MONTHS TO STOP OIL LEAK, BP SAYS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 31, 2010
* * *
AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV WRITES:
Sire James,
I could be wrong, but I thought a prevention device itself failed, which caused the oil disaster – not a human override.
This gulf disaster is a classic in every dimension. It follows in the tradition of Katrina and Challenger. The details don't matter.
Litigation about the "cause" will go on for 15 years or longer.
Before years-end, it will come out that:
(1) The dangers and appropriate precautions were well recognized (Boisjolly, Markopolos) before the rig was built. (Note: Boisjolly and Markopolos were whistle blowers – Fisher)
(2) The engineers presented their case for appropriate prevention to BP management. Think Chief Operating Engineer (COE).
(3) Management arbitrarily overrode the engineering recommendations.
(4) A chain of events, some improbable, lined up in formation to defeat the single blowout preventer.
(5) The associated institutions are woefully incompetent to deal with the crisis.
(6) The public pays the bills and suffers the damage
By D4P thinking, ownership of the responsibility for outcomes transferred from the designers to management at step 3. Just like the bosses at Thiokol, BP management will get off Scott free and keep their jobs. The next rig disaster will fall outside of the regulations formulated in retrospect from this one. And, there will be a next.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
William,
Thank you. It is my sense as well, listening to the Congressional hearings with BP executives, that it was indeed a failure of in place engineering prevention.
Incidentally, the Exxon Valdez litigation went on for years and mounted to millions of pages. BP's latest estimate is that the leak is unlikely to be sealed before at least August. I may never see the end of this ordeal in my lifetime.
It is past the point of the blame game. It is time to learn. It is time to read and digest D4P. It is time to get beyond hindsight thinking, not only in this instance, but also culturally, across the board.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
NOTE:
Livingston is the holder of some 100 patents and author of several books. The most recent is the one mentioned here, DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010). D4P anticipated incipient disaster brought on by hindsight thinking, institutional infallibility, and chain of command authority where engineers and technicians did as they were told. Management-leadership and workers were complicit, a theme common to my many books. Livingston insists in D4P that management, in a posture of infallibility, assumes a role it cannot possibly fulfill. He argues persuasively that complexity is relegated to simply another factor to be dealt with when the methodology and mindset is all wrong for understanding much less dealing effectively with complexity. Livingston introduces the reader to a cadre of folks (in D4P) who have dealt with such problems, but have been summarily ignored.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
WE ARE A GADGET NOT A THINKING SOCIETY! READER COMMENTS!
WE ARE A GADGET NOT A THINKING SOCIETY -- READER COMMENTS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 30, 2010
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Your reviews of D4P are enticing, as was your offer of a free copy.
Don't assume people are ignoring you or are somehow disinterested in challenging topics. For example, I was traveling during the time your offer was sent and did not read it until a day or two later. At that point, I assumed the three copies were gone.
I went to the site you referenced and also looked at Mr. Livingston's Linked In profile. The .pdf section of the site is permission only. Mr. Livingston's profile indicates a long career in engineering prevention. Thank you for exposing me to the fact this is not an anachronistic concept.
Think of the computerization of automobiles, brought to the fore by Toyota's recent problems. Those systems have a great deal of redundancy built in to prevent failures. Several cars have no mechanical links controlling braking or acceleration. The software systems are designed to check for and analyze anomalies.
In the mechanical past, I've had brakes fail with no warning. Current systems, while not perfect, are far better than before.
The oil rig had prevention designed into the system that was over- ridden by humans who chose shortened cycle time and likely personal performance bonuses over safety and quality. I assume Mr. Livingston's book addresses that and appeals to your OD bent.
It is always stimulating to hear from your.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER COMMENTS
Michael,
Thank you for your comment. You are correct DESIGN FOR PREVENTION does appeal to my organizational development (OD) bent. What’s more, it is like that evasive piece of the puzzle that eludes you.
Thanks to the perceptive words of Livingston, I am able to finally see the whole picture. It is an amazing document and I will send it to you if you will give me your address.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
I have received my copy and started reading it. I am duly
impressed and intend to recommend it to my Engineering Psych (Human
Factors) Technical Network...
=;-Don
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you, Dr. D.
We are in “no man’s land,” and it is nice to have someone that can see ahead as you and Livingston can.
Recently someone wrote me commenting on our present situation with a most astute observation. He wrote:
“There is no set way of managing anything for the long term. In almost all industry, the model for non-management/leadership based on running people and things into the ground with an eye only on short-term profit has fully reasserted itself. This has infected and genetically modified those we thought above it (Toyota, for example, has become fully Americanized).”
We are a society like a Major League baseball team that plays nine aging former Most Valuable Players even though they are well past their prime. Our system and its leadership are all wrong for the times. We look for people such as you to change that, and know you are doing your level best in that regard.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 30, 2010
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Your reviews of D4P are enticing, as was your offer of a free copy.
Don't assume people are ignoring you or are somehow disinterested in challenging topics. For example, I was traveling during the time your offer was sent and did not read it until a day or two later. At that point, I assumed the three copies were gone.
I went to the site you referenced and also looked at Mr. Livingston's Linked In profile. The .pdf section of the site is permission only. Mr. Livingston's profile indicates a long career in engineering prevention. Thank you for exposing me to the fact this is not an anachronistic concept.
Think of the computerization of automobiles, brought to the fore by Toyota's recent problems. Those systems have a great deal of redundancy built in to prevent failures. Several cars have no mechanical links controlling braking or acceleration. The software systems are designed to check for and analyze anomalies.
In the mechanical past, I've had brakes fail with no warning. Current systems, while not perfect, are far better than before.
The oil rig had prevention designed into the system that was over- ridden by humans who chose shortened cycle time and likely personal performance bonuses over safety and quality. I assume Mr. Livingston's book addresses that and appeals to your OD bent.
It is always stimulating to hear from your.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER COMMENTS
Michael,
Thank you for your comment. You are correct DESIGN FOR PREVENTION does appeal to my organizational development (OD) bent. What’s more, it is like that evasive piece of the puzzle that eludes you.
Thanks to the perceptive words of Livingston, I am able to finally see the whole picture. It is an amazing document and I will send it to you if you will give me your address.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
I have received my copy and started reading it. I am duly
impressed and intend to recommend it to my Engineering Psych (Human
Factors) Technical Network...
=;-Don
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you, Dr. D.
We are in “no man’s land,” and it is nice to have someone that can see ahead as you and Livingston can.
Recently someone wrote me commenting on our present situation with a most astute observation. He wrote:
“There is no set way of managing anything for the long term. In almost all industry, the model for non-management/leadership based on running people and things into the ground with an eye only on short-term profit has fully reasserted itself. This has infected and genetically modified those we thought above it (Toyota, for example, has become fully Americanized).”
We are a society like a Major League baseball team that plays nine aging former Most Valuable Players even though they are well past their prime. Our system and its leadership are all wrong for the times. We look for people such as you to change that, and know you are doing your level best in that regard.
Be always well,
Jim
WE ARE A GADGET NOT A THINKING SOCIETY!
WE ARE A GADGET NOT A THINKING SOCIETY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 29, 2010
“Folly consists in drawing of false conclusions from just principles, by which it is distinguished from madness, which draws just conclusions from false principles.”
John Locke (1632 – 1704), English philosopher
* * *
If I were walking in a hailstorm, eventually the idea would surface that I best get out of it.
If I was warned that a hailstorm was in the offing, while the skies appeared to be relatively clear, chances are I would consider the possibility of a hailstorm remote and go about my business as usual.
If I was presented with a clear case of the nature of hailstorms and the source of their damaging effects, along with a strategy of understanding of how to prevent them from proving inconvenient or embarrassing, chances are I would ignore the enlightenment.
* * *
After reading William L. Livingston IV's DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), which was conceived and written long before the oilrig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, my sensitivities have been bombarded by media storms and public gnashing of teeth.
I have watched the pusillanimous Congressional hearings, and wondered how Livingston, whose prescription for prevention is so thorough and consistent with natural law, could be so blatantly ignored.
The answer is obvious. We have an eclectic group of programmed thinkers with hindsight mentalities schooled in institutional infallibility, chain of command authority, and business as usual practices that run everything.
They cannot escape, and therefore neither can we, from their circular logic as they attempt to solve problems with the same thinking that caused them.
We are status quo society forever stuck. Even a reminder of this fact with the contretemps of the oilrig disaster is unlikely to find us getting unstuck. We have left the feudal ages but not the futile ages. David Brooks seems to understand this.
* * *
David Brooks, a New York Times columnist of a reflective temperament, is sometimes able to touch if peripherally ideas Livingston investigates much more thoroughly. Brooks does so in a column I read today in the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times (May 29, 2010). The column is titled, "A DANGEROUS ILLUSION OF SAFETY." I suggest you check it out online. It touches some of the themes in Livingston's book.
* * *
I told BB, "I would send Brooks one of Livingston's books, but I'm sure he wouldn't get it much less read it."
"Why do you say that?"
"I have no faith in the media."
"You're such a cynic, Jim."
"Cynic my dear doesn't touch it. I gave a number of people an opportunity to have a copy of this book, and I heard from three. People who I thought had a couple brain cells working together gave it a pass. What do you call that?"
"I call that reality. Most people don't have the time or inclination to . . ."
"Get beyond playing with their iPads or BlackBerry's?"
"I was going to say to think anymore than they have to. You think too much."
"No, my dear, I don't think enough."
"I suppose you're going to write about this?"
"No, well, yes and no. I'm going to suggest people read David Brooks's column. ."
"And Livingston's book?"
"No. I've given up on that idea. We are not a thinking society. We're a gadget society."
"Said by a true non-gadget person."
"So?"
"So you could at least let your readers know how they could download Bill's book."
"I've done that before."
"Quit being such a baby, list the download."
"Well, all right. Here it is http://designforprevention.com/D4P.pdf "
"Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?"
"I think I'm breaking into a rash."
"My big baby."
* * *
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 29, 2010
“Folly consists in drawing of false conclusions from just principles, by which it is distinguished from madness, which draws just conclusions from false principles.”
John Locke (1632 – 1704), English philosopher
* * *
If I were walking in a hailstorm, eventually the idea would surface that I best get out of it.
If I was warned that a hailstorm was in the offing, while the skies appeared to be relatively clear, chances are I would consider the possibility of a hailstorm remote and go about my business as usual.
If I was presented with a clear case of the nature of hailstorms and the source of their damaging effects, along with a strategy of understanding of how to prevent them from proving inconvenient or embarrassing, chances are I would ignore the enlightenment.
* * *
After reading William L. Livingston IV's DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), which was conceived and written long before the oilrig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, my sensitivities have been bombarded by media storms and public gnashing of teeth.
I have watched the pusillanimous Congressional hearings, and wondered how Livingston, whose prescription for prevention is so thorough and consistent with natural law, could be so blatantly ignored.
The answer is obvious. We have an eclectic group of programmed thinkers with hindsight mentalities schooled in institutional infallibility, chain of command authority, and business as usual practices that run everything.
They cannot escape, and therefore neither can we, from their circular logic as they attempt to solve problems with the same thinking that caused them.
We are status quo society forever stuck. Even a reminder of this fact with the contretemps of the oilrig disaster is unlikely to find us getting unstuck. We have left the feudal ages but not the futile ages. David Brooks seems to understand this.
* * *
David Brooks, a New York Times columnist of a reflective temperament, is sometimes able to touch if peripherally ideas Livingston investigates much more thoroughly. Brooks does so in a column I read today in the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times (May 29, 2010). The column is titled, "A DANGEROUS ILLUSION OF SAFETY." I suggest you check it out online. It touches some of the themes in Livingston's book.
* * *
I told BB, "I would send Brooks one of Livingston's books, but I'm sure he wouldn't get it much less read it."
"Why do you say that?"
"I have no faith in the media."
"You're such a cynic, Jim."
"Cynic my dear doesn't touch it. I gave a number of people an opportunity to have a copy of this book, and I heard from three. People who I thought had a couple brain cells working together gave it a pass. What do you call that?"
"I call that reality. Most people don't have the time or inclination to . . ."
"Get beyond playing with their iPads or BlackBerry's?"
"I was going to say to think anymore than they have to. You think too much."
"No, my dear, I don't think enough."
"I suppose you're going to write about this?"
"No, well, yes and no. I'm going to suggest people read David Brooks's column. ."
"And Livingston's book?"
"No. I've given up on that idea. We are not a thinking society. We're a gadget society."
"Said by a true non-gadget person."
"So?"
"So you could at least let your readers know how they could download Bill's book."
"I've done that before."
"Quit being such a baby, list the download."
"Well, all right. Here it is http://designforprevention.com/D4P.pdf "
"Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?"
"I think I'm breaking into a rash."
"My big baby."
* * *
Be always well,
Jim
Thursday, May 13, 2010
HATRED AND HAVING ROCKS IN OUR HEADS!
HATRED AND HAVING ROCKS IN OUR HEADS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 12, 2010
“Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.”
Honore de Balzac (1799 – 1850), French novelist
* * *
REFERENCE:
In my book, “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996), I write:
“Metaphorically, we all have rocks in our heads, snakes in our secret gardens. Our snakes sunning themselves on these rocks symbolize our fantasies and wicked thoughts. To deny their presence is to throw our lives off balance, out of control, as if suddenly pierced by the deadly venom. What we do is one thing; what we think is quite another. No one is absolutely good or absolutely evil, but a combination of both. If we ignore one at the expense of the other, we are bound for trouble. To respect our wickedness gives us an advantage. Others less self-accepting may stumble on their snakes at any time, whereas we ever alert gingerly step around ours. We don’t deny that they are there. Instead, we even use them on occasion. Creative people do to stimulate their visionary powers. Fantasies are an important source of energy, not so much to be acted on as to widen our horizons.”
* * *
I’ve been writing recently about violence, and the disruptive nature of our ways, but not about hate or hatred.
We've all encountered hatred. We can generate hatred just by being ourselves doing what we do. We cannot govern how others see us. You cannot neutralize animosity by due diligence. That is not only naïve but counterproductive. Envy and jealousy are terrible poisons of hatred, what Byron called the “madness of the heart.”
* * *
An author wrote a book more than a half century ago on optimism, went back to his hometown for a high school class reunion, only to be greeted by one of his classmates with the comment, “I don’t remember you being particularly smart. In fact, I remember you as being pretty much average. How can you explain your success?”
The author first took umbrage at this remark, then gathered himself, and smiles. “It’s true. I wasn’t much was I?”
This throws his classmate off his aggressive stride leaving him speechless.
The author continues. “Can I share a secret with you?”
The classmate more puzzled then ever. “Yeah, why not?”
“I’m still not much today.”
“How can you say that? You write books, get your name in the paper, have your profile on the Internet, articles in national magazines, and I hear you're independently wealthy. What's that suppose to mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I’m still the same person you remember, still plugging away still asking embarrassing questions.”
“Yeah, you did that all right sometimes made a fool of yourself as I remember.”
“Still do as a matter of fact." He grins. "You probably remember me as a bit of a grind, had to work hard for my grades.”
“True.”
“I still work hard for my grades.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m talking about report cards. What kind of a report card do you get today? I remember you were quite a student in high school.”
“Report cards? I don’t get report cards anymore. What a foolish question.”
“But you do. Everyone does.”
“Now, you’re not making any sense.”
“Everyone gets a report card every day of their lives. I work as hard today as I did those many years ago to get the best report card I can earn. I see you chose to stay here and work in your father’s business. What kind of a report card do you think you’re getting?”
His classmate takes out a cigarette, stamps it hard against the pack, lights it and blows smoke into the author’s eyes. “You’re reminding me what a bore you were in high school.”
“Oh, and why is that?”
“You always had a book in your face with a smug expression. A lot of people resented your arrogance.’
“That still is not an answer.”
“Well, I guess I still get straight ‘A’s’ every day, how’s that for an answer?”
“That’s good if it’s true!”
“Of course it’s true.”
“If you say so.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean it’s excellent if you believe it to be true.”
“And you’re assuming that it's not?”
“I’m not talking about that grade.”
“Then what?”
“It’s the grade of satisfaction, the grade of personal fulfillment, the grade of loving what you do and doing what you love.”
“Who’s to say that isn’t so?”
“No one, but you. You see you’re the grader and the one being graded.”
“So?”
“You’re still doing the same job you were doing out of high school decades ago."
“So?”
“You’re still living in your family’s home.”
“So what? I inherited it, as well as the business.”
“There is nothing wrong with that if it makes you a happier healthier person.”
“You’re saying I’m not?”
“I’m not saying anything such thing. It is not for me to judge. It has been my experience that the more stimulating our life the more positive our frame of reference, and the more generous our spirit.”
“Translate that into English.”
“Are you happy?”
“Not especially. I don’t know anyone who is happy. Are you happy?”
“Very much so.”
“Then you’re lying.”
“No, I’m not, but then I must ask you another question, are you content?”
“Of course not. How could I be content if I’m not happy?”
“You have a point. They do go together. Are you loving?”
“I love my wife and kids I guess.”
“You guess or you know?”
“Let’s leave it at that. My kids are grown up and not too responsible. They’ve always got their hand out.”
“So sometimes you don’t like them. Do you ever hate them?”
“Hate them?” He stubs out his cigarette and rubs his jaw. “I don’t know where this is going.”
The author waits. Then repeats the question.
“No, I don’t hate them or anybody.”
“There you have it.”
“Have what?”
“The problem.”
“What problem?”
“Your report card might be straight ‘A’s’ as you put it, but you’re flunking life.”
“Don’t get nasty. It doesn't suit you.”
“I don't mean to be nasty. I mean to be honest. I've told you I’m the same as you remember me.” He pauses. “Let me put it another way, have you ever hated anything?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like hypocrisy, jargon, secrecy, intolerance, bigotry, oppression, racism, injustice ..”
“You calling me a racist?”
“Are you?”
“No, but there are certain people I dislike.”
“People you dislike but don't hate."
"Yeah."
"People who are different than you are.”
“Yeah.”
“People of different color and ethnicity.”
“Yeah, people like that. People I don't have anything in common.”
“Also I would suggest people who move on and don’t stay the same.”
“Yeah, people like you who forget their place.”
“Yes, people like me.”
“Now that you’ve said it, yeah, people like you, who think they’re better than people like me.”
“People you compare yourself to.”
"Pardon? I don't follow." The comment seems to throw him. “Oh, now you’re saying I hate you.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“You just dislike me.”
“Well, there is something to that now isn't there? You come here all smiles and self-importance to bless us struggling nobodies with your presence, so what are we supposed to feel?”
To himself he says, as classmate to classmate. "It’s true I’ve moved on, that I’ve had a different career than if I had never left, but it has been a career full of risks and pain, hardship and disappointments, failures as well as some success. I was drawn to the work I love and found love in that work. And yes, contentment and satisfaction. Do I hate? Of course, I do. I hate the things I mentioned. Do I have a fondness for this place? Yes, I do. Have I run into others like you along the way? Every day.”
“You must provoke them.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, you’ve provoked me now didn't you?”
“As I recall, from your opening gambit, what you see me as being has provoked you.”
“Now that is not fair, not fair at all!”
“You were a good student, right?”
“We’ve already established that.”
“Much better student than I was.”
“We’ve established that as well.”
“Success of others reminds you of your personal disappointment. When you read of someone winning a prize, do you think ‘I could have won that prize’ if I had the connections?”
He smiles. “It’s true. You know it’s true. I could have been somebody.”
“No, I don’t think so. You think a somebody is different than you are when a somebody is very much the same. Being a somebody is not being important. It is doing what you love.”
“You’re being sarcastic, right?”
“No, I’m being honest. You see, you compare and compete in your head but not with your heart. You don’t see me as a classmate who happens to be an author. You see me as an author who happens to be a classmate. That angers and dispappoints you. Why him, you think? Why not me? You take pleasure in wishful thinking.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ve already established that you are a nobody implying you want to be a somebody. You think a somebody worries about being a nobody when it never enters his mind. He is too busy fighting his own demons.”
The classmate shakes his head. “You were always squirrelly.” He throws his hands up. “I haven’t understood a word of this conversation," he says and walks away.
The author watches his retreat with sadness in his eyes.
* * *
WE ALL HAVE ROCKS IN OUR HEADS
Life is war. It is a violent and all consuming war from birth to death. It ends with the truce of death. In this constant war, the body is fighting to survive unbeknown to the mind for the host body is governed mainly by an autonomous system. Despite the cavalier disregard of the mind to practice good sense, the body uses its full arsenal of weapons to combat disease, tolerate dissipation, and endure indulgence with monumental patience.
Another war goes on with the spirit. That war is not autonomous but requires the attention of the host. It is a personal war as violent as the war of the body. The spirit is fragile and requires many outside factors for support to sustain its vitality, viability and resilience.
Education supports the spirit, as does experience, as does religion, as does meditation and reflection, as does prudence, but most importantly, as does self-awareness and self-acceptance. With acceptance there is tolerance, tolerance of personal inadequacy and tolerance of others as they are found. It leaves little room for denial where the demons thrive.
There is no shame in personal faults as humiliating as they sometimes can turn out to be, if we accept them as part of our nature. There is no shame in our personal biases as embarrassing as they might become, if we admit them to ourselves, and see them for what they are. We then have the temerity to gingerly step around them without provoking their wrath.
* * *
There is not one person reading this that can escape having been largely formed by others. We come into the world mainly amorphous with little sense of ourselves other than as others describe, program and reinforce that self. We cannot escape our culture or how we are educated to perceive the world.
It is the dichotomy between what we are told we are and what experience tells us we actually are that is the central dynamic of life from birth to death. Many of us get stuck or stung by not respecting this dichotomy, or failing to get inside its hidden meaning.
It is why British Prime Minister Gordon Brown tired and forced out of his nature to campaign on the public stump, talked to a citizen with great magnanimity only to stereotype her in private as a “bigoted woman.” Unfortunately, his recorder was still on and the comment became a national political disaster for him. He lost the election.
The irony is that those things we hate most in ourselves that remind us of our parents are most likely deeply engrained in our personalities, and can color our behavior in the flippancy of the moment.
We are all emotional jigsaw puzzles the cumulative pieces of a life mainly put together by others. The soldiers of control are fear, shame and guilt, and similar programming that bombards our fragile psyches. There is no escape. We are what we are and the more aware we are of that fact the better prepared we are to fight this war of life by moving with it instead of against it.
* * *
Biases programmed into our system can be described as rocks in our heads. On these rocks sunning themselves are our snakes, which are secrets of shame and guilt and fear and incidences in our lives that we wish had not occurred, but had.
The inclination is to walk blindly through our Secret Garden hoping not to disturb these dark demons sunning themselves. So, like Prime Minister Brown, we step on one, it bites us, and we say, that “bigoted woman.”
Everyone has a Secret Garden. If no one had any rocks or snakes sunning themselves on these rocks, they might as well be dead, because they certainly wouldn't be very human.
No one can get through life without making mistakes without stumbling without falling, indeed, without doing something they wish they had never done. These things make them the vibrant person that they are.
It is knowing what makes us “us” that is important. It is not important to share our Secret Garden with another living soul. It is important that we are fully aware of the contents of our Secret Garden so as to avoid stepping unwisely. To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 12, 2010
“Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.”
Honore de Balzac (1799 – 1850), French novelist
* * *
REFERENCE:
In my book, “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996), I write:
“Metaphorically, we all have rocks in our heads, snakes in our secret gardens. Our snakes sunning themselves on these rocks symbolize our fantasies and wicked thoughts. To deny their presence is to throw our lives off balance, out of control, as if suddenly pierced by the deadly venom. What we do is one thing; what we think is quite another. No one is absolutely good or absolutely evil, but a combination of both. If we ignore one at the expense of the other, we are bound for trouble. To respect our wickedness gives us an advantage. Others less self-accepting may stumble on their snakes at any time, whereas we ever alert gingerly step around ours. We don’t deny that they are there. Instead, we even use them on occasion. Creative people do to stimulate their visionary powers. Fantasies are an important source of energy, not so much to be acted on as to widen our horizons.”
* * *
I’ve been writing recently about violence, and the disruptive nature of our ways, but not about hate or hatred.
We've all encountered hatred. We can generate hatred just by being ourselves doing what we do. We cannot govern how others see us. You cannot neutralize animosity by due diligence. That is not only naïve but counterproductive. Envy and jealousy are terrible poisons of hatred, what Byron called the “madness of the heart.”
* * *
An author wrote a book more than a half century ago on optimism, went back to his hometown for a high school class reunion, only to be greeted by one of his classmates with the comment, “I don’t remember you being particularly smart. In fact, I remember you as being pretty much average. How can you explain your success?”
The author first took umbrage at this remark, then gathered himself, and smiles. “It’s true. I wasn’t much was I?”
This throws his classmate off his aggressive stride leaving him speechless.
The author continues. “Can I share a secret with you?”
The classmate more puzzled then ever. “Yeah, why not?”
“I’m still not much today.”
“How can you say that? You write books, get your name in the paper, have your profile on the Internet, articles in national magazines, and I hear you're independently wealthy. What's that suppose to mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I’m still the same person you remember, still plugging away still asking embarrassing questions.”
“Yeah, you did that all right sometimes made a fool of yourself as I remember.”
“Still do as a matter of fact." He grins. "You probably remember me as a bit of a grind, had to work hard for my grades.”
“True.”
“I still work hard for my grades.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m talking about report cards. What kind of a report card do you get today? I remember you were quite a student in high school.”
“Report cards? I don’t get report cards anymore. What a foolish question.”
“But you do. Everyone does.”
“Now, you’re not making any sense.”
“Everyone gets a report card every day of their lives. I work as hard today as I did those many years ago to get the best report card I can earn. I see you chose to stay here and work in your father’s business. What kind of a report card do you think you’re getting?”
His classmate takes out a cigarette, stamps it hard against the pack, lights it and blows smoke into the author’s eyes. “You’re reminding me what a bore you were in high school.”
“Oh, and why is that?”
“You always had a book in your face with a smug expression. A lot of people resented your arrogance.’
“That still is not an answer.”
“Well, I guess I still get straight ‘A’s’ every day, how’s that for an answer?”
“That’s good if it’s true!”
“Of course it’s true.”
“If you say so.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean it’s excellent if you believe it to be true.”
“And you’re assuming that it's not?”
“I’m not talking about that grade.”
“Then what?”
“It’s the grade of satisfaction, the grade of personal fulfillment, the grade of loving what you do and doing what you love.”
“Who’s to say that isn’t so?”
“No one, but you. You see you’re the grader and the one being graded.”
“So?”
“You’re still doing the same job you were doing out of high school decades ago."
“So?”
“You’re still living in your family’s home.”
“So what? I inherited it, as well as the business.”
“There is nothing wrong with that if it makes you a happier healthier person.”
“You’re saying I’m not?”
“I’m not saying anything such thing. It is not for me to judge. It has been my experience that the more stimulating our life the more positive our frame of reference, and the more generous our spirit.”
“Translate that into English.”
“Are you happy?”
“Not especially. I don’t know anyone who is happy. Are you happy?”
“Very much so.”
“Then you’re lying.”
“No, I’m not, but then I must ask you another question, are you content?”
“Of course not. How could I be content if I’m not happy?”
“You have a point. They do go together. Are you loving?”
“I love my wife and kids I guess.”
“You guess or you know?”
“Let’s leave it at that. My kids are grown up and not too responsible. They’ve always got their hand out.”
“So sometimes you don’t like them. Do you ever hate them?”
“Hate them?” He stubs out his cigarette and rubs his jaw. “I don’t know where this is going.”
The author waits. Then repeats the question.
“No, I don’t hate them or anybody.”
“There you have it.”
“Have what?”
“The problem.”
“What problem?”
“Your report card might be straight ‘A’s’ as you put it, but you’re flunking life.”
“Don’t get nasty. It doesn't suit you.”
“I don't mean to be nasty. I mean to be honest. I've told you I’m the same as you remember me.” He pauses. “Let me put it another way, have you ever hated anything?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like hypocrisy, jargon, secrecy, intolerance, bigotry, oppression, racism, injustice ..”
“You calling me a racist?”
“Are you?”
“No, but there are certain people I dislike.”
“People you dislike but don't hate."
"Yeah."
"People who are different than you are.”
“Yeah.”
“People of different color and ethnicity.”
“Yeah, people like that. People I don't have anything in common.”
“Also I would suggest people who move on and don’t stay the same.”
“Yeah, people like you who forget their place.”
“Yes, people like me.”
“Now that you’ve said it, yeah, people like you, who think they’re better than people like me.”
“People you compare yourself to.”
"Pardon? I don't follow." The comment seems to throw him. “Oh, now you’re saying I hate you.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“You just dislike me.”
“Well, there is something to that now isn't there? You come here all smiles and self-importance to bless us struggling nobodies with your presence, so what are we supposed to feel?”
To himself he says, as classmate to classmate. "It’s true I’ve moved on, that I’ve had a different career than if I had never left, but it has been a career full of risks and pain, hardship and disappointments, failures as well as some success. I was drawn to the work I love and found love in that work. And yes, contentment and satisfaction. Do I hate? Of course, I do. I hate the things I mentioned. Do I have a fondness for this place? Yes, I do. Have I run into others like you along the way? Every day.”
“You must provoke them.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, you’ve provoked me now didn't you?”
“As I recall, from your opening gambit, what you see me as being has provoked you.”
“Now that is not fair, not fair at all!”
“You were a good student, right?”
“We’ve already established that.”
“Much better student than I was.”
“We’ve established that as well.”
“Success of others reminds you of your personal disappointment. When you read of someone winning a prize, do you think ‘I could have won that prize’ if I had the connections?”
He smiles. “It’s true. You know it’s true. I could have been somebody.”
“No, I don’t think so. You think a somebody is different than you are when a somebody is very much the same. Being a somebody is not being important. It is doing what you love.”
“You’re being sarcastic, right?”
“No, I’m being honest. You see, you compare and compete in your head but not with your heart. You don’t see me as a classmate who happens to be an author. You see me as an author who happens to be a classmate. That angers and dispappoints you. Why him, you think? Why not me? You take pleasure in wishful thinking.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ve already established that you are a nobody implying you want to be a somebody. You think a somebody worries about being a nobody when it never enters his mind. He is too busy fighting his own demons.”
The classmate shakes his head. “You were always squirrelly.” He throws his hands up. “I haven’t understood a word of this conversation," he says and walks away.
The author watches his retreat with sadness in his eyes.
* * *
WE ALL HAVE ROCKS IN OUR HEADS
Life is war. It is a violent and all consuming war from birth to death. It ends with the truce of death. In this constant war, the body is fighting to survive unbeknown to the mind for the host body is governed mainly by an autonomous system. Despite the cavalier disregard of the mind to practice good sense, the body uses its full arsenal of weapons to combat disease, tolerate dissipation, and endure indulgence with monumental patience.
Another war goes on with the spirit. That war is not autonomous but requires the attention of the host. It is a personal war as violent as the war of the body. The spirit is fragile and requires many outside factors for support to sustain its vitality, viability and resilience.
Education supports the spirit, as does experience, as does religion, as does meditation and reflection, as does prudence, but most importantly, as does self-awareness and self-acceptance. With acceptance there is tolerance, tolerance of personal inadequacy and tolerance of others as they are found. It leaves little room for denial where the demons thrive.
There is no shame in personal faults as humiliating as they sometimes can turn out to be, if we accept them as part of our nature. There is no shame in our personal biases as embarrassing as they might become, if we admit them to ourselves, and see them for what they are. We then have the temerity to gingerly step around them without provoking their wrath.
* * *
There is not one person reading this that can escape having been largely formed by others. We come into the world mainly amorphous with little sense of ourselves other than as others describe, program and reinforce that self. We cannot escape our culture or how we are educated to perceive the world.
It is the dichotomy between what we are told we are and what experience tells us we actually are that is the central dynamic of life from birth to death. Many of us get stuck or stung by not respecting this dichotomy, or failing to get inside its hidden meaning.
It is why British Prime Minister Gordon Brown tired and forced out of his nature to campaign on the public stump, talked to a citizen with great magnanimity only to stereotype her in private as a “bigoted woman.” Unfortunately, his recorder was still on and the comment became a national political disaster for him. He lost the election.
The irony is that those things we hate most in ourselves that remind us of our parents are most likely deeply engrained in our personalities, and can color our behavior in the flippancy of the moment.
We are all emotional jigsaw puzzles the cumulative pieces of a life mainly put together by others. The soldiers of control are fear, shame and guilt, and similar programming that bombards our fragile psyches. There is no escape. We are what we are and the more aware we are of that fact the better prepared we are to fight this war of life by moving with it instead of against it.
* * *
Biases programmed into our system can be described as rocks in our heads. On these rocks sunning themselves are our snakes, which are secrets of shame and guilt and fear and incidences in our lives that we wish had not occurred, but had.
The inclination is to walk blindly through our Secret Garden hoping not to disturb these dark demons sunning themselves. So, like Prime Minister Brown, we step on one, it bites us, and we say, that “bigoted woman.”
Everyone has a Secret Garden. If no one had any rocks or snakes sunning themselves on these rocks, they might as well be dead, because they certainly wouldn't be very human.
No one can get through life without making mistakes without stumbling without falling, indeed, without doing something they wish they had never done. These things make them the vibrant person that they are.
It is knowing what makes us “us” that is important. It is not important to share our Secret Garden with another living soul. It is important that we are fully aware of the contents of our Secret Garden so as to avoid stepping unwisely. To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.
* * *
Monday, May 10, 2010
YOU CANNOT PUSH THE WATER
YOU CANNOT PUSH THE WATER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 10, 2010
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.”
Eric Hoffer
* * *
For the past quarter century or so, I have subscribed to the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. It introduced me to Isaiah Berlin and Garry Wills, among others, resulting in my reading a good share of their published works. I’ve been a peripatetic reader most of my life and have been changed by books. That said books are never the answer.
I came back from South Africa in 1969 after forming a new company for my employer a changed person. The combination of Afrikaner Apartheid and the imperialism of America corpocracy was too much, and so I retired in my tender thirties.
Jeremy Rifkin’s essay in The New York Review (May 27, 2010) intrigued me while I was appalled by the advertisement in the same issue, “Crimes Are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them.” A group of prominent celebrities and intellectuals signed the ad, which I suspect was intended to legitimize the rationale of ad's content.
My wonder is if any of these signers ever commanded anything, ever had to be in the hot seat and make split decisions, had to weigh the pros and cons and come up with an expedient answer? My guess is none of them. Intellectuals can bark but have no bite.
After South Africa, I took a two-year sabbatical. At the end of it, I went back to school full-time for six years immersed in academia and found it every bit as much a factory as had been the corporation, only without the executive clout.
Intellectuals can push ideas around with impunity, but have little sense of the people they try to fit into their garments.
I come out of a technical tradition and so was intrigued with Rifkin’s “Entropy” (1980). I enjoyed his attempt to apply thermodynamics to world order. I read his “Algeny” (1983) in which he puts Darwin on notice and flags again, a new world order, only now with bioengineering. Then I read “Time Wars” (1987), which is about time and, yes, a new world order.
“The Empathic Civilization,” which is the title of the NYR article, and a new book, looks at global consciousness and once again, a new world order, developing a chronology. It was surprisingly unsatisfying. I wondered at my unease.
In my walk today, I decided it was that Rifkin knows little about real people. In fact, as much as he touts “Entropy,” he even knows less about first principles or natural law. You cannot push the water. Nor can you push empathy.
Moreover, that appalling ad that denigrates Bush and Obama indicates those listed know little about power or the execution of power. Power has bark and bite.
In any case, it is engineers, not intellectuals, who are designing our way into the future. They are doing it according to Natural Law with foresight thinking, not hindsight assessments.
Fine sounding as empathic civilization is in reality the natural drive of man is self-preservation. This is hardly empathic. We don’t need utopia or dystopia to see that engineers, not scientists or intellectuals are foraging ahead by looking ahead.
Conflict not empathy holds us together. It must be managed and controlled. Eric Hoffer knew this from life. It is the reason I open my remarks quoting him. Hoffer is without pedigree but a pedigree thinker. We have a society built on the infallibility of pedigreed based hindsight education. Bush and Obama both know that doesn’t work in the hot seat. .
* * *
posted by The Peripatetic Philosopher | 1:03 PM
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 10, 2010
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.”
Eric Hoffer
* * *
For the past quarter century or so, I have subscribed to the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. It introduced me to Isaiah Berlin and Garry Wills, among others, resulting in my reading a good share of their published works. I’ve been a peripatetic reader most of my life and have been changed by books. That said books are never the answer.
I came back from South Africa in 1969 after forming a new company for my employer a changed person. The combination of Afrikaner Apartheid and the imperialism of America corpocracy was too much, and so I retired in my tender thirties.
Jeremy Rifkin’s essay in The New York Review (May 27, 2010) intrigued me while I was appalled by the advertisement in the same issue, “Crimes Are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them.” A group of prominent celebrities and intellectuals signed the ad, which I suspect was intended to legitimize the rationale of ad's content.
My wonder is if any of these signers ever commanded anything, ever had to be in the hot seat and make split decisions, had to weigh the pros and cons and come up with an expedient answer? My guess is none of them. Intellectuals can bark but have no bite.
After South Africa, I took a two-year sabbatical. At the end of it, I went back to school full-time for six years immersed in academia and found it every bit as much a factory as had been the corporation, only without the executive clout.
Intellectuals can push ideas around with impunity, but have little sense of the people they try to fit into their garments.
I come out of a technical tradition and so was intrigued with Rifkin’s “Entropy” (1980). I enjoyed his attempt to apply thermodynamics to world order. I read his “Algeny” (1983) in which he puts Darwin on notice and flags again, a new world order, only now with bioengineering. Then I read “Time Wars” (1987), which is about time and, yes, a new world order.
“The Empathic Civilization,” which is the title of the NYR article, and a new book, looks at global consciousness and once again, a new world order, developing a chronology. It was surprisingly unsatisfying. I wondered at my unease.
In my walk today, I decided it was that Rifkin knows little about real people. In fact, as much as he touts “Entropy,” he even knows less about first principles or natural law. You cannot push the water. Nor can you push empathy.
Moreover, that appalling ad that denigrates Bush and Obama indicates those listed know little about power or the execution of power. Power has bark and bite.
In any case, it is engineers, not intellectuals, who are designing our way into the future. They are doing it according to Natural Law with foresight thinking, not hindsight assessments.
Fine sounding as empathic civilization is in reality the natural drive of man is self-preservation. This is hardly empathic. We don’t need utopia or dystopia to see that engineers, not scientists or intellectuals are foraging ahead by looking ahead.
Conflict not empathy holds us together. It must be managed and controlled. Eric Hoffer knew this from life. It is the reason I open my remarks quoting him. Hoffer is without pedigree but a pedigree thinker. We have a society built on the infallibility of pedigreed based hindsight education. Bush and Obama both know that doesn’t work in the hot seat. .
* * *
posted by The Peripatetic Philosopher | 1:03 PM
Sunday, May 09, 2010
THE PERENNIAL CONUNDRUM -- THE RELUCTANCE OF INSTITUTIONS TO LISTEN -- WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON, IV's "DESIGN FOR PREVENTION"
THE PERENNIAL CONUNDRUM – THE RELUCTANCE OF SOCIETY TO LISTEN
WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON, IV’s DESIGN FOR PREVENTION – AND THE OILRIG DISASTER IN THE GULF OF MEXICO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 9, 2010
“The Design for Prevention is the engineering process. The engineering process is the assault on complexity. Any method, to be a method, is defined apriority (i.e., presumed), before deployment. A goal-seeking method is composed of tasks; each task goal-seeking as well. What goes in is specified as well as what is to take place. What comes out to feed and trigger the on following task meets specifications. The D4P is a fundamental problem-solving strategy, a conscious and directed intervention especially configured to deal with the outrageously complex as it engages the future. Prevention design is all about dynamic vulnerabilities.”
William L. Livingston, IV, Design For Prevention, 2010, page 4.
* * *
We have a monumental disaster currently going on in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana with millions of gallons of oil already in those fragile ecosystems, and all because an oilrig blew up.
The media is full of hand wrenching, executives and politicians are covering their asses, and Rube Goldberg methodology has been employed to cap the major leak dropping a humungous tank a mile down into the murky waters to cover the leak and pump up the oily mixture to the surface.
Let us say those engaged are successful, that 85 percent of the leaking oil is finally capped, and only 15 percent is still leaking into the gulf. We will hear of man being triumphant once again, able engineering of the crisis management team staying the course if not saving the day.
Lost in all this would be the fact that it never needed to happen.
The current mantra is “we haven’t had such a disaster in forty years.” No one seems to appreciate how inane and self-serving this remark. We should never have a disaster at all if the front-end engineering that Livingston has advocated for years was part of the drill.
THE PROBLEM WITH HINDSIGHT
DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is neither understood nor appreciated. Livingston knows this. “Those that don’t have the conceptions to handle complexity can neither detect nor name the threats they face.”
The oilrig was an exploratory one owned by Transocean (RIG) and leased by British Petroleum for $500,000 a day mainly with Transocean people manning the rig.
The oilrig was in the process of being converted from an exploratory rig to a oil producing rig. This required front-end reengineering.
Now we know, if the preliminary analysis proves accurate, that leaking methane gas combined with the heat of the conversion caused a series of combustions that ultimately led to the collapse and disintegration of the oilrig taking with it eleven lives.
Could this have been avoided?
Let me answer it this way, Livingston’s book develops a painstaking case for designing the maximum prevention into the system with a systemic and systematic analysis of every possibility at the front-end with a constant looping back for checking for errors and making adjustments with absolutely nothing ever taken for granted any-step-of-the-way.
Livingston and a cadre of similar thinking individuals over time have had a reverence for first principles and natural law. It could be said that Nature lifted her regal head when the methane gas was torched and the rig exploded. It should have been apparent from the first that Nature cannot be defied. DESIGN FOR PREVENTION understands this and abides accordingly.
* * *
Livingston is a professional engineer writing to professional engineers. I am not a professional engineer but trained in the same sciences that leads to such professionalism.
The society we enjoy is a product of the engineering mind, heart and soul of its practitioners, engineers with the foresight to think in terms of the future, not the past, to acknowledge and anticipate the consequences of defying Mother Nature, not only in the technical but also in the sociological sense.
Rudy Starkerman, a Swiss trained mathematical physicist, has discovered that the ultimate group size for conducting meaningful discourse is FIVE OR LESS. More than five, we start creating hierarchies, power cells, and pyramid building. We see this happening in teams of five or more. This supports my own empirical experience. I have had constant reminders of how true Starkerman’s work is in fact.
Every engineer should read this book. I say that because engineers must daily deal with being under appreciated, undervalued, and under acknowledged when they put forth foresight propositions of prevention.
Livingston clearly presents the corporate mess that we seem never to be able to escape. I’ve called this mess, “corpocracy,” and have outlined some of the errors it produces. Livingston, however, has nailed it, and in doing so reveals much that is wrong with contemporary institutional society.
INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR HOLD ON US
At this point, I should mention these are my views and not the author's as I have read his book. I am expressing how it has registered on my psyche. This should not be a surprise because each person brings his or her own personal, geographic and demographic baggage to a book, what Livingston calls our “cognitive biases.”
He explains how institutions interfere with first principles. There is nothing wrong with institutions, per se, he says, it is what they have become.
(1) Institutions in order to survive have taken the stance of being infallible. Infallibility leads to rules and regulations while demanding obedience, loyalty and conforming behavior to arbitrary standards that have little to do with their function.
(2) Institutions are stultifying because they are closed systems. Closed systems are not free. They are committed to the status quo. This leads to conformity, replication, duplication, and business as usual no matter the internal tension or accelerating external demands. It compromises their ability to act expediency, judicially and effectively to competitive challenges.
(3) Institutions sustain themselves by constant measuring people in accordance with arbitrary standards of conformity, control and order. Standard measurement is practiced with grades in school and performance appraisal in the work environment.
(4) Arbitrary measurement reifies errors as institutional conformity magnifies vulnerability to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy. According to this law, everything is going from useful to wasted energy. Another way of putting it, with entropy, everything is in an inevitable state of dying. To reduce the swiftness of this death march requires negative entropy. At the institutional level, this means the constant reinvention and looping back to resolve issues rather than be mastered to the death by avoiding them.
(5) Institutions by their protocol are committed to hindsight thinking being disinclined to promote foresight thinking. This is why crisis management is so typical of institutions. It is why linear thinking rules the day. It is why they seem to be in a continuing cycle of facing and solving the same problems over and over again. There is no escape when problems are solved with the same thinking that caused them.
(6) Institutional authority is a poor motivator because it encourages complicity rather than compliance, blind obedience with indifference to operational consequences and institutional goals. The most successful employee is the one who never makes waves, and therefore goes down with the ship.
(7) Institutional mindsets form cultures geared to ideologies that treat prevention as a pejorative rather than as a survival strategy. Consequently, they avoid rather than embrace prevention. This leaves them open for 800,000 practicing attorneys to carry the ball when it is dropped. We shall see this in the wake of the BP oilrig explosion as certain as day follows night.
(8) Institutions cannot operate without hierarchies. Hierarchies with their infallibility and chain-of-command construction cannot but spawn disturbances. Complexity has accelerated the rate and magnitude of these perturbations. Institutions confront complexity with CEOs acting as if on automatic treadmills while confusing poison with medicine as remedy. We have seen this with GM, Wall Street, the Vatican, and the Greek government, and subprime real estate meltdown, Ponzi schemes, on and on. We can always explain everything after-the-fact.
(9) Institutions are locked into hindsight. Livingston writes, “More than 99 percent of all courses offered in the educational system, top to bottom, are hindsight based. The subject matter taught, art or science, is based upon history, lessons-learned, and past discoveries. Pragmatic foresight or foresight engineering, the soul of design, is not offered at all. It takes hindsight to get into the university (GPA, SAT’s) and hindsight is all you take out of it.” For years, I have been a critic of the MBA program, mainly because of this. Livingston shows a similar contempt for the MBA “case studies” of Harvard University, which are totally hindsight instruments.
THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE INSTITUTIONAL MAELSTROM
Livingston goes on to show how important it is for the individual to be his own authority, to be autonomous and free thinking, and how critical it is for him to be self-regulated rather than arbitrarily controlled by some institution.
Society is in transition and transformation. It is a matter of first principles and there is no point in forcing or challenging the status quo but rather the prudent thing is for the individual to go with the flow.
In Hard transparency, there is no charismatic appeal for trust and faith. It takes intelligence. Problems today have the property of "multiplicity," that is, they go far beyond the capacity to solve them. Livingston says, "If you want to get by a multiplicity obstacle, you have to go around it." You bow to Mother Nature, and continue on.
For institutions to survive, they must become more vulnerable, more open and fallible to the errors of their ways. Creativity can only function in an open system. Creativity is required today in view of the mounting complexity. Here are a few Livingston quotes:
(1) “Bottom up has functionally displaced top down even while the military organizational chart stays the same.”
(2) “The makeup of the cast doesn't matter. Thinking incompetence is the same thing as sincerity; the number of issues and their rate of growth have already overwhelmed institutional defenses. It is, exactly, like Chernobyl when plant operations quietly went past the bright line where reactor controls still worked. Crisis response activities will only spread the damage.”
(3) “You cannot acquire the requisite cognition of pragmatic foresight from an environment desperately stuck on status quo.”
* * *
Leaping forward, Livingston has a way of capturing the essence of his argument in telling charts, schematics, and tables. Here is one of my favorites.
ROUTINELY ENCOUNTERED PURSUITS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
(1) Change corporate culture.
(2) Adjust “tone at the top”
(3) “Fix” a mismatch
(4) Safety through hindsight
(5) Challenge infallibility
(6) Reduce entropy without intelligence
(7) Giving responsibility for results
(8) Fixing Yin-made (hindsight) problem with Yin
(9) Motivate an institution to alter its ideology
(10) Risk management through hindsight
(11) Start programmatic foresight before the institution has granted clearance
(12) Omit the Front End at the Front
* * *
As he has written elsewhere, the purpose of a system is what it does (POSWID). Intelligence isn’t an IQ score. Intelligence is what it does. Self-regulation is impossible in rule-based systems. Problems are not solved but controlled. This makes control theory imperative.
I don’t mean to leave you up in the air but to give you a sprinkling of the gems in this remarkable book. The author has given me permission to put it on my blog, but I don’t have the software to do so. Meanwhile, I hope I’ve given you a little food for thought.
Be always well,
Jim
WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON, IV’s DESIGN FOR PREVENTION – AND THE OILRIG DISASTER IN THE GULF OF MEXICO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 9, 2010
“The Design for Prevention is the engineering process. The engineering process is the assault on complexity. Any method, to be a method, is defined apriority (i.e., presumed), before deployment. A goal-seeking method is composed of tasks; each task goal-seeking as well. What goes in is specified as well as what is to take place. What comes out to feed and trigger the on following task meets specifications. The D4P is a fundamental problem-solving strategy, a conscious and directed intervention especially configured to deal with the outrageously complex as it engages the future. Prevention design is all about dynamic vulnerabilities.”
William L. Livingston, IV, Design For Prevention, 2010, page 4.
* * *
We have a monumental disaster currently going on in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana with millions of gallons of oil already in those fragile ecosystems, and all because an oilrig blew up.
The media is full of hand wrenching, executives and politicians are covering their asses, and Rube Goldberg methodology has been employed to cap the major leak dropping a humungous tank a mile down into the murky waters to cover the leak and pump up the oily mixture to the surface.
Let us say those engaged are successful, that 85 percent of the leaking oil is finally capped, and only 15 percent is still leaking into the gulf. We will hear of man being triumphant once again, able engineering of the crisis management team staying the course if not saving the day.
Lost in all this would be the fact that it never needed to happen.
The current mantra is “we haven’t had such a disaster in forty years.” No one seems to appreciate how inane and self-serving this remark. We should never have a disaster at all if the front-end engineering that Livingston has advocated for years was part of the drill.
THE PROBLEM WITH HINDSIGHT
DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is neither understood nor appreciated. Livingston knows this. “Those that don’t have the conceptions to handle complexity can neither detect nor name the threats they face.”
The oilrig was an exploratory one owned by Transocean (RIG) and leased by British Petroleum for $500,000 a day mainly with Transocean people manning the rig.
The oilrig was in the process of being converted from an exploratory rig to a oil producing rig. This required front-end reengineering.
Now we know, if the preliminary analysis proves accurate, that leaking methane gas combined with the heat of the conversion caused a series of combustions that ultimately led to the collapse and disintegration of the oilrig taking with it eleven lives.
Could this have been avoided?
Let me answer it this way, Livingston’s book develops a painstaking case for designing the maximum prevention into the system with a systemic and systematic analysis of every possibility at the front-end with a constant looping back for checking for errors and making adjustments with absolutely nothing ever taken for granted any-step-of-the-way.
Livingston and a cadre of similar thinking individuals over time have had a reverence for first principles and natural law. It could be said that Nature lifted her regal head when the methane gas was torched and the rig exploded. It should have been apparent from the first that Nature cannot be defied. DESIGN FOR PREVENTION understands this and abides accordingly.
* * *
Livingston is a professional engineer writing to professional engineers. I am not a professional engineer but trained in the same sciences that leads to such professionalism.
The society we enjoy is a product of the engineering mind, heart and soul of its practitioners, engineers with the foresight to think in terms of the future, not the past, to acknowledge and anticipate the consequences of defying Mother Nature, not only in the technical but also in the sociological sense.
Rudy Starkerman, a Swiss trained mathematical physicist, has discovered that the ultimate group size for conducting meaningful discourse is FIVE OR LESS. More than five, we start creating hierarchies, power cells, and pyramid building. We see this happening in teams of five or more. This supports my own empirical experience. I have had constant reminders of how true Starkerman’s work is in fact.
Every engineer should read this book. I say that because engineers must daily deal with being under appreciated, undervalued, and under acknowledged when they put forth foresight propositions of prevention.
Livingston clearly presents the corporate mess that we seem never to be able to escape. I’ve called this mess, “corpocracy,” and have outlined some of the errors it produces. Livingston, however, has nailed it, and in doing so reveals much that is wrong with contemporary institutional society.
INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR HOLD ON US
At this point, I should mention these are my views and not the author's as I have read his book. I am expressing how it has registered on my psyche. This should not be a surprise because each person brings his or her own personal, geographic and demographic baggage to a book, what Livingston calls our “cognitive biases.”
He explains how institutions interfere with first principles. There is nothing wrong with institutions, per se, he says, it is what they have become.
(1) Institutions in order to survive have taken the stance of being infallible. Infallibility leads to rules and regulations while demanding obedience, loyalty and conforming behavior to arbitrary standards that have little to do with their function.
(2) Institutions are stultifying because they are closed systems. Closed systems are not free. They are committed to the status quo. This leads to conformity, replication, duplication, and business as usual no matter the internal tension or accelerating external demands. It compromises their ability to act expediency, judicially and effectively to competitive challenges.
(3) Institutions sustain themselves by constant measuring people in accordance with arbitrary standards of conformity, control and order. Standard measurement is practiced with grades in school and performance appraisal in the work environment.
(4) Arbitrary measurement reifies errors as institutional conformity magnifies vulnerability to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy. According to this law, everything is going from useful to wasted energy. Another way of putting it, with entropy, everything is in an inevitable state of dying. To reduce the swiftness of this death march requires negative entropy. At the institutional level, this means the constant reinvention and looping back to resolve issues rather than be mastered to the death by avoiding them.
(5) Institutions by their protocol are committed to hindsight thinking being disinclined to promote foresight thinking. This is why crisis management is so typical of institutions. It is why linear thinking rules the day. It is why they seem to be in a continuing cycle of facing and solving the same problems over and over again. There is no escape when problems are solved with the same thinking that caused them.
(6) Institutional authority is a poor motivator because it encourages complicity rather than compliance, blind obedience with indifference to operational consequences and institutional goals. The most successful employee is the one who never makes waves, and therefore goes down with the ship.
(7) Institutional mindsets form cultures geared to ideologies that treat prevention as a pejorative rather than as a survival strategy. Consequently, they avoid rather than embrace prevention. This leaves them open for 800,000 practicing attorneys to carry the ball when it is dropped. We shall see this in the wake of the BP oilrig explosion as certain as day follows night.
(8) Institutions cannot operate without hierarchies. Hierarchies with their infallibility and chain-of-command construction cannot but spawn disturbances. Complexity has accelerated the rate and magnitude of these perturbations. Institutions confront complexity with CEOs acting as if on automatic treadmills while confusing poison with medicine as remedy. We have seen this with GM, Wall Street, the Vatican, and the Greek government, and subprime real estate meltdown, Ponzi schemes, on and on. We can always explain everything after-the-fact.
(9) Institutions are locked into hindsight. Livingston writes, “More than 99 percent of all courses offered in the educational system, top to bottom, are hindsight based. The subject matter taught, art or science, is based upon history, lessons-learned, and past discoveries. Pragmatic foresight or foresight engineering, the soul of design, is not offered at all. It takes hindsight to get into the university (GPA, SAT’s) and hindsight is all you take out of it.” For years, I have been a critic of the MBA program, mainly because of this. Livingston shows a similar contempt for the MBA “case studies” of Harvard University, which are totally hindsight instruments.
THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE INSTITUTIONAL MAELSTROM
Livingston goes on to show how important it is for the individual to be his own authority, to be autonomous and free thinking, and how critical it is for him to be self-regulated rather than arbitrarily controlled by some institution.
Society is in transition and transformation. It is a matter of first principles and there is no point in forcing or challenging the status quo but rather the prudent thing is for the individual to go with the flow.
In Hard transparency, there is no charismatic appeal for trust and faith. It takes intelligence. Problems today have the property of "multiplicity," that is, they go far beyond the capacity to solve them. Livingston says, "If you want to get by a multiplicity obstacle, you have to go around it." You bow to Mother Nature, and continue on.
For institutions to survive, they must become more vulnerable, more open and fallible to the errors of their ways. Creativity can only function in an open system. Creativity is required today in view of the mounting complexity. Here are a few Livingston quotes:
(1) “Bottom up has functionally displaced top down even while the military organizational chart stays the same.”
(2) “The makeup of the cast doesn't matter. Thinking incompetence is the same thing as sincerity; the number of issues and their rate of growth have already overwhelmed institutional defenses. It is, exactly, like Chernobyl when plant operations quietly went past the bright line where reactor controls still worked. Crisis response activities will only spread the damage.”
(3) “You cannot acquire the requisite cognition of pragmatic foresight from an environment desperately stuck on status quo.”
* * *
Leaping forward, Livingston has a way of capturing the essence of his argument in telling charts, schematics, and tables. Here is one of my favorites.
ROUTINELY ENCOUNTERED PURSUITS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
(1) Change corporate culture.
(2) Adjust “tone at the top”
(3) “Fix” a mismatch
(4) Safety through hindsight
(5) Challenge infallibility
(6) Reduce entropy without intelligence
(7) Giving responsibility for results
(8) Fixing Yin-made (hindsight) problem with Yin
(9) Motivate an institution to alter its ideology
(10) Risk management through hindsight
(11) Start programmatic foresight before the institution has granted clearance
(12) Omit the Front End at the Front
* * *
As he has written elsewhere, the purpose of a system is what it does (POSWID). Intelligence isn’t an IQ score. Intelligence is what it does. Self-regulation is impossible in rule-based systems. Problems are not solved but controlled. This makes control theory imperative.
I don’t mean to leave you up in the air but to give you a sprinkling of the gems in this remarkable book. The author has given me permission to put it on my blog, but I don’t have the software to do so. Meanwhile, I hope I’ve given you a little food for thought.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
WHAT KILLED LOVE? THE PERENNIAL DILEMMA
WHAT KILLED LOVE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009
© May 5, 2010
A READER WRITES:
Hi, Jim.
I'm requesting a copy of your piece. I do find your writing interesting.
Don
SOURCE OF HIS INTEREST:
I had written,
"Some have wondered if I have been sick as I've not had a single missive posted since last month, or not for the past four weeks.
"I have been working on a piece that has grown to such size that I am only going to send it to people who request it. How large? It is some twenty pages or about 12,000 words and looks at the subject in reader friendly terms, but it is long. I have not posted it yet on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com), but I will possibly later today.
"What is it about?"
I then ran through the contents starting with "Fisher Fragments of a Philosoophy."
The piece in its entirety is posted now.
JRF
* * *
Hate, violence and death are on parade.
U. S. Army Major, and Board Certified Psychiatrist, Nidal Malik Hasan, murdered thirteen and wounded more than thirty at the Soldier Readiness Center at Ford Hood, Texas, the largest military personnel facility in the United States.
A Russian émigré living in Germany claimed he ‘hated foreigners’ then stabbed to death a young pregnant Muslim mother in a court of law in Dresden, Germany. He also wounded her husband. Alex Wiens was in court to appeal his conviction for spewing racial epithets at Marwa el-Sherbini in the presence of her three-year-old daughter. The slanderous behavior occurred in a Dresden public park when the young mother asked Mr. Wiens if she could use his swing for her daughter.
In Tampa, Florida, four teenage boys, fourteen to sixteen, beat and raped a thirteen-year-old boy without remorse because he was ‘a retard.’
A young gay man in Kingston, Jamaica on his way to Catholic Mass was murdered without much public dismay. Jamaica has zero tolerance for homosexuality.
In Jefferson City, Missouri, a fifteen-year-old girl dug two holes in the ground, and then plotted the right time to murder and bury her victims. Without provocation, she strangled a nine-year-old girl, cut her throat and stabbed her to death, then buried her. Why? She wanted to know what it felt like.
* * *
We live in a culture of hate, a culture of violence, and a culture of death. If you have any doubt, check the subject matter of most popular television programs, films, rap music, novels, and then play this against the central theme of the nightly television news.
Here in Tampa, Florida a day doesn’t go by that there are not multiple murders, hate crimes from graffiti painted on people’s garage doors or public buildings to diatribes on talk radio. The most heinous crimes appear on the back pages of The Tampa Tribune such as ‘a Haitian man, 33, in Naples, Florida kills his wife, 33, and his children 9, 6, 5, 3, and 11-months.’ Another Tampa man hits his beautiful wife on the head with a hammer, douses her with inflammable fluid, and then torches her. She is now in hospital in critical condition with burns over 80 percent of her body. ‘Now I am the monster you thought me to be,” he gushes.
This is the age of Darwinism where the gap between a cockroach and a human isn’t measured in terms of love or a soul, but by the passing millennia. One wonders if death and hate through the vehicle of violence have become less somber. Has the dark side of human nature become almost friendly? Have we as a society become tired of life? The words of Apostle Paul come to mind, ‘Death, where is your sting?’
* * *
It didn’t start this way at birth. A child comes into the world loving its mother, curious of its surroundings and early associates, innocent of self-loathing. A child is born embracing life in communion with others. Hate and violence are learned behaviors.
“Love is a natural expression of life. Love is majestic at birth but thereafter vulnerable to pain and depletion as life is embraced and the reality of experience kicks in.
* * *
Love has been killed. Many have killed love. Most prosaically, we could say work is one of love’s killers. Work was once love made visible. Work no longer is love, visible or otherwise, but predicated on power and profit, not service and satisfaction. We are attracted to work that fills our pockets not our souls. Few are in work that they love. Most have contempt for what they do. They choose to believe circumstances have so imprisoned them, failing to realize choice is a cage of weakness of will.
In this darkness of circumstances, we have become “the working poor.” We have no middle class. It is a myth we cling to; it has evaporated except in the coldness of governmental statistics. Most Americans (80%) are slaves to the job whether they earn $20,000 or $350,000 a year. They live to work, not work to live. They are wound up machines on automatic pilot programmed to the mantra of their masters.
Corporate capitalism finds workers addicted to credit cards, excessive mortgage payments, indulgent lifestyles, expensive gas guzzling automobiles, and other extravagances that mimic the rich while vulnerable to having their jobs cut out from under them at any time at corporate whim without any apparent recourse.
By the same token, corporate welfare depends on the robotic demand and conspicuous consumption of the working poor as it accounts for two-thirds of the GDP, which means it must buy what it doesn’t need and can afford, saddling itself as perpetual debtor never creditor. Should the working poor reverse this and become creditor rather than debtor, the economy would collapse, and corpocracy with it, which cannot be allowed.
Multi-billionaire Warren Buffet has understood this heresy but has not been humbled by it. He is a common man with an uncommon touch, living modestly despite his great wealth, as his grasp has never exceeded his reach.
Money is America’s civil religion. Money has no soul. Money promotes competition at the expense of cooperation, profligacy at the expense of prudence, subjecting the working poor to hell on earth. This represents the sullied progression of capitalism from ‘creative destruction’ and freedom to fail, which it was meant to advocate, to ‘too big to fail’ and counterfeit capitalism. The love of work, which is who we are, has been cut out of the heart of Economic Man. This is how work killed love.
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)
* * *
ABSTRACT
“How the brain works” was the subject of discussion on PBS with Charlie Rose with a panel of distinguished American scientists. The brain has fascinated man for ages and still defies his probing.
The program dealt with consciousness, brain neurology, various areas of the brain and how they function, and how genes and the billions of brain cells connect with their synapses to result in thought, experience and behavior.
The claim is, there have been extraordinary advances in brain science in this new century. Scientists are becoming more confident such terrible diseases as Alzheimer’s, autism, and Parkinson’s among others can be better understood, and if not cured at least stopped in their advancement.
A notable comment was that pharmaceutical therapy dealing with brain disorders has not been effective and continues to make little progress, yet we are a pill dependent society.
At the other end of the spectrum on the History Channel, exorcism was discussed, the practice of driving out evil spirits from a person. This ancient practice of thousands of years continues unabated. The late Pope John Paul II in fact engaged in it when a parishioner had a fit while he was saying Mass. In the light of scientific inquiry, exorcism would seem absurd if not diabolical. Yet it is not only practiced, but the Church of Rome has a college dedicated to training priests to become exorcists.
In the midst of all this, the mind, which is the blueprint of the brain in action, continues to mystify scientists on how it works.
As I walk today, these thoughts percolate through my mind but take an unexpected detour to the matter of love. Love was not mentioned with this panel of scientists. Nor was love discussed on the program devoted to exorcism. Scientists have little inclination for such dalliance, yet good and evil evolve from the hard and soft wiring in the brain where love resides until it is damaged by our early programming.
My wonder is what has happened to love, the social inhibitor that gives balance and resilience to the human spirit. I can only conclude we have killed love as I see us lost in a “mind field” of terror. We have become enemies of each other because we are in a war with ourselves. We have lost the saving grace of love. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the world in which we reside.
Scientists, I suspect, are unmoved by my concern. Their sights are too lofty on such matters as the brain’s topography, and too noble in their quest for conquering physical diseases to be distracted by societal diseases of the spirit. After all, love and the soul are not readily quantifiable. My sense is the more scientists pursue material mysteries, the more they are frustrated by the immaterial world.
Man is full of himself. Yet he continues to thrash about blindly unable to get on top of such issues as global famine, global warming, global war, or other essentially behavioral issues of man. The Church thrashes about with exorcism. Medical psychiatry thrashes about with frontal lobotomies. The human soul has lost its moorings. A recipe of erotica failed to create stability in the high Middle Ages; nor has the somber Puritanism of modernity managed it any better. Now, in post modernity, the soul is looking for love in all the wrong places.
* * *
WHAT IS LOVE?
We live in the Darwinian Age. Everything seemingly is evolving accept love, which is a constant. Theology has been stripped of the miraculous. Biology has become bionic. Strength is preferred to goodness, pride to humility, intellect to passion, and power to love.
Critical philosophy is preferred to philosophical poetry, science to art, intellect to instinct, logic to mysticism, optimism to pessimism, and fear to love.
There has been no shortage of the chemistry of emotion. Love is an emotion, but the need and capacity to love is not a simple synaptic connection in the brain nor can it be reduced to an emotional affect.
I walk today through my Florida neighborhood in record-breaking October heat (92 degrees) drifting away into muddled thought. Systematic thought no longer interests me.
Thoughts roam through my conscience as automobiles speed by, cyclists push me to the curb, and joggers remind me I am old and slow as their happy feet dance by. They pay me little mind, but yet we are connected in love and life. We are love itself manifested.
* * *
My aim here is not to dream up a new theory, develop a new religion or philosophy, but to cause readers to think, to be less awed by what prominent voices have to say, as in truth their views emanate from their own peculiar darkness. My hope is that readers will seek the light of their own ways. .
Four loves that I would like to mention are Agape, Eros, Narcissism and Altruism.
(1) Agape is unconditional love. It is the love of a parent for a child. It is the love expressed by Jesus for all humanity in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as in the apocryphal gospels of Thomas and Judas, Peter and James. It is the love that has no boundaries. It is love most generous.
(2) Eros is sexual love. It is the lust of the flesh, the desire for pleasure and physical fulfillment. Eros is the secret will to power, to possess, to master and to subjugate. Eros is jealous love, yet as romantic love it inspires affection and friendship. It is conditional love, something given for something received. It is needy love, which is helpless against the demands of passion.
Whereas Agape cannot be quantified, Eros is obsessed with quantification and qualification. Eros debates, describes and calibrates love listing pros and cons, assets and liabilities of the beloved as if a commodity to be purchased. It evaluates and measures performance and ecstasy. Eros is based solely on need and need fulfillment. In fairness, Plato claimed Eros helps the soul recall its knowledge of beauty. He saw it contributing to an understanding of spiritual truth.
Eros is the wellspring of storytelling and poetry, of philosophy and art, of literature and music, of architecture and mysticism, of lying and treachery. Eros is the love that can never be satisfied and therefore it must constantly renew its demands to survive. It is love most egoistic and least generous. It is love that worships the body and forgets the soul.
(3) Narcissism is self-love, the most confused and baffling of loves because it has been misrepresented from the first. Narcissus in Greek mythology pines away for love of his reflection in a pool and is turned into a flower. What should he have seen looking into the pool but himself?
Narcissism involves personality traits such as self-esteem and self-image, but it is still more fundamental. It is the love and respect that emanates from deep within the self, not as an object to worship but as a compass to guide, direct and control behavior.
There can be no love of others if there is no love of self. Contempt for one’s self results in the same contempt for others. To attempt to love others empty of self-respect is to be false and disingenuous. The pejorative of self-love is self-deceit expressed in vanity, conceit, egotism and selfishness, and ultimately, self-hate. A generous spirit rises from one not needy but full of love, one that becomes more loving in the giving.
(4) Altruism is love of others. Altruism is an essential part of humanity. It comes into play when we are self-forgetting and reach out to assist others in need. It is the love expressed when we leave the comfort of our home to help flood victims of a raging river, when we volunteer at hospitals, soup kitchens, schools and churches to assist the disadvantaged, when we do something selfless even though we may never be found out.
Albert Schweitzer personified altruism. He gave his life to science and art until he was thirty. The balance of his life was given to humanity. A celebrated classical European musicologist (organ), composer, theologian, and philosopher, Schweitzer left this world to study medicine. Once a doctor, he set up a hospital in French Equatorial Africa at Lambarene, a deserted mission station, to treat leprosy and sleeping sickness. There his ethical principle “reverence for life” was fully worked out in relation to the defects he saw in European society until his death in 1965 at the age of 90.
The Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, missionaries, and other volunteer organizations display altruism as they step out of their comfort zone to serve others, thus erasing boundaries between race, religion, ethnicity, language and culture. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the opposite trend, which we will now discuss.
* * *
WHAT KILLED LOVE?
WAS IT SCIENCE?
Science has flourished in Western society for reason. Christian and Judaic belief systems separated nature from religion. Genesis (The Bible):
“Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.”
Conversely, religions of the Far East were pantheistic with nature and religion intertwined discouraging inquiry into nature’s mysteries.
* * *
The idea of the soul is a distraction to science. With science if it cannot be measured, it does not exist. It is precisely because of this that mystics and philosophers and great religions have flourished. With them, it is a matter of faith and wonder.
We are in a scientific age that is as dogmatic and righteous as was the great Roman Catholic Church in its heyday. We expect scientific objectivity, but not dismissive contempt for the soul. Whether the soul is or isn’t, it exists in the mind of most cultures and religions of the world, and therefore impacts behavior. The soul cannot be ignored but it resists as well being found out. It is the eternal conundrum that connects modern man with his primordial roots.
* * *
That said the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of the genetic molecule DNA with James Watson, developed an interest in the brain and human consciousness. This led to speculation about “the soul.” Crick after Kant dismissed the idea that the soul could exist if it were impossible to detect and measure.
Science now finds one Galen Strawson postulating about neural metaphysics. He claims the self exists but is not a human being. He holds that experiences are events in our brain, and if there is a self, which is our subject it, too, must be in the brain. This is a departure from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.”
Crick and Strawson are saying if the “soul” and “self” exist they must reside in the brain, the residence of the mind. Scientists are the latest pioneers plowing through the iffy territory of brain topography with neurophysiology and genetics, among other disciplines.
Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul” (1994), while complex and confusing in its inquiry, leaves the reader essentially empty in the end. The same is true of Strawson’s “Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics” (2009). The soul or self fails to materialize in the brain or to be refuted as existing elsewhere.
* * *
Scientists are forever undaunted. Now they are measuring blood flow to the brain in an attempt to identify love, creativity and happiness. This is part of the drive to understand how the brain works, and to arrest if not cure disturbing diseases that find residence there.
Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI) has gained stature. These $3 million tunnel machines are designed to examine what is happening in the brain. A person placed in the machine is asked to fix attention on God, love or happiness to see what magnetic resonance field is created. Blood flow patterns to the brain are hoped to reveal important clues to these elusive human emotions.
Color-coded maps of the brain form labyrinths of thought that are displayed on screens, which then can be interpreted. Pepsi and Coca-Cola have been doing this for years in neuromarketing campaigns. So, if it works with colas, why not on love?
It seems predictable that fMRI’s (i.e., function of this technique) would attempt to measure genius along with inspiration for art, the nature of love, and an appreciation of beauty, followed by correlation of these findings with brain activity. My wonder is what Leonardo de Vinci’s brain might have revealed. Genius he was, but also known to be a bit of a scatterbrain with an unreliable attention span, and a tendency to abandon pet projects before completion. .
Bizarre as it may seem, once Einstein had died, his brain was stolen from his body, secretly sliced in sagittal sections, chromatically dyed, and then analyzed to discover his genius. Nothing of significance was found. My conclusion: we think too much.
Passion was the breadth and depth of de Vinci’s character. It compelled him to investigate an infinite multitude of mysteries leaving him little time to surrender himself to their completion. James Watson of DNA fame claimed not to be particularly intelligent but avidly curious. Einstein made the same claim, but added the difference with him was that he stayed with problems longer than his colleagues.
* * *
We live in a paradoxical age of waning curiosity and obsessive self-consciousness. This is displayed in runaway technology. No one seems concerned with what is lost for what is gained. Technology always lags science by hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Archimedes may have invented the first crude computer, and he died in 212 BC. Technology always piggybacks on earlier science. Likewise, art frames its time.
Matisse took apart and reconfigured the components of color, but my sense is he was unconscious of the neural landscaping and neural sculpturing of his efforts. Van Gogh logged his perceptions in frantic flushes of color seemingly unconcerned with the mathematics of a world within or without. When he put brush to canvas in Arles in 1888, I doubt he saw the eye as the mind’s passive receptacle for all the stuff pouring into it from the outside. Picasso kept devising new periods of his paintings to escape a triangular straightjacket. These artists knew without knowing, which is the residence of art.
Let us say that neuropsychology, genetics, neurobiology and neurophilosophy succeed in their ultimately quest to determine how the brain works, how it forms concepts and translates these into acts, what then will be left of the imagination? Will there ever be a painting to rival the eyes of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” Michelangelo’s “Sistine Chapel,” Cézanne’s “Mount-Sainte-Victoire”?
These artists didn’t question the soul, which is present in their works. Art today is angry and self-conscious. It reflects minds groveling in self-pity in the sinkhole of despair. Works of art today are often filled with contempt and hatred expressed in vile desecration of cultural icons such as Andress Serrano’s the “Piss Christ.”
One of the panelists on the Charlie Rose show made the distinction between the silicon of the computer and the organic construction of the brain without disclaiming the brain being something of a computer. The computer given its widely acclaimed advantages and advancements does not have a soul and is incapable of love. Since we are becoming increasingly slave to electronic devices, it would seem science and technology is playing their part in the death of love.
One experiment I read about in graduate school involved a volunteer couple that professed to being very much in love. The couple was essentially starved, eventually presented with food, studying how they would react. They shared the simple meal. This was much less sophisticated than psychologist Arthur Aron’s attempt to measure love by blood flow analysis to the brains of people claiming to be in love. Researchers concede that love is a possible intuitive designation, but still wonder if there are “love spots” in the brain. Be confident science will try to isolate them if there are. Beyond that, there is likely to be little agreement.
* * *
WAS IT FREUD?
Sigmund Freud knew better. He was not only a doctor of medicine but also a student of neurology. He had studied the great religions, the Greek philosophers and the early cultures of man. He was singularly ambitious and desperate to make a difference. His greatness was a manifestation of his egoism. Krishnamurti claimed Freud was swept away by his own conception of self and the problems with which he wrestled. “The Western world,” the mystic added, “was shamelessly inclined to adopt the great physicians neuroses as its own.” It is an engaging story how Freud succeeded.
* * *
He took many false steps, some working with a dentist, where they experimented with cocaine. Some gave them credit for discovering Novocain. In his persistence, he proved quite the fictioneer, that is, having a natural novelist’s panache at case descriptions. His agile prose reveals a poet’s sense of nuance and a novelist’s grasp of gravitas. Yet, as Janet Malcolm (“The Purloined Clinic,” 1992) has noted, Freud’s talking cures are as porous as a sieve, albeit still very much in vogue today.
Psychiatry has vacillated between the absurd and the ridiculous as esteemed psychiatrists and authors R. D. Laing (“Wisdom, Madness & Folly,” 1985) and Thomas Szasz (“The Manufacture of Madness,” 1970) have pointed out. Now, in the early twenty-first century, psychiatry is relegated to pill pushing and brain anatomy, while Western society remains preoccupied with Freud’s erogenous zones.
Szasz is brutal. He claims psychiatry is not an advancement over the superstitions and practices of witch-hunts. Nor is it a retrogression from the humanism of the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment period, but an actual continuation of the Inquisition. All that has changed, he argues, is the vocabulary and social style.
* * *
Freud began his psychiatric practice in Vienna treating the very rich, mainly women, suffering from boredom and unrequited love after being shelved by their prosperous but possessive husbands and lovers. He burrowed into these psyches to expose their early sexual awakenings for answers. It was a prescription for provocation. Novelist John Updike once said, “We want to read about life in full tide, in love, or at war, the wretched childhoods, the fraught adulteries, the big deaths, the scandals, the crises of sexuality.” Freud understood this, laying more claim to his novelistic bent.
Materialism failed to placate restive minds for loveless lives. Starved of affection and erogenous fulfillment, the affluent, who had everything and nothing at all, found solace on Freud’s couch. “Citizen Kane” (1941) gave an American twist to this hysteria with the symbolic “rosebud” of the film, a snow sled that stood for sexual angst.
Freud distilled the psychosexual hysteria from his clients’ panic and then reported it to his readers with the breathless thrill of schadenfreude. His focus on Eros was bold, but consistent with his conviction that repressed sexual love was the underlying neurosis of Victorian bourgeois society. There, Catholicism had locked love out with its dogma, while Protestant Puritanism had placed a chastity belt around sexual mores. Given this programming, he wasn’t short of clientele.
His initial patrons in Vienna were Jewish as were his professional medical associates. This changed when Protestant Carl Jung joined the group. Freudianism would prove far more successful in the United States than Europe. Americans conveniently misread his thesis as they were looking for an excuse to let it all hang out. Western society on both sides of the Atlantic dared now to cease to be Christian but instead attempted to out-Christian each other, while following a theology of more, which led to pervasive decadence.
The Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties of the last century considered Freud “Dr. Feel Good,” giving them permission to put their anxieties behind in libidinous liberation. “The War to End all Wars” (i.e., WWI) had been successfully concluded with the world everyone’s oyster.
“War,” exclaimed Thomas Mann as the European powder keg exploded in 1914 with World War I, “is purification, liberation, and an enormous hope.” War, in other words, is beautiful. For a hundred years, aggression had lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture splitting the social order into insiders and outsiders with the infrastructure in shambles. Polite society had lost its way while power was changing hands from the aristocracy to corporate barons, and women were coming out from under the shackles of domesticity and one dimensionalism.
Freud, they mistakenly believed, had taken the wraps off morality. Modern man was entering an undefined period. Peter Gay captures this in a most readable study: “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud: Vols. I – IV” (1984 – 1995). In this study, Gay traces “The Education of the Senses” (Vol. I) through “The Tender Passion” (Vol. II) on to “The Cultivation of Hatred” (Vol. III) to “The Naked Heart” (Vol. IV). It was the Freudian Age with sensual man being put through this Austrian’s strainer.
* * *
With a bow to Sophocles, Freud identified the “Oedipus Complex,” as a son’s desire to kill his father and bed his mother, and the “Electra Complex,” as a daughter’s desire to kill her mother and bed her father. Sexual fantasies, Freud believed, were repressed in early childhood only to lead to hysterical symptoms in adulthood.
In “Freud: A Life for Our Time” (2005), Peter Gay shows how the creator of psychoanalysis delved into his own subconscious to lead to a new age of thinking. The wonder is how the twentieth century so willingly and enthusiastically took his findings to be its own. Whatever you think of Freudianism, you must admit he had an uncanny way of reducing life’s grammar to easily understood principles:
(1) The Morality Principle: The “Superego” identifies how we should behave. This is the domain of the parent or the authority figure. Authority can be either nurturing or critical but it is always judgmental. It dictates the moral tone and code of how we are expected to think, behave and judge others.
(2) The Reality Principle: The “Ego” identifies how we actually behave. The adult is the mature individual who sees, accepts and deals with reality, or “what is,” defining and solving our problems, not denying them or pointing fingers.
(3) The Pleasure Principle: The “Id” identifies how we want to behave. It is the restless child in the man. It is the person suspended in permanent adolescence and arrested development no matter what age. It is the spoiled brat, the person who is unwilling or unable to grow up. The impulsive “Id” blames others for its failure to make satisfactory progress. The “Id” personifies a current cultural concern (see Diana West’s “The Death of the Grown-Up,” 2007). With the “Id” there is little capacity for delayed gratification. The cry is, “I must have it now, see it now, be it now!” It is the “nowness” of everything that is central to the “Id” character.
Freud could see a repressive (parental) culture spawning a juvenile society (see “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 1961) with the soul of the child under the armor of the warrior. The evidence today is alarming. Patriarchal institutions -- governments, religions, educational institutions and corporations – have become pusillanimously top heavy and lethargic being continuously frustrated by apathetic constituencies, urban gangs and rogue nations.
No one is in control. Everyone is posturing and lecturing, while rhetoric has become surrogate for leadership, which is skin deep. To be fair, so it has been off and on since the beginning of time, especially during transitional periods. We are all marching forward wearing blindfolds with a cockiness that is scary.
The Office of the President of the United States resembles that of a potentate but often acts like a puppet on a string in the discharge of its duties.
There are 545 members of Congress (445 in the House of Representatives and 100 Senators) duly elected by 307 million Americans. Precious few act as the voice of the silent many.
Governance is a function of some 55,000 lobbyists in Washington, DC who dictate trade policy. The fate of the economy is in the hands of former Wall Street insiders who are now running the Department of Treasury. This has become something of a laugher as lobbyists and the appointed let the elected hold public hearings while they pull the strings off stage.
Taxpayers are where the buck stops. In praise of folly, taxpayers received modest checks from the stimulus package, but now they may have to pay back nearly twice as much as they received in the form of income taxes. In Florida, the unemployment compensation tax for small businesses is set to go up by 1200 percent in January or from $8 to $100.31 per employee. Misguided fiscal policy has made these draconian measures necessary.
* * *
American corporations, fronted by an army of lobbyists, keep putting the brakes on healthcare reform legislation while claiming to be passionately for it. Few things are what they seem. There are some 60,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, but more than 60,000 private military and civilian contractors operating there at the US government and taxpayer’s behest.
This shadow militia of hired guns represents the child in armor playing cowboy at the government’s expense, sometimes with acute embarrassment as we saw in Iraq. Blackwater Security, a private military company, paid Iraqi government officials a million dollar bribe to cover up the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in September 2007.
Freud wasn’t the first to see through the complicit gamesmanship played between the lines of the sacred and profane. He was but one of the more eloquent voices. The State Department, incidentally, was found to be complicit in the Blackwater Security cover up. Freud saw hypocrisy at the root of modern society and the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. He writes in “The Future of an Illusion” (1961):
“If religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, it comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.” Then he goes on to say, “It tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”
This was years before jihadists and al-Qaeda crossed our consciousness, but the germ of Holy War was not far below his radar. My sense is that he would see delusional man in charge today across the global spectrum.
* * *
Not so long ago the child on a rampage (Pleasure Principle) was personified during the HIPPIE revolt of the 1960s and 1970s. Young people took Freud at his Eros word and made love not war, burned their draft cards and escaped to Canada, or formed communes and polygamist relationships. They attacked the system that gave them the right to express their angst while embracing self-indulgent self-destructive lifestyles with impunity.
This hysteria had much in common with Freud’s first clients in Vienna. The unfulfilled Viennese turned to self-absorption. Peter Gay called this “the naked heart.” Young people in the 1960s did the same. Such academic luminaries as Harvard professor Timothy Leary advised them to “tune out and turn off” from the material culture of their parents. Leary gave them permission to trip out, as their parents had been too busy making money to love, protect and nurture them.
So, they became their own parents and an authority on to themselves. They rebelled against the system that killed love and escaped into psychedelic dreams. Parents, teachers and other authority figures lost control, gave up, and retreated off stage. Home, school, and work were reduced to combat zones.
Not surprising, they created a society that mirrored the one they held in contempt. They thought that they were free, but were they? The HIPPIE movement was as dictatorial and repressive as the society they had abandoned. Hippies claimed they didn’t trust anyone over thirty, looked down on anyone who was not of their kind, that dressed, talked, believed, or behaved differently than they did. They came to worship their genitals as their new god as primitives had centuries before.
Hippies now are AARP old, seemingly still unable to shake free of their societal angst. They created, and now are custodians of, a one-dimensional society where sameness rules, still struggling with identity. This struggle is a legacy passed on to their children, and their children’s children. The psychedelic haze of yesteryear has transmogrified to texting, twittering, Facebook and surfing the Internet. Everything is connected in disconnection; only acid trips are now virtual reality escapades.
If sameness were not enough, people have become billboards of self-advertising, no matter the social status, with identity personified in tattoos, body piercing, hair pieces, and wide exposure of naked flesh regardless of how unflattering it is to the naked eye.
Freudianism has become Orwellian. Not only is war interchangeable with peace, hate with love, conformity with individuality, the ridiculous with the sublime, but the profane with the sacred. After all, Freud elevated description to the level of solution, as solutions are more fun than testy problems. Everything is upside down while those in charge don’t seem to mind the discomfort of standing on their heads:
(1) A general declared in the Vietnam War that he had to destroy a village to save it.
(2) The Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman in 2008 claimed greedy irresponsible banks and investment houses were “too big to fail,” and so taxpayers had no choice but to bail them out. No one had a vote on this.
(3) Credit card companies, part of the grand scheme of these reckless rogues on Wall Street, tossed ethics aside once bailout money brought them back to profitability by imposing usury fees on the very taxpayers that rescued them. Justification? They needed to make a profit.
This brings me to my next consideration.
* * *
WAS IT SOCIETY?
There is evidence we are experiencing a dystopian nightmare. The times defy logic. It is as if we cannot help ourselves.
Who would have thought Wall Street, months after being resuscitated with billions of taxpayer dollars, would return to its old ways awarding itself bonuses in the billions?
Who would have thought after putting Watergate and Nixon’s “enemy list” safely away in the archives of history that the Obama Administration would launch an attack in the same paranoid Nixonian fashion on the conservative Fox News Network reminiscent of those earlier days?
Who would have thought Afghanistan would become chillingly reminiscent of Viet Nam?
Who would have thought a dysfunctional healthcare and educational system, costing more than any other on the planet, but failing on both fronts, would be redesigned and repackaged costing more than a trillion dollars over ten years, meaning it will actually cost three or four times that much, as cash as solution has always found Congress doing little more than breaking wind?
Who would have thought that the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidency, which collapsed on its “guns and butter” policy, would rise from the dead with the Barak Hussein Obama “guns and butter” presidency?
Something is terribly wrong with a society that has little capacity to learn, or courage to change other than rhetorically, choosing instead to repeat its missteps or misdeeds ad infinitum. When a society has leadership afraid to lead, hesitant to create enemies or lacks the courage to oppose friends, then it is a society on life support as it is killing love which is the energy of resilience.
* * *
We are not happy campers and have misplaced our soul, the site of our moral compass and viable center. We have settled on distractions.
Everything in the mind emanates from the soul. It is not something that can be measured by any kind of mechanistic or electronic probe, for it is a nonmaterial something that guides us nonetheless. The soul is something we share with the ancients who lived thousands of years ago, and who expressed it in paintings on the walls of caves as they hid from the wild beast, who were far larger, faster and stronger than they were, but lacked their consciousness.
Consciousness was not enough then. Consciousness is not enough now.
* * *
WAS IT RELIGION?
Primitive man invented religion to connect his frightened center or soul with the reassuring spirit world or God beyond his comprehension. It was necessary as he was conscious of being alone in a hostile mysterious planet.
Man invented time to measure his presence in a timeless universe for he gradually became aware of his impermanence. Yet, he was reassured by the mysteries of darkness and reappearing light, of the clap of thunder and bolts of lightning in the sky that came when the heavens opened up and showered him with life’s essential substance, rain.
Man witnessed the earth as it changed colors, became naked and fallow, then like magic bloomed again, and he worshiped the heavens for this.
Man’s religion took thousands of years before it became anthropomorphic, before he saw man in the image and likeness of his God. Primitive religions, fragments of which are buried deep in our collective human psyches, reappear in some form in all religions, as they are based on mystical wonders and intangible fears that make us human beings, human.
Man is different than the animal and plant kingdom that was here first. This makes man forever an interloper. He must not forget that.
Animism is still prominent in African religions. It is a belief system that finds a soul in everything, animate and inanimate. All religions believe in a soul. Whether the soul is real or not, the fact that people believe in it makes the soul real. The concept of soul is reconfirmed in art, music, and architecture, in cultures that have emanated in the past 12,000 years across the planet. That apparently is not enough.
Man must know. He must understand. It is the nature of man and his restless mind. He is not content to live in harmony with nature. He must conquer it, solve its mysteries so that he may “have dominion over the earth and subdue it.” It prompted Albert Schweitzer to observe, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
* * *
The new religion is neural theology. It entered the fray more than a decade ago attempting to find the “God spot” in the brain by doing brain scans of nuns. It was without success. In this age of science, the sublime can become ridiculous with the intensity of the search. Balance is seldom a factor in human consciousness in an obsessive quest for understanding. Are we not still searching for the Holy Grail?
It was Francis Bacon who said in his “Essay of Vicissitude of Things”:
“Solomon saith, there is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon given his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. We peel away the darkness to reveal the light only to encounter more darkness.”
* * *
If you look at the great religions of man, God and love are inextricably wrapped into the politics and life of the time. Unconditional love of Jesus, alas, did not survive his death.
The early Christians were stumbling in the dark until Paul came along in the first century Christian Era (CE.). At the “Incident at Antioch,” he confronted Peter about the role of gentiles in the Church, a blowup that revealed Peter’s incomprehension of Paul’s ambition. From that point forward, Christianity became Paul’s faith. His Acts and Epistles gave structure to the faith, but also a retreat from the unconditional love and message of Jesus, as Paul advocated a conditional love of sin and atonement.
Apostle Paul is pivotal to the Church. Early Christian scholars track the apocryphal second century writings of Peter and James, Thomas and Judas, some who believed Paul a tool of Satan. In “What Paul Meant” (2006), Garry Wills discredits such claims or the legendary belief that Paul was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and critical of the teachings of Jesus. The evidence suggests Wills argument is weak.
Everything changed with Paul’s conversion in Chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles when he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus hearing the Lord say, “I am Jesus, whom you persecute, arise and go into the city, and persecute me no longer.”
Imagine Saul now Paul, an epileptic, tent maker, and fractured figure of assorted complexities, physically blinded by the event for three days, suddenly sees the Christian message as his appointed task. Passionate by temperament, intellectually gifted with an indomitable spirit, his life reversed direction.
Apostle Paul abandoned the Jewish roots of his fathers and created a proselytizing faith among the gentiles, clearly expressed in the “Letters to the Romans.” The skeletal structure of this new religion was sparse in its reference to the teachings of Jesus but dense in what Christians should believe and how they should live. His Christology of atonement, that Christians are redeemed from sin by Jesus’ death and resurrection, centered around baptism as the free gift of membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.
Scholars dispute all of this with various interpretations because of the sketchy accounts and histories extant of Christian leadership in the first century.
* * *
Fast forward to St. Augustine. His foundational work on the gospels in the fourth century brought attention to grace as a gift, on morality as the life of the Spirit, on predestination as the rationale for eternal life, and on original sin as confirmed by Paul's "Letters to the Romans."
Augustine was a late convert to Christianity. Born in North Africa in the fourth century (354 CE), his mother was a devout Catholic, his father a pagan. He received a Catholic education but was not baptized until a man.
During his youth he had a series of love affairs, but was a serious student of philosophy. His youthful dalliance would trouble him the rest of his life. It would also influence his repressive theology and philosophy
At the age of 32 (386), he read an account of the life of St. Anthony of the Desert and heard a childlike voice tell him, “take up and read.” He took this to mean Christian theology. In 391 at the age of 37, he was ordained a priest. Five years later in 396 he became Bishop of Hippo. The rest is history.
* * *
The theology of Original Sin and the necessity of Baptism to remove it is largely that of this saint. It was Augustine that visualized Hell as a terrible place. Hell had only been a vague notion before. As a man of the cloth, he painted sexual love with Satan’s brush. Before his time, Satan was also a vague notion. Now, Satan took on an anthropomorphic character, a dastardly creature that evolved, over time, into a red devil with horns and a tail, the personification of evil. Augustine didn’t create this caricature but he did help seed it.
This would have unintended consequences. James Cleugh in “Love Locked Out” (1963), shows how this increased, rather than reduced, promiscuity fueling a new industry, pornography. A mental chastity belt confined love making to marriage and procreation. This Augustinian influenced dogma commenced to see sex and love in dualistic Manichean terms of immorality and sin. My wonder is if St. Augustine would be surprised to learn that some sociological studies indicate a disproportionate number of prostitutes have a Catholic background.
* * *
Dante Alighieri would perfect the imagery of Hell (“Inferno”) in his “Divine Comedy” (1320). Dante, who was an engineer as well as a poet and artist, created Hell on a grand architectural scale marrying the grotesque with the comical. For instance, fortune-tellers in Dante’s Inferno have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, as that was what they had tried to do in life. Catholic popes are depicted as the greatest sinners of all, residing in the ninth or lowest circle of Hell for their pride and corruption.
Still, Hell down through the ages has frightened little children with images of sinners burning for eternity in fire and brimstone. Priests and nuns used this in my day to get students to behave, and it worked.
Fear, not love, has been the prescription for order. Consequently, there appears little evidence that the Jesus message has survived. Jesus never spoke of the “seven deadly sins” (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) much less mortal sin. These descriptions didn’t come into vogue until the fourteenth century.
Christianity is an evolving religion, and has changed progressively from its conception more than 2,000 years ago. It still professes to be about love but appears obsessed with sin. Blame it on St. Augustine. He was fixated with sin (see his “Confessions”). Catholicism in particular and Christianity have an Augustinian aspect. With television evangelists, love is silent; sin is loud. Hell and the seven deadly sins are largely part of their corporate theology.
* * *
Religion is dominated by politics, by the need for power, not love, for strength, not goodness, for souls, not spiritual fulfillment. The Catholic Church was founded on politics. Constantine in the fourth century made it the religion of the Roman Empire. The Catholic Church for centuries had its own army, and was a powerful feudal landlord, as a matter of fact, it still is.
The Holy Crusades were a religiously sanctioned military campaign waged by Christian Europe to restore Christian control of the Holy Land. These wars were fought over a period of nearly 200 years (1095 – 1291), depleting the treasury of the Church, France and the Holy Roman Empire. They fueled mistrust and hostilities across the empire, and were not holy and certainly not Christian. They had far reaching political, economic, and social consequences extending into contemporary times.
* * *
It could be argued that without the Roman Catholic Church there would be no Western Civilization. Modern science was born in the Church. Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five centuries before Adam Smith. The Church invented the university. Western law grew out of Church canon law, which was introduced by St. Augustine and St. Aquinas. Indeed, the human aspect in all its sublime to ridiculous sojourns can be traced back to that foundation. With such formalism, love hardly had a chance.
* * *
Love was not on display in the twelfth century when the Church resorted to an ecclesiastical proscription of torture and execution for heresy. The interrogating body formed for this work was known as “the Inquisition.” Dark as the Inquisition, it still survives. Twentieth century Pope Pius X, later canonized a saint, renamed the Inquisition the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.” Then in 1965, it was renamed the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which it remains to this day. Punishment in the modern era is more likely to be ostracism from Church membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.
* * *
Whether you believe in God or the Christ of Christianity, there is historical evidence that Jesus did live and died on the cross, and that his death was an expression of love. Christianity since has claimed to be the religion of love although it has often stumbled and displayed quite the opposite. Distortion of message and fanaticism is seemingly common to all religions. Lest we forget Christian missionaries supported by sixteenth century Spanish Conquistadors annihilated Latin American cultures and decimated their pagan religions and imposed Christianity. How’s that for love?
* * *
WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?
We have survived the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Revolution, Freudianism, and now are in the postmodern era with a decidedly dystopian aspect.
The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” have been busy. The twentieth century featured:
(1) The White horse of Conquest with first Adolf Hitler’s failure and then Lenin and Stalin’s more subtle attempt to spread global Communism leading to the Cold War.
(2) The Red horse of War ended the nineteenth century with the Spanish American War only to be followed in the twentieth century by WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, and several smaller bloody civil wars of ethnic cleansing across the globe.
(3) The Black horse of Famine made a wide swath across Africa due to drought, pollution, civil war, and the failure of government. Of the world’s six billion souls one billion go to bed hungry every day with a child dying of hunger every six seconds. Add to this the misery of the AIDS pandemic that cuts another swath across the globe, but never more fatally than in Africa.
(4) The Pale Green horse of Death saw over 100 million dying in twentieth century wars and tens of millions more dying of AIDS, numbers far in excess of the Black Death of the Middle Ages. There was the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews perished. And then there was United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands perished but it ended WWII in the Pacific. As society has grown more technologically sophisticated, military and civilian casualties have grown exponentially. More died in twentieth century wars than the previous ten centuries of mortal combat combined.
Science is the new secular religion with technology its acolyte. The sacred cannot be separated from the profane. Philosophy is lost in this conundrum as philosophers are all too human. Although they see what others take for granted, ponder it, sense trends buried in it, their hard and soft wiring, experience and consciousness limit their ideas. We sometimes forget that.
Imagine a philosopher is looking out of a bay window on the top floor of a prominent building with darting humanity happily scurrying about below. In one sense he is separated from the heat and tension of the moment, but in another overwhelmed with its implications. Compelled by his nature to make sense of things, he paints the activity with the broad brush of his intellect and biases.
Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein come to mind. They attempted to bypass man’s ambiguity, staying within the hygienic realm of mathematics. Alas, even there they couldn’t escape their roots. This leaked through their brilliance to reveal a common despair as both men thought of suicide. Wittgenstein once told a friend that before he discovered philosophy he endured nine years of loneliness and suffering. Russell hid his loneliness in being a bit of a rake.
* * *
Dsytopian philosophers have noted an increasingly loveless world. To widen consciousness of this fact they often chose poetry, allegory, fiction and science fiction as vehicles of expression.
Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” (1932) presents the bizarre world of cloning.
Yevgeny Zamyatin in “We” (1921) paints a portrait of a totally controlled environment (OneState) organized around mathematical precision. People no longer have surnames but are designated by numbers, and marched in-step while dressed in identical clothing.
Ayn Rand in “Anthem” (1938) has the personal pronoun “I” disappear from language. Individualism is extinct, as mankind has entered a new dark age of total communal collectivism.
Poet T. S. Eliot reduces man to a cipher in “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday.”
Margaret Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) visualizes the Republic of Gilead (a.k.a. United States) as a wasteland of nuclear, biological and chemical pollution after a terrorist attack. The population has been rendered sterile with leadership wiped out as the President and all members of Congress have been killed.
Kurt Vonnegut in “Player Piano” (1952) pictures a totally mechanized society that has eliminated the need for anyone to work. This creates a running conflict between the wealthy upper class of engineers and managers who keep society running, while everyone else, who have nothing to do, being replaced by machines.
George Orwell in “I984” (1948) introduces Big Brother who is watching our every move with audio and visual electronic devices. Big Brother has created a new vocabulary of meaning which is the flip side of what had meaning before: war is now peace, evil is good, and hate is love.
Anthony Burgess in “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) has criminals taking on the role of the police. Law and order are a thing of the past. Free will is neutralized and manipulated with chemical and visual programming. Burgess slang entered the popular culture of the time.
In Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” (1994) a utopian world spins off into dystopia. Jonas is selected to be the inheritor of the position of “Receiver of Memory,” where all the memories, of the time before “Sameness,” were stored. As Jonas receives the memories from the previous receiver (The Giver), he discovers how shallow his community has become and aborts the role.
* * *
One might complain that these pedestrian philosophers unfairly attack a caricature of the technological revolution. Remember they are looking down from their elevated perch far above the commotion and maddening crowd.
Love is noticeably absent in these dystopian imaginings. They do however target the failure of religious fundamentalism, misguided technology, scorched earth environmental policy, teenage angst, indifferent parenting, precocious sexuality and juvenile delinquency, genetic modification and bioengineering, the relentless drive of amoral corpocracy, and the cruelty and wickedness that transpires when man’s humanity is unhinged from its roots.
* * *
WAS IT NIETZSCHE?
Nietzsche is different. He saw the rise of secular society and the problems likely to face a postmodern Western civilization. Well informed in Scriptural, historical theology, and doctrinal subtleties of the West, his account of Christian theology in the postmodern world has proven prophetic. As was the case with Freud in his psychological revolution, however, Nietzsche has been misread and misunderstood.
The son of a clergyman, he attacked Christianity because there was so much of its moral spirit in him. His philosophy was an attempt to balance and correct by violent contradiction his irresistible tendency to gentleness, kindness and peace. Often those most controversial and provocative have great affection for that which they attack.
At eighteen, he lost his faith in the God of his fathers in a calamitous cultural crisis. Left godless, he spent the remainder of his life looking for a new deity. He thought he found one in the Superman. He wrote that he had taken the change from God to Superman easily. He didn’t. He had the habit of easily deceiving himself. In fact, he displayed his cynicism as if he had lost everything in a single throw of the dice.
This was so because religion was the marrow of his life. Now, empty of meaning and his once revered anchor, he was forced to go forward. As happens with great men, the struggle often mirrors the struggle of the times.
In any case, he escaped in writing, most poignantly about his new teacher, Zoraster, and his new god, Superman. Yet, in all of his writings, the soul can be seen to rise stubbornly and overflow with a desire for banal love and societal connection. He denied this, of course, but the shadow of the Christian God he abandoned was always there. That is most apparent in his famous but ambivalent report, “God is dead!”
Nietzsche has a madman running through the streets crying, “God is dead!” He presents the madman in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1961) as a sincerely religious and concerned man for the spiritual condition of the modern world. Nietzsche is affirming that the meaning of life is to be found in human terms, that spirituality was never more important. His claim is that it cannot be found in a church or in a god but in the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.
The audience of the madman is of a scientific and material persuasion. This audience prides itself on having renounced religious superstition but is unaware of the brewing crisis. It cannot imagine it has lost anything as it rearranges its life around entirely secular goals. It doesn’t notice the lost, in part because it has maintained the habits that religion had always fostered, particularly the habit of faith, having replaced faith in God now with faith in science.
This new faith, Nietzsche is saying, is no improvement over the old. He combines his statement of “God is dead” with a critique of modern faith in scientific materialism. A knowing society imagines it has replaced fables with facts, but Nietzsche sees the dominance of scientific accounts as substituting one self-denigrating myth for another. If anything, he is saying, the scientific myth is worse. Faith in God eroded our confidence in our own human powers, he argues, which is the basis of his cynicism, but at least it encouraged the belief we have dignity as creations of God whom God took seriously.
The myth of science by contrasts, he insists, suggests the belief that our existence is accidental and that we are organisms on an obscure planet on the periphery of the universe. His problem with religion is its projection of our power onto God, that forces a sense of worthlessness without God, but this is nothing compared with the nihilism he sees that science promotes.
Nietzsche hopes for a rebirth of spirituality with a renewed appreciation of life and nature and man. The shift of the West from a Christian to a secular culture was inevitable, he claims, as the Christian account became more abstract and increasingly divorced from personal experience. Christianity lost connection with people. Failing to recognize man’s changing consciousness and requirements to cope in a more demanding world, Christianity declared war on the body, denounced man’s liberating passions and appetites and relegated them to sources of sin. This made man increasingly self-conscious, self-negating, and uptight.
His problem with Christianity is well known. His counsel for mending the spirit is not. He encourages the embracing of life experience, of asserting our individual virtues and powers, but offers no “how to” formula. He speaks of the “innocence of the senses” and for approaching the world openly, naturally, without trying to improve our wounded sense of inadequacy, but to learn to love the world and ourselves on its terms.
This is a side of Nietzsche seldom captured, the side that would embrace life and love in deference to Christian sin and atonement. He had the madman crying through the streets, “God is dead,” but the evidence is equally compelling that love was dead as well.
* * *
WAS IT CAPITALISM?
Recently, a woman was interviewed on Nightly News with Brian Williams on NBCTV. She is a Bank of American credit card holder. She has seen her service charges increase from 7 to 15 to 30 percent on the unpaid balance of her credit card in a matter of months. She carries a credit balance of more than $10,000 on her card. Economic circumstances forced her to use her card excessively during this past year, and now she is being punished for doing so.
Bank of America, knowing that in February 2010, usury limitations are going to be placed on credit cards, a bank which took billions of taxpayer dollars in bailout funds, is willing to essentially extort money from those least able to pay while it can. This is not an isolated incident.
Democratic capitalism has become an oxymoron.
Democracy sponsors drift. It gives permission to institutions to do as they please, which means democracy lacks a coherent and interdependent approach in crisis in the enthronement of liberty and chaos. Democracy worships mediocrity and distrusts excellence. Democracy literally frustrates the possibility of responsible leadership, especially in crisis, as those elected represent the lowest common denominator of society, as voters vote with their hearts not their heads.
Capitalism encourages greed. Capitalism is an economic and social system in which capital is privately controlled by an elite few. More than 50 percent of Americans may own stock, but the wealth creators or the top 10 percent control the economy. Labor, goods and capital are traded in free markets, and profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries. That is the comic book version.
The reality is that investment and commercial banks that handle electronic transfers take huge risks leveraging capital to the tune of as much as $45 invested for every $1 actually held in securities. With such leverage, Wall Street is able to amass gigantic profits justifying bonuses totaling billions, but with the potential of reeking havoc on the economy when it tanks. Then Wall Street falls to Main Street to bail it out, as in the recent subprime real estate meltdown.
* * *
Americans are paying for this directly, but also indirectly like that lady with the $10,000 credit card debt. She is going to pay and pay mightily for it, not the banks, not the big brokerage houses. They are safe. They have returned to their lair. They have sold taxpayers on the myth that they are too big to fail. Now, a year later, these banks are operating with the same amoral avarice and zeal as they had before. Lobbyists on Capitol Hill are ubiquitously pulling the strings for them with the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government obligingly responding in puppet fashion. Have no fear, the more things change the more they shall remain the same.
Capitalism postulates the idea that the invisible hand of the free market forces self-interest, competition, and supply and demand to reallocate wealth and regulate resources in society. After repeatedly finding this to be false, the myth and the belief still hold as the puppet masters are in charge.
* * *
In the span of eighty years (1929 – 2009), we have had a Great Depression and a Great Recession. We are a debtor nation and have seen the U.S. dollar decline against foreign currency, especially the Euro. The national debt continues to balloon, the trade deficit to climb and seventeen million American workers are unemployed with another 10 million underemployed.
The economy has changed radically from jobs in manufacturing to information technology, from blue collar to white collar, something that was apparent thirty years ago. Yet nothing was or has been done systemically to deal with the drift other than to mount cosmetic changes. Gas guzzling automobiles were anachronistic decades ago, but Detroit continued to produce them. Medical insurance is the highest per capita in the world yet 40 million Americans are still uninsured. More money is allocated to education yet our students in math and science skills compare unfavorably with nations allocating far less to education. Given this, how do you suppose most Americans are feeling? The answer is apparently terrific!
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index surveys 1,000 Americans daily, 350 days a year to measure prevailing attitudes. It has found people are more optimistic today than they were a year ago (88% versus 84%). They have higher expectations in matters of finance and love (70% versus 61%) and 87 percent of those surveyed expect this holiday season to be happier than the last even though they will spend less money.
This defines COMPLACENCY in capital letters. Not a note of worry about joining the unemployed much less the underemployed. Be optimistic, man, think positively, wish for the best, have the audacity to hope! Sound familiar?
Will it be too late when we finally “get it”? Is our arrogance so impenetrable that we’re incapable of embracing reality? Freud writes in “The Future of an Illusion”(1961):
“An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error . . .It was an illusion of Columbus that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies . . .The part played in his wish is very clear . . .What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions . . .In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality.”
* * *
Reality, economists tell us, is that 2010 and 2011 are likely to be tougher years than 2009. The loss of American jobs to Europe and Asia is expected to continue, not decrease. Lobbyists can be expected to continue to promote corporate self-interest. Corpocracy, in defiance of the congressional agenda, will continue to cut jobs to improve its bottom line. If this is a recipe for happiness, my wonder is what constitutes misery? Apparently, our civil religion, money, remains the opium of the people.
How long can a false positive hold? How long are working Americans willing to take it on the chin? I don’t know the answer. The spirit lives in a body that has to be fed, clothed and housed, and a mind that needs the pride of some kind of life supporting work. Americans love to work. Industry is a romance of the spirit that cannot be denied. Take work away from Americans, and they might as well be dead. This is counterfeit capitalism. Are you listening?
* * *
In “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” (2005), author Thomas E. Woods, Jr., gives the Church credit for capitalism and free markets. Woods makes reference to the work of fourteenth century Jean Buridan (1300 – 1358) who showed how money emerged freely and spontaneously on the open market, first as a useful commodity and then as a medium of exchange.
Fast forward to the sixteenth century. Capitalism truly took off in concert with the Protestant Reformation. Economist and sociologist Max Weber studied the influence of John Calvin and the French theologian’s idea of “The Elected,” or the chosen. Weber found the response to Calvin’s secular theology spectacular. He attempted to capture this in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”(1958). Weber writes:
“The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism . . . Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least the rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.”
There was little restraint evident with “The Elected,” as it came to dominate Europe economically changing the face of capitalism forever.
* * *
Fast forward again to the nineteenth century and the “Robber Barons.” They exemplified White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite, and set the stage for the making of money to become America’s civil religion. Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller showed no Weber restraint. In fact, they hired thugs as union busters, created monopolies and held the United States in economic hostage to their demands in steel, oil and timber as they had control of shipping and the shipping lanes, as well as the railroads and railroad lines.
* * *
Now, in the twenty-first century, the broken world cannot be mended with wishful thinking. Two questions come to mind with regard to material (economics) and spiritual (love) needs of man:
(1) What matters most: money or happiness, and are they mutually inclusive?
(2) What has freedom to do with love and happiness and economic success?
Earlier I suggested that we have no middle class; that the majority of us are members of the “the working poor”; that that includes those making as much as $350,000 a year. I sense that Weber’s bourgeois capitalism is on life support here, but not yet dead.
That notwithstanding, the working poor still sees itself as rich but suffering “Puritan anxiety,” or never being “rich” enough. Tempering the rational with the irrational impulse has faded to a dream, as the pressure to have more toys, toys it cannot afford, has not yet peaked. Voodoo economics and counterfeit capitalism now prevail.
The idea no one can ever have enough money is equated with happiness and tied to economic security. Consequently, want is made out to be need, optimism is preferred to reality, wishful thinking is substituted for purposeful action, and frantic cell phone and texting traffic is an escape from thinking.
Are statistical surveys arbiters of self-denial? Pollsters have yet to figure out that people are inclined to say what media has programmed them to think. Virtual reality has become reality without anyone noticing. Complacency is a trance as real as an acid trip in the 1960s that never ended.
* * *
There is nothing wrong with being rich if the price is not too high. Nor is there anything romantic about being poor. But when you are poor because you cannot stop spending, you kill your capacity to love, your freedom to do, and your power to have control of your life.
The proper goal of society is not to deify millionaires and billionaires but to distribute economic wealth so that wealth creators and wealth consumers are on the same page.
As to the matter of freedom, its price has been too high for most Americans to embrace. They have given freedom up without a fuss. We have become increasingly controlled and increasingly the same. Being daffy or dotty, or being out of step with others has disappeared in a culture of sameness. We have become true believers in being connected, and thus have lost our capacity for individual identity. The result? An amalgamated homogenous machine of mass mediocrity.
* * *
Isaiah Berlin has reduced this perplexing polarity to positive and negative freedom.
Negative freedom refers to freedom without constraints, without interference from other people. We display negative freedom to the extent that we have total control of our actions without encountering barriers. It follows therefore that negative freedom places strong limitations on the activities of the state.
Positive freedom is less an individual proposition than a group norm. The state has essential control of our life within a network of constraints and barriers meant to protect us from others and ourselves, or from disturbing or threatening interferences. Homeland Security is an organ of positive freedom.
No surprise here, the rich favor negative freedom. The poor favor positive freedom. The rich prefer as little interference as possible from government regulators. Wealth creators – entrepreneurs – believe positive freedom or regulation neutralizes their efforts. The poor expect support from unions, government agencies, and the United States Congress for their socio-economic welfare. The poor seek protection from those that would exploit them and are willing to give up freedom for such guarantees.
Positive freedom thrives in a climate where there is a disinclination to take charge or responsibility for outcomes. Security is considered more precious than freedom, failing to realize that security so realized is a recipe for counterdependence and subjugation.
On balance, negative freedom is precious but few believe they can afford it. Positive freedom, if not inherently paternalistic, involves external manipulation and control. Working in a corporation in a hierarchically structured organization with managers and workers precisely defined along sacrosanct lines is the epitome of positive freedom. Ironically, managers and engineers think of themselves driven by negative freedom when the workplace climate is the antithesis of such freedom. The command and control hierarchy of corpocracy is a reactive rather than a “take charge” environment. That said it is sobering to realize we all live in a corporate culture. We are a crisis-managed society ever reacting rather than anticipating our problems.
Currently, Congress, the State Department, the Defense Department, and National Security are pointing fingers as to why nobody picked up on Major Hasan’s religious fanaticism before he killed thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood. This failure was consistent with a pattern. Nobody apparently saw the terrorist attack coming on the Twin Towers, the economic meltdown coming, or even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. My wonder is why this is not more troubling.
* * *
The rich are inclined to be inner directed; the poor outer directed. The poor tend to abandon their power as a rule to union leadership and corporate management. There was a time early in the last century, however, when workers had control of their work, but unions persuaded them to give up control for pay and benefits. Now, most of these jobs are gone and the freedom surrendered for job protection and security with them.
* * *
In the perpetual struggle between security and freedom, workers stand in the front line. Now in the era of Homeland Security, surveillance has been ratchet up so that not even the affluent can escape Orwell’s “Big Brother.”
Disembodied voices boom out their futile admonitions at shopping malls, airports and workplaces. Cameras track out our every turning as we walk the streets, looking down from tall buildings, while cameras at traffic lights register vehicles going through stop signs. Then there are always unmarked police cars roaming the streets and sitting on hills waiting to tag vehicular violators. It is also possible that cell phones and Internet activity is monitored. Yet, still more sinister than these irritations is the creeping privatizing of security to corporate contractors. Life appears to be increasingly imitating Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange.”
Americans are not happy with these countless checks and regulations but they are not alone. It has become a condition of urban life in Europe as well British author Anna Minton shows this in her new book, “Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City” (2009).
The affluent, and now many moderate earners have embraced positive freedom by migrating to gated communities or luxury condominiums. These are controlled, and pan optically spied on by private companies whose rules, regulations and sub-clauses prescribe behavior as tightly as a prison. Similar private companies keep a watchful eye for vagaries and eccentrics in commercial malls that might threaten the ethics of consumer conformity. Such segregation is carried out in the name of security. But does it work; do barriers, guards, and cameras make people feel safer? Minton says they don’t. In fact she claims they make people more fearful.
* * *
The paradox of the times is the more we seek security the less secure we are; the more dependent we are on mobile electronics the greater the barriers between us; the more physically we isolate ourselves from each other the more afraid we are to open our doors to strangers; the more we accede power and control to others to alleviate our fears the more fearful we become. Positive and negative freedom is not mutually exclusive but a complementary proposition.
It is a matter of balance. That is where love comes in, self-love, as it will not tolerate unreasonable intrusion. Self-love will embrace its insecurity not run from it; self-love will say, “No, thank you,” when unwanted protection is offered but not asked for; self-love will say, “No, I won’t go,” when what is asked of us is contrary to our self-interests.
Modern walls are being built around us because it is profitable business. The old saw still holds true, the more others do for us, whatever the nature of the doing, the less we are free. Yes, there is crime on our streets but there is much more peace. Remember that.
* * *
Finally, capitalism has become counterfeit because:
(1) The economic level of consumer confidence has tanked;
(2) Consumers have lost trust in producers, in banks, and elected politicians as custodians of the economy; they expected them to play fair ball and they haven’t;
(3) People in general have had their fill of predatory corporations such as Enron and predatory capital managers such as Bernard Madoff; this bad faith has translated into being fed up with financial institutions in general;
(4) Ordinary wage earners and small investors feel let down and exploited by a Federal Reserve too chummy with Wall Street at Main Street’s expense. It has allowed the dollar to continue its decline and jobs with it;
(5) The narrative of economists has been cheery before, during and after the economic meltdown. The story line has been replete with mathematical models these economists favor, which have proved to be as reliable as reading tealeaves. What is more confusing is that many American economists have won Nobel Prizes in Economics parading these mathematical models.
China and India are showing there are many routes to growth and development. Americans have always trusted the system, but now are not so sure. They don’t know the answer or whom to trust. They feel as if left in limbo. They need guidance, but please, no more explanatory models! Tell us where we are, no more claptrap! If forecasting is voodoo economics, tell us. If you don’t have a clue, tell us that, too. Stimulate our spirit with a little candor. That is where love resides. Behavior will follow including a synergy usually only reserved for wartime or national disaster.
* * *
LOVE IS ENOUGH
Man has left the cave but the cave has not left man.
Man no longer fears the beast of nature because he can make machines stronger, faster and more killing.
Man can explore the depths of the oceans, and the remote planets of our universe. He sends satellites into space, and instantly communicates with people across the world by cell phone or the Internet. He can control planes and trains by remote control, clone life by genetic manipulation, tear down or create mountains. But he cannot stop the killing, the unnecessary starvation of millions of innocent people.
Man cannot rise above war, or rapacious crimes against humanity. Nor can he stop himself from heating up the planet or persuade himself to live in harmony with nature. Who does he blame? Not himself. Not his excesses. Not his lifestyle. Not technology. Man blames God and religion for his twisted soul.
Yet, God and soul emanate from instinctive love, a love that makes the world go around. Nature is bridged by science and religion by love, complements that make this hostile planet a tolerable earthly home. Science solves one mystery and creates ten others. Technology takes science and creates wonders at breakneck speed failing to note, much less measure, what has been lost for what has been gained.
Science is important but love is enough. Love gives meaning and balance to life. Without love, man is a runaway killing machine with an incessant appetite for war.
Rogue nations fueled by hate threaten the very survival of man. Secular society has replaced religion with science, looking past its abuses to create bionic man and woman, impervious to growing psychic depression.
The soul cannot be quantified nor can God or love. A billionaire cannot buy love, but a homeless person can possess it, as it is priceless.
Love is to the soul what nourishment is to the body. If you look at the great religions, God and Love are intertwined and interchangeable.
* * *
There is much talk in this secular age of romantic love, sexual love, possessive love, but these are but expressions of lust, not love. We speak of marital love as being a 50-50 proposition, as if love were a capitalistic expression. Marital combat is the result, which is a zero sum game that leads many to divorce. Marital love is a 100-100 proposition, or agape love. It involves respect, trust and acceptance of each other, unconditionally. Anything less is Eros in disguise looking for a replaceable love object to beef up a waning libido. Viagra is part of love’s great deception.
* * *
We live in a paranoid age. We accuse the Taliban and Al-Qaeda of atrocities when we have no familiarity with our own. We see Islam as a satanic religion and label anyone to question Christianity an anti-Christ. Most religions are fundamentally based on love. Something we sometimes forget.
Will love as it once was appreciated come back? Not in my lifetime. We are too enamored of things, too dizzy with technology and global configurations to realize everything, the world over, are local.
But is there still love? I don’t see it; I don’t feel it; I don’t hear it; I just hear noise. I hear noise in music, I see it in art, I read it in literature. I don’t think our best days are ahead of us. I don’t think we are through our worse.
Consider these sobering words of Anton Chekhov in “The Wife and Other Stories” (1985):
“There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him – disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others”
* * *
PS. Forgive me for how clumsy my attempt has been to convey the critical nature of love. Hate is so much easier to express, love so difficult to convey.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009
© May 5, 2010
A READER WRITES:
Hi, Jim.
I'm requesting a copy of your piece. I do find your writing interesting.
Don
SOURCE OF HIS INTEREST:
I had written,
"Some have wondered if I have been sick as I've not had a single missive posted since last month, or not for the past four weeks.
"I have been working on a piece that has grown to such size that I am only going to send it to people who request it. How large? It is some twenty pages or about 12,000 words and looks at the subject in reader friendly terms, but it is long. I have not posted it yet on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com), but I will possibly later today.
"What is it about?"
I then ran through the contents starting with "Fisher Fragments of a Philosoophy."
The piece in its entirety is posted now.
JRF
* * *
Hate, violence and death are on parade.
U. S. Army Major, and Board Certified Psychiatrist, Nidal Malik Hasan, murdered thirteen and wounded more than thirty at the Soldier Readiness Center at Ford Hood, Texas, the largest military personnel facility in the United States.
A Russian émigré living in Germany claimed he ‘hated foreigners’ then stabbed to death a young pregnant Muslim mother in a court of law in Dresden, Germany. He also wounded her husband. Alex Wiens was in court to appeal his conviction for spewing racial epithets at Marwa el-Sherbini in the presence of her three-year-old daughter. The slanderous behavior occurred in a Dresden public park when the young mother asked Mr. Wiens if she could use his swing for her daughter.
In Tampa, Florida, four teenage boys, fourteen to sixteen, beat and raped a thirteen-year-old boy without remorse because he was ‘a retard.’
A young gay man in Kingston, Jamaica on his way to Catholic Mass was murdered without much public dismay. Jamaica has zero tolerance for homosexuality.
In Jefferson City, Missouri, a fifteen-year-old girl dug two holes in the ground, and then plotted the right time to murder and bury her victims. Without provocation, she strangled a nine-year-old girl, cut her throat and stabbed her to death, then buried her. Why? She wanted to know what it felt like.
* * *
We live in a culture of hate, a culture of violence, and a culture of death. If you have any doubt, check the subject matter of most popular television programs, films, rap music, novels, and then play this against the central theme of the nightly television news.
Here in Tampa, Florida a day doesn’t go by that there are not multiple murders, hate crimes from graffiti painted on people’s garage doors or public buildings to diatribes on talk radio. The most heinous crimes appear on the back pages of The Tampa Tribune such as ‘a Haitian man, 33, in Naples, Florida kills his wife, 33, and his children 9, 6, 5, 3, and 11-months.’ Another Tampa man hits his beautiful wife on the head with a hammer, douses her with inflammable fluid, and then torches her. She is now in hospital in critical condition with burns over 80 percent of her body. ‘Now I am the monster you thought me to be,” he gushes.
This is the age of Darwinism where the gap between a cockroach and a human isn’t measured in terms of love or a soul, but by the passing millennia. One wonders if death and hate through the vehicle of violence have become less somber. Has the dark side of human nature become almost friendly? Have we as a society become tired of life? The words of Apostle Paul come to mind, ‘Death, where is your sting?’
* * *
It didn’t start this way at birth. A child comes into the world loving its mother, curious of its surroundings and early associates, innocent of self-loathing. A child is born embracing life in communion with others. Hate and violence are learned behaviors.
“Love is a natural expression of life. Love is majestic at birth but thereafter vulnerable to pain and depletion as life is embraced and the reality of experience kicks in.
* * *
Love has been killed. Many have killed love. Most prosaically, we could say work is one of love’s killers. Work was once love made visible. Work no longer is love, visible or otherwise, but predicated on power and profit, not service and satisfaction. We are attracted to work that fills our pockets not our souls. Few are in work that they love. Most have contempt for what they do. They choose to believe circumstances have so imprisoned them, failing to realize choice is a cage of weakness of will.
In this darkness of circumstances, we have become “the working poor.” We have no middle class. It is a myth we cling to; it has evaporated except in the coldness of governmental statistics. Most Americans (80%) are slaves to the job whether they earn $20,000 or $350,000 a year. They live to work, not work to live. They are wound up machines on automatic pilot programmed to the mantra of their masters.
Corporate capitalism finds workers addicted to credit cards, excessive mortgage payments, indulgent lifestyles, expensive gas guzzling automobiles, and other extravagances that mimic the rich while vulnerable to having their jobs cut out from under them at any time at corporate whim without any apparent recourse.
By the same token, corporate welfare depends on the robotic demand and conspicuous consumption of the working poor as it accounts for two-thirds of the GDP, which means it must buy what it doesn’t need and can afford, saddling itself as perpetual debtor never creditor. Should the working poor reverse this and become creditor rather than debtor, the economy would collapse, and corpocracy with it, which cannot be allowed.
Multi-billionaire Warren Buffet has understood this heresy but has not been humbled by it. He is a common man with an uncommon touch, living modestly despite his great wealth, as his grasp has never exceeded his reach.
Money is America’s civil religion. Money has no soul. Money promotes competition at the expense of cooperation, profligacy at the expense of prudence, subjecting the working poor to hell on earth. This represents the sullied progression of capitalism from ‘creative destruction’ and freedom to fail, which it was meant to advocate, to ‘too big to fail’ and counterfeit capitalism. The love of work, which is who we are, has been cut out of the heart of Economic Man. This is how work killed love.
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)
* * *
ABSTRACT
“How the brain works” was the subject of discussion on PBS with Charlie Rose with a panel of distinguished American scientists. The brain has fascinated man for ages and still defies his probing.
The program dealt with consciousness, brain neurology, various areas of the brain and how they function, and how genes and the billions of brain cells connect with their synapses to result in thought, experience and behavior.
The claim is, there have been extraordinary advances in brain science in this new century. Scientists are becoming more confident such terrible diseases as Alzheimer’s, autism, and Parkinson’s among others can be better understood, and if not cured at least stopped in their advancement.
A notable comment was that pharmaceutical therapy dealing with brain disorders has not been effective and continues to make little progress, yet we are a pill dependent society.
At the other end of the spectrum on the History Channel, exorcism was discussed, the practice of driving out evil spirits from a person. This ancient practice of thousands of years continues unabated. The late Pope John Paul II in fact engaged in it when a parishioner had a fit while he was saying Mass. In the light of scientific inquiry, exorcism would seem absurd if not diabolical. Yet it is not only practiced, but the Church of Rome has a college dedicated to training priests to become exorcists.
In the midst of all this, the mind, which is the blueprint of the brain in action, continues to mystify scientists on how it works.
As I walk today, these thoughts percolate through my mind but take an unexpected detour to the matter of love. Love was not mentioned with this panel of scientists. Nor was love discussed on the program devoted to exorcism. Scientists have little inclination for such dalliance, yet good and evil evolve from the hard and soft wiring in the brain where love resides until it is damaged by our early programming.
My wonder is what has happened to love, the social inhibitor that gives balance and resilience to the human spirit. I can only conclude we have killed love as I see us lost in a “mind field” of terror. We have become enemies of each other because we are in a war with ourselves. We have lost the saving grace of love. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the world in which we reside.
Scientists, I suspect, are unmoved by my concern. Their sights are too lofty on such matters as the brain’s topography, and too noble in their quest for conquering physical diseases to be distracted by societal diseases of the spirit. After all, love and the soul are not readily quantifiable. My sense is the more scientists pursue material mysteries, the more they are frustrated by the immaterial world.
Man is full of himself. Yet he continues to thrash about blindly unable to get on top of such issues as global famine, global warming, global war, or other essentially behavioral issues of man. The Church thrashes about with exorcism. Medical psychiatry thrashes about with frontal lobotomies. The human soul has lost its moorings. A recipe of erotica failed to create stability in the high Middle Ages; nor has the somber Puritanism of modernity managed it any better. Now, in post modernity, the soul is looking for love in all the wrong places.
* * *
WHAT IS LOVE?
We live in the Darwinian Age. Everything seemingly is evolving accept love, which is a constant. Theology has been stripped of the miraculous. Biology has become bionic. Strength is preferred to goodness, pride to humility, intellect to passion, and power to love.
Critical philosophy is preferred to philosophical poetry, science to art, intellect to instinct, logic to mysticism, optimism to pessimism, and fear to love.
There has been no shortage of the chemistry of emotion. Love is an emotion, but the need and capacity to love is not a simple synaptic connection in the brain nor can it be reduced to an emotional affect.
I walk today through my Florida neighborhood in record-breaking October heat (92 degrees) drifting away into muddled thought. Systematic thought no longer interests me.
Thoughts roam through my conscience as automobiles speed by, cyclists push me to the curb, and joggers remind me I am old and slow as their happy feet dance by. They pay me little mind, but yet we are connected in love and life. We are love itself manifested.
* * *
My aim here is not to dream up a new theory, develop a new religion or philosophy, but to cause readers to think, to be less awed by what prominent voices have to say, as in truth their views emanate from their own peculiar darkness. My hope is that readers will seek the light of their own ways. .
Four loves that I would like to mention are Agape, Eros, Narcissism and Altruism.
(1) Agape is unconditional love. It is the love of a parent for a child. It is the love expressed by Jesus for all humanity in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as in the apocryphal gospels of Thomas and Judas, Peter and James. It is the love that has no boundaries. It is love most generous.
(2) Eros is sexual love. It is the lust of the flesh, the desire for pleasure and physical fulfillment. Eros is the secret will to power, to possess, to master and to subjugate. Eros is jealous love, yet as romantic love it inspires affection and friendship. It is conditional love, something given for something received. It is needy love, which is helpless against the demands of passion.
Whereas Agape cannot be quantified, Eros is obsessed with quantification and qualification. Eros debates, describes and calibrates love listing pros and cons, assets and liabilities of the beloved as if a commodity to be purchased. It evaluates and measures performance and ecstasy. Eros is based solely on need and need fulfillment. In fairness, Plato claimed Eros helps the soul recall its knowledge of beauty. He saw it contributing to an understanding of spiritual truth.
Eros is the wellspring of storytelling and poetry, of philosophy and art, of literature and music, of architecture and mysticism, of lying and treachery. Eros is the love that can never be satisfied and therefore it must constantly renew its demands to survive. It is love most egoistic and least generous. It is love that worships the body and forgets the soul.
(3) Narcissism is self-love, the most confused and baffling of loves because it has been misrepresented from the first. Narcissus in Greek mythology pines away for love of his reflection in a pool and is turned into a flower. What should he have seen looking into the pool but himself?
Narcissism involves personality traits such as self-esteem and self-image, but it is still more fundamental. It is the love and respect that emanates from deep within the self, not as an object to worship but as a compass to guide, direct and control behavior.
There can be no love of others if there is no love of self. Contempt for one’s self results in the same contempt for others. To attempt to love others empty of self-respect is to be false and disingenuous. The pejorative of self-love is self-deceit expressed in vanity, conceit, egotism and selfishness, and ultimately, self-hate. A generous spirit rises from one not needy but full of love, one that becomes more loving in the giving.
(4) Altruism is love of others. Altruism is an essential part of humanity. It comes into play when we are self-forgetting and reach out to assist others in need. It is the love expressed when we leave the comfort of our home to help flood victims of a raging river, when we volunteer at hospitals, soup kitchens, schools and churches to assist the disadvantaged, when we do something selfless even though we may never be found out.
Albert Schweitzer personified altruism. He gave his life to science and art until he was thirty. The balance of his life was given to humanity. A celebrated classical European musicologist (organ), composer, theologian, and philosopher, Schweitzer left this world to study medicine. Once a doctor, he set up a hospital in French Equatorial Africa at Lambarene, a deserted mission station, to treat leprosy and sleeping sickness. There his ethical principle “reverence for life” was fully worked out in relation to the defects he saw in European society until his death in 1965 at the age of 90.
The Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, missionaries, and other volunteer organizations display altruism as they step out of their comfort zone to serve others, thus erasing boundaries between race, religion, ethnicity, language and culture. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the opposite trend, which we will now discuss.
* * *
WHAT KILLED LOVE?
WAS IT SCIENCE?
Science has flourished in Western society for reason. Christian and Judaic belief systems separated nature from religion. Genesis (The Bible):
“Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.”
Conversely, religions of the Far East were pantheistic with nature and religion intertwined discouraging inquiry into nature’s mysteries.
* * *
The idea of the soul is a distraction to science. With science if it cannot be measured, it does not exist. It is precisely because of this that mystics and philosophers and great religions have flourished. With them, it is a matter of faith and wonder.
We are in a scientific age that is as dogmatic and righteous as was the great Roman Catholic Church in its heyday. We expect scientific objectivity, but not dismissive contempt for the soul. Whether the soul is or isn’t, it exists in the mind of most cultures and religions of the world, and therefore impacts behavior. The soul cannot be ignored but it resists as well being found out. It is the eternal conundrum that connects modern man with his primordial roots.
* * *
That said the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of the genetic molecule DNA with James Watson, developed an interest in the brain and human consciousness. This led to speculation about “the soul.” Crick after Kant dismissed the idea that the soul could exist if it were impossible to detect and measure.
Science now finds one Galen Strawson postulating about neural metaphysics. He claims the self exists but is not a human being. He holds that experiences are events in our brain, and if there is a self, which is our subject it, too, must be in the brain. This is a departure from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.”
Crick and Strawson are saying if the “soul” and “self” exist they must reside in the brain, the residence of the mind. Scientists are the latest pioneers plowing through the iffy territory of brain topography with neurophysiology and genetics, among other disciplines.
Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul” (1994), while complex and confusing in its inquiry, leaves the reader essentially empty in the end. The same is true of Strawson’s “Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics” (2009). The soul or self fails to materialize in the brain or to be refuted as existing elsewhere.
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Scientists are forever undaunted. Now they are measuring blood flow to the brain in an attempt to identify love, creativity and happiness. This is part of the drive to understand how the brain works, and to arrest if not cure disturbing diseases that find residence there.
Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI) has gained stature. These $3 million tunnel machines are designed to examine what is happening in the brain. A person placed in the machine is asked to fix attention on God, love or happiness to see what magnetic resonance field is created. Blood flow patterns to the brain are hoped to reveal important clues to these elusive human emotions.
Color-coded maps of the brain form labyrinths of thought that are displayed on screens, which then can be interpreted. Pepsi and Coca-Cola have been doing this for years in neuromarketing campaigns. So, if it works with colas, why not on love?
It seems predictable that fMRI’s (i.e., function of this technique) would attempt to measure genius along with inspiration for art, the nature of love, and an appreciation of beauty, followed by correlation of these findings with brain activity. My wonder is what Leonardo de Vinci’s brain might have revealed. Genius he was, but also known to be a bit of a scatterbrain with an unreliable attention span, and a tendency to abandon pet projects before completion. .
Bizarre as it may seem, once Einstein had died, his brain was stolen from his body, secretly sliced in sagittal sections, chromatically dyed, and then analyzed to discover his genius. Nothing of significance was found. My conclusion: we think too much.
Passion was the breadth and depth of de Vinci’s character. It compelled him to investigate an infinite multitude of mysteries leaving him little time to surrender himself to their completion. James Watson of DNA fame claimed not to be particularly intelligent but avidly curious. Einstein made the same claim, but added the difference with him was that he stayed with problems longer than his colleagues.
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We live in a paradoxical age of waning curiosity and obsessive self-consciousness. This is displayed in runaway technology. No one seems concerned with what is lost for what is gained. Technology always lags science by hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Archimedes may have invented the first crude computer, and he died in 212 BC. Technology always piggybacks on earlier science. Likewise, art frames its time.
Matisse took apart and reconfigured the components of color, but my sense is he was unconscious of the neural landscaping and neural sculpturing of his efforts. Van Gogh logged his perceptions in frantic flushes of color seemingly unconcerned with the mathematics of a world within or without. When he put brush to canvas in Arles in 1888, I doubt he saw the eye as the mind’s passive receptacle for all the stuff pouring into it from the outside. Picasso kept devising new periods of his paintings to escape a triangular straightjacket. These artists knew without knowing, which is the residence of art.
Let us say that neuropsychology, genetics, neurobiology and neurophilosophy succeed in their ultimately quest to determine how the brain works, how it forms concepts and translates these into acts, what then will be left of the imagination? Will there ever be a painting to rival the eyes of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” Michelangelo’s “Sistine Chapel,” Cézanne’s “Mount-Sainte-Victoire”?
These artists didn’t question the soul, which is present in their works. Art today is angry and self-conscious. It reflects minds groveling in self-pity in the sinkhole of despair. Works of art today are often filled with contempt and hatred expressed in vile desecration of cultural icons such as Andress Serrano’s the “Piss Christ.”
One of the panelists on the Charlie Rose show made the distinction between the silicon of the computer and the organic construction of the brain without disclaiming the brain being something of a computer. The computer given its widely acclaimed advantages and advancements does not have a soul and is incapable of love. Since we are becoming increasingly slave to electronic devices, it would seem science and technology is playing their part in the death of love.
One experiment I read about in graduate school involved a volunteer couple that professed to being very much in love. The couple was essentially starved, eventually presented with food, studying how they would react. They shared the simple meal. This was much less sophisticated than psychologist Arthur Aron’s attempt to measure love by blood flow analysis to the brains of people claiming to be in love. Researchers concede that love is a possible intuitive designation, but still wonder if there are “love spots” in the brain. Be confident science will try to isolate them if there are. Beyond that, there is likely to be little agreement.
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WAS IT FREUD?
Sigmund Freud knew better. He was not only a doctor of medicine but also a student of neurology. He had studied the great religions, the Greek philosophers and the early cultures of man. He was singularly ambitious and desperate to make a difference. His greatness was a manifestation of his egoism. Krishnamurti claimed Freud was swept away by his own conception of self and the problems with which he wrestled. “The Western world,” the mystic added, “was shamelessly inclined to adopt the great physicians neuroses as its own.” It is an engaging story how Freud succeeded.
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He took many false steps, some working with a dentist, where they experimented with cocaine. Some gave them credit for discovering Novocain. In his persistence, he proved quite the fictioneer, that is, having a natural novelist’s panache at case descriptions. His agile prose reveals a poet’s sense of nuance and a novelist’s grasp of gravitas. Yet, as Janet Malcolm (“The Purloined Clinic,” 1992) has noted, Freud’s talking cures are as porous as a sieve, albeit still very much in vogue today.
Psychiatry has vacillated between the absurd and the ridiculous as esteemed psychiatrists and authors R. D. Laing (“Wisdom, Madness & Folly,” 1985) and Thomas Szasz (“The Manufacture of Madness,” 1970) have pointed out. Now, in the early twenty-first century, psychiatry is relegated to pill pushing and brain anatomy, while Western society remains preoccupied with Freud’s erogenous zones.
Szasz is brutal. He claims psychiatry is not an advancement over the superstitions and practices of witch-hunts. Nor is it a retrogression from the humanism of the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment period, but an actual continuation of the Inquisition. All that has changed, he argues, is the vocabulary and social style.
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Freud began his psychiatric practice in Vienna treating the very rich, mainly women, suffering from boredom and unrequited love after being shelved by their prosperous but possessive husbands and lovers. He burrowed into these psyches to expose their early sexual awakenings for answers. It was a prescription for provocation. Novelist John Updike once said, “We want to read about life in full tide, in love, or at war, the wretched childhoods, the fraught adulteries, the big deaths, the scandals, the crises of sexuality.” Freud understood this, laying more claim to his novelistic bent.
Materialism failed to placate restive minds for loveless lives. Starved of affection and erogenous fulfillment, the affluent, who had everything and nothing at all, found solace on Freud’s couch. “Citizen Kane” (1941) gave an American twist to this hysteria with the symbolic “rosebud” of the film, a snow sled that stood for sexual angst.
Freud distilled the psychosexual hysteria from his clients’ panic and then reported it to his readers with the breathless thrill of schadenfreude. His focus on Eros was bold, but consistent with his conviction that repressed sexual love was the underlying neurosis of Victorian bourgeois society. There, Catholicism had locked love out with its dogma, while Protestant Puritanism had placed a chastity belt around sexual mores. Given this programming, he wasn’t short of clientele.
His initial patrons in Vienna were Jewish as were his professional medical associates. This changed when Protestant Carl Jung joined the group. Freudianism would prove far more successful in the United States than Europe. Americans conveniently misread his thesis as they were looking for an excuse to let it all hang out. Western society on both sides of the Atlantic dared now to cease to be Christian but instead attempted to out-Christian each other, while following a theology of more, which led to pervasive decadence.
The Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties of the last century considered Freud “Dr. Feel Good,” giving them permission to put their anxieties behind in libidinous liberation. “The War to End all Wars” (i.e., WWI) had been successfully concluded with the world everyone’s oyster.
“War,” exclaimed Thomas Mann as the European powder keg exploded in 1914 with World War I, “is purification, liberation, and an enormous hope.” War, in other words, is beautiful. For a hundred years, aggression had lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture splitting the social order into insiders and outsiders with the infrastructure in shambles. Polite society had lost its way while power was changing hands from the aristocracy to corporate barons, and women were coming out from under the shackles of domesticity and one dimensionalism.
Freud, they mistakenly believed, had taken the wraps off morality. Modern man was entering an undefined period. Peter Gay captures this in a most readable study: “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud: Vols. I – IV” (1984 – 1995). In this study, Gay traces “The Education of the Senses” (Vol. I) through “The Tender Passion” (Vol. II) on to “The Cultivation of Hatred” (Vol. III) to “The Naked Heart” (Vol. IV). It was the Freudian Age with sensual man being put through this Austrian’s strainer.
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With a bow to Sophocles, Freud identified the “Oedipus Complex,” as a son’s desire to kill his father and bed his mother, and the “Electra Complex,” as a daughter’s desire to kill her mother and bed her father. Sexual fantasies, Freud believed, were repressed in early childhood only to lead to hysterical symptoms in adulthood.
In “Freud: A Life for Our Time” (2005), Peter Gay shows how the creator of psychoanalysis delved into his own subconscious to lead to a new age of thinking. The wonder is how the twentieth century so willingly and enthusiastically took his findings to be its own. Whatever you think of Freudianism, you must admit he had an uncanny way of reducing life’s grammar to easily understood principles:
(1) The Morality Principle: The “Superego” identifies how we should behave. This is the domain of the parent or the authority figure. Authority can be either nurturing or critical but it is always judgmental. It dictates the moral tone and code of how we are expected to think, behave and judge others.
(2) The Reality Principle: The “Ego” identifies how we actually behave. The adult is the mature individual who sees, accepts and deals with reality, or “what is,” defining and solving our problems, not denying them or pointing fingers.
(3) The Pleasure Principle: The “Id” identifies how we want to behave. It is the restless child in the man. It is the person suspended in permanent adolescence and arrested development no matter what age. It is the spoiled brat, the person who is unwilling or unable to grow up. The impulsive “Id” blames others for its failure to make satisfactory progress. The “Id” personifies a current cultural concern (see Diana West’s “The Death of the Grown-Up,” 2007). With the “Id” there is little capacity for delayed gratification. The cry is, “I must have it now, see it now, be it now!” It is the “nowness” of everything that is central to the “Id” character.
Freud could see a repressive (parental) culture spawning a juvenile society (see “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 1961) with the soul of the child under the armor of the warrior. The evidence today is alarming. Patriarchal institutions -- governments, religions, educational institutions and corporations – have become pusillanimously top heavy and lethargic being continuously frustrated by apathetic constituencies, urban gangs and rogue nations.
No one is in control. Everyone is posturing and lecturing, while rhetoric has become surrogate for leadership, which is skin deep. To be fair, so it has been off and on since the beginning of time, especially during transitional periods. We are all marching forward wearing blindfolds with a cockiness that is scary.
The Office of the President of the United States resembles that of a potentate but often acts like a puppet on a string in the discharge of its duties.
There are 545 members of Congress (445 in the House of Representatives and 100 Senators) duly elected by 307 million Americans. Precious few act as the voice of the silent many.
Governance is a function of some 55,000 lobbyists in Washington, DC who dictate trade policy. The fate of the economy is in the hands of former Wall Street insiders who are now running the Department of Treasury. This has become something of a laugher as lobbyists and the appointed let the elected hold public hearings while they pull the strings off stage.
Taxpayers are where the buck stops. In praise of folly, taxpayers received modest checks from the stimulus package, but now they may have to pay back nearly twice as much as they received in the form of income taxes. In Florida, the unemployment compensation tax for small businesses is set to go up by 1200 percent in January or from $8 to $100.31 per employee. Misguided fiscal policy has made these draconian measures necessary.
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American corporations, fronted by an army of lobbyists, keep putting the brakes on healthcare reform legislation while claiming to be passionately for it. Few things are what they seem. There are some 60,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, but more than 60,000 private military and civilian contractors operating there at the US government and taxpayer’s behest.
This shadow militia of hired guns represents the child in armor playing cowboy at the government’s expense, sometimes with acute embarrassment as we saw in Iraq. Blackwater Security, a private military company, paid Iraqi government officials a million dollar bribe to cover up the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in September 2007.
Freud wasn’t the first to see through the complicit gamesmanship played between the lines of the sacred and profane. He was but one of the more eloquent voices. The State Department, incidentally, was found to be complicit in the Blackwater Security cover up. Freud saw hypocrisy at the root of modern society and the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. He writes in “The Future of an Illusion” (1961):
“If religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, it comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.” Then he goes on to say, “It tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”
This was years before jihadists and al-Qaeda crossed our consciousness, but the germ of Holy War was not far below his radar. My sense is that he would see delusional man in charge today across the global spectrum.
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Not so long ago the child on a rampage (Pleasure Principle) was personified during the HIPPIE revolt of the 1960s and 1970s. Young people took Freud at his Eros word and made love not war, burned their draft cards and escaped to Canada, or formed communes and polygamist relationships. They attacked the system that gave them the right to express their angst while embracing self-indulgent self-destructive lifestyles with impunity.
This hysteria had much in common with Freud’s first clients in Vienna. The unfulfilled Viennese turned to self-absorption. Peter Gay called this “the naked heart.” Young people in the 1960s did the same. Such academic luminaries as Harvard professor Timothy Leary advised them to “tune out and turn off” from the material culture of their parents. Leary gave them permission to trip out, as their parents had been too busy making money to love, protect and nurture them.
So, they became their own parents and an authority on to themselves. They rebelled against the system that killed love and escaped into psychedelic dreams. Parents, teachers and other authority figures lost control, gave up, and retreated off stage. Home, school, and work were reduced to combat zones.
Not surprising, they created a society that mirrored the one they held in contempt. They thought that they were free, but were they? The HIPPIE movement was as dictatorial and repressive as the society they had abandoned. Hippies claimed they didn’t trust anyone over thirty, looked down on anyone who was not of their kind, that dressed, talked, believed, or behaved differently than they did. They came to worship their genitals as their new god as primitives had centuries before.
Hippies now are AARP old, seemingly still unable to shake free of their societal angst. They created, and now are custodians of, a one-dimensional society where sameness rules, still struggling with identity. This struggle is a legacy passed on to their children, and their children’s children. The psychedelic haze of yesteryear has transmogrified to texting, twittering, Facebook and surfing the Internet. Everything is connected in disconnection; only acid trips are now virtual reality escapades.
If sameness were not enough, people have become billboards of self-advertising, no matter the social status, with identity personified in tattoos, body piercing, hair pieces, and wide exposure of naked flesh regardless of how unflattering it is to the naked eye.
Freudianism has become Orwellian. Not only is war interchangeable with peace, hate with love, conformity with individuality, the ridiculous with the sublime, but the profane with the sacred. After all, Freud elevated description to the level of solution, as solutions are more fun than testy problems. Everything is upside down while those in charge don’t seem to mind the discomfort of standing on their heads:
(1) A general declared in the Vietnam War that he had to destroy a village to save it.
(2) The Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman in 2008 claimed greedy irresponsible banks and investment houses were “too big to fail,” and so taxpayers had no choice but to bail them out. No one had a vote on this.
(3) Credit card companies, part of the grand scheme of these reckless rogues on Wall Street, tossed ethics aside once bailout money brought them back to profitability by imposing usury fees on the very taxpayers that rescued them. Justification? They needed to make a profit.
This brings me to my next consideration.
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WAS IT SOCIETY?
There is evidence we are experiencing a dystopian nightmare. The times defy logic. It is as if we cannot help ourselves.
Who would have thought Wall Street, months after being resuscitated with billions of taxpayer dollars, would return to its old ways awarding itself bonuses in the billions?
Who would have thought after putting Watergate and Nixon’s “enemy list” safely away in the archives of history that the Obama Administration would launch an attack in the same paranoid Nixonian fashion on the conservative Fox News Network reminiscent of those earlier days?
Who would have thought Afghanistan would become chillingly reminiscent of Viet Nam?
Who would have thought a dysfunctional healthcare and educational system, costing more than any other on the planet, but failing on both fronts, would be redesigned and repackaged costing more than a trillion dollars over ten years, meaning it will actually cost three or four times that much, as cash as solution has always found Congress doing little more than breaking wind?
Who would have thought that the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidency, which collapsed on its “guns and butter” policy, would rise from the dead with the Barak Hussein Obama “guns and butter” presidency?
Something is terribly wrong with a society that has little capacity to learn, or courage to change other than rhetorically, choosing instead to repeat its missteps or misdeeds ad infinitum. When a society has leadership afraid to lead, hesitant to create enemies or lacks the courage to oppose friends, then it is a society on life support as it is killing love which is the energy of resilience.
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We are not happy campers and have misplaced our soul, the site of our moral compass and viable center. We have settled on distractions.
Everything in the mind emanates from the soul. It is not something that can be measured by any kind of mechanistic or electronic probe, for it is a nonmaterial something that guides us nonetheless. The soul is something we share with the ancients who lived thousands of years ago, and who expressed it in paintings on the walls of caves as they hid from the wild beast, who were far larger, faster and stronger than they were, but lacked their consciousness.
Consciousness was not enough then. Consciousness is not enough now.
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WAS IT RELIGION?
Primitive man invented religion to connect his frightened center or soul with the reassuring spirit world or God beyond his comprehension. It was necessary as he was conscious of being alone in a hostile mysterious planet.
Man invented time to measure his presence in a timeless universe for he gradually became aware of his impermanence. Yet, he was reassured by the mysteries of darkness and reappearing light, of the clap of thunder and bolts of lightning in the sky that came when the heavens opened up and showered him with life’s essential substance, rain.
Man witnessed the earth as it changed colors, became naked and fallow, then like magic bloomed again, and he worshiped the heavens for this.
Man’s religion took thousands of years before it became anthropomorphic, before he saw man in the image and likeness of his God. Primitive religions, fragments of which are buried deep in our collective human psyches, reappear in some form in all religions, as they are based on mystical wonders and intangible fears that make us human beings, human.
Man is different than the animal and plant kingdom that was here first. This makes man forever an interloper. He must not forget that.
Animism is still prominent in African religions. It is a belief system that finds a soul in everything, animate and inanimate. All religions believe in a soul. Whether the soul is real or not, the fact that people believe in it makes the soul real. The concept of soul is reconfirmed in art, music, and architecture, in cultures that have emanated in the past 12,000 years across the planet. That apparently is not enough.
Man must know. He must understand. It is the nature of man and his restless mind. He is not content to live in harmony with nature. He must conquer it, solve its mysteries so that he may “have dominion over the earth and subdue it.” It prompted Albert Schweitzer to observe, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
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The new religion is neural theology. It entered the fray more than a decade ago attempting to find the “God spot” in the brain by doing brain scans of nuns. It was without success. In this age of science, the sublime can become ridiculous with the intensity of the search. Balance is seldom a factor in human consciousness in an obsessive quest for understanding. Are we not still searching for the Holy Grail?
It was Francis Bacon who said in his “Essay of Vicissitude of Things”:
“Solomon saith, there is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon given his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. We peel away the darkness to reveal the light only to encounter more darkness.”
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If you look at the great religions of man, God and love are inextricably wrapped into the politics and life of the time. Unconditional love of Jesus, alas, did not survive his death.
The early Christians were stumbling in the dark until Paul came along in the first century Christian Era (CE.). At the “Incident at Antioch,” he confronted Peter about the role of gentiles in the Church, a blowup that revealed Peter’s incomprehension of Paul’s ambition. From that point forward, Christianity became Paul’s faith. His Acts and Epistles gave structure to the faith, but also a retreat from the unconditional love and message of Jesus, as Paul advocated a conditional love of sin and atonement.
Apostle Paul is pivotal to the Church. Early Christian scholars track the apocryphal second century writings of Peter and James, Thomas and Judas, some who believed Paul a tool of Satan. In “What Paul Meant” (2006), Garry Wills discredits such claims or the legendary belief that Paul was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and critical of the teachings of Jesus. The evidence suggests Wills argument is weak.
Everything changed with Paul’s conversion in Chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles when he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus hearing the Lord say, “I am Jesus, whom you persecute, arise and go into the city, and persecute me no longer.”
Imagine Saul now Paul, an epileptic, tent maker, and fractured figure of assorted complexities, physically blinded by the event for three days, suddenly sees the Christian message as his appointed task. Passionate by temperament, intellectually gifted with an indomitable spirit, his life reversed direction.
Apostle Paul abandoned the Jewish roots of his fathers and created a proselytizing faith among the gentiles, clearly expressed in the “Letters to the Romans.” The skeletal structure of this new religion was sparse in its reference to the teachings of Jesus but dense in what Christians should believe and how they should live. His Christology of atonement, that Christians are redeemed from sin by Jesus’ death and resurrection, centered around baptism as the free gift of membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.
Scholars dispute all of this with various interpretations because of the sketchy accounts and histories extant of Christian leadership in the first century.
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Fast forward to St. Augustine. His foundational work on the gospels in the fourth century brought attention to grace as a gift, on morality as the life of the Spirit, on predestination as the rationale for eternal life, and on original sin as confirmed by Paul's "Letters to the Romans."
Augustine was a late convert to Christianity. Born in North Africa in the fourth century (354 CE), his mother was a devout Catholic, his father a pagan. He received a Catholic education but was not baptized until a man.
During his youth he had a series of love affairs, but was a serious student of philosophy. His youthful dalliance would trouble him the rest of his life. It would also influence his repressive theology and philosophy
At the age of 32 (386), he read an account of the life of St. Anthony of the Desert and heard a childlike voice tell him, “take up and read.” He took this to mean Christian theology. In 391 at the age of 37, he was ordained a priest. Five years later in 396 he became Bishop of Hippo. The rest is history.
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The theology of Original Sin and the necessity of Baptism to remove it is largely that of this saint. It was Augustine that visualized Hell as a terrible place. Hell had only been a vague notion before. As a man of the cloth, he painted sexual love with Satan’s brush. Before his time, Satan was also a vague notion. Now, Satan took on an anthropomorphic character, a dastardly creature that evolved, over time, into a red devil with horns and a tail, the personification of evil. Augustine didn’t create this caricature but he did help seed it.
This would have unintended consequences. James Cleugh in “Love Locked Out” (1963), shows how this increased, rather than reduced, promiscuity fueling a new industry, pornography. A mental chastity belt confined love making to marriage and procreation. This Augustinian influenced dogma commenced to see sex and love in dualistic Manichean terms of immorality and sin. My wonder is if St. Augustine would be surprised to learn that some sociological studies indicate a disproportionate number of prostitutes have a Catholic background.
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Dante Alighieri would perfect the imagery of Hell (“Inferno”) in his “Divine Comedy” (1320). Dante, who was an engineer as well as a poet and artist, created Hell on a grand architectural scale marrying the grotesque with the comical. For instance, fortune-tellers in Dante’s Inferno have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, as that was what they had tried to do in life. Catholic popes are depicted as the greatest sinners of all, residing in the ninth or lowest circle of Hell for their pride and corruption.
Still, Hell down through the ages has frightened little children with images of sinners burning for eternity in fire and brimstone. Priests and nuns used this in my day to get students to behave, and it worked.
Fear, not love, has been the prescription for order. Consequently, there appears little evidence that the Jesus message has survived. Jesus never spoke of the “seven deadly sins” (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) much less mortal sin. These descriptions didn’t come into vogue until the fourteenth century.
Christianity is an evolving religion, and has changed progressively from its conception more than 2,000 years ago. It still professes to be about love but appears obsessed with sin. Blame it on St. Augustine. He was fixated with sin (see his “Confessions”). Catholicism in particular and Christianity have an Augustinian aspect. With television evangelists, love is silent; sin is loud. Hell and the seven deadly sins are largely part of their corporate theology.
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Religion is dominated by politics, by the need for power, not love, for strength, not goodness, for souls, not spiritual fulfillment. The Catholic Church was founded on politics. Constantine in the fourth century made it the religion of the Roman Empire. The Catholic Church for centuries had its own army, and was a powerful feudal landlord, as a matter of fact, it still is.
The Holy Crusades were a religiously sanctioned military campaign waged by Christian Europe to restore Christian control of the Holy Land. These wars were fought over a period of nearly 200 years (1095 – 1291), depleting the treasury of the Church, France and the Holy Roman Empire. They fueled mistrust and hostilities across the empire, and were not holy and certainly not Christian. They had far reaching political, economic, and social consequences extending into contemporary times.
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It could be argued that without the Roman Catholic Church there would be no Western Civilization. Modern science was born in the Church. Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five centuries before Adam Smith. The Church invented the university. Western law grew out of Church canon law, which was introduced by St. Augustine and St. Aquinas. Indeed, the human aspect in all its sublime to ridiculous sojourns can be traced back to that foundation. With such formalism, love hardly had a chance.
* * *
Love was not on display in the twelfth century when the Church resorted to an ecclesiastical proscription of torture and execution for heresy. The interrogating body formed for this work was known as “the Inquisition.” Dark as the Inquisition, it still survives. Twentieth century Pope Pius X, later canonized a saint, renamed the Inquisition the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.” Then in 1965, it was renamed the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which it remains to this day. Punishment in the modern era is more likely to be ostracism from Church membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.
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Whether you believe in God or the Christ of Christianity, there is historical evidence that Jesus did live and died on the cross, and that his death was an expression of love. Christianity since has claimed to be the religion of love although it has often stumbled and displayed quite the opposite. Distortion of message and fanaticism is seemingly common to all religions. Lest we forget Christian missionaries supported by sixteenth century Spanish Conquistadors annihilated Latin American cultures and decimated their pagan religions and imposed Christianity. How’s that for love?
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WAS IT PHILOSOPHERS?
We have survived the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Revolution, Freudianism, and now are in the postmodern era with a decidedly dystopian aspect.
The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” have been busy. The twentieth century featured:
(1) The White horse of Conquest with first Adolf Hitler’s failure and then Lenin and Stalin’s more subtle attempt to spread global Communism leading to the Cold War.
(2) The Red horse of War ended the nineteenth century with the Spanish American War only to be followed in the twentieth century by WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, and several smaller bloody civil wars of ethnic cleansing across the globe.
(3) The Black horse of Famine made a wide swath across Africa due to drought, pollution, civil war, and the failure of government. Of the world’s six billion souls one billion go to bed hungry every day with a child dying of hunger every six seconds. Add to this the misery of the AIDS pandemic that cuts another swath across the globe, but never more fatally than in Africa.
(4) The Pale Green horse of Death saw over 100 million dying in twentieth century wars and tens of millions more dying of AIDS, numbers far in excess of the Black Death of the Middle Ages. There was the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews perished. And then there was United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands perished but it ended WWII in the Pacific. As society has grown more technologically sophisticated, military and civilian casualties have grown exponentially. More died in twentieth century wars than the previous ten centuries of mortal combat combined.
Science is the new secular religion with technology its acolyte. The sacred cannot be separated from the profane. Philosophy is lost in this conundrum as philosophers are all too human. Although they see what others take for granted, ponder it, sense trends buried in it, their hard and soft wiring, experience and consciousness limit their ideas. We sometimes forget that.
Imagine a philosopher is looking out of a bay window on the top floor of a prominent building with darting humanity happily scurrying about below. In one sense he is separated from the heat and tension of the moment, but in another overwhelmed with its implications. Compelled by his nature to make sense of things, he paints the activity with the broad brush of his intellect and biases.
Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein come to mind. They attempted to bypass man’s ambiguity, staying within the hygienic realm of mathematics. Alas, even there they couldn’t escape their roots. This leaked through their brilliance to reveal a common despair as both men thought of suicide. Wittgenstein once told a friend that before he discovered philosophy he endured nine years of loneliness and suffering. Russell hid his loneliness in being a bit of a rake.
* * *
Dsytopian philosophers have noted an increasingly loveless world. To widen consciousness of this fact they often chose poetry, allegory, fiction and science fiction as vehicles of expression.
Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” (1932) presents the bizarre world of cloning.
Yevgeny Zamyatin in “We” (1921) paints a portrait of a totally controlled environment (OneState) organized around mathematical precision. People no longer have surnames but are designated by numbers, and marched in-step while dressed in identical clothing.
Ayn Rand in “Anthem” (1938) has the personal pronoun “I” disappear from language. Individualism is extinct, as mankind has entered a new dark age of total communal collectivism.
Poet T. S. Eliot reduces man to a cipher in “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday.”
Margaret Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) visualizes the Republic of Gilead (a.k.a. United States) as a wasteland of nuclear, biological and chemical pollution after a terrorist attack. The population has been rendered sterile with leadership wiped out as the President and all members of Congress have been killed.
Kurt Vonnegut in “Player Piano” (1952) pictures a totally mechanized society that has eliminated the need for anyone to work. This creates a running conflict between the wealthy upper class of engineers and managers who keep society running, while everyone else, who have nothing to do, being replaced by machines.
George Orwell in “I984” (1948) introduces Big Brother who is watching our every move with audio and visual electronic devices. Big Brother has created a new vocabulary of meaning which is the flip side of what had meaning before: war is now peace, evil is good, and hate is love.
Anthony Burgess in “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) has criminals taking on the role of the police. Law and order are a thing of the past. Free will is neutralized and manipulated with chemical and visual programming. Burgess slang entered the popular culture of the time.
In Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” (1994) a utopian world spins off into dystopia. Jonas is selected to be the inheritor of the position of “Receiver of Memory,” where all the memories, of the time before “Sameness,” were stored. As Jonas receives the memories from the previous receiver (The Giver), he discovers how shallow his community has become and aborts the role.
* * *
One might complain that these pedestrian philosophers unfairly attack a caricature of the technological revolution. Remember they are looking down from their elevated perch far above the commotion and maddening crowd.
Love is noticeably absent in these dystopian imaginings. They do however target the failure of religious fundamentalism, misguided technology, scorched earth environmental policy, teenage angst, indifferent parenting, precocious sexuality and juvenile delinquency, genetic modification and bioengineering, the relentless drive of amoral corpocracy, and the cruelty and wickedness that transpires when man’s humanity is unhinged from its roots.
* * *
WAS IT NIETZSCHE?
Nietzsche is different. He saw the rise of secular society and the problems likely to face a postmodern Western civilization. Well informed in Scriptural, historical theology, and doctrinal subtleties of the West, his account of Christian theology in the postmodern world has proven prophetic. As was the case with Freud in his psychological revolution, however, Nietzsche has been misread and misunderstood.
The son of a clergyman, he attacked Christianity because there was so much of its moral spirit in him. His philosophy was an attempt to balance and correct by violent contradiction his irresistible tendency to gentleness, kindness and peace. Often those most controversial and provocative have great affection for that which they attack.
At eighteen, he lost his faith in the God of his fathers in a calamitous cultural crisis. Left godless, he spent the remainder of his life looking for a new deity. He thought he found one in the Superman. He wrote that he had taken the change from God to Superman easily. He didn’t. He had the habit of easily deceiving himself. In fact, he displayed his cynicism as if he had lost everything in a single throw of the dice.
This was so because religion was the marrow of his life. Now, empty of meaning and his once revered anchor, he was forced to go forward. As happens with great men, the struggle often mirrors the struggle of the times.
In any case, he escaped in writing, most poignantly about his new teacher, Zoraster, and his new god, Superman. Yet, in all of his writings, the soul can be seen to rise stubbornly and overflow with a desire for banal love and societal connection. He denied this, of course, but the shadow of the Christian God he abandoned was always there. That is most apparent in his famous but ambivalent report, “God is dead!”
Nietzsche has a madman running through the streets crying, “God is dead!” He presents the madman in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1961) as a sincerely religious and concerned man for the spiritual condition of the modern world. Nietzsche is affirming that the meaning of life is to be found in human terms, that spirituality was never more important. His claim is that it cannot be found in a church or in a god but in the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.
The audience of the madman is of a scientific and material persuasion. This audience prides itself on having renounced religious superstition but is unaware of the brewing crisis. It cannot imagine it has lost anything as it rearranges its life around entirely secular goals. It doesn’t notice the lost, in part because it has maintained the habits that religion had always fostered, particularly the habit of faith, having replaced faith in God now with faith in science.
This new faith, Nietzsche is saying, is no improvement over the old. He combines his statement of “God is dead” with a critique of modern faith in scientific materialism. A knowing society imagines it has replaced fables with facts, but Nietzsche sees the dominance of scientific accounts as substituting one self-denigrating myth for another. If anything, he is saying, the scientific myth is worse. Faith in God eroded our confidence in our own human powers, he argues, which is the basis of his cynicism, but at least it encouraged the belief we have dignity as creations of God whom God took seriously.
The myth of science by contrasts, he insists, suggests the belief that our existence is accidental and that we are organisms on an obscure planet on the periphery of the universe. His problem with religion is its projection of our power onto God, that forces a sense of worthlessness without God, but this is nothing compared with the nihilism he sees that science promotes.
Nietzsche hopes for a rebirth of spirituality with a renewed appreciation of life and nature and man. The shift of the West from a Christian to a secular culture was inevitable, he claims, as the Christian account became more abstract and increasingly divorced from personal experience. Christianity lost connection with people. Failing to recognize man’s changing consciousness and requirements to cope in a more demanding world, Christianity declared war on the body, denounced man’s liberating passions and appetites and relegated them to sources of sin. This made man increasingly self-conscious, self-negating, and uptight.
His problem with Christianity is well known. His counsel for mending the spirit is not. He encourages the embracing of life experience, of asserting our individual virtues and powers, but offers no “how to” formula. He speaks of the “innocence of the senses” and for approaching the world openly, naturally, without trying to improve our wounded sense of inadequacy, but to learn to love the world and ourselves on its terms.
This is a side of Nietzsche seldom captured, the side that would embrace life and love in deference to Christian sin and atonement. He had the madman crying through the streets, “God is dead,” but the evidence is equally compelling that love was dead as well.
* * *
WAS IT CAPITALISM?
Recently, a woman was interviewed on Nightly News with Brian Williams on NBCTV. She is a Bank of American credit card holder. She has seen her service charges increase from 7 to 15 to 30 percent on the unpaid balance of her credit card in a matter of months. She carries a credit balance of more than $10,000 on her card. Economic circumstances forced her to use her card excessively during this past year, and now she is being punished for doing so.
Bank of America, knowing that in February 2010, usury limitations are going to be placed on credit cards, a bank which took billions of taxpayer dollars in bailout funds, is willing to essentially extort money from those least able to pay while it can. This is not an isolated incident.
Democratic capitalism has become an oxymoron.
Democracy sponsors drift. It gives permission to institutions to do as they please, which means democracy lacks a coherent and interdependent approach in crisis in the enthronement of liberty and chaos. Democracy worships mediocrity and distrusts excellence. Democracy literally frustrates the possibility of responsible leadership, especially in crisis, as those elected represent the lowest common denominator of society, as voters vote with their hearts not their heads.
Capitalism encourages greed. Capitalism is an economic and social system in which capital is privately controlled by an elite few. More than 50 percent of Americans may own stock, but the wealth creators or the top 10 percent control the economy. Labor, goods and capital are traded in free markets, and profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries. That is the comic book version.
The reality is that investment and commercial banks that handle electronic transfers take huge risks leveraging capital to the tune of as much as $45 invested for every $1 actually held in securities. With such leverage, Wall Street is able to amass gigantic profits justifying bonuses totaling billions, but with the potential of reeking havoc on the economy when it tanks. Then Wall Street falls to Main Street to bail it out, as in the recent subprime real estate meltdown.
* * *
Americans are paying for this directly, but also indirectly like that lady with the $10,000 credit card debt. She is going to pay and pay mightily for it, not the banks, not the big brokerage houses. They are safe. They have returned to their lair. They have sold taxpayers on the myth that they are too big to fail. Now, a year later, these banks are operating with the same amoral avarice and zeal as they had before. Lobbyists on Capitol Hill are ubiquitously pulling the strings for them with the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government obligingly responding in puppet fashion. Have no fear, the more things change the more they shall remain the same.
Capitalism postulates the idea that the invisible hand of the free market forces self-interest, competition, and supply and demand to reallocate wealth and regulate resources in society. After repeatedly finding this to be false, the myth and the belief still hold as the puppet masters are in charge.
* * *
In the span of eighty years (1929 – 2009), we have had a Great Depression and a Great Recession. We are a debtor nation and have seen the U.S. dollar decline against foreign currency, especially the Euro. The national debt continues to balloon, the trade deficit to climb and seventeen million American workers are unemployed with another 10 million underemployed.
The economy has changed radically from jobs in manufacturing to information technology, from blue collar to white collar, something that was apparent thirty years ago. Yet nothing was or has been done systemically to deal with the drift other than to mount cosmetic changes. Gas guzzling automobiles were anachronistic decades ago, but Detroit continued to produce them. Medical insurance is the highest per capita in the world yet 40 million Americans are still uninsured. More money is allocated to education yet our students in math and science skills compare unfavorably with nations allocating far less to education. Given this, how do you suppose most Americans are feeling? The answer is apparently terrific!
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index surveys 1,000 Americans daily, 350 days a year to measure prevailing attitudes. It has found people are more optimistic today than they were a year ago (88% versus 84%). They have higher expectations in matters of finance and love (70% versus 61%) and 87 percent of those surveyed expect this holiday season to be happier than the last even though they will spend less money.
This defines COMPLACENCY in capital letters. Not a note of worry about joining the unemployed much less the underemployed. Be optimistic, man, think positively, wish for the best, have the audacity to hope! Sound familiar?
Will it be too late when we finally “get it”? Is our arrogance so impenetrable that we’re incapable of embracing reality? Freud writes in “The Future of an Illusion”(1961):
“An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error . . .It was an illusion of Columbus that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies . . .The part played in his wish is very clear . . .What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions . . .In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality.”
* * *
Reality, economists tell us, is that 2010 and 2011 are likely to be tougher years than 2009. The loss of American jobs to Europe and Asia is expected to continue, not decrease. Lobbyists can be expected to continue to promote corporate self-interest. Corpocracy, in defiance of the congressional agenda, will continue to cut jobs to improve its bottom line. If this is a recipe for happiness, my wonder is what constitutes misery? Apparently, our civil religion, money, remains the opium of the people.
How long can a false positive hold? How long are working Americans willing to take it on the chin? I don’t know the answer. The spirit lives in a body that has to be fed, clothed and housed, and a mind that needs the pride of some kind of life supporting work. Americans love to work. Industry is a romance of the spirit that cannot be denied. Take work away from Americans, and they might as well be dead. This is counterfeit capitalism. Are you listening?
* * *
In “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” (2005), author Thomas E. Woods, Jr., gives the Church credit for capitalism and free markets. Woods makes reference to the work of fourteenth century Jean Buridan (1300 – 1358) who showed how money emerged freely and spontaneously on the open market, first as a useful commodity and then as a medium of exchange.
Fast forward to the sixteenth century. Capitalism truly took off in concert with the Protestant Reformation. Economist and sociologist Max Weber studied the influence of John Calvin and the French theologian’s idea of “The Elected,” or the chosen. Weber found the response to Calvin’s secular theology spectacular. He attempted to capture this in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”(1958). Weber writes:
“The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism . . . Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least the rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.”
There was little restraint evident with “The Elected,” as it came to dominate Europe economically changing the face of capitalism forever.
* * *
Fast forward again to the nineteenth century and the “Robber Barons.” They exemplified White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite, and set the stage for the making of money to become America’s civil religion. Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller showed no Weber restraint. In fact, they hired thugs as union busters, created monopolies and held the United States in economic hostage to their demands in steel, oil and timber as they had control of shipping and the shipping lanes, as well as the railroads and railroad lines.
* * *
Now, in the twenty-first century, the broken world cannot be mended with wishful thinking. Two questions come to mind with regard to material (economics) and spiritual (love) needs of man:
(1) What matters most: money or happiness, and are they mutually inclusive?
(2) What has freedom to do with love and happiness and economic success?
Earlier I suggested that we have no middle class; that the majority of us are members of the “the working poor”; that that includes those making as much as $350,000 a year. I sense that Weber’s bourgeois capitalism is on life support here, but not yet dead.
That notwithstanding, the working poor still sees itself as rich but suffering “Puritan anxiety,” or never being “rich” enough. Tempering the rational with the irrational impulse has faded to a dream, as the pressure to have more toys, toys it cannot afford, has not yet peaked. Voodoo economics and counterfeit capitalism now prevail.
The idea no one can ever have enough money is equated with happiness and tied to economic security. Consequently, want is made out to be need, optimism is preferred to reality, wishful thinking is substituted for purposeful action, and frantic cell phone and texting traffic is an escape from thinking.
Are statistical surveys arbiters of self-denial? Pollsters have yet to figure out that people are inclined to say what media has programmed them to think. Virtual reality has become reality without anyone noticing. Complacency is a trance as real as an acid trip in the 1960s that never ended.
* * *
There is nothing wrong with being rich if the price is not too high. Nor is there anything romantic about being poor. But when you are poor because you cannot stop spending, you kill your capacity to love, your freedom to do, and your power to have control of your life.
The proper goal of society is not to deify millionaires and billionaires but to distribute economic wealth so that wealth creators and wealth consumers are on the same page.
As to the matter of freedom, its price has been too high for most Americans to embrace. They have given freedom up without a fuss. We have become increasingly controlled and increasingly the same. Being daffy or dotty, or being out of step with others has disappeared in a culture of sameness. We have become true believers in being connected, and thus have lost our capacity for individual identity. The result? An amalgamated homogenous machine of mass mediocrity.
* * *
Isaiah Berlin has reduced this perplexing polarity to positive and negative freedom.
Negative freedom refers to freedom without constraints, without interference from other people. We display negative freedom to the extent that we have total control of our actions without encountering barriers. It follows therefore that negative freedom places strong limitations on the activities of the state.
Positive freedom is less an individual proposition than a group norm. The state has essential control of our life within a network of constraints and barriers meant to protect us from others and ourselves, or from disturbing or threatening interferences. Homeland Security is an organ of positive freedom.
No surprise here, the rich favor negative freedom. The poor favor positive freedom. The rich prefer as little interference as possible from government regulators. Wealth creators – entrepreneurs – believe positive freedom or regulation neutralizes their efforts. The poor expect support from unions, government agencies, and the United States Congress for their socio-economic welfare. The poor seek protection from those that would exploit them and are willing to give up freedom for such guarantees.
Positive freedom thrives in a climate where there is a disinclination to take charge or responsibility for outcomes. Security is considered more precious than freedom, failing to realize that security so realized is a recipe for counterdependence and subjugation.
On balance, negative freedom is precious but few believe they can afford it. Positive freedom, if not inherently paternalistic, involves external manipulation and control. Working in a corporation in a hierarchically structured organization with managers and workers precisely defined along sacrosanct lines is the epitome of positive freedom. Ironically, managers and engineers think of themselves driven by negative freedom when the workplace climate is the antithesis of such freedom. The command and control hierarchy of corpocracy is a reactive rather than a “take charge” environment. That said it is sobering to realize we all live in a corporate culture. We are a crisis-managed society ever reacting rather than anticipating our problems.
Currently, Congress, the State Department, the Defense Department, and National Security are pointing fingers as to why nobody picked up on Major Hasan’s religious fanaticism before he killed thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood. This failure was consistent with a pattern. Nobody apparently saw the terrorist attack coming on the Twin Towers, the economic meltdown coming, or even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. My wonder is why this is not more troubling.
* * *
The rich are inclined to be inner directed; the poor outer directed. The poor tend to abandon their power as a rule to union leadership and corporate management. There was a time early in the last century, however, when workers had control of their work, but unions persuaded them to give up control for pay and benefits. Now, most of these jobs are gone and the freedom surrendered for job protection and security with them.
* * *
In the perpetual struggle between security and freedom, workers stand in the front line. Now in the era of Homeland Security, surveillance has been ratchet up so that not even the affluent can escape Orwell’s “Big Brother.”
Disembodied voices boom out their futile admonitions at shopping malls, airports and workplaces. Cameras track out our every turning as we walk the streets, looking down from tall buildings, while cameras at traffic lights register vehicles going through stop signs. Then there are always unmarked police cars roaming the streets and sitting on hills waiting to tag vehicular violators. It is also possible that cell phones and Internet activity is monitored. Yet, still more sinister than these irritations is the creeping privatizing of security to corporate contractors. Life appears to be increasingly imitating Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange.”
Americans are not happy with these countless checks and regulations but they are not alone. It has become a condition of urban life in Europe as well British author Anna Minton shows this in her new book, “Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City” (2009).
The affluent, and now many moderate earners have embraced positive freedom by migrating to gated communities or luxury condominiums. These are controlled, and pan optically spied on by private companies whose rules, regulations and sub-clauses prescribe behavior as tightly as a prison. Similar private companies keep a watchful eye for vagaries and eccentrics in commercial malls that might threaten the ethics of consumer conformity. Such segregation is carried out in the name of security. But does it work; do barriers, guards, and cameras make people feel safer? Minton says they don’t. In fact she claims they make people more fearful.
* * *
The paradox of the times is the more we seek security the less secure we are; the more dependent we are on mobile electronics the greater the barriers between us; the more physically we isolate ourselves from each other the more afraid we are to open our doors to strangers; the more we accede power and control to others to alleviate our fears the more fearful we become. Positive and negative freedom is not mutually exclusive but a complementary proposition.
It is a matter of balance. That is where love comes in, self-love, as it will not tolerate unreasonable intrusion. Self-love will embrace its insecurity not run from it; self-love will say, “No, thank you,” when unwanted protection is offered but not asked for; self-love will say, “No, I won’t go,” when what is asked of us is contrary to our self-interests.
Modern walls are being built around us because it is profitable business. The old saw still holds true, the more others do for us, whatever the nature of the doing, the less we are free. Yes, there is crime on our streets but there is much more peace. Remember that.
* * *
Finally, capitalism has become counterfeit because:
(1) The economic level of consumer confidence has tanked;
(2) Consumers have lost trust in producers, in banks, and elected politicians as custodians of the economy; they expected them to play fair ball and they haven’t;
(3) People in general have had their fill of predatory corporations such as Enron and predatory capital managers such as Bernard Madoff; this bad faith has translated into being fed up with financial institutions in general;
(4) Ordinary wage earners and small investors feel let down and exploited by a Federal Reserve too chummy with Wall Street at Main Street’s expense. It has allowed the dollar to continue its decline and jobs with it;
(5) The narrative of economists has been cheery before, during and after the economic meltdown. The story line has been replete with mathematical models these economists favor, which have proved to be as reliable as reading tealeaves. What is more confusing is that many American economists have won Nobel Prizes in Economics parading these mathematical models.
China and India are showing there are many routes to growth and development. Americans have always trusted the system, but now are not so sure. They don’t know the answer or whom to trust. They feel as if left in limbo. They need guidance, but please, no more explanatory models! Tell us where we are, no more claptrap! If forecasting is voodoo economics, tell us. If you don’t have a clue, tell us that, too. Stimulate our spirit with a little candor. That is where love resides. Behavior will follow including a synergy usually only reserved for wartime or national disaster.
* * *
LOVE IS ENOUGH
Man has left the cave but the cave has not left man.
Man no longer fears the beast of nature because he can make machines stronger, faster and more killing.
Man can explore the depths of the oceans, and the remote planets of our universe. He sends satellites into space, and instantly communicates with people across the world by cell phone or the Internet. He can control planes and trains by remote control, clone life by genetic manipulation, tear down or create mountains. But he cannot stop the killing, the unnecessary starvation of millions of innocent people.
Man cannot rise above war, or rapacious crimes against humanity. Nor can he stop himself from heating up the planet or persuade himself to live in harmony with nature. Who does he blame? Not himself. Not his excesses. Not his lifestyle. Not technology. Man blames God and religion for his twisted soul.
Yet, God and soul emanate from instinctive love, a love that makes the world go around. Nature is bridged by science and religion by love, complements that make this hostile planet a tolerable earthly home. Science solves one mystery and creates ten others. Technology takes science and creates wonders at breakneck speed failing to note, much less measure, what has been lost for what has been gained.
Science is important but love is enough. Love gives meaning and balance to life. Without love, man is a runaway killing machine with an incessant appetite for war.
Rogue nations fueled by hate threaten the very survival of man. Secular society has replaced religion with science, looking past its abuses to create bionic man and woman, impervious to growing psychic depression.
The soul cannot be quantified nor can God or love. A billionaire cannot buy love, but a homeless person can possess it, as it is priceless.
Love is to the soul what nourishment is to the body. If you look at the great religions, God and Love are intertwined and interchangeable.
* * *
There is much talk in this secular age of romantic love, sexual love, possessive love, but these are but expressions of lust, not love. We speak of marital love as being a 50-50 proposition, as if love were a capitalistic expression. Marital combat is the result, which is a zero sum game that leads many to divorce. Marital love is a 100-100 proposition, or agape love. It involves respect, trust and acceptance of each other, unconditionally. Anything less is Eros in disguise looking for a replaceable love object to beef up a waning libido. Viagra is part of love’s great deception.
* * *
We live in a paranoid age. We accuse the Taliban and Al-Qaeda of atrocities when we have no familiarity with our own. We see Islam as a satanic religion and label anyone to question Christianity an anti-Christ. Most religions are fundamentally based on love. Something we sometimes forget.
Will love as it once was appreciated come back? Not in my lifetime. We are too enamored of things, too dizzy with technology and global configurations to realize everything, the world over, are local.
But is there still love? I don’t see it; I don’t feel it; I don’t hear it; I just hear noise. I hear noise in music, I see it in art, I read it in literature. I don’t think our best days are ahead of us. I don’t think we are through our worse.
Consider these sobering words of Anton Chekhov in “The Wife and Other Stories” (1985):
“There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him – disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others”
* * *
PS. Forgive me for how clumsy my attempt has been to convey the critical nature of love. Hate is so much easier to express, love so difficult to convey.
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