way is more fun, too – something which has to be experienced to be appreciated.
“Collegial support, the environment filled with good cheer and congeniality, is not a public relations gimmick. Teaming – vertical and horizontal integration – is crucial to organizational life.” (p. 285)
SO WHAT?
It simply proves once again why conventional media are years behind the curve. FORTUNE magazine featured a piece on “work without managers” several years after my book was published on the subject without acknowledgement. I wrote the publication, and never received the courtesy of a reply. During the Vietnam War, TIME magazine featured a piece, “What you should think about Vietnam.” I wrote TIME and told them I didn’t want them to tell me what to think, just report the news. To TIME magazine’s credit, they replied to my letter explaining that interpreting the news was its job.
* * *