THANK GOD FOR DIFFERENCES!

THANK GOD FOR DIFFERENCES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 21, 2009

“Management deals best with what it knows, which means people are often managed as things. People do not behave, react, or forgive the way things do, which is the basis of conflict. Relationships imply conflict. As sociologist Georg Simmel observed, conflict can be the very glue, which binds people to a task. Yet conflict is considered a pejorative. Disagreement is considered disruptive when it is a vital precursor to agreement. Managed conflict keeps the organization on course and is essential to its health.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Six Silent Killers” (1998), p. 119.

* * *

I was reading my third novel ("Train") by the excellent writer, Pete Dexter, an author who has won the National Book Award ("Paris Trout”), yet I could not find his books on the shelves of Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Thanks to the Internet I was able to order all his published works at discount prices, which made me wonder how could someone write so well, so honestly, and poignantly and not have an audience? I answered my own question.

It was another nail in the coffin of our barbaric times. But that is not why I am writing this today. I am writing about the marvel of television that despite all its inanities manages to connect us to "minds alive." Not everyone is asleep.

To take a break from reading, I checked the baseball games on television -- Reds and White Sox, Red Sox and Braves -- and at commercial break, I wandered over to C-Span. There I caught Jay Wesley Richards lecturing on his book, "Money, Greed and God" at the Enterprise Institute.

Richards, whose works I was not familiar, is an advocate of "intelligent design," which I only found out later looking him up on google. He is a young man with a point of view, an educated perspective, and a convincing way of presenting his argument. I thought, if I had known he was an apologist for "intelligent design," would I have listened to his ideas on capitalism (which he sees as the solution not the problem) or missed an opportunity to experience an engaged mind? I must confess I might have done so. It would have been my loss.

He covered a lot of territory that I have considered often with a different slant but honestly from his point of view. He reads Ayn Rand (on selfishness) the same way I've read her, but has a more sophisticated appreciation of greed and a more level interpretation of self-interest than I've been able to convey, although my sentiments are similar. I feel uncomfortable bringing a theistic point of view into my thinking although, I suspect, Richards has had similar training in that regard to my own.

I say this because he breaks down words into their Latin origins, as I do, and defines them in those etymological terms. For example, "altruism" does not mean "selflessness" but "other directed," from the Latin "alter." An individual doesn't abandon "self-interest," but is "other directed" to promote self-interest. This is consistent with Freud’s "quid pro quo," or something gained for something given. I feel self-interest is not only critical to success, but essential to survival.

Richards demonstrates more finesse than I've been able to display in making the connection, but we speak a similar language.

Looking him up on google, I learned that in January 2008 he had a debate with Christopher Hitchens on “intelligent design,” which must have been something. What an odd couple that must have been on stage, Richards, clean cut and well groomed, Hitchens the exact opposite. Hitchens is the darling of the liberals, and Richards, I would imagine, is relatively unknown by conservatives with the possible exception of Christian conservatives.

My point in writing this is that it is nice to see television sponsoring discussions of people of ideas, allowing them to have free reign in that climate. This may possibly reduce the shadow of existence a bit. We live in an age where people think to be heard rather than be heard to promote thinking, and authors write to attract an audience rather than have an audience discover itself through its authors. Despite appealing to the lowest common denominator, thanks to such programs, ideas have not died.

For example, Richards referred to a book about "bees," again a book with which I was not familiar, in which the author analyzed how combative, self-interested, and conflicting were these bees, but terribly productive. An experimenter introduced a chemical to make the bees less aggressive, and the hive fell apart.

I sat there and smiled to myself. Edward O. Wilson at Harvard has been telling us for years that the smallest creatures on earth, insects, behave precisely as man, or is it the other way around? Anyway, conflict has been a thesis in my books on OD. Conflict is the glue that holds an organization to its task. Harmony is what dissolves that cohesiveness. We have had sixty years of increasingly harmonious organizational life, giving workers everything but the kitchen sink, apologizing for their untoward behavior, and, thanks to human resources, have failed to learn what bees know intuitively.

We are so late smart when it comes to understanding what makes us tick and what does not. Remember this, whether you are an advocate of the theory of evolution or “intelligent design,” you can learn a lot about yourself, especially in the other camp. No one has a monopoly on ideas. No one.

Be always well,

Jim