THE NAPLES INSTITUTE -- WHY IT FAILED -- A REALITY CHECK TODAY!

THE NAPLES INSTITUTE – WHY IT FAILED – A REALITY CHECK TODAY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 13, 2010

REALITY CHECK:

I wrote this piece hurriedly not able to get the images of those thoughtless murders in northern Nigeria out of my mind (missive follows) only to be shocked this morning to learn the son of one of the original COURTHOUSE TIGERS who was profiled IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) was one of the victims of the shootings at the University of Alabama Medical School in Huntsville, Alabama yesterday.

Dr. Joseph Leahy, the son of Phil Leahy, a professor of microbiology was one of the six victims, all professors of the School of Medicine. Three are dead, two are in critical condition, and one professor is in stable condition. Dr. Leahy is one of the critically wounded.

Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard educated, and a professor in the medical school, who failed to win tenure, is the shooter.

Readers don’t like me to generalize about the depravity of our society, of the god of progress that we worship, or that we go zany over something like “American Idol” or all these wonderful handheld contraptions we possess. Well, folks, no apologies here. We are messed up, people, and this is brought home when our best educated and leaders of our society go berserk.
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DR. FISHER WROTE:

Dear Ted,

I want to applaud you for your efforts along with Bernie to launch THE NAPLES INSTITUTE. That said I think there are a number of reasons why it failed.

(1) I think its niche, social justice, although commendable, was too ambiguous. Social justice should be an absolute but we are in the age of relativism and therefore many have different and conflicting definitions of what that might be.

Therefore, I think it was wrong to attempt to specify the niche when it would be better not to be identifying with a niche at all.

(2) A think tank needs a benefactor, a person with deep pockets that can get it off the ground no strings attached, and finance it for several years as it attempts to define its role and contribution to this troubled world.

(3) You have to have the right kind of people, and by that I mean thinkers, not doers not entrepreneurs not people that are capitalists or socialists, conservatives or liberals but who are driven by ideas and ideals not power.

It takes a very different mind to make money than a mind to change the world.

(4) THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, from the many memos I have read, were not the right people for the purposes of which I outlined in a long piece to you several months ago.

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Most people in this electronic age get 99 percent of their information either through the Internet,on television, or radio. Ironically, the entrepreneur spirit and not what I outline above drive media, electronic and print journalism.

Recently, only this past week, PBS's "World Focus," the "German News" and the "BBC News" showed video evidence of the police and military in northern Nigeria singling out a total of thirteen men, two on crutches, and having them prostrate themselves on the ground while uniformed officers shot them in the back of the head, one officer telling a shooter not to shoot the man in the head because he wanted his hat, another man started to get up and turn around and an officer said "pose for the camera," and then shot him dead.

I'm an old man and this wrenched my soul. This brutality has happened before and will happen again but I always have had the filter of reading about it in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The New York Review, or in some book, not seeing it naked before my eyes. This is the horror of the world we live in.

Meanwhile, the air waves are concerned about former president Bill Clinton's stent implants, Sarah Palim's writing discussion points on her hand, or some other inconsequential nonsense. More people are dying in Afghanistan and more troops are there to contribute to the death toll, collateral and otherwise, and nothing changes.

Border towns in Mexico have scores of deaths every day because of drug wars with weapons from the United States. These large drug cartels are in business because of Americans insatiable appetite for illegal drugs. Thousands of Mexican soldiers police these towns but to no avail. We seem to always look at problems ass backwards.

You cannot legislate morality, decency, dignity or belief in a common humanity. I feel it sad to say that I will most likely leave this world in far worse shape than when I entered it. If this is progress, I don't want any of it.

The last hope of some sensibility in society are think tanks that are not fronts for lobbyists, special interests, bleeding hearts, religious organizations or for that matter, political parties. The world is in a mess. It has taken a crazy pill and cannot overcome its addiction. I had hope for THE NAPLES INSTITUTE because I didn't think it was afraid of ideas. I think ideas killed it, and that is sad.

Be always well,

Jim

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A READER REPLIES:

Hello Jim,

I liked the brief commentary on our times, its brevity and liked for its being a further commentary on our times. What was the old Marxist belief? Religion is the opiate of the masses. Your piece made me think in the 21st Century mass media is the new opiate of the masses. People desire to numb themselves to the inhumanity of man rather than being disgusted by it. Disgust requires action. Think Nazi Germany.

I think of the Bruce Springsteen lyric:
In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
Its a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while were young
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Unfortunately, we don't really leave the cage we just go to another room. Our escape is imaginary and we don't want it fettered with hard truth. Even when the hard truth is accompanied by solutions, as messy as those solutions can be.

As much as I dislike the tea party solutions, they have one thing right. Throw the bums out. This last turn in congress, in which a super majority couldn't pass meaningful legislation because its own members held it hostage while their grubby, pork stained hands grabbed for more pork is indicative of how badly broken our government really is.

Social justice may only come from an active revolt of those who believe social justice is important. Think tanks are fine, but only if their thoughts are capable of fueling the disgust and rage needed to change the world.

Michael

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you for sharing.

My aim is not to defend think tanks but to note their possible usefulness. Historian Paul Johnson who has written many books suitable to the laymen, two of which I have read, “The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830”(1991) and “Intellectuals” (1988) says of President Barak Obama (that also may be true of most of us), “President Obama talks too much and thinks too little.”

Thinking no longer has the predicate of importance it once enjoyed. We think in words but as long as we can use words well there is little reason to think past what the words imply if they imply anything.

The president has his own hiccup which is slightly different from the most common hiccup, which is “you know you know you know,” when of course we don’t know.

The president’s hiccup is “let me make one thing perfectly clear” when what is perfectly clear is not clear at all. I don’t mean to be picking on the president but he has the bully pulpit and is a constant voice and model for us all.

A think tank, if it functions like a think tank, gets inside language, inside ideas, inside the meaning not only of words but styles of life and values within those lives. Philosophy once provided that service but philosophy has gotten into mechanics and semiotics, which is different than what I am implying, and into relativism and deconstructionism. We are in the tearing apart and putting back together phase of existence. Historians such as Paul Johnson will have none of that, and therefore he is on the fringe of his profession.

We as a society have a broken wing and still are attempting to fly without repairing the wing.

You are right to quote Bruce Springsteen. I am not much into popular culture, but know such artists often cut through the malarkey to reveal fundamental truths.

Your reference to the cage intrigues me. I wrote a book titled, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? I couldn’t find a publisher as I cannot find a publisher for most of my books. One day my daughter, Jennifer, asks me how many manuscripts, that is, complete books I had written that had not been published? I was embarrassed to tell her more than the nine books I have found into print.

Finally, my enthusiasm for the TEA PARTY movement is no more enthusiastic than any other. We vote the bums out and replace them with new bums, who we vote out to replace them with newer bums, ad infinitum.

The snowstorm in Washington, D.C. found 300,000 government workers unable to get to their offices, and yet the nation ran okay. We could get rid of 300,000 CEOs across the nation and everything would go on okay as well. We have the mistaken idea, placed in our heads of course by this contingent that the nation and society could not operate without these folks, but it can and does and has and will.

The inescapable idea that democracy and totalitarianism share is that leaders make the difference and not the people, that ideas percolate down from on high and catch hold in the bowels of society when the actual reverse is true.

Those at the top, that 300,000 or so on Wall Street and in corpocracy are holding to the myth for dear life, not only in the United States but everywhere. People make the difference and they always have. They choose not to accept the fact because then whom would they blame?

Be always well,

Jim

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ANOTHER READER REPLIES TO THIS MISSIVE:

Jim,

I guess not only your # 2 is a major reason for success, but also such idealistic tasks are generally too broad and fluffy to get people really excited. It has to have a specific target that can be reached in a certain timeframe.

Manfred

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Manfred,

What you say is true, but I fear the problem is that old saw, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

To me, a think tank is the egg. It has to be incubated with ideas and leavened with subtle care before it hatches into anything meaningful, useful or in your words, specific.

There are conservative and liberal think tanks, medical and scientific think tanks, and so on, but they fail my test which I describe above, that is, they are preternaturally idealized before they are hatched, and therefore they have a bias that limits thought and frames ideas in a peculiar way.

It has always amused me when scientists would say to me, “What right do you have to comment on science? You are not a scientist?”

I have parried with, “Sir, you are wrong. We are all scientists. We just don’t all wear the white coat and straight jacket.”

Commentators are now in their total explanatory mode trying to explain President Obama’s loss of support from Americans out in the tundra, those without high school educations that Sarah Palim is supposedly reaching in her illiterate ramblings.

One of the benefits of a long life is that some of the smartest people I have known never graduated from high school, one was my da. I’ve known many others. School doesn't make a person wise, life does.

The professor at the University of Alabama Medical School who murdered three of her professor colleagues, and critically wounded three others was educated at Harvard University. Motivation for the crime is alleged to be her failure to win tenure.

Tenure for an academic is job security and the equivalent of lifetime employment that cannot be denied the tenured person unless convicted of some moral or criminal turpitude.

* * *

Back in the 1970s, a Dr. Fisher in the chemistry department of Florida State University was murdered by a student whose dissertation was not accepted, a necessary fulfillment to be awarded a Ph.D. He murdered Dr. Fisher, who was on his committee, for this failure. Perhaps as many as fifty telephone calls came to my house thinking it was I that had been murdered. It gave me pause.

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My book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2003) was all about the madness of our times, a book that people didn’t want to read to be reminded of the fact.

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Can think tanks change this? No. But think tanks can have the integrity to keep up the pressure.

Be always well,

Jim