MORALITY IS IN THE MIND OF THE TIMES

MORALITY IS IN THE MIND OF THE TIMES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 24, 2010

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REFERENCE:

When I was in the US Navy on a ship in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s, we had an outbreak of the Asian flue. Eighty to ninety percent of our crew of 1,400 sailors was sick, seven died from the malady, forcing us to anchor at sea. I was a corpsman, a striker at that time, or of the lowest rank, and had to ran the 40-bed hospital, and manage the delivery of meals from the galley to sailors in their bunks. Only the doctor and I of a 36-man hospital division were able to work. I never got the flu nor did the doctor. Neither of us had taken the mandatory flu shot, and yet we treated very sick incapacitated people. This is in way of introduction to this missive.

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AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON WRITES (Reference to his reply to: “Why Do We Not Embrace What Is Good For Us?”):

Sir James,

Thanks for going to the trouble to respond to my query. Well done. Profound.

I only ask that you continue to look for a theory of the drivers of this ubiquity. As you know my propensities, it is frustrating to collect data points without knowing the efficient causes.

As the collection of examples grows to mountainous size, nothing points at the perpetrator. None of my mentors got near this matter. It's the elephant in the pantry, Sire. Significant in the extreme.

If the population is genetically endowed with this suicidal DNA, and I have no reason to question otherwise, why don't practitioners have it?

I spent most of my life ricocheting off the barriers of society and the only harm received is the chronic ache of nonstop learning and growth. I can play the game and blend in to the masses incognito as one fully culturally processed. It does not work the other way.

As you know, Ron Prichard has developed a gangbusters teaching scheme based on this ubiquity. His strategy works on the assumption that everyone in the class has a full complement of stories. His assumption has proven to be incontrovertible.

What he does is derive the theory (of the day) for the class, in lecture format. One way. Then he presents a set of carefully composed intermediate questions involving this theory (BTW Prichard hasn't yet figured out the structure he is using to do this). Lastly, he runs through the set of intermediate questions with the class, which is encouraged to falsify the theory (of the day). His part is done.

The class members then give their stories that either support or disconfirm the theory. Once that starts the class educates itself both on the ubiquity (a natural-law attribute) and the generalized theory itself. If a class member should tell a story of his experience that runs counter to the theory, the class immediately responds to the flaws in his story. Since everyone in the class has stories, there is focused attention on the recitals. Self-demonstration; self-learning.

As the theories are derived and tested, there comes a point where the class has enough theories of experience to decipher any story on their own. You can well imagine the impact that carries forward after the class disbands. True to form, class members never ask for further enlightenment. They know what happens to practitioners back home in the institution.

We 've got to crack that nut, Sir James.


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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

There is a saying in Buddhism, “You cannot push the water.” As I say in the referred piece, we cannot change our stripes. Does that mean everyone has suicidal DNA? Freud would say, yes, only with some practitioners, in your parlance, it might be nascent or in remission. It is still there.

Ron Pritchard uses stories to get inside the heads of his students to illustrate variance, you add, “yet he hasn’t figured out the structure he is using to do this.” Perhaps there isn’t any, perhaps that is because it is fluid. We live in a fluid age. Put another way, perhaps what you would like identified is not a demonstrable law of nature but evidence of the dynamics of nature.

To illustrate my thinking, let us proceed calling stories “myths,” starting with a popular children’s story.

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The hero of the “Toy Story” trilogy is a toy cowboy. In “Toy Story Three” when the toys belonging to Andy, now about to leave for college, find themselves at a daycare center, and a kindly bear welcomes them into a community of toys freed from their owners, the cowboy alone stays loyal to Andy. The toy bear turns out to be a dictator worse than any owner, proving the toy cowboy right for the solidarity of his loyalty.

It is just a Pixar animation, but like many subliminal injections into our culture, the daycare center could be taken to represent the public realm, Andy the private realm, the cowboy the hero because he stands for social values. Why make the hero a cowboy?

Could it be social values are old-fashioned like the cowboy hero who resolutely clings to that order? The cowboy riding off alone into the sunset wasn’t exactly a paragon of virtue. He was a Hollywood myth that grew into a genre in Western films in the 1950s.

It doesn’t matter that the West after the Civil War was not nearly as violent as depicted in film. Westerns tell a story of the meaning and management of violence in the establishment of social order and political authority. The plethora of “Law & Order,” police, crime, and legal dramas on television, in film and in books are adaptations of cowboy stories.

“Toy Story Three” recognizes the cowboy hero is a political figure, moving into new territory in America’s myth of individualism and going it alone. It propagates the myth that social values are in place, and now these values are in electronic space as the national story of the United States.

Being American from the beginning of our history has been essentially a political identification in a climate of real, potential or imagined violence. It is such a conflicting and contradictory state of affairs that holds us together as a nation, absent a long slow unfolding of tradition on a settled piece of real estate as is the case for Europe.

Americans live more in their heads than in their lives. Without a long settled past, but in a restless present, Americans live for and only in the future.

The frontier, from Jeffersonian natural democracy to Darwinian struggle for survival and power to pushing the envelope to the limits of mind, energy and resources, has been from the beginning an encounter between culture and nature.

It has involved movement from loosening and leveling the wilderness of our ways to a new civilized order in a never ending continued new beginning toward liberty and equality.

Along the way our culture has encountered savagery that has been well documented: Robber Barons employing thugs to break up union meetings, savaging women groups working for the vote, lynching blacks who looked at white women, organizing into the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society, savaging the Civil Rights Movement, and now savaging immigrants who cross the border illegally. Savagery disturbs the order of society but continuously opens it to the prospects of greater liberty and equality.

I’m dwelling on the cowboy myth because he is present in the Wall Street trader who act in reckless abandon telling investors one thing and doing another to his own enhancement, in the CEOs of oil companies who preach safety but practice risk taking to the brink of disaster, in the Congressmen who are more concerned about reelection than doing the people’s business, in members of the merchant, middle or working class who see themselves as cowboy hero warriors self-aggrandizing as they go forward unworried and disinclined to look back to note unintended consequences.

The Wall Street cowboy does what he does because to his mind it needs doing, silently without apology disappearing into the shadows, not honored, not mythologized, not remembered. This is not the cowboy of the Western legend, but his doppelganger with an opposite bent. He is the cowboy of the last sixty years.

The Western cowboy could not forgive the deceiver, the man willing without much visible struggling with his conscience to build his life into a lie. He would have exposed the hypocrisy of a society that dissembles its motivation in the guise of the law.

What I take from your communiqué is that Ron Pritchard presents the myth (stories) and the truth side by side for the benefit of all participants. He takes the view that participants look at the myth and truth and then decide. You may ask, how can participants once apprised of the truth decide in favor of the myth? Is it not possible to go on believing in a legend that has been exposed as false?

You cannot make people believe in something, even if it is in their own best interests, because the mind of our time is like an invisible hand urging people to walk to the end of the cliff, which they appear to be doing willingly.

You say we have got to crack that nut, but the nut is already cracked. The problem is that the many refuse to believe it so. They have to want what they need. They can be shown the way but they need not follow, especially if cowboys in the tradition of Hollywood myth. In the end, the most powerful force of all is the morality of the times, and that is not a happy dance at the moment.

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