IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS – RESPONSE FROM GERMANY – A CANADIAN RESPONSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 31, 2010
* * *
A READER FROM CANADA WRITES:
Hello Jim,
This is interesting but the problem being discussed surely qualifies as a "complex problem" or fuzzball, as Bill Livingston would say.
In a broad sense, this appears to be the "universal scenario" in operation - in the U.S. and Germany.
Everyone agrees there is a problem and then they approach that problem in typical bureaucratic fashion with off the shelf solutions (the feeding frenzy).
I think Bill would say a solution starts with the "front end", don't you? Maybe the proof is in how long the problem has been talked about but how little has changed and, in fact, has worsened.
Thanks for keeping me in the loop.
Best wishes,
George
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
You couldn’t be more on the money. But as I’ve implied, this is not natural to either politicians or to people in general. Moreover, it is not only a problem in the United States and Germany, but in all advanced technological societies.
We are inclined to attack symptoms and call them “causes” in a crisis management strategy, and wonder why we never get off the dime.
William L. Livingston IV has dedicated his life to unraveling this societal warp. To his credit, despite programmed noise preventing people from hearing and heeding him, he perseveres.
My criticism of him is the same criticism I direct at myself. It is our responsibility to find someway through this fog to make connection. Ideas from both of us have been stolen as fodder to the pabulum of HYPE, as one reader pointed out recently regarding my “SIX SILENT KILLERS” (1998).
My hope is that the design phase, the “front end” as you put it, the careful defining of the problem before organizing some action, will eventually get through and be manifested.
It is why the emphasis in my missives in interpreting Livingston’s D4P has been on these contributing factors that he elaborates on in his book:
(1) Institutional infallibility; (2) business as usual; (3) reifying the status quo; (4) hindsight thinking; and (5) attempting to change culture.
As you point out, we are locked into repeating our problems because we use the same thinking that caused them. It is impossible to get beyond our problems as no less than Einstein has reminded us when we are prisoners to the thinking that formed them.
In Livingston’s next edition of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION, the centerpiece will be the incontrovertible Standard of Care of design. He will challenge any auditor in this next rendition on an objective, rational argument against the claim. Stay tuned.
Be always well,
Jim
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPER -- RESPONSE FROM GERMANY
IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS – RESPONSE FROM GERMANY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 31, 2010
REFERENCE:
This is a response to the writer who posed some questions regarding the original missive on this subject (See In Defense of Newspapers -- Another Response, August 30, 2010).
* * *
A READER WRITES FROM GERMANY:
Jim,
For whatever it may be worth, here are a few comments to your recent exchange:
From my point of view of someone who has worked extensively in the United States, as have my children, but from the perspective of German citizen, the size of an economy is not a decisive factor for an economy.
In fact perhaps a larger economy has even the advantage not to be as fickle as smaller ones, because they have more resistance to drastic changes.
As you rightfully mentioned, it is more a question of attitude, that is, the commitment to accomplish a real good job. But prosperity makes one complacent and driven by other things than the job.
Discrimination (i.e. for color etc.) is often taken as an excuse for other deficiencies. The political system denies that there are natural differences in strengths and weaknesses as there are as well in cultures.
For instance, why do blacks generally not care to read Shelby Steele, an African American, or other books critical of their race, books designed to give them insight into their problems, and alternatives to extrapolating them from such problems?
In the beginning of industrialization, there was a huge need for workers to do simple routines, now machines replace them.
Higher intelligence is now required for getting a professional occupation. It is not only a question of opportunity. It is also a question to have the passion to perform.
Coming back to the first question of your responder, Germany as have other European countries has a far smaller economy than the U.S. That said we have amazingly similar problems. For example, we have a much higher percentage of immigrants from Islamic countries. Unfortunately, our politicians like those in your United States don't have the wisdom to find the right answers.
Be always well
M
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
M,
You have crystallized the problem in succinct terms. It is not an American or German problem. It is a problem of Western democracies, a problem brought on by shortsightedness.
After World War Two you may recall, Germany exploded in growth. It was called an economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder). German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was anointed a hero here in the United States, the “father of the German economic miracle” along with his Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard.
Devastated by war with a large component of the male population sacrificed to that war effort, you may recall a policy of bringing into Germany indentured workers from Turkey was established. Now, as you point out, that Islamic component is a significant part of the German population, and has no intentions of returning to its Turkey homeland.
I saw the same thing in South Africa when I was there in the 1960s. Indentured workers from India were brought into the country to work the sugar plantations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and stayed and multiplied in the Natal Province. As a matter of fact, Mahatma Gandhi launched his drive for India’s independence in South Africa after WWI.
The reason for mentioning this is that the consequences of the actions of politicians often are not realized for generations.
That said, as I am a fan of DW-TV, I know that most people of Turkish or Islamic descent, while remaining essentially in their own community, have continued to contribute. There is a radical fringe that creates problems, people who refuse to learn German or assimilate into the German culture.
You are right, however, I don’t think most Americans know how significant this problem is for Germany, especially in these trying times. We make such a big thing of undocumented workers, which pales in comparison to what Germany must deal with on a national basis.
* * *
Comedian Bill Cosby, a man who has a doctorate in education, has been severely criticized by his own people when he has lectured them on getting off their duffs and welfare rolls and doing something.
Again, as I’ve said many times in other missives, we have programmed dependence into African Americans after using them for more than one hundred years as slaves. We have an African American President, but we will never get beyond the guilt of that subjugation. It is part of our national heritage.
I was an angry young man. Now I am a crotchety old man. I’ve often wondered what I would have been had I been born black instead of white with the same temperament. To put it another way, I can identify with Bill Cosby.
Thank you for your precise analysis. It is wonderful to have this media of exchange. I feel honored to have you as friend and feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 31, 2010
REFERENCE:
This is a response to the writer who posed some questions regarding the original missive on this subject (See In Defense of Newspapers -- Another Response, August 30, 2010).
* * *
A READER WRITES FROM GERMANY:
Jim,
For whatever it may be worth, here are a few comments to your recent exchange:
From my point of view of someone who has worked extensively in the United States, as have my children, but from the perspective of German citizen, the size of an economy is not a decisive factor for an economy.
In fact perhaps a larger economy has even the advantage not to be as fickle as smaller ones, because they have more resistance to drastic changes.
As you rightfully mentioned, it is more a question of attitude, that is, the commitment to accomplish a real good job. But prosperity makes one complacent and driven by other things than the job.
Discrimination (i.e. for color etc.) is often taken as an excuse for other deficiencies. The political system denies that there are natural differences in strengths and weaknesses as there are as well in cultures.
For instance, why do blacks generally not care to read Shelby Steele, an African American, or other books critical of their race, books designed to give them insight into their problems, and alternatives to extrapolating them from such problems?
In the beginning of industrialization, there was a huge need for workers to do simple routines, now machines replace them.
Higher intelligence is now required for getting a professional occupation. It is not only a question of opportunity. It is also a question to have the passion to perform.
Coming back to the first question of your responder, Germany as have other European countries has a far smaller economy than the U.S. That said we have amazingly similar problems. For example, we have a much higher percentage of immigrants from Islamic countries. Unfortunately, our politicians like those in your United States don't have the wisdom to find the right answers.
Be always well
M
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
M,
You have crystallized the problem in succinct terms. It is not an American or German problem. It is a problem of Western democracies, a problem brought on by shortsightedness.
After World War Two you may recall, Germany exploded in growth. It was called an economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder). German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was anointed a hero here in the United States, the “father of the German economic miracle” along with his Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard.
Devastated by war with a large component of the male population sacrificed to that war effort, you may recall a policy of bringing into Germany indentured workers from Turkey was established. Now, as you point out, that Islamic component is a significant part of the German population, and has no intentions of returning to its Turkey homeland.
I saw the same thing in South Africa when I was there in the 1960s. Indentured workers from India were brought into the country to work the sugar plantations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and stayed and multiplied in the Natal Province. As a matter of fact, Mahatma Gandhi launched his drive for India’s independence in South Africa after WWI.
The reason for mentioning this is that the consequences of the actions of politicians often are not realized for generations.
That said, as I am a fan of DW-TV, I know that most people of Turkish or Islamic descent, while remaining essentially in their own community, have continued to contribute. There is a radical fringe that creates problems, people who refuse to learn German or assimilate into the German culture.
You are right, however, I don’t think most Americans know how significant this problem is for Germany, especially in these trying times. We make such a big thing of undocumented workers, which pales in comparison to what Germany must deal with on a national basis.
* * *
Comedian Bill Cosby, a man who has a doctorate in education, has been severely criticized by his own people when he has lectured them on getting off their duffs and welfare rolls and doing something.
Again, as I’ve said many times in other missives, we have programmed dependence into African Americans after using them for more than one hundred years as slaves. We have an African American President, but we will never get beyond the guilt of that subjugation. It is part of our national heritage.
I was an angry young man. Now I am a crotchety old man. I’ve often wondered what I would have been had I been born black instead of white with the same temperament. To put it another way, I can identify with Bill Cosby.
Thank you for your precise analysis. It is wonderful to have this media of exchange. I feel honored to have you as friend and feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you.
Be always well,
Jim
Monday, August 30, 2010
IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS -- ANOTHER RESPONSE!
IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS – ANOTHER RESPONSE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010
REFERENCE:
This little missive has generated quite a response. I cannot acknowledge much less publish all of your comments, but I can share with you a representative sample of them. I am most pleased that I am hearing from contemporaries who shared similar experiences to mine, and have had the temerity to share thoughts. Here is one.
* * *
READER NO. 1 WRITES:
Jim,
I always enjoy your musings on different subjects, most of which I am interested in. My early mornings are taken up about like yours, reading sports and editorials first, though at about 7 AM not 5. I'd like to ask you a couple questions:
QUESTION NO. ONE:
Isn't it a little easier for Germany and England to attack their recession than it is ours, because their countries are smaller, and their political systems a little more controllable?
I wonder if we haven't let our country get so far out of control, so messed up and broken, with outgo growing and income not, that we are in a difficult position to correct.
QUESTION NO. TWO:
Although you grew up as I did in a town with few blacks, I'm sure you have lived where the situation is different and have seen the problems. There again, I wonder how we can correct it.
I live in South Carolina (40% black, mostly poor). We have handled the racial situation in schools and society poorly. We dumb down our public schools to suit the mores of the blacks and pacify them.
Graduation rates are terrible, as our job opportunities.
Our factory jobs that employed high school graduates have moved and mostly only higher tech and automotive jobs requiring tech ed or college are available, increasing the problems of welfare, unemployment, lack of motivation, and increased crime.
Both whites and blacks are tired of it and blame each other.
Now, undocumented Mexicans are getting to be an increasing problem making a bad problem: employment, health care, education, welfare, crime and public cost worse.
It seems to me the politicians at all levels blame each other, and on both sides spend much money to get elected, as you pointed out, and for which they owe favors, then start on getting reelected, yet the problems are never solved.
We need more income and yet everyone wants lower taxes,
With our constitution and government and the lack of statesmen (everything is more money, more power), I question how we can straighten out our problem.
I think Congress should be reorganized, take away retirement and benefits, and have term limits, limit or eliminate lobbyists. But how would we get Congress to vote against itself?
I think we need to quit fighting no win, wasteful wars, bring our troops home, not have the military dictate our budget, overhaul our welfare system, maybe localize it with rules.
Another problem is that without regulation, too much money is wasted, and with it we just have wasteful bureaucracy. Is there a solution that you see? What?
Dick
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dick,
Thank you for your thoughtful email. As you know, I am an organizational-industrial psychologist with most of my career spent in organizational development (OD) psychology, although I initially worked as a chemist in the lab and chemical engineer in the field. That work took me to South America, Europe and South Africa, as well as the Middle East.
* * *
Since economics is mainly about behavior, and since my career has been behavior-intensive, I will attempt to share some of my observations here with only the certainty of my views the perspective of a single individual, who like you, grew up in farm country in the middle of the United States with a certain value and belief system.
* * *
QUESTION NO. ONE: ECONOMICS OF SCALE
It is true Great Britain and Germany are smaller economic systems than the United States, but being smaller does not relegate them to having less difficulty when economic collapse hits them from across the Atlantic with the real estate meltdown and the crash on Wall Street.
Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the European Economic Community (EEC) is larger than that of the United States. Put another way, what happens in one part of Europe affects all the other nations in the EEC. And what happens in the United States not only has a ripple affect on the EEC but the nations of South East Asia including China, Japan and India.
Given this intertwined interdependence, chaos and order are fluctuating currents that can produce economic tsunamis.
Take wheat production, for example.
Due to forest fires in Russia, that country lost one-third of its wheat crop that would have been exported. Russia is exporting no wheat in 2010. Speculators in wheat futures are literally making hey. Speculation has increased several hundred folds in recent years. This drives up the price of wheat at the first blush of panic.
In many Third World countries, more than two billion souls make no more than $2 a day with 70 percent of that income going for food.
Starvation is a likely possibility if suitable reserves have not been set-aside at a reasonable cost. The current picture could not be bleaker for them.
Meanwhile, wheat farmers in Kansas are going to feel as if they have won the lottery.
It is hard to be philosophical about this problem.
* * *
QUESTION NO. ONE: CULTURE AND STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION
When I was working in Europe and living in Brussels, Belgium in the 1980s, I brought no furniture with me over than a bed and some books along with Beautiful Betty and Jennifer.
I look around my study here today and see the solid office furniture I bought there, which was largely German, and a smile crosses my face.
Not only was the furniture solid and serviceable but also the German manufacturers provided extra pieces in anticipation I would lose something or in the process of putting it together break something.
The German culture prides itself in making things. That is the structure and function of work. It translates into people across the world wanting things made by Germans.
* * *
The American sociologist Vance Packard wrote two compelling books that describe the American propensity for buying things.
Americans have a consumers' attitude towards things. Packard calls this in THE WASTE MAKERS (1960) the obsolescence of desirability and the obsolescence of function.
Americans, he says, are obsessed with always having something new. Obsolescence, then, is a planned conspiracy between producers and consumers.
Earlier, he wrote THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS (1957), which was the practice of using subliminal stimulation in advertisements and television commercials that energized consumers to want what they didn't need and to buy it now.
* * *
Our country is not out-of-control. It is marching to its typical drummer. The problem now is that the world has caught up with us and we are a luxury we can no longer afford.
Even the economic crisis of 2008 is unlikely to neither break this spell nor change the structure and function of our desire.
* * *
We are a nation of spoiled brats. You and I may not be able to identify with this attribution because we came along when struggle and hard work were all we knew. Our world is history to baby boomers and the children of baby boomers.
FDR gave us the Social Security System. Hard working people, who have managed to stay employed and have shared the expense of Social Security with their employer, now derive some benefits.
That is not likely to be the case for the children of baby boomers. That is sad for at least two reasons. One, Social Security has been a safety net for ordinary people; and two, the extravagance of young people today are unlikely to know what hit them fifty years from now.
* * *
We are a bankrupt nation living off of European and China success not to mention many South American countries as well. When we get into difficulty, we print more money. You can do that only as long as your bankers, these nations holding our notes, have a sense of humor about the United States of America.
This launches me into your second question.
* * *
QUESTION NO. TWO – IT IS NOT OUR PROBLEM!
Like you, I never grew up around Negroes as they were called in our day, but I did know a few.
We had less than 300 in a town of 33,000, and they were mostly confined to a two-block area near the courthouse. I never had a Negro in a single class in high school, but played football with one, Edward Thompson, who was one heck of a football player. I also played baseball as a fourteen-year-old with Leroy Watts in the Industrial Baseball League. He graduated from high school when I was in the seventh grade. I knew Negroes who were baseball players far better than I was that had no opportunity to play with our American Legion Team.
We lived in the north, Dick, but in as much a segregated environment as any Negro from Alabama.
* * *
In my long life, it has never changed. When economic circumstances get tight or someone drops the ball, we have an easy target, blacks, and now Mexicans to gang up on.
Recently, I had a new bathroom put in my study, a work project to my amazement that took nine days. The principle worker on that project was a Mexican, named Rosendo. I’ve never met a harder workingman, or a more polite and dignified human being. He struggled with his English but was patient with me when I asked questions. I am a demanding employer as BB would be quick to acknowledge.
A young man who drove up in a new BMW, and hardly did anything yet I learned he was not the supervisor but a fellow worker. BB who has employed this firm at her work said that Rosendo most likely makes the minimum wage. I doubt seriously if that is the case of the beamer owner.
* * *
The hysteria about blacks and undocumented workers is a problem here in Florida as well as a hot campaign issue. I see Mexicans working in my neighborhood all the time when I walk, cutting down trees, doing lawns, roofing, painting houses, and doing construction. It is hot here year around and I’ve never seen them complaining. They are always polite and seriously engaged.
We don’t have an energy policy or an immigration policy. We go from election to election with the promise of such policies but they never materialize. They are simply campaign fodder.
Congressmen are elected every two years, and yet incumbents win more than 90 percent of the time. So, I don’t think the answer is the system, but our apathy when it comes to voting. Less than 20 percent turned out in Florida for the mid-term elections for party nominees for the Democrats and Republicans. Whose fault is that? We get the representation we deserve, and it will always remain so until we change our ways.
* * *
When you and I came into the world in Clinton, Iowa during the Great Depression, the Negro church was strong. Clinton had several African Christian denominations in our town. Moreover, most Negroes of our town grew up in two-parent families. This was true of Eddie Thompson and Leroy Watts. It also happened to be the norm across American society in the 1930s. What happened?
A book that has helped me understand the problem of race in America is Shelby Steele’s THE CONTENT OF OUR CHARACTER: A NEW VISION OF RACE IN AMERICA (1991).
Steele takes an introspective view of his race based on his own experience. He is critical of affirmative action as he sees it weaken blacks and their resolve. He sees the welfare system another trap of blacks in dependence in perpetuity.
Steele is an angry man and doesn’t pull any of his punches. Whites read him but he is largely ignored by his own race. Yet, he still blames whites for limiting opportunities for blacks.
* * *
QUESTION TWO: IS THERE A SOLUTION?
Optimism breed’s eternal.
We are an optimistic people but a country disinclined to make the deep calculations to resolve the many issues you site: wasteful wars, a dysfunctional welfare system, a wasteful bureaucracy, and general apathy.
We react to crises rather than anticipate them. During our entire unique and remarkable history, we have been dependent on our resilience to lift us out of our greatest stupidities, and to date we have managed to land on our feet. How about tomorrow?
Alas, we are looking for solutions when we have no consensus on what are the problems. Our discussion here has been on symptoms. Causes are too ugly to consider.
Fairness and equal opportunity in freedom is one thing. Embracing such requirements is quite another. We all live in the safety of our character, our comfort zone, and our common ground. Operationally, we want problems that impinge on that to be solved without our involvement.
* * *
We are the minority race in America now, and in one hundred years the problems we agonize over so assiduously today will be academic tomorrow.
As I said in my last piece, we are a skin-deep culture, cosmetic, superficial, transitory, on the run, thinking the world revolves around us. Well, it doesn’t. It never has only now we can't ignore the fact.
We can blame our discomfort and anxiety on Blacks or Mexicans or some other scapegoat but that doesn’t resolve the issue. It would help if we were a truly integrated society and had friends based on common interest rather than skin color or ethnicity, but that will take time.
Meanwhile, we need to help those who cannot help themselves whatever their skin color or ethnicity to be responsible, accountable and contributors to society. It starts by accepting them as they are and ourselves as we are. The blame game serves no one.
Remarkably, should the economy suddenly turn around, and Blacks be employed as readily as Whites, the crime rate would go down, and all the other disparaging preoccupations that have been alluded to here will, temporarily, melt away.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010
REFERENCE:
This little missive has generated quite a response. I cannot acknowledge much less publish all of your comments, but I can share with you a representative sample of them. I am most pleased that I am hearing from contemporaries who shared similar experiences to mine, and have had the temerity to share thoughts. Here is one.
* * *
READER NO. 1 WRITES:
Jim,
I always enjoy your musings on different subjects, most of which I am interested in. My early mornings are taken up about like yours, reading sports and editorials first, though at about 7 AM not 5. I'd like to ask you a couple questions:
QUESTION NO. ONE:
Isn't it a little easier for Germany and England to attack their recession than it is ours, because their countries are smaller, and their political systems a little more controllable?
I wonder if we haven't let our country get so far out of control, so messed up and broken, with outgo growing and income not, that we are in a difficult position to correct.
QUESTION NO. TWO:
Although you grew up as I did in a town with few blacks, I'm sure you have lived where the situation is different and have seen the problems. There again, I wonder how we can correct it.
I live in South Carolina (40% black, mostly poor). We have handled the racial situation in schools and society poorly. We dumb down our public schools to suit the mores of the blacks and pacify them.
Graduation rates are terrible, as our job opportunities.
Our factory jobs that employed high school graduates have moved and mostly only higher tech and automotive jobs requiring tech ed or college are available, increasing the problems of welfare, unemployment, lack of motivation, and increased crime.
Both whites and blacks are tired of it and blame each other.
Now, undocumented Mexicans are getting to be an increasing problem making a bad problem: employment, health care, education, welfare, crime and public cost worse.
It seems to me the politicians at all levels blame each other, and on both sides spend much money to get elected, as you pointed out, and for which they owe favors, then start on getting reelected, yet the problems are never solved.
We need more income and yet everyone wants lower taxes,
With our constitution and government and the lack of statesmen (everything is more money, more power), I question how we can straighten out our problem.
I think Congress should be reorganized, take away retirement and benefits, and have term limits, limit or eliminate lobbyists. But how would we get Congress to vote against itself?
I think we need to quit fighting no win, wasteful wars, bring our troops home, not have the military dictate our budget, overhaul our welfare system, maybe localize it with rules.
Another problem is that without regulation, too much money is wasted, and with it we just have wasteful bureaucracy. Is there a solution that you see? What?
Dick
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dick,
Thank you for your thoughtful email. As you know, I am an organizational-industrial psychologist with most of my career spent in organizational development (OD) psychology, although I initially worked as a chemist in the lab and chemical engineer in the field. That work took me to South America, Europe and South Africa, as well as the Middle East.
* * *
Since economics is mainly about behavior, and since my career has been behavior-intensive, I will attempt to share some of my observations here with only the certainty of my views the perspective of a single individual, who like you, grew up in farm country in the middle of the United States with a certain value and belief system.
* * *
QUESTION NO. ONE: ECONOMICS OF SCALE
It is true Great Britain and Germany are smaller economic systems than the United States, but being smaller does not relegate them to having less difficulty when economic collapse hits them from across the Atlantic with the real estate meltdown and the crash on Wall Street.
Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the European Economic Community (EEC) is larger than that of the United States. Put another way, what happens in one part of Europe affects all the other nations in the EEC. And what happens in the United States not only has a ripple affect on the EEC but the nations of South East Asia including China, Japan and India.
Given this intertwined interdependence, chaos and order are fluctuating currents that can produce economic tsunamis.
Take wheat production, for example.
Due to forest fires in Russia, that country lost one-third of its wheat crop that would have been exported. Russia is exporting no wheat in 2010. Speculators in wheat futures are literally making hey. Speculation has increased several hundred folds in recent years. This drives up the price of wheat at the first blush of panic.
In many Third World countries, more than two billion souls make no more than $2 a day with 70 percent of that income going for food.
Starvation is a likely possibility if suitable reserves have not been set-aside at a reasonable cost. The current picture could not be bleaker for them.
Meanwhile, wheat farmers in Kansas are going to feel as if they have won the lottery.
It is hard to be philosophical about this problem.
* * *
QUESTION NO. ONE: CULTURE AND STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION
When I was working in Europe and living in Brussels, Belgium in the 1980s, I brought no furniture with me over than a bed and some books along with Beautiful Betty and Jennifer.
I look around my study here today and see the solid office furniture I bought there, which was largely German, and a smile crosses my face.
Not only was the furniture solid and serviceable but also the German manufacturers provided extra pieces in anticipation I would lose something or in the process of putting it together break something.
The German culture prides itself in making things. That is the structure and function of work. It translates into people across the world wanting things made by Germans.
* * *
The American sociologist Vance Packard wrote two compelling books that describe the American propensity for buying things.
Americans have a consumers' attitude towards things. Packard calls this in THE WASTE MAKERS (1960) the obsolescence of desirability and the obsolescence of function.
Americans, he says, are obsessed with always having something new. Obsolescence, then, is a planned conspiracy between producers and consumers.
Earlier, he wrote THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS (1957), which was the practice of using subliminal stimulation in advertisements and television commercials that energized consumers to want what they didn't need and to buy it now.
* * *
Our country is not out-of-control. It is marching to its typical drummer. The problem now is that the world has caught up with us and we are a luxury we can no longer afford.
Even the economic crisis of 2008 is unlikely to neither break this spell nor change the structure and function of our desire.
* * *
We are a nation of spoiled brats. You and I may not be able to identify with this attribution because we came along when struggle and hard work were all we knew. Our world is history to baby boomers and the children of baby boomers.
FDR gave us the Social Security System. Hard working people, who have managed to stay employed and have shared the expense of Social Security with their employer, now derive some benefits.
That is not likely to be the case for the children of baby boomers. That is sad for at least two reasons. One, Social Security has been a safety net for ordinary people; and two, the extravagance of young people today are unlikely to know what hit them fifty years from now.
* * *
We are a bankrupt nation living off of European and China success not to mention many South American countries as well. When we get into difficulty, we print more money. You can do that only as long as your bankers, these nations holding our notes, have a sense of humor about the United States of America.
This launches me into your second question.
* * *
QUESTION NO. TWO – IT IS NOT OUR PROBLEM!
Like you, I never grew up around Negroes as they were called in our day, but I did know a few.
We had less than 300 in a town of 33,000, and they were mostly confined to a two-block area near the courthouse. I never had a Negro in a single class in high school, but played football with one, Edward Thompson, who was one heck of a football player. I also played baseball as a fourteen-year-old with Leroy Watts in the Industrial Baseball League. He graduated from high school when I was in the seventh grade. I knew Negroes who were baseball players far better than I was that had no opportunity to play with our American Legion Team.
We lived in the north, Dick, but in as much a segregated environment as any Negro from Alabama.
* * *
In my long life, it has never changed. When economic circumstances get tight or someone drops the ball, we have an easy target, blacks, and now Mexicans to gang up on.
Recently, I had a new bathroom put in my study, a work project to my amazement that took nine days. The principle worker on that project was a Mexican, named Rosendo. I’ve never met a harder workingman, or a more polite and dignified human being. He struggled with his English but was patient with me when I asked questions. I am a demanding employer as BB would be quick to acknowledge.
A young man who drove up in a new BMW, and hardly did anything yet I learned he was not the supervisor but a fellow worker. BB who has employed this firm at her work said that Rosendo most likely makes the minimum wage. I doubt seriously if that is the case of the beamer owner.
* * *
The hysteria about blacks and undocumented workers is a problem here in Florida as well as a hot campaign issue. I see Mexicans working in my neighborhood all the time when I walk, cutting down trees, doing lawns, roofing, painting houses, and doing construction. It is hot here year around and I’ve never seen them complaining. They are always polite and seriously engaged.
We don’t have an energy policy or an immigration policy. We go from election to election with the promise of such policies but they never materialize. They are simply campaign fodder.
Congressmen are elected every two years, and yet incumbents win more than 90 percent of the time. So, I don’t think the answer is the system, but our apathy when it comes to voting. Less than 20 percent turned out in Florida for the mid-term elections for party nominees for the Democrats and Republicans. Whose fault is that? We get the representation we deserve, and it will always remain so until we change our ways.
* * *
When you and I came into the world in Clinton, Iowa during the Great Depression, the Negro church was strong. Clinton had several African Christian denominations in our town. Moreover, most Negroes of our town grew up in two-parent families. This was true of Eddie Thompson and Leroy Watts. It also happened to be the norm across American society in the 1930s. What happened?
A book that has helped me understand the problem of race in America is Shelby Steele’s THE CONTENT OF OUR CHARACTER: A NEW VISION OF RACE IN AMERICA (1991).
Steele takes an introspective view of his race based on his own experience. He is critical of affirmative action as he sees it weaken blacks and their resolve. He sees the welfare system another trap of blacks in dependence in perpetuity.
Steele is an angry man and doesn’t pull any of his punches. Whites read him but he is largely ignored by his own race. Yet, he still blames whites for limiting opportunities for blacks.
* * *
QUESTION TWO: IS THERE A SOLUTION?
Optimism breed’s eternal.
We are an optimistic people but a country disinclined to make the deep calculations to resolve the many issues you site: wasteful wars, a dysfunctional welfare system, a wasteful bureaucracy, and general apathy.
We react to crises rather than anticipate them. During our entire unique and remarkable history, we have been dependent on our resilience to lift us out of our greatest stupidities, and to date we have managed to land on our feet. How about tomorrow?
Alas, we are looking for solutions when we have no consensus on what are the problems. Our discussion here has been on symptoms. Causes are too ugly to consider.
Fairness and equal opportunity in freedom is one thing. Embracing such requirements is quite another. We all live in the safety of our character, our comfort zone, and our common ground. Operationally, we want problems that impinge on that to be solved without our involvement.
* * *
We are the minority race in America now, and in one hundred years the problems we agonize over so assiduously today will be academic tomorrow.
As I said in my last piece, we are a skin-deep culture, cosmetic, superficial, transitory, on the run, thinking the world revolves around us. Well, it doesn’t. It never has only now we can't ignore the fact.
We can blame our discomfort and anxiety on Blacks or Mexicans or some other scapegoat but that doesn’t resolve the issue. It would help if we were a truly integrated society and had friends based on common interest rather than skin color or ethnicity, but that will take time.
Meanwhile, we need to help those who cannot help themselves whatever their skin color or ethnicity to be responsible, accountable and contributors to society. It starts by accepting them as they are and ourselves as we are. The blame game serves no one.
Remarkably, should the economy suddenly turn around, and Blacks be employed as readily as Whites, the crime rate would go down, and all the other disparaging preoccupations that have been alluded to here will, temporarily, melt away.
Be always well,
Jim
DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS -- A RESPONSE
DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS – A RESPONSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding newspapers. I receive and read two Chicago dailies and the Wall Street Journal every day.
The last section of your piece made me think. Politics might be one of the more simulative elements of our economy. Think about the $70 million spent on the gubernatorial primary. It went to hiring staff with a portion of the salaries returned to the government in payroll and income taxes. Printing and distributing posters and other forms of campaign collateral gives work to print shops keeping people employed and generating small business profits. There are rallies requiring equipment rentals and setup.
This is all nice, but other than transferring money from political donors to a variety of services, it does nothing to add lasting value. Posters go to landfill, sound systems and stages go back to storage, and campaign workers go to the unemployment line.
In the end you can assume 30% of the money goes to state or federal government in some form of tax, ultimately paying (less the typical government waste) for some of the services mentioned in the column.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
If I didn’t know better, I would think you were an apologist for the carpetbaggers. Sure, the money is distributed but this is a spike not a remedial measure. Whatever the system, money has been an important factor in governance, and capitalism is little different than any other system.
It seems remarkable to me that the world has survived stupid kings and emperors, stupid presidents and prime ministers, and stupid parliaments and congressional bodies. The world has survived because people are wiser and more pragmatic than their leadership. This has always been the case in the best and worst of times.
Inbreeding of class magnifies the problem. Even with the most able of leaders they are likely to have as powerful shortcomings and they have assets. Now, competence and confidence has given way to theatre.
We have billionaires such as Jeff Greene, who made his money in suspect ways when the economy went belly up, and Rick Scott, who made his money forming a healthcare company that was sued to the tune of nearly $2 billion for fraud in overcharging Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Small wonder public confidence in politicians is so low.
There were many times in my own career when I could have taken advantage of my position but was never so inclined, thanks to my da. He told me never to forget my roots as a lower middle class kid. "That is who and what you are no matter how much the high rollers may flatter you to the contrary." He then added, this man with only a seventh grade education, “Be leery of the high rollers. What you see is never what you get.” It has saved me from a life of embarrassing temptations.
* * *
Yesterday, I watched “The Enron Story” on television. I had read a book on that affair. Somehow seeing these high rollers defrauding employees and companies and unions of their wealth while playing up the lie of Enron’s “stupendous success” with grins, slaps on the back, compelling PowerPoint slides, not to mention banquets and awards ceremonies, was shatteringly painful.
Straight white teeth and a good tan on a slim frame draped in a $5,000 suit doesn’t make a man, nor does having the right degrees from the right institutions with the right friends living in the right neighborhoods.
My problem with the $70 million is that we have become a skin-deep culture. It should be of little surprise that our leaders excel in that one-dimentionalism.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding newspapers. I receive and read two Chicago dailies and the Wall Street Journal every day.
The last section of your piece made me think. Politics might be one of the more simulative elements of our economy. Think about the $70 million spent on the gubernatorial primary. It went to hiring staff with a portion of the salaries returned to the government in payroll and income taxes. Printing and distributing posters and other forms of campaign collateral gives work to print shops keeping people employed and generating small business profits. There are rallies requiring equipment rentals and setup.
This is all nice, but other than transferring money from political donors to a variety of services, it does nothing to add lasting value. Posters go to landfill, sound systems and stages go back to storage, and campaign workers go to the unemployment line.
In the end you can assume 30% of the money goes to state or federal government in some form of tax, ultimately paying (less the typical government waste) for some of the services mentioned in the column.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
If I didn’t know better, I would think you were an apologist for the carpetbaggers. Sure, the money is distributed but this is a spike not a remedial measure. Whatever the system, money has been an important factor in governance, and capitalism is little different than any other system.
It seems remarkable to me that the world has survived stupid kings and emperors, stupid presidents and prime ministers, and stupid parliaments and congressional bodies. The world has survived because people are wiser and more pragmatic than their leadership. This has always been the case in the best and worst of times.
Inbreeding of class magnifies the problem. Even with the most able of leaders they are likely to have as powerful shortcomings and they have assets. Now, competence and confidence has given way to theatre.
We have billionaires such as Jeff Greene, who made his money in suspect ways when the economy went belly up, and Rick Scott, who made his money forming a healthcare company that was sued to the tune of nearly $2 billion for fraud in overcharging Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Small wonder public confidence in politicians is so low.
There were many times in my own career when I could have taken advantage of my position but was never so inclined, thanks to my da. He told me never to forget my roots as a lower middle class kid. "That is who and what you are no matter how much the high rollers may flatter you to the contrary." He then added, this man with only a seventh grade education, “Be leery of the high rollers. What you see is never what you get.” It has saved me from a life of embarrassing temptations.
* * *
Yesterday, I watched “The Enron Story” on television. I had read a book on that affair. Somehow seeing these high rollers defrauding employees and companies and unions of their wealth while playing up the lie of Enron’s “stupendous success” with grins, slaps on the back, compelling PowerPoint slides, not to mention banquets and awards ceremonies, was shatteringly painful.
Straight white teeth and a good tan on a slim frame draped in a $5,000 suit doesn’t make a man, nor does having the right degrees from the right institutions with the right friends living in the right neighborhoods.
My problem with the $70 million is that we have become a skin-deep culture. It should be of little surprise that our leaders excel in that one-dimentionalism.
Be always well,
Jim
IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS!
IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010
* * *
This morning, as I do every morning about 5 a.m., I go to the curb, pick up my newspaper and read it as I eat my breakfast.
I read the sports page first because I wake up slowly. I love baseball and am a fan of the Chicago Cubs and the Tampa Bay Rays. The Cubs have folded but the Rays are holding steady in first place with the Yankees. My knowledge of baseball is cursory compared to my good friend, the late Robert Collins, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of every team and all their statistics.
Then I rush to the op-ed page of the St. Petersburg Times, which often stimulates my mind for the rest of the day, leading to some kind of missive.
This is the political season. We’ve just completed the primaries, where we have seen candidates acting like six graders. So, it is nice to have a respite from this nonsense and newspapers can provide it.
* * *
Two of my favorite columnists were featured today, David Brooks and George Will. I’m comfortable with Brooks because we seem to have conceptual resonance. I like Will because he (like me) is something of a statistical freak.
Today David Brooks writes about how the United States differs in its approach to the current recession with Germany and Great Britain. He frequently makes reference to the cultural aspects of the situation, which I like, and is less an ideologue than Will, which is where I live as well.
Moreover, from Monday through Friday on PBS television I watch news from Berlin, Germany and London, England. This invites me into these countries to see how they deal with their economic and political challenges. It also gives me a different perspective to the daily world news. CNN to me is like Chinese torture.
I also read Foreign Affairs, New York Review, London Review, Time, Smithsonian, and occasionally, an article on the Internet that is recommended by a reader, and, of course, topical books by such writers as Thomas Friedman and Thomas Sowell. This dates me, but it also indicates the anchors of my perspective.
THE GERMAN WAY – DAVID BROOKS
David Brooks indicates that Germany’s stimulus package was 1.5 percent of GDP whereas the United States’ was 6 percent of GDP. Paul Krugman, whom I often agree with, but not on this point, thought the stimulus should have been bigger. He references the Great Depression and how FDR got us out of that mess with his aggressive economic stimulation. Historians now differ with Krugman’s assessment finding WWII had more to do with our economic emergence.
Brooks chooses to see the differing approach of Germany and the United States a matter of culture and values.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her government have not had a walk in the park, but have stayed the course. Germany appears not only to becoming out of recession, but to be doing so with some momentum.
The German economy is more vibrant than it has been for years growing at 9 percent at the moment, mainly from exports. This has reduced unemployment and improved and stimulated spending. “The United States tried big,” Brooks writes, “but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.”
This is where culture comes in.
Germany, Brooks says, got back to its fundamentals; the US did not. Germany’s fundamentals revolve around basic research and worker training. They have also reduced cultural rigidity, which has not been easy, and taken strong measures to balance the budget.
The fundamentals of the United States are more of the swashbuckler as exemplified by Silicon Valley innovation, over-the-top speculation, and letting the fundamentals take care of themselves.
The US is a culture comfortable without boundaries, short-term thinking, and the fantasy of the American dream of every family being homeowners. The cover story in the current issue of Time (“Rethinking Homeownership," September 6, 2010) throws a monkey wrench into that myth.
* * *
Before the bust of 2008, as we now know, tens of thousands of Americans were not only buying homes they couldn’t afford, they were often buying homes when they had no income, the idea being that they could always make money selling the house as the value was bound to go up. Not!
Prime Minister David Cameron, who like President Obama, inherited a can of worms, is showing amazing form by returning to fundamentals as Great Britain, too, is doing much better than the United States, although it has committed some of the same excesses including a huge stimulus package.
Brooks writes:
“Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions. German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well, ushering in painful but necessary reforms. America has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling.”
He sees two classes emerging: one exposes weakness in fundamentals, shatters Orthodoxies, and forms new coalitions such have been the case in Germany and Great Britain; the other is gridlock in political division, finger pointing, denying fundamental shortcomings, while aggressively fixing things for the next month, next quarter with myopic short range thinking. Brooks sees the United States in the latter category.
Incidentally, William L. Livingston IV in “Design for Prevention” (2010) exposes institutional weakness and puts meat on the bones beyond mere observation.
* * *
OUR TRAGIC NUMBERS AND THEIR HUMAN TOLL – GEORGE WILL
George Will opens his column by alerting the reader to the fact that 10,000 baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare every day while the unemployment hovers around 10 percent.
He then quotes figures from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is nonpolitical. It sees a $10 trillion deficit between expected revenue and outlays over the next fifty years. This can all change, of course, and remedies may materialize, but it is still frightening.
Will then focuses on one specific group in America, the African American, a group he claims has been below the radar during the Obama Administration. He quotes Nathan Glazer, a sociologist, writing in the “American Interest”:
(1) By the early 2000s, more than one-third of all young black noncollege men were incarcerated;
(2) More than 60 percent of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s end in prison;
(3) For every 100 bachelor’s degrees conferred on black men, 200 were conferred on black women;
(4) Inner cities have become havens for the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and the unemployable;
(5) High out-of-wedlock birthrates exacerbate the social and economic problems of adolescent males without male parenting;
(6) This translates into disorderly neighborhoods and disorderly schools;
(7) Some young blacks see hitting the books like black males “acting white”;
(8) Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents;
(9) 24 percent of white eighth graders watch four or more hours of television a day whereas 59 percent of their black peers do (upscale children waste their time on some electronic contraption);
(10) By the age of 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in working-class family, and about 35 million more words than the average child in a welfare family with a mother who is most likely a high school dropout.
* * *
The disappointing fact, according to Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley, writing about the achievement gap, is that the gap was closing between blacks and whites in the 1970s and 1980s. They write, “Progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination.”
Barton and Coley conclude five factors have contributed to this loss of progress:
(1) The number of days students are absent from school;
(2) The number of hours students spend watching television;
(3) The number of pages read for homework;
(4) The quality and quantity of reading material;
(5) The presence of two parents in the home.
* * *
George Will admits public policy is not the answer. The answer is the same as that advocated by David Brooks. The strength of the culture and the resonance of the values of that culture with the concomitant demands on it produce the desired returns. In our rush into the future, we have left our soul behind, which is the idea of America.
* * *
A LITTLE COMIC RELIEF
St. Petersburg Times reporter Danny Valentine mused what could have been done with the $50 million Rick Scott spent to win the Republican nomination for Governor of Florida and the $20 million Bill McCollum spent in a losing campaign:
(1) School lunches for 87,448 school children could be paid for 356 days;
(2) Family memberships for ten years at the YMCA could be paid for 6,776 families;
(3) Four year degree programs at the University of Florida could be paid for 3,486 individual students;
(4) The city and county could hire 188 firefighters and pay their salaries for ten years.
* * *
Not mentioned was Jeff Greene spent $25 million of his own money in an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Florida to Kendrick Meek’s $6 million. The Fisher Paradigm predicts Meeks will win the senate seat. Stay tuned.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010
* * *
This morning, as I do every morning about 5 a.m., I go to the curb, pick up my newspaper and read it as I eat my breakfast.
I read the sports page first because I wake up slowly. I love baseball and am a fan of the Chicago Cubs and the Tampa Bay Rays. The Cubs have folded but the Rays are holding steady in first place with the Yankees. My knowledge of baseball is cursory compared to my good friend, the late Robert Collins, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of every team and all their statistics.
Then I rush to the op-ed page of the St. Petersburg Times, which often stimulates my mind for the rest of the day, leading to some kind of missive.
This is the political season. We’ve just completed the primaries, where we have seen candidates acting like six graders. So, it is nice to have a respite from this nonsense and newspapers can provide it.
* * *
Two of my favorite columnists were featured today, David Brooks and George Will. I’m comfortable with Brooks because we seem to have conceptual resonance. I like Will because he (like me) is something of a statistical freak.
Today David Brooks writes about how the United States differs in its approach to the current recession with Germany and Great Britain. He frequently makes reference to the cultural aspects of the situation, which I like, and is less an ideologue than Will, which is where I live as well.
Moreover, from Monday through Friday on PBS television I watch news from Berlin, Germany and London, England. This invites me into these countries to see how they deal with their economic and political challenges. It also gives me a different perspective to the daily world news. CNN to me is like Chinese torture.
I also read Foreign Affairs, New York Review, London Review, Time, Smithsonian, and occasionally, an article on the Internet that is recommended by a reader, and, of course, topical books by such writers as Thomas Friedman and Thomas Sowell. This dates me, but it also indicates the anchors of my perspective.
THE GERMAN WAY – DAVID BROOKS
David Brooks indicates that Germany’s stimulus package was 1.5 percent of GDP whereas the United States’ was 6 percent of GDP. Paul Krugman, whom I often agree with, but not on this point, thought the stimulus should have been bigger. He references the Great Depression and how FDR got us out of that mess with his aggressive economic stimulation. Historians now differ with Krugman’s assessment finding WWII had more to do with our economic emergence.
Brooks chooses to see the differing approach of Germany and the United States a matter of culture and values.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her government have not had a walk in the park, but have stayed the course. Germany appears not only to becoming out of recession, but to be doing so with some momentum.
The German economy is more vibrant than it has been for years growing at 9 percent at the moment, mainly from exports. This has reduced unemployment and improved and stimulated spending. “The United States tried big,” Brooks writes, “but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.”
This is where culture comes in.
Germany, Brooks says, got back to its fundamentals; the US did not. Germany’s fundamentals revolve around basic research and worker training. They have also reduced cultural rigidity, which has not been easy, and taken strong measures to balance the budget.
The fundamentals of the United States are more of the swashbuckler as exemplified by Silicon Valley innovation, over-the-top speculation, and letting the fundamentals take care of themselves.
The US is a culture comfortable without boundaries, short-term thinking, and the fantasy of the American dream of every family being homeowners. The cover story in the current issue of Time (“Rethinking Homeownership," September 6, 2010) throws a monkey wrench into that myth.
* * *
Before the bust of 2008, as we now know, tens of thousands of Americans were not only buying homes they couldn’t afford, they were often buying homes when they had no income, the idea being that they could always make money selling the house as the value was bound to go up. Not!
Prime Minister David Cameron, who like President Obama, inherited a can of worms, is showing amazing form by returning to fundamentals as Great Britain, too, is doing much better than the United States, although it has committed some of the same excesses including a huge stimulus package.
Brooks writes:
“Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions. German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well, ushering in painful but necessary reforms. America has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling.”
He sees two classes emerging: one exposes weakness in fundamentals, shatters Orthodoxies, and forms new coalitions such have been the case in Germany and Great Britain; the other is gridlock in political division, finger pointing, denying fundamental shortcomings, while aggressively fixing things for the next month, next quarter with myopic short range thinking. Brooks sees the United States in the latter category.
Incidentally, William L. Livingston IV in “Design for Prevention” (2010) exposes institutional weakness and puts meat on the bones beyond mere observation.
* * *
OUR TRAGIC NUMBERS AND THEIR HUMAN TOLL – GEORGE WILL
George Will opens his column by alerting the reader to the fact that 10,000 baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare every day while the unemployment hovers around 10 percent.
He then quotes figures from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is nonpolitical. It sees a $10 trillion deficit between expected revenue and outlays over the next fifty years. This can all change, of course, and remedies may materialize, but it is still frightening.
Will then focuses on one specific group in America, the African American, a group he claims has been below the radar during the Obama Administration. He quotes Nathan Glazer, a sociologist, writing in the “American Interest”:
(1) By the early 2000s, more than one-third of all young black noncollege men were incarcerated;
(2) More than 60 percent of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s end in prison;
(3) For every 100 bachelor’s degrees conferred on black men, 200 were conferred on black women;
(4) Inner cities have become havens for the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and the unemployable;
(5) High out-of-wedlock birthrates exacerbate the social and economic problems of adolescent males without male parenting;
(6) This translates into disorderly neighborhoods and disorderly schools;
(7) Some young blacks see hitting the books like black males “acting white”;
(8) Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents;
(9) 24 percent of white eighth graders watch four or more hours of television a day whereas 59 percent of their black peers do (upscale children waste their time on some electronic contraption);
(10) By the age of 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in working-class family, and about 35 million more words than the average child in a welfare family with a mother who is most likely a high school dropout.
* * *
The disappointing fact, according to Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley, writing about the achievement gap, is that the gap was closing between blacks and whites in the 1970s and 1980s. They write, “Progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination.”
Barton and Coley conclude five factors have contributed to this loss of progress:
(1) The number of days students are absent from school;
(2) The number of hours students spend watching television;
(3) The number of pages read for homework;
(4) The quality and quantity of reading material;
(5) The presence of two parents in the home.
* * *
George Will admits public policy is not the answer. The answer is the same as that advocated by David Brooks. The strength of the culture and the resonance of the values of that culture with the concomitant demands on it produce the desired returns. In our rush into the future, we have left our soul behind, which is the idea of America.
* * *
A LITTLE COMIC RELIEF
St. Petersburg Times reporter Danny Valentine mused what could have been done with the $50 million Rick Scott spent to win the Republican nomination for Governor of Florida and the $20 million Bill McCollum spent in a losing campaign:
(1) School lunches for 87,448 school children could be paid for 356 days;
(2) Family memberships for ten years at the YMCA could be paid for 6,776 families;
(3) Four year degree programs at the University of Florida could be paid for 3,486 individual students;
(4) The city and county could hire 188 firefighters and pay their salaries for ten years.
* * *
Not mentioned was Jeff Greene spent $25 million of his own money in an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Florida to Kendrick Meek’s $6 million. The Fisher Paradigm predicts Meeks will win the senate seat. Stay tuned.
* * *
Thursday, August 26, 2010
OUT OF ORDER -- THE CHANGING CLIMATE OF AUTHORITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
OUT OF ORDER – THE CHANGING CLIMATE OF AUTHORITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 26, 2010
Colonel Matthew Moten of the U.S. Army writes in FOREIGN AFFAIRS (September/October 2010) that the relieving of General McChrystal of command of the war in Afghanistan by President Obama was not new. Indeed, it wasn’t.
President James Polk had a problem with Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scot in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s.
President Harry Truman famously removed General Douglas MacArthur from Command of U.S. forces in Korea in 1951.
President Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War removed General George McClellan from Command of the Union Army of the North, and appointed an over-the-hill known drunk Ulysses S. Grant to that command, and as a result won the war. Lincoln couldn’t win the peace because he was assassinated.
President Andrew Jackson was exploited by the times with a dysfunctional relationship with Grant that crippled his presidency and reconstruction, a poison, which has remained in our system to the present day.
* * *
Colonel Moten sees the problem of order a matter of political-military tension with “the additional issue of personalities and individuals; mixing together ambitions, powerful, highly skilled, and strong-willed people with diverse perspectives and different experiences to collaborate on solving problems.” He goes on to say such tension can be either destructive or constructive. How true, but mostly for those who have no voice in the affair.
* * *
For the past more than thousand years of institutional society the design of authority has imitated and emulated two powerful components, the Church and the military. All other institutions from governance to education to industry and commerce have fallen into line with this construction. From the Renaissance on, there has been little question of such authority. There have been wars and revolutions resulting in changing of the guard, but the authority model has been maintained whatever the political system.
Colonel Moten claims that General McChrystal’s problem was mainly because his career was in the “shadowy environment of special operations (which) left him unschooled in dealing with the media and ill equipped for the political demands of a four-star (general’s) position.” He goes on to say, however, the general is far from naïve. He maintained a Spartan almost monk-like existence, close to his troops, and close to the tribal lords of Afghan society. He was, in a sense, a tribal general. My wonder, then, is if his dismissal does not represent a larger issue. General Petraeus, his replacement, acclaimed as a “strategic leader” and “soldier-scholar” is also a political general in the image of Dwight David Eisenhower.
* * *
MANICHEAN AMBIVALENCE OF AUTHORITY
Reading Colonel Moten’s article, where he correctly relates the current approval of the military at 82 percent compared to 60 percent during the Vietnam War, I had the sense there is a preference for order to chaos, security to freedom, by-the-numbers robotic certainty to creative license at any cost.
The U.S. Congress has an approval rating around 20 percent while President Obama’s is around 40 percent. My question: is this approval rating bad or is it normal for a thinking free society in transition? I vote for it being normal, healthy and good.
True, the two major political parties are stalemated. Congress appears in stasis. Independent voters are moving away from ideologies on the left and right to find a new common ground in the pragmatic center. How does that bold for the military?
* * *
The colonel argues for increased professionalism in the military, a throwback to the “the military’s professional ethic, the constitutional principle of civilian control, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” This sounds good but what is missing here?
It appears that the military, like industry and education, is top heavy and will be increasingly so as “the army now promotes almost 100 percent of eligible captains to major and about 90 percent of majors to lieutenant colonel; less than 15 years ago, these figures were 25-30 percentage points lower.”
We are increasingly becoming a professional society of leaders who cannot lead; who can order but cannot relate to ordinary people or to the mundane things of life.
We have tenured professors who can’t or won’t teach preferring to do research that often go nowhere. We have the good-ole boy network in corpocracy where the privileged few are promoted to top executive positions in industry and have no idea what goes on in the trenches with little apparent interest in finding out.
Colonel Moten writes, “If the military selects its generals simply as a function of their 25 years of perseverance . . . with no qualitative winnowing – the US. Military’s strategic leadership will only get weaker, with disastrous consequences.” It already has not only in the military but also across society.
We are seeing those disastrous consequences in Katrina, in the Gulf of Mexico oilrig explosion, in the subprime real estate collapse, in bankruptcy of the automotive industry, in the cavalier disregard of main street by Wall Street, in the menacing possibility of a double dip economic recession, not to mention the economic and personnel costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We suffer from too much, too many, too soon. Are we Rome revisited more than a thousand years later?
* * *
The window of leadership of society is often viewed through the lens of the military and the Church. The military appears to be on top of the issue, which is misleading, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would suggest, while the Church is in chaos and decline in moral authority, which is disconcerting.
* * *
THE SHADOW ARMY
The colonel writes, “Ever since the military began to shrink after the Cold War, it was inevitable that the country would come to rely on contractors to meet the heavy demands of fighting active wars.”
There are more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today. There is an equal number of contractors from such firms as Halliburton, DynCorps, CACT, and Blackwell, to name just a few of the thousands of such corporations now performing military functions in that war in that country.
Many of these contractors are ex-military. Moten writes, “U.S. military has hired 158 flag officers as advisers and senior mentors at rates from $200 to $340 an hour. Eighty (80) percent of those had financial ties to defense contractors.”
A 2008 Government Accountability Office report found that as of 2006, 52 defense contractors employed 2,435 former generals and admirals in contracting and acquisitions positions senior enough to be subject to lobbying rules. The colonel concludes, “A military that relies on contractors for its doctrine is farming out its thinking, the armed forces fight with their brains as much as with their arms.”
It is the same of all society.
Such a shadowy army is, of course, not new. We have a shadow government as well. There are ten times as many lobbyists dictating policies to our elected members of Congress, change masters who manage to stay essentially under the radar. The same can be said of the Church and our educational institutions. They are swayed by endowments and well heeled shadowy figures that act as puppeteers beyond the level of those directly affected.
Colonel Moten concludes, “A military that chooses short-term expediency over long-term professional health is also choosing slow professional death.”
This may be true, but is professionalism the answer?
Professionalism implies specialization, and specialization would appear the problem not the answer.
Where is the jack-of-all-trades in the equation?
We may be a paralyzed society because we can no longer do the simple things, or even have an appetite for doing them.
We can explain what is wrong but we have no one to do anything about it. This is why we have contractors fighting our wars, illegal immigrants doing our mundane chores, drug dealers flourishing to put us in a happy state to handle our insane self-created stress, tons of medical specialists to deal with the privileged few ailments while few physicians are available to take care of the flu, and soldiers at the front in Manichean life and death situations, fighting wars they don’t understand because politicians are misinformed or asleep at the controls.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 26, 2010
Colonel Matthew Moten of the U.S. Army writes in FOREIGN AFFAIRS (September/October 2010) that the relieving of General McChrystal of command of the war in Afghanistan by President Obama was not new. Indeed, it wasn’t.
President James Polk had a problem with Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scot in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s.
President Harry Truman famously removed General Douglas MacArthur from Command of U.S. forces in Korea in 1951.
President Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War removed General George McClellan from Command of the Union Army of the North, and appointed an over-the-hill known drunk Ulysses S. Grant to that command, and as a result won the war. Lincoln couldn’t win the peace because he was assassinated.
President Andrew Jackson was exploited by the times with a dysfunctional relationship with Grant that crippled his presidency and reconstruction, a poison, which has remained in our system to the present day.
* * *
Colonel Moten sees the problem of order a matter of political-military tension with “the additional issue of personalities and individuals; mixing together ambitions, powerful, highly skilled, and strong-willed people with diverse perspectives and different experiences to collaborate on solving problems.” He goes on to say such tension can be either destructive or constructive. How true, but mostly for those who have no voice in the affair.
* * *
For the past more than thousand years of institutional society the design of authority has imitated and emulated two powerful components, the Church and the military. All other institutions from governance to education to industry and commerce have fallen into line with this construction. From the Renaissance on, there has been little question of such authority. There have been wars and revolutions resulting in changing of the guard, but the authority model has been maintained whatever the political system.
Colonel Moten claims that General McChrystal’s problem was mainly because his career was in the “shadowy environment of special operations (which) left him unschooled in dealing with the media and ill equipped for the political demands of a four-star (general’s) position.” He goes on to say, however, the general is far from naïve. He maintained a Spartan almost monk-like existence, close to his troops, and close to the tribal lords of Afghan society. He was, in a sense, a tribal general. My wonder, then, is if his dismissal does not represent a larger issue. General Petraeus, his replacement, acclaimed as a “strategic leader” and “soldier-scholar” is also a political general in the image of Dwight David Eisenhower.
* * *
MANICHEAN AMBIVALENCE OF AUTHORITY
Reading Colonel Moten’s article, where he correctly relates the current approval of the military at 82 percent compared to 60 percent during the Vietnam War, I had the sense there is a preference for order to chaos, security to freedom, by-the-numbers robotic certainty to creative license at any cost.
The U.S. Congress has an approval rating around 20 percent while President Obama’s is around 40 percent. My question: is this approval rating bad or is it normal for a thinking free society in transition? I vote for it being normal, healthy and good.
True, the two major political parties are stalemated. Congress appears in stasis. Independent voters are moving away from ideologies on the left and right to find a new common ground in the pragmatic center. How does that bold for the military?
* * *
The colonel argues for increased professionalism in the military, a throwback to the “the military’s professional ethic, the constitutional principle of civilian control, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” This sounds good but what is missing here?
It appears that the military, like industry and education, is top heavy and will be increasingly so as “the army now promotes almost 100 percent of eligible captains to major and about 90 percent of majors to lieutenant colonel; less than 15 years ago, these figures were 25-30 percentage points lower.”
We are increasingly becoming a professional society of leaders who cannot lead; who can order but cannot relate to ordinary people or to the mundane things of life.
We have tenured professors who can’t or won’t teach preferring to do research that often go nowhere. We have the good-ole boy network in corpocracy where the privileged few are promoted to top executive positions in industry and have no idea what goes on in the trenches with little apparent interest in finding out.
Colonel Moten writes, “If the military selects its generals simply as a function of their 25 years of perseverance . . . with no qualitative winnowing – the US. Military’s strategic leadership will only get weaker, with disastrous consequences.” It already has not only in the military but also across society.
We are seeing those disastrous consequences in Katrina, in the Gulf of Mexico oilrig explosion, in the subprime real estate collapse, in bankruptcy of the automotive industry, in the cavalier disregard of main street by Wall Street, in the menacing possibility of a double dip economic recession, not to mention the economic and personnel costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We suffer from too much, too many, too soon. Are we Rome revisited more than a thousand years later?
* * *
The window of leadership of society is often viewed through the lens of the military and the Church. The military appears to be on top of the issue, which is misleading, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would suggest, while the Church is in chaos and decline in moral authority, which is disconcerting.
* * *
THE SHADOW ARMY
The colonel writes, “Ever since the military began to shrink after the Cold War, it was inevitable that the country would come to rely on contractors to meet the heavy demands of fighting active wars.”
There are more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today. There is an equal number of contractors from such firms as Halliburton, DynCorps, CACT, and Blackwell, to name just a few of the thousands of such corporations now performing military functions in that war in that country.
Many of these contractors are ex-military. Moten writes, “U.S. military has hired 158 flag officers as advisers and senior mentors at rates from $200 to $340 an hour. Eighty (80) percent of those had financial ties to defense contractors.”
A 2008 Government Accountability Office report found that as of 2006, 52 defense contractors employed 2,435 former generals and admirals in contracting and acquisitions positions senior enough to be subject to lobbying rules. The colonel concludes, “A military that relies on contractors for its doctrine is farming out its thinking, the armed forces fight with their brains as much as with their arms.”
It is the same of all society.
Such a shadowy army is, of course, not new. We have a shadow government as well. There are ten times as many lobbyists dictating policies to our elected members of Congress, change masters who manage to stay essentially under the radar. The same can be said of the Church and our educational institutions. They are swayed by endowments and well heeled shadowy figures that act as puppeteers beyond the level of those directly affected.
Colonel Moten concludes, “A military that chooses short-term expediency over long-term professional health is also choosing slow professional death.”
This may be true, but is professionalism the answer?
Professionalism implies specialization, and specialization would appear the problem not the answer.
Where is the jack-of-all-trades in the equation?
We may be a paralyzed society because we can no longer do the simple things, or even have an appetite for doing them.
We can explain what is wrong but we have no one to do anything about it. This is why we have contractors fighting our wars, illegal immigrants doing our mundane chores, drug dealers flourishing to put us in a happy state to handle our insane self-created stress, tons of medical specialists to deal with the privileged few ailments while few physicians are available to take care of the flu, and soldiers at the front in Manichean life and death situations, fighting wars they don’t understand because politicians are misinformed or asleep at the controls.
* * *
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
COST BENEFIT TO A $300,000 HYPE EDUCATION -- A PROFESSOR RESPONDS!
COST BENEFIT TO A $300,000 HYPE VOCATIONAL EDUCATION – A PROFESSOR RESPONDS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2010
REFERENCE:
A professor in management and organizational development (OD) contacted me in 1991. He wanted me to come to his university to address a graduate seminar of his students who were reading my book, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS.
To his credit, he paid for my travel and lodging expenses out of his own pocket as there was no budget for my appearance. That was nearly twenty years ago.
The professor is a dedicated educator. He has consulted all over the world. Somehow, he has failed to become jaded by what I have described in my writings – as has William L. Livingston IV – as the dysfunctional nature of university education.
Dr. Deresiewicz article (“The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"), which I quote generously, recognizes how education has been reduced to vocational training. He says, “We have forgotten the reason universities exist. They exist to make minds, not careers.” Over the years, how often I have beaten that beast.
There is no degree that I abhor more than the MBA precisely because it is vocational training, and not liberating training of the mind. My professor teaches MBA students.
How far do we have to sink in the swamp of despair before this gets through? How soon before our fall from grace matches that of Great Britain?
Great Britain still has Oxford and Cambridge. Adam Sisman has an interesting take on this in his new biography of “Hugh Trevor-Roper” (2010), “Perhaps he (Trevor-Roper) should never have gone to Oxford. Perhaps it maimed him.”
My wonder is how many young people are being maimed today by elitist education.
My correspondent makes mention that a Harvard professor used the central theme (“six silent killers”) of two of my books in his Montreal seminar. It would have been nice if he had mentioned these books, too, or best case, had used them! But of course I am a pedestrian not a HYPE scholar. He can cherry pick my ideas without credit with impunity. I’d like to see him do that to a HYPE colleague.
If you sense that I am angry, you are wrong. I am disappointed; disappointed that some of the things Livingston and I write about are neither acknowledged nor used in academia, or certainly to any considerable extent.
To my correspondent’s credit, he has used one of my books, and freely acknowledged my authorship. He is an exception to the rule as well as an exceptional man. He is a nice person and I have never been so inclined.
* * *
A PROFESSOR WRITES:
Jim-
I was just thinking of you while up in Montreal at a conference.
One of our speakers was Michael Beer at Harvard. He is a good man who once almost hired me at Corning Glass. His speech was loaded with references to the "six silent killers" working in organization.
Though this is the title of one of your books, I doubt if you have copyrighted the term. I was curious if you had ever worked with him or know his work.
Take care and I appreciate the note and image of PhD’s as the pinprick that most of us are. My hope is that we help to have a small impact to larger human consciousness.
I think I do this best with my better students who share a joy of learning.
A new book that you may be attracted to is "5 Roads to the Future" by Starobin. He discusses the famous short paper put together by Immanuel Kant in 1783. It speaks to why the age of enlightenment might be the opening salvo for humans to finally grow up and take full responsibility for the worlds we have created.
This reference to Kant excited me. If you want to see some options for how we might create our global future, this is worth reading. The author, like you, seems most dedicated to continual learning. When I told him by email that I was hoping to use his book in my "futures class,” he immediately responded. We share many of the same ideas about the world of tomorrow.
You may not recall that I teach a special course here. Here is a syllabus I have used in the past that I thought you might enjoy in terms of how I frame a class focused on both self and strategic thinking for managers.
My students are graduating seniors in our management program and this term I have almost 60 of then in two different classes. They each will read and take essay exams on four assigned books. The class is taught in teams so that they also must work together.
In addition this last summer I added the following to my list of expectations for how I can help them over their full career. Here is my opening contract with my students (“Key Concepts for How This Course Will Be Taught”).
We are still doing creative things here. In two years, I am taking a pension from the state and going back to exploring much of the world I love. Keep up the flow of good ideas and an occasional well-deserved critique.
K
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
K,
It has been a while since I’ve heard from you. Several like you haven’t commented on my stuff forever. A person once told me – it must be forty years ago now – when I was wondering why I was not hearing from my former colleagues. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “They don’t need you any more.”
He went on to say I wear people out. I guess I do. So, I must congratulate you for your perseverance.
Academia will be losing a good soul when they lose you, but I sense you will still stay connected.
You must know by now that I have my problem with globalization. I have with any idea that has the ring of a mantra. I read Tom Friedman (“The Earth is Flat”), who has ideas, but ideas that are like litmus tests. I often disagree with him but he makes me think.
I can say the same for Kant. I’ve written on Kant elsewhere, and not exactly in complementary terms. What I like best about Kant is his contrariness. My sense is that the Enlightenment and rationalism were necessary on the way to the irrationality of the nineteenth and twentieth century.
The whole war machine of the twentieth century was a product of the science revolution that jumped the tracks into irrationality. But I tarry.
* * *
My BB says that if someone says it is black I will say it is white, and if they say the same thing is white I will say it is black. She tolerates my glutinous frustration and me. I hope I am subtler than that.
It is clear from Deresiewicz’s article that I am an intellectual, a free wheeling idea guy without borders. Jorge once said that of me. I don’t think of myself that way, only the idea aspect. I have the luxury of being a peripatetic philosopher below the radar. That is not by choice but by experience.
You are right. I am interested in young people finding their passions. That will be increasingly difficult as all passion is spent on nonsense today. No one in charge can see beyond the end of his or her advantage.
Take leaderless leadership. It is evident in Pakistan with 20 million people barely surviving because of the flooded plains. It is evident in the senseless war in Afghanistan. It is also evident in academia.
Nothing can liberate the spirit more from its prison than education, yet in that sense we have not yet left the nineteenth century.
You see my problem? It will not be answered by globalization, but by people like you in the trenches. By leaders who have a gut understanding of what goes on in those trenches. That is why everyone is a leader or no one is.
If I had my way, I would erase CEOs and managers, priests, professors and other authority figures and start all over.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2010
REFERENCE:
A professor in management and organizational development (OD) contacted me in 1991. He wanted me to come to his university to address a graduate seminar of his students who were reading my book, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS.
To his credit, he paid for my travel and lodging expenses out of his own pocket as there was no budget for my appearance. That was nearly twenty years ago.
The professor is a dedicated educator. He has consulted all over the world. Somehow, he has failed to become jaded by what I have described in my writings – as has William L. Livingston IV – as the dysfunctional nature of university education.
Dr. Deresiewicz article (“The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"), which I quote generously, recognizes how education has been reduced to vocational training. He says, “We have forgotten the reason universities exist. They exist to make minds, not careers.” Over the years, how often I have beaten that beast.
There is no degree that I abhor more than the MBA precisely because it is vocational training, and not liberating training of the mind. My professor teaches MBA students.
How far do we have to sink in the swamp of despair before this gets through? How soon before our fall from grace matches that of Great Britain?
Great Britain still has Oxford and Cambridge. Adam Sisman has an interesting take on this in his new biography of “Hugh Trevor-Roper” (2010), “Perhaps he (Trevor-Roper) should never have gone to Oxford. Perhaps it maimed him.”
My wonder is how many young people are being maimed today by elitist education.
My correspondent makes mention that a Harvard professor used the central theme (“six silent killers”) of two of my books in his Montreal seminar. It would have been nice if he had mentioned these books, too, or best case, had used them! But of course I am a pedestrian not a HYPE scholar. He can cherry pick my ideas without credit with impunity. I’d like to see him do that to a HYPE colleague.
If you sense that I am angry, you are wrong. I am disappointed; disappointed that some of the things Livingston and I write about are neither acknowledged nor used in academia, or certainly to any considerable extent.
To my correspondent’s credit, he has used one of my books, and freely acknowledged my authorship. He is an exception to the rule as well as an exceptional man. He is a nice person and I have never been so inclined.
* * *
A PROFESSOR WRITES:
Jim-
I was just thinking of you while up in Montreal at a conference.
One of our speakers was Michael Beer at Harvard. He is a good man who once almost hired me at Corning Glass. His speech was loaded with references to the "six silent killers" working in organization.
Though this is the title of one of your books, I doubt if you have copyrighted the term. I was curious if you had ever worked with him or know his work.
Take care and I appreciate the note and image of PhD’s as the pinprick that most of us are. My hope is that we help to have a small impact to larger human consciousness.
I think I do this best with my better students who share a joy of learning.
A new book that you may be attracted to is "5 Roads to the Future" by Starobin. He discusses the famous short paper put together by Immanuel Kant in 1783. It speaks to why the age of enlightenment might be the opening salvo for humans to finally grow up and take full responsibility for the worlds we have created.
This reference to Kant excited me. If you want to see some options for how we might create our global future, this is worth reading. The author, like you, seems most dedicated to continual learning. When I told him by email that I was hoping to use his book in my "futures class,” he immediately responded. We share many of the same ideas about the world of tomorrow.
You may not recall that I teach a special course here. Here is a syllabus I have used in the past that I thought you might enjoy in terms of how I frame a class focused on both self and strategic thinking for managers.
My students are graduating seniors in our management program and this term I have almost 60 of then in two different classes. They each will read and take essay exams on four assigned books. The class is taught in teams so that they also must work together.
In addition this last summer I added the following to my list of expectations for how I can help them over their full career. Here is my opening contract with my students (“Key Concepts for How This Course Will Be Taught”).
We are still doing creative things here. In two years, I am taking a pension from the state and going back to exploring much of the world I love. Keep up the flow of good ideas and an occasional well-deserved critique.
K
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
K,
It has been a while since I’ve heard from you. Several like you haven’t commented on my stuff forever. A person once told me – it must be forty years ago now – when I was wondering why I was not hearing from my former colleagues. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “They don’t need you any more.”
He went on to say I wear people out. I guess I do. So, I must congratulate you for your perseverance.
Academia will be losing a good soul when they lose you, but I sense you will still stay connected.
You must know by now that I have my problem with globalization. I have with any idea that has the ring of a mantra. I read Tom Friedman (“The Earth is Flat”), who has ideas, but ideas that are like litmus tests. I often disagree with him but he makes me think.
I can say the same for Kant. I’ve written on Kant elsewhere, and not exactly in complementary terms. What I like best about Kant is his contrariness. My sense is that the Enlightenment and rationalism were necessary on the way to the irrationality of the nineteenth and twentieth century.
The whole war machine of the twentieth century was a product of the science revolution that jumped the tracks into irrationality. But I tarry.
* * *
My BB says that if someone says it is black I will say it is white, and if they say the same thing is white I will say it is black. She tolerates my glutinous frustration and me. I hope I am subtler than that.
It is clear from Deresiewicz’s article that I am an intellectual, a free wheeling idea guy without borders. Jorge once said that of me. I don’t think of myself that way, only the idea aspect. I have the luxury of being a peripatetic philosopher below the radar. That is not by choice but by experience.
You are right. I am interested in young people finding their passions. That will be increasingly difficult as all passion is spent on nonsense today. No one in charge can see beyond the end of his or her advantage.
Take leaderless leadership. It is evident in Pakistan with 20 million people barely surviving because of the flooded plains. It is evident in the senseless war in Afghanistan. It is also evident in academia.
Nothing can liberate the spirit more from its prison than education, yet in that sense we have not yet left the nineteenth century.
You see my problem? It will not be answered by globalization, but by people like you in the trenches. By leaders who have a gut understanding of what goes on in those trenches. That is why everyone is a leader or no one is.
If I had my way, I would erase CEOs and managers, priests, professors and other authority figures and start all over.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
Monday, August 23, 2010
COST BENEFIT TO A $300,000 HYPE (HARVARD, YALE, PRINCETON ELITE) VOCATIONAL EDUCATION?
COST BENEFIT TO A $300,000 HYPE (HARVARD, YALE, PRINCETON ELITE) VOCATIONAL EDUCATION?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(August 23, 2010)
“When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business . . . We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorification form of vocational training.”
William Deresiewicz, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Summer 2008
* * *
REFERENCE:
One of my regular readers, a Canadian and a professional engineer, alerted me to this article in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Dr. Deresiewicz is a product of HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) where he matriculated as a student and also has taught. My reader knows that for the past quarter century I have been saying many of the things in this article, as has my colleague and friend, William L. Livingston IV.1
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
I really like this article. http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leader ship/.
It hits on many of the points raised by yourself and Bill Livingston. Maybe a trend is developing. I hope so.
Best wishes,
George
P.S. I originally discovered this article in a publication called Utne Reader. I have subscribed to it for at least a decade. The article in Utne Reader is somewhat revised from this one, but it's the same content and message. Utne Reader is a digest of reprinted articles from the alternative press: www.utne.com
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
Thank you for alerting me to this piece. Yes, it has many themes similar to what Bill and I have been writing about over the years. The problem is that a long piece like this is unlikely to be read by many.
Considering it is two-years old the status quo and business as usual has not changed one iota at HYPE, or anywhere else because of it. Nor will it until people have the vision, courage, determination, and yes, the risk taking inclinations necessary for social transformation. We don’t create such leadership because the system doesn’t support such leadership. We have had leaderless leadership so long that it is now considered leadership. It pains me when I pick up a best selling book on leadership only to find it reifies the obvious and the conventional from the perspective of institutional infallibility.
Two things I’ve said repeatedly. I am glad that I was born poor because that meant I had no safety net. I’m happy as well that I’ve never left my roots or the people that made me, me. I am still a Clinton, Iowa boy out in the world fencing with windmills.
My whole life has been an attempt to point out to my children and friends how the system is stacked against them; how they are willing participants in their own enslavement be it cultural programming, lifestyle, mimicking the rich and famous, or being obsessed with following authority, celebrity and the pedigreed without reflecting on their own station, situation and relation to the scheme of things.
Too many I have known have been drawn into the energy-sapping intrigue of career, promotion and professional acceptance. This has been at the price of their identity, dignity and self-realization.
They become, as a consequence, a diligent affectation of what they are not to the dilution of what they are. They are victims of the private terror of public failure. So, they become safe hires, stay put in a miserable job, take orders from an incompetent boss who when failure occurs, and it always does, force them to take the brunt of the blame or be made redundant.
When I was a consultant, I worked with Ivy Leaguers and was impressed with their analytical but not their empathetic skills. They saw me as an anomaly as they often worked for me, especially when I was a contract consultant for The American Management Association.
One especially perceptive Ivy Leaguer during those days said I was a strong mind trapped in my own glutinous frustration. In other words, I enjoyed pissing people off to calibrate their reaction.
He also said that I enjoyed going against the grain to turn dogma on its head and that I delighted in asking those in power embarrassing and sometimes unpardonable questions. I smiled at this because I didn’t think it was too wide of the mark. “You don’t care what I think of you?” he said finally. I didn’t answer.
I offer this as preamble to what follows, which are highlighted excerpts of Dr. Deresiewicz’s article.
* * *
IVY RETARDATION – INABILITY TO CONNECT WITH ORDINARY PEOPLE
The author had a plumber working in his home, and he had no idea how to talk to him. “It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy . . . elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there. . .
“This is not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanism that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public ‘feeder’ schools . . .
“Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated . . .
“Because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone one in it . . .
“We were the best and the brightest, as those places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright . . .
“I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t smart . . . social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms (of intelligence), are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. . .
* * *
IVY RETARDATION – TEST TAKING MENTALITIES
“An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth . . .
“SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those (rankings) . . .
“They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity, not only your identity, but your value . . . what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests.
“One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
* * *
IVY LEAGUE EDUCATION – ENTITLED MEDIOCRITY
“An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there . . .
“The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy . . . The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair (if I got caught cheating or failing and penalized for it because I have the self protection of the old-boy network that now includes girls) . . .
“Elite schools nurtured excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale student I know calls ‘entitled mediocrity.’ A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough . . .
“It’s no coincidence that (President George W. Bush), the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale . . .
“It’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to under performing CEOs are an adult version of the A- . . .
“The belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club . . .
“One of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security . . .
(The failure to take school teaching jobs is based on the rationale) “Wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? . . .
* * *
IVY LEAGUE SYNDROME – ANTI-INTELLECTUAL IMMATURITY
(The fight to get into Ivy League schools is intense) “Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They have been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure . . .
“If you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual . . .
“Being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework . . .
“If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them . . . that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers . . .
“Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas, and not for the duration of the semester . . .
(Most students of elite universities seem) “Content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them . . . (few) have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim’s soul . . .
“If students want (a transformation) conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal college . . .
“When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business . . . we are slouching, even at elite schools, towards a glorified form of vocational education . . .
“There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers, holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty . . . the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni . . .
“The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities . . .
“It’s no wonder that the students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused . . .
“Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society, and then realizing the vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile . . . it takes more than intellect; it takes imagination and courage . . .
* * *
IVY LEAGUERS – TEACHER PLEASERS AND LOOK ALIKES
“Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system . . . (they are) world-class hoop-jumpers and teach-pleasers, getting A’s (no matter how pointless the subject) . . .
“I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone look . . .(they are) thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance, and affect, that go with achievement (Dress for success, medicate for success.) . . .
* * *
IVY LEAGUERS – FEAR OF SOLITUDE
“A pretty good description of an elite college campus (is) never being allowed to feel alone. (I asked that question) What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? (A student answered) I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself . . .
“Emerson says that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. (One of the students interrupted) Wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend? . . .
“There has been much talk of the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude . . . Now students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships . . .
“What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude . . .
(A student asked) “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time; one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system . . .
(The author references Al Gore, John Kerry, and George Bush as products of this Ivy League system and sees the next generation of leaders in) “The kid who’s loading up on AP courses in junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone to think. (This kid) will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.”
* * *
FINAL NOTE
Amen!
* * *
Be always well,
Jim
_________
1 See WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), THE WORKER, ALONE! (1992), THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN (2000) and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) by James R. Fisher, Jr., or THE NEW PLAGUE (1985), HAVE FUN AT WORK (1988), FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES (1990) and DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) by William L. Livingston IV. Both authors went to secondary or tertiary universities outside the Ivy League, a fact that is unimportant other than that ideas expressed in this piece are old hat to them. Most readers are unlikely to know traditional publishers are enamored of Ivy League protocol and the hindsight thinking that emanates from it. As I’ve said in one of my recent missives those in charge of job creation in this recession have never run a mom-pop business, never been made redundant, never struggled to make a mortgage payment and may have compassion for the unemployed but little sense of their plight in human terms, and therefore a total inability to connect.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(August 23, 2010)
“When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business . . . We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorification form of vocational training.”
William Deresiewicz, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Summer 2008
* * *
REFERENCE:
One of my regular readers, a Canadian and a professional engineer, alerted me to this article in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Dr. Deresiewicz is a product of HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) where he matriculated as a student and also has taught. My reader knows that for the past quarter century I have been saying many of the things in this article, as has my colleague and friend, William L. Livingston IV.1
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
I really like this article. http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leader ship/.
It hits on many of the points raised by yourself and Bill Livingston. Maybe a trend is developing. I hope so.
Best wishes,
George
P.S. I originally discovered this article in a publication called Utne Reader. I have subscribed to it for at least a decade. The article in Utne Reader is somewhat revised from this one, but it's the same content and message. Utne Reader is a digest of reprinted articles from the alternative press: www.utne.com
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
Thank you for alerting me to this piece. Yes, it has many themes similar to what Bill and I have been writing about over the years. The problem is that a long piece like this is unlikely to be read by many.
Considering it is two-years old the status quo and business as usual has not changed one iota at HYPE, or anywhere else because of it. Nor will it until people have the vision, courage, determination, and yes, the risk taking inclinations necessary for social transformation. We don’t create such leadership because the system doesn’t support such leadership. We have had leaderless leadership so long that it is now considered leadership. It pains me when I pick up a best selling book on leadership only to find it reifies the obvious and the conventional from the perspective of institutional infallibility.
Two things I’ve said repeatedly. I am glad that I was born poor because that meant I had no safety net. I’m happy as well that I’ve never left my roots or the people that made me, me. I am still a Clinton, Iowa boy out in the world fencing with windmills.
My whole life has been an attempt to point out to my children and friends how the system is stacked against them; how they are willing participants in their own enslavement be it cultural programming, lifestyle, mimicking the rich and famous, or being obsessed with following authority, celebrity and the pedigreed without reflecting on their own station, situation and relation to the scheme of things.
Too many I have known have been drawn into the energy-sapping intrigue of career, promotion and professional acceptance. This has been at the price of their identity, dignity and self-realization.
They become, as a consequence, a diligent affectation of what they are not to the dilution of what they are. They are victims of the private terror of public failure. So, they become safe hires, stay put in a miserable job, take orders from an incompetent boss who when failure occurs, and it always does, force them to take the brunt of the blame or be made redundant.
When I was a consultant, I worked with Ivy Leaguers and was impressed with their analytical but not their empathetic skills. They saw me as an anomaly as they often worked for me, especially when I was a contract consultant for The American Management Association.
One especially perceptive Ivy Leaguer during those days said I was a strong mind trapped in my own glutinous frustration. In other words, I enjoyed pissing people off to calibrate their reaction.
He also said that I enjoyed going against the grain to turn dogma on its head and that I delighted in asking those in power embarrassing and sometimes unpardonable questions. I smiled at this because I didn’t think it was too wide of the mark. “You don’t care what I think of you?” he said finally. I didn’t answer.
I offer this as preamble to what follows, which are highlighted excerpts of Dr. Deresiewicz’s article.
* * *
IVY RETARDATION – INABILITY TO CONNECT WITH ORDINARY PEOPLE
The author had a plumber working in his home, and he had no idea how to talk to him. “It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy . . . elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there. . .
“This is not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanism that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public ‘feeder’ schools . . .
“Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated . . .
“Because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone one in it . . .
“We were the best and the brightest, as those places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright . . .
“I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t smart . . . social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms (of intelligence), are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. . .
* * *
IVY RETARDATION – TEST TAKING MENTALITIES
“An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth . . .
“SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those (rankings) . . .
“They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity, not only your identity, but your value . . . what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests.
“One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
* * *
IVY LEAGUE EDUCATION – ENTITLED MEDIOCRITY
“An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there . . .
“The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy . . . The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair (if I got caught cheating or failing and penalized for it because I have the self protection of the old-boy network that now includes girls) . . .
“Elite schools nurtured excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale student I know calls ‘entitled mediocrity.’ A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough . . .
“It’s no coincidence that (President George W. Bush), the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale . . .
“It’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to under performing CEOs are an adult version of the A- . . .
“The belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club . . .
“One of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security . . .
(The failure to take school teaching jobs is based on the rationale) “Wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? . . .
* * *
IVY LEAGUE SYNDROME – ANTI-INTELLECTUAL IMMATURITY
(The fight to get into Ivy League schools is intense) “Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They have been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure . . .
“If you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual . . .
“Being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework . . .
“If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them . . . that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers . . .
“Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas, and not for the duration of the semester . . .
(Most students of elite universities seem) “Content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them . . . (few) have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim’s soul . . .
“If students want (a transformation) conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal college . . .
“When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business . . . we are slouching, even at elite schools, towards a glorified form of vocational education . . .
“There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers, holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty . . . the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni . . .
“The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities . . .
“It’s no wonder that the students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused . . .
“Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society, and then realizing the vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile . . . it takes more than intellect; it takes imagination and courage . . .
* * *
IVY LEAGUERS – TEACHER PLEASERS AND LOOK ALIKES
“Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system . . . (they are) world-class hoop-jumpers and teach-pleasers, getting A’s (no matter how pointless the subject) . . .
“I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone look . . .(they are) thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance, and affect, that go with achievement (Dress for success, medicate for success.) . . .
* * *
IVY LEAGUERS – FEAR OF SOLITUDE
“A pretty good description of an elite college campus (is) never being allowed to feel alone. (I asked that question) What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? (A student answered) I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself . . .
“Emerson says that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. (One of the students interrupted) Wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend? . . .
“There has been much talk of the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude . . . Now students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships . . .
“What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude . . .
(A student asked) “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time; one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system . . .
(The author references Al Gore, John Kerry, and George Bush as products of this Ivy League system and sees the next generation of leaders in) “The kid who’s loading up on AP courses in junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone to think. (This kid) will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.”
* * *
FINAL NOTE
Amen!
* * *
Be always well,
Jim
_________
1 See WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), THE WORKER, ALONE! (1992), THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN (2000) and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) by James R. Fisher, Jr., or THE NEW PLAGUE (1985), HAVE FUN AT WORK (1988), FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES (1990) and DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) by William L. Livingston IV. Both authors went to secondary or tertiary universities outside the Ivy League, a fact that is unimportant other than that ideas expressed in this piece are old hat to them. Most readers are unlikely to know traditional publishers are enamored of Ivy League protocol and the hindsight thinking that emanates from it. As I’ve said in one of my recent missives those in charge of job creation in this recession have never run a mom-pop business, never been made redundant, never struggled to make a mortgage payment and may have compassion for the unemployed but little sense of their plight in human terms, and therefore a total inability to connect.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
STIMULATING TV -- 2010 HARLEM BOOK FAIR PANEL DISCUSSIONS
STIMULATING TV: 2010 HARLEM BOOK FAIR PANEL DISCUSSIONS (July 17 – 19, 2010)
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
August 22, 2010
REFERENCE:
As is my inclination of a Sunday, I look at BOOK BEAT and other programs that are on C-Span, and if interested, I stay with them. Such was the case today when I viewed 2010 HARLEM BOOK FAIR. There were panels on black history, black biography and black graphic arts in the digital age.
* * *
IMPRESSIONS
My first reaction was that I wished every American whatever his color had a chance to watch and listen to these most articulate and interesting people share their works and points of view.
I felt like a primitive never having had such concentrated exposure over a three-hour period of what African intellectuals think and feel. These panels reflected the true power of the television medium.
* * *
I had read such black authors as the legendary Civil War era black, Frederick Douglass (“Narrative of Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Myself,” as well as William S. McFeely’s “Frederick Douglass,” 1991).
More recently, I’ve read the op-ed columns of Thomas Sowell in the newspaper, and his “Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogma” (1993), and “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy,”(1995). I've also read John McWorter’s “Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority,” and “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.”
In my graduate work, I also read Gunnar Myrdal’s two-volume study, “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem & Modern Democracy” (1962).
* * *
Given this exposure, I wasn’t prepared for the treat of listening to people who have come out of the Civil Rights struggle, and have taken their places in society to the great advantage of us all.
In addition to sharing their expertise in literature, history and the graphic arts in the digital age, they shared their own particular journeys, and what they had learned from them.
Wes Moore, an over accomplished individual if there ever was one, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins, is in the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a captain of paratroopers in Afghanistan in an elite airborne group, a White House Fellow and Special Assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an investment banker with Citigroup, and author of “The Other Wes Moore.”
The book is the biography of a life timer in prison for killing a police officer. Both men are the same age, same ethnicity, came out of similar culturally demanding neighborhoods, one ended in prison and the other on Ebony magazine’s “Top 30 Leaders Under 30.”
When the successful Wes Moore asked the incarcerated Wes Moore if cultural disadvantage was his problem, he said, “No, it was a matter of expectations.” Most of us can relate to that.
Dr. Peniel Joseph, a black scholar who is often on such programs as PBS Nightly News as a demographic expert, is a professor of history at Tufts University and the author of “Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barak Obama” (2010). I am looking forward to reading this book.
* * *
These two were typical of the three panels, placing the emphasis on “making the life experience your own,” and no one else’s, and translated your pain and anger into productive effort. Again, I think most of us can relate to that.
One panelist, in the graphic arts and digital age discussion group, said something that I’d never thought about before.
When I was a boy of seven or eight until I was ten, and the good nuns introduced me to reading books, I was a voracious comic book reader. While the guys would hang out at the courthouse jail when it rained (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE 2003), I would bury myself in comic books in my room.
What I didn’t know as one of these panelists pointed out is that the iconic images in comic books massaged my right brain, or my intuitive mind, while the words in the bubbles above the iconic images supplied subtext to the story and stimulated my left-brain or cognitive mind. It made sense when I think of the nature of my conceptual orientation.
* * *
One of the phenomena of the digital age is that graphic arts are cutting into the book business. Children, and many adults for that matter, are not interested in reading books but will read comics.
One questioner of the panel, a teacher in elementary education for past ten years, said that children hate to read books.
One of the panelists asked him, “Then explain why they read Harry Potter books without pictures that are 400 or 500 pages long?” The questioner hesitated.
The panelist answered his own question, “Because the imagery clips with them. They can visualize the stories.”
* * *
Finally, my sense is that these panelists successfully reached out and connected with the audience, not in a token way, but in a genuine effort to direct and influence it to be more active and confident in the conduct of its lives, and by extension, the lives of those it influences.
Granted, it was a black conference about black scholars and authors, relating to their indigenous community, but I found the appeal to be consistent with the core values of my being.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
August 22, 2010
REFERENCE:
As is my inclination of a Sunday, I look at BOOK BEAT and other programs that are on C-Span, and if interested, I stay with them. Such was the case today when I viewed 2010 HARLEM BOOK FAIR. There were panels on black history, black biography and black graphic arts in the digital age.
* * *
IMPRESSIONS
My first reaction was that I wished every American whatever his color had a chance to watch and listen to these most articulate and interesting people share their works and points of view.
I felt like a primitive never having had such concentrated exposure over a three-hour period of what African intellectuals think and feel. These panels reflected the true power of the television medium.
* * *
I had read such black authors as the legendary Civil War era black, Frederick Douglass (“Narrative of Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Myself,” as well as William S. McFeely’s “Frederick Douglass,” 1991).
More recently, I’ve read the op-ed columns of Thomas Sowell in the newspaper, and his “Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogma” (1993), and “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy,”(1995). I've also read John McWorter’s “Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority,” and “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.”
In my graduate work, I also read Gunnar Myrdal’s two-volume study, “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem & Modern Democracy” (1962).
* * *
Given this exposure, I wasn’t prepared for the treat of listening to people who have come out of the Civil Rights struggle, and have taken their places in society to the great advantage of us all.
In addition to sharing their expertise in literature, history and the graphic arts in the digital age, they shared their own particular journeys, and what they had learned from them.
Wes Moore, an over accomplished individual if there ever was one, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins, is in the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a captain of paratroopers in Afghanistan in an elite airborne group, a White House Fellow and Special Assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an investment banker with Citigroup, and author of “The Other Wes Moore.”
The book is the biography of a life timer in prison for killing a police officer. Both men are the same age, same ethnicity, came out of similar culturally demanding neighborhoods, one ended in prison and the other on Ebony magazine’s “Top 30 Leaders Under 30.”
When the successful Wes Moore asked the incarcerated Wes Moore if cultural disadvantage was his problem, he said, “No, it was a matter of expectations.” Most of us can relate to that.
Dr. Peniel Joseph, a black scholar who is often on such programs as PBS Nightly News as a demographic expert, is a professor of history at Tufts University and the author of “Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barak Obama” (2010). I am looking forward to reading this book.
* * *
These two were typical of the three panels, placing the emphasis on “making the life experience your own,” and no one else’s, and translated your pain and anger into productive effort. Again, I think most of us can relate to that.
One panelist, in the graphic arts and digital age discussion group, said something that I’d never thought about before.
When I was a boy of seven or eight until I was ten, and the good nuns introduced me to reading books, I was a voracious comic book reader. While the guys would hang out at the courthouse jail when it rained (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE 2003), I would bury myself in comic books in my room.
What I didn’t know as one of these panelists pointed out is that the iconic images in comic books massaged my right brain, or my intuitive mind, while the words in the bubbles above the iconic images supplied subtext to the story and stimulated my left-brain or cognitive mind. It made sense when I think of the nature of my conceptual orientation.
* * *
One of the phenomena of the digital age is that graphic arts are cutting into the book business. Children, and many adults for that matter, are not interested in reading books but will read comics.
One questioner of the panel, a teacher in elementary education for past ten years, said that children hate to read books.
One of the panelists asked him, “Then explain why they read Harry Potter books without pictures that are 400 or 500 pages long?” The questioner hesitated.
The panelist answered his own question, “Because the imagery clips with them. They can visualize the stories.”
* * *
Finally, my sense is that these panelists successfully reached out and connected with the audience, not in a token way, but in a genuine effort to direct and influence it to be more active and confident in the conduct of its lives, and by extension, the lives of those it influences.
Granted, it was a black conference about black scholars and authors, relating to their indigenous community, but I found the appeal to be consistent with the core values of my being.
* * *
ENTROPY AND WHAT YOU SOW SHALL YOU REAP!
ENTROPY AND WHAT YOU SOW SHALL YOU REAP!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 22, 2010
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.”
James Oppenheim (1882 – 1932), American author and early follower of C. G. Jung
* * *
The beauty of life is that we will all die. The tragedy of life is that few of us find time to live.
Words have become a substitute for life.
We are a society resplendent with words. After all, this is the age of 24/7 media, of everyone talking incessantly on some electronic contraption throughout the day and night, texting and surfing the Internet awash in words.
A prominent swashbuckling historian Tony Judt died this past week of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. He wanted his final epitaph to read, “I did words.”
Christopher Hitchen, the Brit who became an American citizen, the confessed atheist, and the person of the pungent prose to rival Gore Vidal’s, is dying of esophageal cancer. I have never been a fan of his prose or polemics. Yet, I felt he had a perfect right to author his best selling book “God is not Great,” or more recently “Hitch 22,” a take off on Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” and his sobriquet, “Hitch.”
These books are easily forgettable reads, yet his persona and celebrity has a kind of staying power. I have no way of proving this because I am in my own golden years, but I doubt seriously if a single one of his books will be read or referred to in fifty years, as no doubt this will be equally true of 99 percent of the printed words today.
My reason for saying so is that words today are not meant to connect, but to exasperate. People are bored, essentially struck dumb by the cacophony of words.
People have too much time on their hands, but regrettably, no time for living. They work not to make a living, but to pursue a fantasy. Consequently, good enough is never enough. There must be better, and more.
This finds people have plenty of time for celebrity watching, texting nonsense to each other, or filling the void with the noise of words. Even music today is essentially noise. The bastardization of words in music has found earthy expletives no longer have punch.
Our whole society is built on achievement – achievement of what? Of influence? Of attention? Of ambition? My question is for what purpose?
We are considered fools if we don’t listen to HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitists), while hearing such commentators as Charlie Rose speaking of the Untied States having “18 of the 20 best universities in the world.” Institutions built on words!
Words didn’t save us from Katrina, from the BP Oilrig Explosion, but words will give us a Brian Williams special tonight on Katrina, and no doubt several in the future on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We like to make like we care. Words.
* * *
Words didn’t save the life of Tony Judt but I hope they gave him comfort. Words are not going to save Christopher Hitchen. I wonder if this has anything to do with his fascination for their toxitity. .
I don’t know about Judt but if Hitchen own words are accurate he willed his condition on himself through his lifestyle and defiance of good sense. He has been so busy living he hasn’t found time to have a life. I say this because a life of attention, influence and ambition is not a life for self-generation but suggests the need for self-adulation.
* * *
In the 1950s while I was a student at the University of Iowa, Bob Hope came to put on a concert in the Iowa Field House. Practically no one showed up. On stage, he was so incensed for the lack of attendance that he took his whole show, kitten and caboodle, to the Iowa City Veterans Administration Hospital where a captive audience had no chance to leave and would appreciate this celebrity radiating his charm in its presence.
* * *
The great minds of the past one hundred years or so, those who carved up the world into its xenophobic structure, those who created the science without attendant consequences, those who educated us to be more not less conscious of color and cultural differences, those who profit most when we are at war or in the business of making war machines, and those who celebrate humanity when societies is falling apart from natural disasters in Haiti, Afghanistan, China and Indonesia, are reaping what they have sowed.
* * *
The true heroes of life are those brave enough to live within family, culture, tradition, belief, community and the dictates of nature. Entropy is all about dying as everything returns to nature. Nothing exists beyond nature. We accelerate entropy when we ignore or defy nature.
Nature has no conscience. It will create tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, floods, and hurricanes without a moment’s pause. Man’s intelligence is smaller than the smallest spec of sand in Nature’s Universe. Man’s only recourse is to respect the Laws of Nature from the way he conducts his daily life to the way he treats Nature’s Garden, earth. With our intelligence, we have made it a garbage dump, and then have wondered who is the blame.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 22, 2010
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.”
James Oppenheim (1882 – 1932), American author and early follower of C. G. Jung
* * *
The beauty of life is that we will all die. The tragedy of life is that few of us find time to live.
Words have become a substitute for life.
We are a society resplendent with words. After all, this is the age of 24/7 media, of everyone talking incessantly on some electronic contraption throughout the day and night, texting and surfing the Internet awash in words.
A prominent swashbuckling historian Tony Judt died this past week of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. He wanted his final epitaph to read, “I did words.”
Christopher Hitchen, the Brit who became an American citizen, the confessed atheist, and the person of the pungent prose to rival Gore Vidal’s, is dying of esophageal cancer. I have never been a fan of his prose or polemics. Yet, I felt he had a perfect right to author his best selling book “God is not Great,” or more recently “Hitch 22,” a take off on Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” and his sobriquet, “Hitch.”
These books are easily forgettable reads, yet his persona and celebrity has a kind of staying power. I have no way of proving this because I am in my own golden years, but I doubt seriously if a single one of his books will be read or referred to in fifty years, as no doubt this will be equally true of 99 percent of the printed words today.
My reason for saying so is that words today are not meant to connect, but to exasperate. People are bored, essentially struck dumb by the cacophony of words.
People have too much time on their hands, but regrettably, no time for living. They work not to make a living, but to pursue a fantasy. Consequently, good enough is never enough. There must be better, and more.
This finds people have plenty of time for celebrity watching, texting nonsense to each other, or filling the void with the noise of words. Even music today is essentially noise. The bastardization of words in music has found earthy expletives no longer have punch.
Our whole society is built on achievement – achievement of what? Of influence? Of attention? Of ambition? My question is for what purpose?
We are considered fools if we don’t listen to HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitists), while hearing such commentators as Charlie Rose speaking of the Untied States having “18 of the 20 best universities in the world.” Institutions built on words!
Words didn’t save us from Katrina, from the BP Oilrig Explosion, but words will give us a Brian Williams special tonight on Katrina, and no doubt several in the future on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We like to make like we care. Words.
* * *
Words didn’t save the life of Tony Judt but I hope they gave him comfort. Words are not going to save Christopher Hitchen. I wonder if this has anything to do with his fascination for their toxitity. .
I don’t know about Judt but if Hitchen own words are accurate he willed his condition on himself through his lifestyle and defiance of good sense. He has been so busy living he hasn’t found time to have a life. I say this because a life of attention, influence and ambition is not a life for self-generation but suggests the need for self-adulation.
* * *
In the 1950s while I was a student at the University of Iowa, Bob Hope came to put on a concert in the Iowa Field House. Practically no one showed up. On stage, he was so incensed for the lack of attendance that he took his whole show, kitten and caboodle, to the Iowa City Veterans Administration Hospital where a captive audience had no chance to leave and would appreciate this celebrity radiating his charm in its presence.
* * *
The great minds of the past one hundred years or so, those who carved up the world into its xenophobic structure, those who created the science without attendant consequences, those who educated us to be more not less conscious of color and cultural differences, those who profit most when we are at war or in the business of making war machines, and those who celebrate humanity when societies is falling apart from natural disasters in Haiti, Afghanistan, China and Indonesia, are reaping what they have sowed.
* * *
The true heroes of life are those brave enough to live within family, culture, tradition, belief, community and the dictates of nature. Entropy is all about dying as everything returns to nature. Nothing exists beyond nature. We accelerate entropy when we ignore or defy nature.
Nature has no conscience. It will create tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, floods, and hurricanes without a moment’s pause. Man’s intelligence is smaller than the smallest spec of sand in Nature’s Universe. Man’s only recourse is to respect the Laws of Nature from the way he conducts his daily life to the way he treats Nature’s Garden, earth. With our intelligence, we have made it a garbage dump, and then have wondered who is the blame.
* * *
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
"LORD OF THE FLIES" -- PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES!
"LORD OF THE FLIES" – PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 17, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
My granddaughter, fourteen, going into ninth grade this month, had LORD OF THE FLIES by Nobel Laureate Sir William Golding as one of the required books of her summer reading. I asked her, a voracious reader, how she liked the book. She confessed she was having difficulty getting into it.
That surprised me as the Nobel Committee cited the Golding novella, his first book, when they awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. I had read it more than sixty years ago with stirring interest.
“I’ll read it again,” I told her, “and then let’s have a seminar.” Well, we haven’t had that seminar, and may not as school starts next week.
I express here the impact the book has on me now, and why I think now more than ever how important a book it is and why.
* * *
THE FICKLE NATURE OF BOOK PUBLISHING
LORD OF THE FLIES sold fewer than 3,000 copies in 1955 in the United States, a year after it was published in England, and then quietly went out of print. The radical 1960s and the struggle between rhetoric and reality that embraced the times saw the book resurface as a bestseller. It became required reading in colleges and universities, and a film in 1963 and again in 1990. Today many public schools and most preparatory schools for college make it required reading in high school.
Even so, to this day many members of the literati are less than impressed with this symbolic loaded rendition of a Robin Crusoe kind of existence of children isolated on an island. The literati were never comfortable with Golding’s winning the Nobel Prize anymore than they were when John Steinbeck won.
Were Golding a budding novelist today chances are he would have to self-publish LORD OF THE FLIES, or bury it in another genre. The preference is for novels of family pathos, vampire fantasy, or huff and puff fiction to blow down institutional barriers.
Then there is the category of mystery and horror novels of escape fiction. The irony is serious mystery novelists, many coming out of such Nordic countries as Iceland, Norway and Sweden engage in social and cultural commentary in the process of providing escape.
Consider such writers as Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Arnaldur Indridason of Iceland, Jo Nesbo of Norway, and Stieg Larsson, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahlloo, Kjell Ericksson, Nakan Nesser, and Camilla Lackberg of Sweden. If you haven’t read them already, you might give yourself a treat.
* * *
SELF-RIGHTEOUS GENERATION, THE COLLAPSE OF WESTERN SOCIETY?
The twentieth century was marked by two world wars mainly fought in the West with more than one hundred million Westerners perishing in those conflagrations.
Sixty-five years after WWII, Russia is still unable to grow its population. Erich Maria Remarque captured the insanity of war in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1928). He didn’t celebrate heroes, but ripped away the platitudes and glorification of war. James Hillman did it in A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR (2004).
Golding is in league with these voices. He manages to get to the underbelly of self-deception by tracing the defects of society back to our collective defects in our human nature.
He insists the moral shape of society depends on a modicum of good sense, and good sense depends on the ethical constitution of the individual not on any religious or political system.
LORD OF FLIES is a symbolic adventure into this reality. The child conscious state is rescued by adult consciousness in the person of a British Naval officer. The irony here is that he is a member of a British cruiser in WWII hunting to sink enemy submarines. He is as savage as these children become isolated on this island; only he is in the embrace of Western culture.
* * *
THE POWER OF SYMBOLS
This allegory takes place in the dawn of the atomic age of WWII. A British plane crash-lands into a paradisiacal island with no survivors older than twelve and many as young as six.
The symbolism begins with the title “the lord of flies,” which refers to Beelzebub or the devil. It is not a religious devil but a devil devoted to decay, destruction, demoralization, hysteria, panic and recreational violence. This devil is the equivalent of an amoral personality, or a collection of “true believers” with anarchic inclinations. It finds the host society being eaten away from the inside by its diseased construction. Golding is saying this is the psychic structure of Natural Man.
Natural Man is a living contradiction in conflict with himself. He has impulses towards society to live by rules and counter impulses to defy such limitations. Golding touches on themes popular in his time, themes which continue to have traction in ours. There is the conflict between groupthink versus individualism, between rational and irrational reaction to common stimuli, between morality and immorality. This plays out as the major subtext of LORD OF THE FLIES.
* * *
THE ALLEGORICAL STORY
This story can be approached at several levels. The storyline is that of fair-haired Ralph and pudgy “Piggy” finding a conch shell, which becomes the talisman of authority.
Ralph uses it to call the children to assemble. He embodies the public school autocrat as parliamentarian. He is the action figure, Piggy is the intellectual and reflective figure.
The other dominant boy is Jack, a redhead who was head of the choirboys. Ralph is voted chief, losing only the votes of Jack’s fellow choirboys .
Ralph has two goals: have fun and work towards rescue by keeping a constant fire signal. The fire is created with Piggy’s glasses. Shelters are erected. Assignments are laid out for gathering food and water, and keeping the fire going.
Jack is charged with rotating choirboys to maintain the fire. He fails to do so as he envisions himself and his group as “hunters,” which distracts him from his command assignment.
The fourth principal is a black-haired boy named Simon, who heads the crew erecting the huts. He is a dreamy boy suffering from epileptic seizures who takes a special interest in protecting the “littluns,” the younger boys.
Time passes, and with it enthusiasm for structure and function. Piggy notes this. He informs Ralph, who does nothing. Piggy is the most sensible of the bunch as well as the most aware of the growing tension between Ralph and Jack. He sees it leading to chaos, derailing Ralph from the main objective, being rescued. Ralph is blind to this choosing to see Piggy as an outsider and a source of natural derision.
A ship passes while Jack and the choirboys are hunting. No one is manning the fire. It goes out so there is no smoke signal. The tension between Ralph and Jack is now palpable. Jack attempts to ease the strain by promising as the hunter to kill the beast and bring back meat. The beast is a sow, nursing her piglets.
The stalking and killing of the sow is erotic and has the overtones of a sexual rape and the denouement of a brutal murder. The head of the dead pig is placed on a stick as the new talisman of the hunters. It quickly collects flies.
Simon sees the pig’s head swarming with flies and calls it the “Lord of the Flies.” He believes it talks to him. He also discovers the wild “Beast” near the Castle Rock to be a dead parachutist. Simon “interview” with the pig’s head identifies itself as the real “Beast,” disclosing to Simon the truth about itself, and that is that the boys themselves created the beast, and that the real beast was inside them all.
Simon arrives back at the camp with his discovery of parachutist and his new insight into the nature of the beast, not being a sleeping monster but a cadaver, and the truth about the true beast being in all of them.
Heady with this information he arrives in the dark, when the tribal ritual of the hunters are in a state of delirium celebrating the sow kill, decked out in war paint, still reeling with blood lust, blindly swarming around Simon as they did the sow, attacking and killing him as he is mistaken as the “Beast.” Ralph and Piggy took part in the feast but convinced themselves they were no part of the murder.
All Piggy’s advice to Ralph that had been ignored. It was now coming to roost. Ralph had lost his confidence and direction but not Piggy. He tells Ralph that they are in danger, as they retreat back to their hut, only to have it invaded and Piggy’s glasses stolen to make fire.
Not satisfied with being dominant and ruling a savage group, Jack feels he must hunt and kill Ralph and Piggy to cement his control. In the process of looking for them, Piggy is killed accidentally, and the mountain is set afire in an attempt to flush out Ralph. This brings the British Naval officer to the rescue, where Ralph again emerges as the head boy.
* * *
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT WITH A FREUDIAN PERSPECTIVE
Without careful tone and construction, a symbolic morality play can fall on deaf ears, and even be ridiculed as bizarre. Dostoyevsky took such high risk when he had Christ coming back to earth in the time of the Inquisition in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (1879 – 1880). Dostoyevsky found salvation in freedom, but also damnation in it.
Joseph Conrad’s novella, HEART OF DARKNESS (1902), was a passion play of the gloss of civility covering the nascent brute of wildness.
Freud, however, is most evident symbolically in the characters of Golding’s story. It was also a dominant theme in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
Briefly we might look at the main characters in terms of this perspective.
RALPH represents Freud’s Superego, the Parent, or the Morality Principle.
This is the Parent who plays the dual judgmental role of being the critical and nurturing as the case may be. He is the authority figure and the personification of a rule of law, policies and procedures, acceptable and unacceptable conduct, and the consequences of thereof.
The Parent embodies the tradition of the establishment, institutional authority and culture.
Separated from that culture on an isolated island, Ralph draws upon what he knows and how he has been programmed to think and behave as a Parent. He attempts to establish that climate as the chief with the talisman of his authority, the conch.
In social psychological terms, the Parent sees itself as a thinker, but it is a feeler, and can be driven to distraction by emotions. The Parent’s mind is built on righteousness in terms of what should be or ought to be. The Parent needs an outside source to provide balance and perspective to keep it on mission. Piggy supplies this role in mainly an OD manner.
* * *
JACK represents Freud’s Id, the Child, or the Pleasure Principle.
This is the Child, where wildness and primitive reptilian behavior crave fulfillment. It is in everyone, but society is organized to repress and suppress its expression, and ultimately subdue it into compliance with cultural dictates.
The Child is the person of any age consumed with reckless abandon games.
The Child is a Type “T” Personality committed to high-risk-taking, thrill seeking, rule-breaking, creative-abandon games. Being primarily “left brain” dominated, such an individual’s reasoning easily gravitates to the bizarre. Paranoia, which is busily fermenting under the surface, comes to dominate the mind.
The individual is obsessed with looking for trouble, and invariably finds it. He looks for enemies and finds himself surrounded by them. He feels he is under siege, and must do something precipitously to rid him of the terror.
In social psychological terms, the Child is guided by impulse and behaves in a state of “whatever” regardless of the consequences.
* * *
PIGGY represents Freud’s Ego, the Adult, or the Reality Principle.
The Adult deals with “what is” as opposed to “what should be.” Data is taken in, processed, assimilated, conceptualized and articulated as to what appears to be the case.
The Adult is a thinker with the mature mindset of a pragmatist. The compelling drive is to be and stay on the right track. The interest is not obtrusive, political or the need to take credit but to get the desired results.
This was captured in an exchange between Ralph and Piggy when Ralph’s resolve was dissolving. They encountered Jack’s tribe in all its war paint glory. Ralph was taken back hiding his edginess in disjointed meanderings.
“Well, we won’t be painted,” said Ralph, “because we aren’t savages.”
Samneric (Sam and Eric, the twins) looked at each other. “All the same—“
Ralph shouted. “No paint!” He tried to remember (what his role was). “Smoke,” he said, “we need smoke.” He turned on the twins fiercely. “I said ‘smoke’! We’ve got to have smoke.”
There was silence, except for the multitudinous murmur of the bees. At last Piggy spoke, kindly. “Course we have. Cos the smoke’s a signal and we can’t be rescued if we don’t have smoke.”
“I knew that!” shouted Ralph. He pulled his arm away from Piggy. “Are you suggesting--?”
“I’m jus’ saying what you always say,” said Piggy hastily. “I’d thought for a moment”
“I hadn’t,” said Ralph loudly. “I knew it all the time. I hadn’t forgotten.”
Piggy nodded propitiously. “You’re chief, Ralph. You remember everything.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Course not.”
* * *
Ralph often wondered why he didn’t think of the things that seemed to come so naturally to Piggy. He wondered, too, why Piggy took all the abuse but yet was loyal to him.
Piggy thought like the Adult, and the Adult in him had only one interest, being rescued. He knew that took finding a way to alert a passing ship that they were there, which was the idea of the smoke. The relationship of rescue and smoke increasingly became lost in Ralph’s consciousness as he became increasingly distracted by the exploits of Jack. Piggy knew they might self-destruct if they were not rescued soon.
In social psychological terms, he was guided by his mind through cognitive reflection.
ROGER is worse than the disturbed Child.
He is the Child without conscience, the brute that is in us all, but the brute that is attracted to the likes of Jack, which gives it free reign. He kills Piggy accidentally on purpose with a stone, and represents the evil element that Freud claimed is just under the surface in us all.
SIMON is a Christ-like figure with kindness and caring for the littluns.
He is in tune with Nature and hears her music. The pig’s head throws him into hallucinations, and I suspect an epileptic seizure. He emerges from his interview with “Lord of the Flies” recognition of our human capacity for evil and the superficial nature of human morality.
He attains knowledge of the end of innocence of which Ralph is to weep at the end of the book. Simon, like Christ, predicts his death and the manner it would occur, in the middle of the tribal festivities.
NAVAL OFFICER arrives, and with that arrival, the world of Ralph and Jack dissolves, as they return to being little boys.
He represents society and civilization of the West. He is an officer of a warship hunting submarines, not unlike the savagery of Jack hunting wild boars, but he is civilized, mannered, well groomed, and wears the tribal colors of his country and military discipline..
The boys are rescued from one existence and swallowed up by another.
THE CONCH represents civility, order, democracy and all the other artificial symbols of authority. National flags are talismans, as are churches, temples, synagogues and mosques.
The conch was smashed into a thousand pieces by the same rock that killed Piggy. This symbolism demonstrates how fragile order is, how quickly we can retreat from good sense by reliance on talismans.
THE BEAST is a figment of the imagination but it goes through much iteration until Simon realizes the Beast is a creation of the imagination.
Often when someone penetrates the myths of society, or society’s duplicity and double standards the truth bearer suffers for the exposure. Simon was beaten to death before he could reveal his truth.
THE LORD OF THE FLIES is a physical manifestation of evil in the boys, here personified in the pig’s head on the stick.
Below the veneer of innocence, Golding is saying, evil lurks. We should take little comfort when the likes of Piggy and Simon perish, while the ambivalence of Ralph and the unhinged Jack endure.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 17, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
My granddaughter, fourteen, going into ninth grade this month, had LORD OF THE FLIES by Nobel Laureate Sir William Golding as one of the required books of her summer reading. I asked her, a voracious reader, how she liked the book. She confessed she was having difficulty getting into it.
That surprised me as the Nobel Committee cited the Golding novella, his first book, when they awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. I had read it more than sixty years ago with stirring interest.
“I’ll read it again,” I told her, “and then let’s have a seminar.” Well, we haven’t had that seminar, and may not as school starts next week.
I express here the impact the book has on me now, and why I think now more than ever how important a book it is and why.
* * *
THE FICKLE NATURE OF BOOK PUBLISHING
LORD OF THE FLIES sold fewer than 3,000 copies in 1955 in the United States, a year after it was published in England, and then quietly went out of print. The radical 1960s and the struggle between rhetoric and reality that embraced the times saw the book resurface as a bestseller. It became required reading in colleges and universities, and a film in 1963 and again in 1990. Today many public schools and most preparatory schools for college make it required reading in high school.
Even so, to this day many members of the literati are less than impressed with this symbolic loaded rendition of a Robin Crusoe kind of existence of children isolated on an island. The literati were never comfortable with Golding’s winning the Nobel Prize anymore than they were when John Steinbeck won.
Were Golding a budding novelist today chances are he would have to self-publish LORD OF THE FLIES, or bury it in another genre. The preference is for novels of family pathos, vampire fantasy, or huff and puff fiction to blow down institutional barriers.
Then there is the category of mystery and horror novels of escape fiction. The irony is serious mystery novelists, many coming out of such Nordic countries as Iceland, Norway and Sweden engage in social and cultural commentary in the process of providing escape.
Consider such writers as Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Arnaldur Indridason of Iceland, Jo Nesbo of Norway, and Stieg Larsson, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahlloo, Kjell Ericksson, Nakan Nesser, and Camilla Lackberg of Sweden. If you haven’t read them already, you might give yourself a treat.
* * *
SELF-RIGHTEOUS GENERATION, THE COLLAPSE OF WESTERN SOCIETY?
The twentieth century was marked by two world wars mainly fought in the West with more than one hundred million Westerners perishing in those conflagrations.
Sixty-five years after WWII, Russia is still unable to grow its population. Erich Maria Remarque captured the insanity of war in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1928). He didn’t celebrate heroes, but ripped away the platitudes and glorification of war. James Hillman did it in A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR (2004).
Golding is in league with these voices. He manages to get to the underbelly of self-deception by tracing the defects of society back to our collective defects in our human nature.
He insists the moral shape of society depends on a modicum of good sense, and good sense depends on the ethical constitution of the individual not on any religious or political system.
LORD OF FLIES is a symbolic adventure into this reality. The child conscious state is rescued by adult consciousness in the person of a British Naval officer. The irony here is that he is a member of a British cruiser in WWII hunting to sink enemy submarines. He is as savage as these children become isolated on this island; only he is in the embrace of Western culture.
* * *
THE POWER OF SYMBOLS
This allegory takes place in the dawn of the atomic age of WWII. A British plane crash-lands into a paradisiacal island with no survivors older than twelve and many as young as six.
The symbolism begins with the title “the lord of flies,” which refers to Beelzebub or the devil. It is not a religious devil but a devil devoted to decay, destruction, demoralization, hysteria, panic and recreational violence. This devil is the equivalent of an amoral personality, or a collection of “true believers” with anarchic inclinations. It finds the host society being eaten away from the inside by its diseased construction. Golding is saying this is the psychic structure of Natural Man.
Natural Man is a living contradiction in conflict with himself. He has impulses towards society to live by rules and counter impulses to defy such limitations. Golding touches on themes popular in his time, themes which continue to have traction in ours. There is the conflict between groupthink versus individualism, between rational and irrational reaction to common stimuli, between morality and immorality. This plays out as the major subtext of LORD OF THE FLIES.
* * *
THE ALLEGORICAL STORY
This story can be approached at several levels. The storyline is that of fair-haired Ralph and pudgy “Piggy” finding a conch shell, which becomes the talisman of authority.
Ralph uses it to call the children to assemble. He embodies the public school autocrat as parliamentarian. He is the action figure, Piggy is the intellectual and reflective figure.
The other dominant boy is Jack, a redhead who was head of the choirboys. Ralph is voted chief, losing only the votes of Jack’s fellow choirboys .
Ralph has two goals: have fun and work towards rescue by keeping a constant fire signal. The fire is created with Piggy’s glasses. Shelters are erected. Assignments are laid out for gathering food and water, and keeping the fire going.
Jack is charged with rotating choirboys to maintain the fire. He fails to do so as he envisions himself and his group as “hunters,” which distracts him from his command assignment.
The fourth principal is a black-haired boy named Simon, who heads the crew erecting the huts. He is a dreamy boy suffering from epileptic seizures who takes a special interest in protecting the “littluns,” the younger boys.
Time passes, and with it enthusiasm for structure and function. Piggy notes this. He informs Ralph, who does nothing. Piggy is the most sensible of the bunch as well as the most aware of the growing tension between Ralph and Jack. He sees it leading to chaos, derailing Ralph from the main objective, being rescued. Ralph is blind to this choosing to see Piggy as an outsider and a source of natural derision.
A ship passes while Jack and the choirboys are hunting. No one is manning the fire. It goes out so there is no smoke signal. The tension between Ralph and Jack is now palpable. Jack attempts to ease the strain by promising as the hunter to kill the beast and bring back meat. The beast is a sow, nursing her piglets.
The stalking and killing of the sow is erotic and has the overtones of a sexual rape and the denouement of a brutal murder. The head of the dead pig is placed on a stick as the new talisman of the hunters. It quickly collects flies.
Simon sees the pig’s head swarming with flies and calls it the “Lord of the Flies.” He believes it talks to him. He also discovers the wild “Beast” near the Castle Rock to be a dead parachutist. Simon “interview” with the pig’s head identifies itself as the real “Beast,” disclosing to Simon the truth about itself, and that is that the boys themselves created the beast, and that the real beast was inside them all.
Simon arrives back at the camp with his discovery of parachutist and his new insight into the nature of the beast, not being a sleeping monster but a cadaver, and the truth about the true beast being in all of them.
Heady with this information he arrives in the dark, when the tribal ritual of the hunters are in a state of delirium celebrating the sow kill, decked out in war paint, still reeling with blood lust, blindly swarming around Simon as they did the sow, attacking and killing him as he is mistaken as the “Beast.” Ralph and Piggy took part in the feast but convinced themselves they were no part of the murder.
All Piggy’s advice to Ralph that had been ignored. It was now coming to roost. Ralph had lost his confidence and direction but not Piggy. He tells Ralph that they are in danger, as they retreat back to their hut, only to have it invaded and Piggy’s glasses stolen to make fire.
Not satisfied with being dominant and ruling a savage group, Jack feels he must hunt and kill Ralph and Piggy to cement his control. In the process of looking for them, Piggy is killed accidentally, and the mountain is set afire in an attempt to flush out Ralph. This brings the British Naval officer to the rescue, where Ralph again emerges as the head boy.
* * *
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT WITH A FREUDIAN PERSPECTIVE
Without careful tone and construction, a symbolic morality play can fall on deaf ears, and even be ridiculed as bizarre. Dostoyevsky took such high risk when he had Christ coming back to earth in the time of the Inquisition in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (1879 – 1880). Dostoyevsky found salvation in freedom, but also damnation in it.
Joseph Conrad’s novella, HEART OF DARKNESS (1902), was a passion play of the gloss of civility covering the nascent brute of wildness.
Freud, however, is most evident symbolically in the characters of Golding’s story. It was also a dominant theme in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
Briefly we might look at the main characters in terms of this perspective.
RALPH represents Freud’s Superego, the Parent, or the Morality Principle.
This is the Parent who plays the dual judgmental role of being the critical and nurturing as the case may be. He is the authority figure and the personification of a rule of law, policies and procedures, acceptable and unacceptable conduct, and the consequences of thereof.
The Parent embodies the tradition of the establishment, institutional authority and culture.
Separated from that culture on an isolated island, Ralph draws upon what he knows and how he has been programmed to think and behave as a Parent. He attempts to establish that climate as the chief with the talisman of his authority, the conch.
In social psychological terms, the Parent sees itself as a thinker, but it is a feeler, and can be driven to distraction by emotions. The Parent’s mind is built on righteousness in terms of what should be or ought to be. The Parent needs an outside source to provide balance and perspective to keep it on mission. Piggy supplies this role in mainly an OD manner.
* * *
JACK represents Freud’s Id, the Child, or the Pleasure Principle.
This is the Child, where wildness and primitive reptilian behavior crave fulfillment. It is in everyone, but society is organized to repress and suppress its expression, and ultimately subdue it into compliance with cultural dictates.
The Child is the person of any age consumed with reckless abandon games.
The Child is a Type “T” Personality committed to high-risk-taking, thrill seeking, rule-breaking, creative-abandon games. Being primarily “left brain” dominated, such an individual’s reasoning easily gravitates to the bizarre. Paranoia, which is busily fermenting under the surface, comes to dominate the mind.
The individual is obsessed with looking for trouble, and invariably finds it. He looks for enemies and finds himself surrounded by them. He feels he is under siege, and must do something precipitously to rid him of the terror.
In social psychological terms, the Child is guided by impulse and behaves in a state of “whatever” regardless of the consequences.
* * *
PIGGY represents Freud’s Ego, the Adult, or the Reality Principle.
The Adult deals with “what is” as opposed to “what should be.” Data is taken in, processed, assimilated, conceptualized and articulated as to what appears to be the case.
The Adult is a thinker with the mature mindset of a pragmatist. The compelling drive is to be and stay on the right track. The interest is not obtrusive, political or the need to take credit but to get the desired results.
This was captured in an exchange between Ralph and Piggy when Ralph’s resolve was dissolving. They encountered Jack’s tribe in all its war paint glory. Ralph was taken back hiding his edginess in disjointed meanderings.
“Well, we won’t be painted,” said Ralph, “because we aren’t savages.”
Samneric (Sam and Eric, the twins) looked at each other. “All the same—“
Ralph shouted. “No paint!” He tried to remember (what his role was). “Smoke,” he said, “we need smoke.” He turned on the twins fiercely. “I said ‘smoke’! We’ve got to have smoke.”
There was silence, except for the multitudinous murmur of the bees. At last Piggy spoke, kindly. “Course we have. Cos the smoke’s a signal and we can’t be rescued if we don’t have smoke.”
“I knew that!” shouted Ralph. He pulled his arm away from Piggy. “Are you suggesting--?”
“I’m jus’ saying what you always say,” said Piggy hastily. “I’d thought for a moment”
“I hadn’t,” said Ralph loudly. “I knew it all the time. I hadn’t forgotten.”
Piggy nodded propitiously. “You’re chief, Ralph. You remember everything.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Course not.”
* * *
Ralph often wondered why he didn’t think of the things that seemed to come so naturally to Piggy. He wondered, too, why Piggy took all the abuse but yet was loyal to him.
Piggy thought like the Adult, and the Adult in him had only one interest, being rescued. He knew that took finding a way to alert a passing ship that they were there, which was the idea of the smoke. The relationship of rescue and smoke increasingly became lost in Ralph’s consciousness as he became increasingly distracted by the exploits of Jack. Piggy knew they might self-destruct if they were not rescued soon.
In social psychological terms, he was guided by his mind through cognitive reflection.
ROGER is worse than the disturbed Child.
He is the Child without conscience, the brute that is in us all, but the brute that is attracted to the likes of Jack, which gives it free reign. He kills Piggy accidentally on purpose with a stone, and represents the evil element that Freud claimed is just under the surface in us all.
SIMON is a Christ-like figure with kindness and caring for the littluns.
He is in tune with Nature and hears her music. The pig’s head throws him into hallucinations, and I suspect an epileptic seizure. He emerges from his interview with “Lord of the Flies” recognition of our human capacity for evil and the superficial nature of human morality.
He attains knowledge of the end of innocence of which Ralph is to weep at the end of the book. Simon, like Christ, predicts his death and the manner it would occur, in the middle of the tribal festivities.
NAVAL OFFICER arrives, and with that arrival, the world of Ralph and Jack dissolves, as they return to being little boys.
He represents society and civilization of the West. He is an officer of a warship hunting submarines, not unlike the savagery of Jack hunting wild boars, but he is civilized, mannered, well groomed, and wears the tribal colors of his country and military discipline..
The boys are rescued from one existence and swallowed up by another.
THE CONCH represents civility, order, democracy and all the other artificial symbols of authority. National flags are talismans, as are churches, temples, synagogues and mosques.
The conch was smashed into a thousand pieces by the same rock that killed Piggy. This symbolism demonstrates how fragile order is, how quickly we can retreat from good sense by reliance on talismans.
THE BEAST is a figment of the imagination but it goes through much iteration until Simon realizes the Beast is a creation of the imagination.
Often when someone penetrates the myths of society, or society’s duplicity and double standards the truth bearer suffers for the exposure. Simon was beaten to death before he could reveal his truth.
THE LORD OF THE FLIES is a physical manifestation of evil in the boys, here personified in the pig’s head on the stick.
Below the veneer of innocence, Golding is saying, evil lurks. We should take little comfort when the likes of Piggy and Simon perish, while the ambivalence of Ralph and the unhinged Jack endure.
* * *
Sunday, August 15, 2010
SOFT HEADED SOCIETY ON DISPLAY!
SOFT HEADED SOCIETY ON DISPLAY!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 15, 2010
* * *
A WRITER’S COMMENTS RECEIVING LIVINSTON’S BOOKS:
Thanks Jim.
I will put Bill Livingston’s HAVE FUN AT WORK and FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES to good use. Also, thanks to you, I contacted Ned Hamson and he kindly emailed the pdf version of THE NEW PLAGUE to me. Bill has been on this tack for a long time I see.
All the best,
George
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
Yes he has, and I know you will make good use of Bill Livingston's books.
You're a professional engineer; you've paid your dues. And if I'm right, Livingston is a beacon to you, and others like you, in confirming that you are not only on the right track but are in control of the game.
The problem, and Livingston is well aware of this, and that is the game has been taken away from you. It has been made so by institutional infallibility, protecting the status quo, and no matter what the demands on the system pursuing business as usual.
Society has become controlled by politicians that know nothing about engineering except how to exploit it; by artists that know nothing about engineering, but how to denigrate it; and by ordinary citizens that know nothing about engineering, but how to consume it as toys of distraction.
* * *
My Sundays are often dedicated to watching the various programs on books and authors on C-Span. One program -- taped May 27, 2010 -- hosted by John Stewart, whom I'm still trying to understand the legitimacy of his claim to being a satirist -- and featuring John Grisham, Condolezza Rice, and Mary Roach.
Authors today are combination politicians and advertising executives, who are as glib in front of a microphone as Bob Hope was at one time. They say the right words, make the right pauses, and connect with their adulating passive audience by saying precisely what that audience expects them to say. The whole affair is choreographed to perfection, leaving a good feeling in the audience’s mind like Valium.
Then I wandered on to a half hour interview with Christopher Hitchens regarding his new memoir "Hitch 22." Again, this was taped May 27, 2010. No one is glibber than Hitchens. He apparently is preoccupied with two things, being boring -- he can think of nothing worse; and death -- yet it is apparent in his appearance that hedonistic self-destruction has not taken a pause.
My wonder is why he is so popular. Then I gave myself pause and realized it all fits. Society is disintegrating around us -- which engineers are trying to shore up at every turn -- and we are confined to nice words, polite arguments, and total mediocrity.
This came to a head for me when I read the cover story of the current issue of Time magazine titled "Great American Novelist."
Words have become meaningless in our language such as "great" and "smart" and "brilliant." We are so impressed in what people are that we fail to look at what they do. Livingston says it is not the words but the actions that make the difference. In any case, it prompted me to write "A Letter to the Editor" at Time. To wit:
COVER STORY: “GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST” (8/23/10)
Come on, Time! Greatness isn’t an ad campaign. Greatness evolves as it has in certain respects with other midwestern writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Meredith Wilson. A few even won Nobel Laureate honors. Yet it is difficult to put American writers in the company of Joyce, Balzac, Camus, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Perhaps it is a matter of culture. Time magazine has done a disservice to Jonathan Franzen by placing the manacle of greatness on him. Then to confirm his popularity with book sales, I wonder how that registers with him.
* * *
Finally, I watched publishing executives cry real tears on television regarding the dramatic shift in the publishing business. It is clear they don’t have a clue as to what to do. For more than one hundred years the publishing industry has been the hostage of authors, and now authors are every man and woman on the street. Clearly, this whole idea of electronic books has publishers flummoxed. Watching these executives try to paste words to their malaise was like watching Roman emperors fighting the wild beasts in the coliseum while the gladiators – the engineers – sat in the emperor’s box with “thumbs ups” or “thumbs down” to exploits in the arena.
* * *
It would be nice if Livingston were twenty years younger, when he started this whole crusade. Then he would have the energy to make it right and in doing so make society well in the process. His books, as you know, cut to the marrow of the mischief of our times, and few in any walk of life and at any level have the constitution for facing that reality.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 15, 2010
* * *
A WRITER’S COMMENTS RECEIVING LIVINSTON’S BOOKS:
Thanks Jim.
I will put Bill Livingston’s HAVE FUN AT WORK and FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES to good use. Also, thanks to you, I contacted Ned Hamson and he kindly emailed the pdf version of THE NEW PLAGUE to me. Bill has been on this tack for a long time I see.
All the best,
George
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
Yes he has, and I know you will make good use of Bill Livingston's books.
You're a professional engineer; you've paid your dues. And if I'm right, Livingston is a beacon to you, and others like you, in confirming that you are not only on the right track but are in control of the game.
The problem, and Livingston is well aware of this, and that is the game has been taken away from you. It has been made so by institutional infallibility, protecting the status quo, and no matter what the demands on the system pursuing business as usual.
Society has become controlled by politicians that know nothing about engineering except how to exploit it; by artists that know nothing about engineering, but how to denigrate it; and by ordinary citizens that know nothing about engineering, but how to consume it as toys of distraction.
* * *
My Sundays are often dedicated to watching the various programs on books and authors on C-Span. One program -- taped May 27, 2010 -- hosted by John Stewart, whom I'm still trying to understand the legitimacy of his claim to being a satirist -- and featuring John Grisham, Condolezza Rice, and Mary Roach.
Authors today are combination politicians and advertising executives, who are as glib in front of a microphone as Bob Hope was at one time. They say the right words, make the right pauses, and connect with their adulating passive audience by saying precisely what that audience expects them to say. The whole affair is choreographed to perfection, leaving a good feeling in the audience’s mind like Valium.
Then I wandered on to a half hour interview with Christopher Hitchens regarding his new memoir "Hitch 22." Again, this was taped May 27, 2010. No one is glibber than Hitchens. He apparently is preoccupied with two things, being boring -- he can think of nothing worse; and death -- yet it is apparent in his appearance that hedonistic self-destruction has not taken a pause.
My wonder is why he is so popular. Then I gave myself pause and realized it all fits. Society is disintegrating around us -- which engineers are trying to shore up at every turn -- and we are confined to nice words, polite arguments, and total mediocrity.
This came to a head for me when I read the cover story of the current issue of Time magazine titled "Great American Novelist."
Words have become meaningless in our language such as "great" and "smart" and "brilliant." We are so impressed in what people are that we fail to look at what they do. Livingston says it is not the words but the actions that make the difference. In any case, it prompted me to write "A Letter to the Editor" at Time. To wit:
COVER STORY: “GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST” (8/23/10)
Come on, Time! Greatness isn’t an ad campaign. Greatness evolves as it has in certain respects with other midwestern writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Meredith Wilson. A few even won Nobel Laureate honors. Yet it is difficult to put American writers in the company of Joyce, Balzac, Camus, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Perhaps it is a matter of culture. Time magazine has done a disservice to Jonathan Franzen by placing the manacle of greatness on him. Then to confirm his popularity with book sales, I wonder how that registers with him.
* * *
Finally, I watched publishing executives cry real tears on television regarding the dramatic shift in the publishing business. It is clear they don’t have a clue as to what to do. For more than one hundred years the publishing industry has been the hostage of authors, and now authors are every man and woman on the street. Clearly, this whole idea of electronic books has publishers flummoxed. Watching these executives try to paste words to their malaise was like watching Roman emperors fighting the wild beasts in the coliseum while the gladiators – the engineers – sat in the emperor’s box with “thumbs ups” or “thumbs down” to exploits in the arena.
* * *
It would be nice if Livingston were twenty years younger, when he started this whole crusade. Then he would have the energy to make it right and in doing so make society well in the process. His books, as you know, cut to the marrow of the mischief of our times, and few in any walk of life and at any level have the constitution for facing that reality.
Be always well,
Jim
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