OUT OF ORDER! MORE THAN A MILITARY PROBLEM -- A RESPONSE

OUT OF ORDER! MORE THAN A MILITARY PROBLEM – A RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 1, 2010

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A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

Hope you are well.

We have what exists today because we deserve it. We are moving more and more to a society, a culture that bases important electoral decisions on sound bites, platitudes and unfounded hyperbole.

As a result we will always chose the substance-less comedian. If Robin Williams was born twenty years later he could have been President. Slick, mean and frequent advertising trumps performance and track record. If Paul Simon were born forty years later he never would have been elected.

Michael,

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Your response intrigues me. So, I get ready as I launch into a word journey.

Words transform history and are more powerful than bullets. It is interesting that you should mention two wordsmiths, Robin Williams and Paul Simon, relative to this missive (OUT OF ORDER: The Changing Climate of Authority and Its Consequences, August 26, 2010). I've spent some time ruminating over this.

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“Good Morning, Vietnam” was a signature performance of Robin Williams. Although Mitch Markowitz wrote the film, most of the dialogue of Williams as a disc jockey was improvised. Words in that film pricked the absurdity of Vietnam with humor, not with pathos as in the case "Apocalypse Now" (1979) starring Marlon Brando.

A few years ago, I was in Denver watching John Stewart on cable with my nephew. I had never heard of Stewart but was familiar with his guests, Robin Williams and Joe Bidden. The ad-libs of Williams were like eclectic firecrackers. He demonstrated knowledge on a wide range of subjects. It was an astonishing performance. With that quirky smile of his, words rolled off his lips without effort. As I recall, Bidden mainly smiled.

Paul Simon, ten years senior to Williams, is more of my generation. I remember in 1968 British South Africans returning from New York to South Africa humming “Mrs. Robinson” after seeing "The Graduate."

Simon’s “Graceland,” nearly a score of years later, was about South Africa apartheid (not Elvis Presley’s home).

"Graceland" is said to have turned the tide on that policy. Be that as it may, in 1990, four years after the song was published, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Then in 1994, he led a multi-racial democracy to a new South Africa government. Apartheid was gone! Imagine that! Could words in a song be that explosive? I wonder.

Two artists, connoisseurs of words, have managed to punch holes in the fabric of unpopular societal movements without guns or armies.

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Obviously, Colonel Mathhew Moten had other intentions in his “Out of Order” article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS (September/October 2010). His focus was on strengthening political-military relationships. You have managed to widen my sense of this. It is all about words.

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"OUTSIDER" AND "INSIDER" AND OTHER MEANINGLESS WORDS

Outsider Rick Scott gained the Republican nomination for governor of Florida by beating the heir apparent Bill McCollum, the “insider” politician. He did it by spending $50 million.

Scott the “outsider” relied almost totally on a campaign of television ads with few boots-on-the-ground, unconventional to say the least. He linked McCollum to former state GOP leader, Jim Greer, who was “indicted" for "fraud,” and to McCollum’s unpopular stand on “immigration.”

Words in quotation marks are charged words that actually are relatively meaningless in the context in which they are used. Not to worry, an emotional electorate thrives on meaningless words.

McCollum had the massive Republican political machine working for him against Scott, and it, too, lost in the fray. Republicans were stuck in convention, in business as usual, and failed to realize the ground rules had changed.

Was it money that won for Scott? Was it his capacity to see where Floridians were and wanted to go? I think it was a combination of both. There is another factor.

Elections have become beauty contests with smiling baldheaded Scott being seen as more attractive than whining, wimpy McCollum. Scott rolled with the punches on television while McCollum seemed punch drunk from them. Viewers don't miss this.

* * *

Were Robin Williams and Paul Simon politicians I think we would be surprised by how they would fare. There is something manic in the humor of Williams, while Simon seems to shuffle along on a Valium carpet. Both performers hit the conscious centers of the brain but with different medicine. Different medicines are required at different times in society.

Aaron David Miller touches on this in the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times (August 22, 2010). He writes:

“Woody Allen got it wrong. Ninety percent of success in life isn’t showing up; it’s showing up at the right time and knowing what to do once you get there.”

Miller sees President Barak Obama missing his moment, and America’s by attempting to become a “great” president by passing important legislation, such as healthcare reform, finance regulation, and then playing tough with the military.

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The columnist sees it is hard for President Obama to step out of his character. It is hard for us all to step out of our own skin and be what we are not.

Obama is a cerebral president in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson with some of the cutting charm of John F. Kennedy. If you believe historians, these men were great but not necessarily great presidents.

Great presidents, Miller writes, were the courageous (and lucky) George Washington, the cerebral (and courageous) Abraham Lincoln, and the pragmatic (and sociable) Franklin D. Roosevelt. Circumstances had much to do with their greatness as well.

According to Miller, three presidents he sees as “near great” capitalized on succeeding weak presidents: Andrew Jackson (my favorite) succeeded John Quincy Adams; Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy; and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter.

These “near great” presidents seized the moment and understood where America was and where it wanted to go and took the country there. This is a pretty good definition of LEADERSHIP.

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LEADERSHIP REVOLVES AROUND WORDS

“Professionalism,” which is a word Colonel Moten is fond of using, is a word that bothers me. Few of us are multitasked oriented. We find safety in being “professional.” Indeed, we have scores of disciplines in psychology to explain behavior, yet common behavior remains a mystery.

We have found refuge in “words,” words without meaning that bounce off our psyches like raindrops. Great presidents have known the right words were secret weapons, as have leaders throughout time.

* * *

Leadership involves action but revolves around words, words with meaning in the high octane numbers, words with the purity of explosives. Ordinary leaders shy away from such words because they fear the chaos. Chaos leads to inevitable, irrefutable, incontrovertible change. You can never put the words back into the tube.

* * *

Our citadels of learning know this. They shy away from such words because they have a vested interest in things, as they are: enrollments, endowments, tenure and all the rest.

My sense is when thinking is too pure too unvarnished it may in fact blow up in our collective faces. Purity has its dangers.

Many years ago when I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, we had a new chemical plant in Freeport Texas. It blew up shortly after it went on line. The plant was built to the specifications of a radical new chemical process to make tetraethyl and tetra methyl lead then used as catalysts to produce high-octane gasoline. Nalco, a small but successful specialty chemical company, was betting its future on this new technology. Overnight, those aspirations were reduced to melting steel and pungent toxic fumes.

A comprehensive study was made of the failure. It turned out that the process was too pure. I have never forgotten that word “pure” in association with “spontaneous combustion.”

As Rick Scott demonstrated in his campaign a little dirt can go a long way. Our great and near great presidents were good at throwing dirt, and no one better than Thomas Jefferson. It takes luck to succeed with the public but it helps, or at least it is believed that it helps, if you hedge your bet by sullying the reputation of your opponent. That said I have a wider view.

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THE PRICE OF HAVING TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON

Sometimes I wonder if technology changes society or if society changes technology because change seems predicated on boredom. We want relief from the doldrums. We talk of a “clash of cultures,” or some other sophisticated nonsense because we have time on our hands in busyness, which is boring, and don’t have enough to do that is consequential.

* * *

Man is a curious being, but forever lives in a veritable conundrum. He likes the comfort and security of things as they are, but must constantly fiddle with them because of his nervous temperament to change them, and thus by changing them changes himself to some degree, and everything around him. He never thinks of the consequences of his fiddling. That would be boring. Fiddling is an end in itself.

* * *

For the past hundred years or so, machines have taken over what man had done for himself the previous more than a thousand years. This has left him with time on his hands. But like the nervous chicken that he is, cackling away at shadows as T. S. Eliot’s “hollow man," he hasn't risen to his numerator but sunk instead to his common denominator.

Author William Livingston calls this shadow “cognitive bias.”

Talk radio with the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know the power of this bias. It increases entropy as it reduces transparency to a shadow.

Grass root movements depend on this bias as they exploit prejudice, fixed misconceptions, favoritism, and partialities. Livingston writes in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) “Not only does cognitive bias operate to displace information from its axis of truth, it is the basis of delusions about goals and consequences.”

We are currently in the throes of false beliefs, hallucinations, and misperceptions about our own President of the United States. But this is not new. It is the necessary charge on minds of those that are attracted to the herd, as Eric Hoffer so carefully illustrates in his book, THE TRUE BELIEVER (1954).

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WE ARE SHAPED BY “THE WORD” and THE RECENT PAST

It has been said that our character is made by the decades that immediately preceded our birth. Think of that a moment. Think of when you were born and what you believe to be true.

To give you a respite from this personal angst consider the ordeal of Shakespeare in the same context. He has fascinated me mainly because of the impact he has had not only on us more than four hundred years later, but on his own time.

Shakespeare was born in 1564 and was influenced by the Manichean clash of The Renaissance and The Reformation. His art became a distillation of this chemistry.

The world he describes is one of political confusion, religious bewilderment and personal danger. It was a time not unlike our own. There is something of Erasmus and Luther in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies.

More importantly, like Robin Williams and Paul Simon, his work revolves around the "rise of the Word." It may seem blasphemy to put these men in the company of Shakespeare, but remember Shakespeare wrote in the vernacular of the common man and was the common man’s principle entertainer.

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Shakespeare with his conceptual depth, iconoclasm and reservoir of ancient beliefs, showed the "Word” was to his mind “God." Thus he unwittingly invented psychology, as I challenge anyone to show me a better psychologist than he reveals in his plays. He brought to the surface a new ethos of conscience and consciousness, a self-scrutiny and introspection that has survived to our day.

Imagine the times and then think of them in terms of our own. In Shakespeare’s time, Roman Catholicism was in a state of collapse in a climate of corruption with dogmatic beliefs shattered in the wake of the passionate intensity of Luther.

It was a time of tragedy and self-disgust. Shakespeare took hold of history and rumor and turned it into art and a new psychology, as Freud would do centuries later with the collapse of Victorian sensibilities.

Morality is in the mind of the times.

Morality was then provoked by the rush of the uncertainties of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of capitalism, the hysteria of a new age, and the introduction of World War.

Peter Gay covers this period in THE CULTIVATION OF HATRED: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud (Volume III, 1993). It is mention here because many of us, now old, had parents born during this climatic change, which was the second decade of the twentieth century. .

* * *

To not put not to fine a point on this, decades before I was born society was coming out of the tumultuous First World War and the Roaring (irresponsible) Twenties to give birth to The Great Depression. The Great Depression has had considerable impact on my generation, and consequently and subsequently on how we have reared our children.

As was the case with Shakespeare, we are products of our times. The ways we look at things are manifested in our attitudes and behavior, our writing, wondering, and creative verve.

Shakespeare is more like us than we might think. For example, he was not considered to possess the “genius” of say, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was constantly reminded of his “potential,” of his specialness. He was said to have been hedonistic, self-indulgent, atheistic, adventuresome, cynical, alas, a self-destructive personality. He displayed the reckless abandon of a type “A” personality that has become familiar to us today.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a family man, something of plodder with a consuming drive to give life to his demons through art. There is no doubt he had demons. He was a practicing Protestant and closet Catholic. He stayed essentially below the political radar in his art. It reminds me of Rod Serling who did it in the 1960s with his televised “The Twilight Zone.”

There were few great painters or inventors in Shakespeare’s time. There were, however, great philosophers and theologians as “the Word” reign supreme.

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FAST FORWARD TO TODAY

Robin Williams and Paul Simon have used language to elevate thought while it has since been essentially bastardized and made toxic driving the human spirit down to its common denominator where it can be exploited at whim. .

Ironically, the Bible, the Torah and the Koran manage to thrive in this toxic climate.

Human reflection, however, is now forced through the prism of science, and science is on safe ground as long as it deals honestly with Mother Nature. Yet some treat science like it was a dogmatic religion. There is a world that science cannot touch and that is the world of the spirit where “the Word” resides. Science moves beyond its boundaries when it denies the human spirit that science cannot see and cannot measure, but which nonetheless exists beyond ontic space, or in the imagination. It is why Genesis has always had a special appeal to me.

NIHLISM OR THE AGE OF SELF-HATE

Take comfort, Michael, in what you know, believe and value because they make you, you.

Too many people today are defined by what they have, or what electronic device they hold in their hands.

As I’ve said at the beginning of this missive, we are products of the decades that preceded our birth. Young people today were born before terrible World War Two, before the insanity of the Holocaust, before the dropping of the atomic bomb, and before the collapse and redefining of civilizations across the globe arbitrarily by the victors. Everything that has transpired since 1945 is a product of this disposition.

Much of life is a reaction rather than an action to circumstances. Before I was born, there was the First World War with the collapse of three empires almost instantaneously as if they had never existed. Europe spun on a dime.

Science and technology entered the vacuum and created the weapons of the next war, and the wars thereafter. Everyone alive today has lived in this climate of uncertainty since birth. Traditional anchors have been fragmented if not shattered such as family, church, school, company and country. Everything is in flux. Seemingly, the only thing incontrovertible is the discoveries of science.

Yet, science cannot explain beliefs, feelings, and common practices, but it can claim the immortal soul is false, if it cannot prove it.

Co-discoverer of “the double helix”, the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, has tried with his book, THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: THE SCIENFIC SEARCH FOR THE SOUL (1994). He was pursuing the idea that the soul exists in some fold of our brain. He didn’t find it.

Let us say for argument's sake that the soul exists only in our mind. If so, does that make the soul any less real in our behavior?

* * *

I must confess “Word” keep a hold on my sanity. They are not offered to win approval or a following. I am not on a crusade other then to persuade people to think, to process what they have to what they are, and to determine, on balance, if it is what they desire.

Each of us must forage our way through the muck of our times, alone, with all kinds of competing distractions meant to disengage us from self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-direction.

“Individualism” has been preached, yet now we are entering the “Age of the Individual,” not the contrived sense of the individual of existentialism, but the individual with the identity and authenticity capable of resisting the pressures to be a tool of technology or any other distracting phenomenon.

Man will establish the verticality of reality through human perception without the multi-filters of media and culture.

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We are leaving the “Age of Nihilism” and despair where all passion is spent. The signs, as Pitrim Sorokin reminded us in THE CRISIS OF OUR AGE (1941), are evidence of the passing of the Sensate culture into an Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow.

Sorokin could see the waning of passion and the rising of the artificial and cosmetic to dominate human preoccupation.

We see this in vigara, pornography, noise as music, blasphemy as art, misery as literature, history as revisionism, cultural evolution as psychology, sociology and anthropology, and analytic philosophy as the answer to “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land,” which, incidentally, was the title of one of my books I could never find a publisher.

Read a biography of Shakespeare and you will see how he soared above his times while being an essential part of them. He worked hard, harder than any of his artistic contemporaries, and we have his art today to show for it.

* * *

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote of our mental flabbiness as imperiling our national fabric. My readers outside the United States tell me this is endemic to their societies as well. Brooks concludes: “To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate . . . Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.”

Brooks could make a similar charge to people in general, but he is too polite to infer such a possibility. I am not.

Be always well,

Jim