DRIVEN OFF THE ROAD -- A RESPONSE

DRIVEN OFF THE ROAD – A RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 20, 2011

A READER RESPONDS:

Highly interesting article. I read the Time piece about Bob Lutz yesterday, by coincidence. The notion that the US could abandon manufacturing and prosper instead by providing services ignored that if the people who took up manufacturing as the result of the US ignoring it are smart enough to do so, they are smart enough to provide "services," too.  Already the Big Four accounting companies and many law firms are outsourcing tax returns and document discovery responses, respectively. 

The Germans have identified high value added manufacturing they think they can accomplish better than third world countries and found a way to make things at prices, albeit high ones, that others are willing to pay. They have also identified new manufactured products, train their workers to make them, and let labor representatives sit on company boards and see the books, too.

Perhaps regrettably, present American law provided an almost automatic conflict of interest as a matter of law in coming on corporate boards. The American director is required to discharge a fiduciary obligation to the corporation.  Representing and advocating the interests of labor is seemingly accomplished in breach of the fiduciary obligation to the corporation. That could be changed quickly by providing for divided obligations, but don't count on our getting that accomplished in this or other recent Congresses.

Tom

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your response indicates some MBA training in your past.  I mention this because I believe, unwitting but systematically, we have programmed ourselves out of the competition by misreading our strengths and compounding our weaknesses.  Corporate speak is your language and it is driving us off the cliff. 

We see ourselves as a competitive society when cooperation is our strength.  Several years ago, there was a national best seller titled WINNING THROUGH INTIMIDATION (1974), which fostered the idea that selling, indeed, entrepreneurship and commerce, was all about “you.”  A few years earlier, there was a book CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), which was all about the customer and how to develop a partnership.  In other words, it was about cooperation.  The latter had a modest success compared to the former, but remained in print for twenty years.  The two books are like polar coordinates of the bifurcated spirit of American enterprise.  By the irony of circumstances, cooperation is the only legitimate game in town, but we Americans still don’t get it, and MBA programs and our culture aren’t helping. 

In SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), chapter six has the titled, “Six Silent Killers: The Manic Monarchs of the Merry Madhouse.”  The reference to the “madhouse” was how the United States was then seen.  .            

The reason the Time magazine article (July 18, 2011) resonated with me is simply because it has been a theme I have been singing for thirty-one years.  What follows are the opening paragraphs of chapter six of that 1998 book.  You be the judge if we are not stuck in over intellectualizing the problem, when the world moves away from our interests:

The crippled genius of American workers contains many paradoxes.  Contrast when workers are full of themselves with when they are not.

In the case of the former, they are obsessed with self, preoccupied with things.  With the latter, they are concerned with others and their well-being.

Workers have an essential drive to acquire, but an equal need to serve.  Their paradoxical natures take on many forms.  A few years ago, after a winter thaw, the Mississippi River at Waterloo, Iowa, threatened to flood the city.  Faced with this crisis, the city mobilized its resources, and people of all ages filled sandbags, mounted them on trucks, and distributed them throughout the city to form manmade dikes.  Hundreds of citizens worked around the clock beside neighbors and friends, and yes, beside strangers as well.  The separate identities of age, race, religion, values, and professions dissolved into a faceless common challenge.  For one brief moment, a sense of community possessed their consciousness.

After the crisis had passed, several volunteers were asked why they did it.  The consensus was “because it had to be done.  The city had to be saved!”

Would they do it again?  Without hesitation, they replied in union.  They would submit themselves to the demands of crisis management.

Waterloo at that moment had no insiders and outsiders.  It was a community with a common mission. 

This is but one event in the kaleidoscopic spectrum of self-forgetfulness in times of perceived crisis.  Whenever physical survival is at stake (World War Two), or psychological survival is at issue (launching of Russia's Spunik), whenever the threat comes from the outside, the sense of belonging to a communal tribe is at its strongest.  The key words are “perceived crisis.”

Throughout history, tension invariably produces tribal music, while relaxation typically generates tribal noise.  If we don’t feel it, can’t see it, or it doesn’t touch us, as with the current economic world instability, it doesn’t exist.

Yet, tension is as natural to the spirit as joy is unnatural.  We Americans are a tense and intense lot.  We find it difficult to deal with ourselves when things are going well.  We are always waiting for the other shoe to fall.  For some reason, we have to work very hard at not working at all.  Leisure is intimidating.  Work is our sanctuary.

THE ODYSSEY OF AMERICAN WORKERS

Consequently, the quest for satisfaction has not been a particularly happy one. When you see joy on the faces of workers, it is likely a mask concealing the tension of struggle and fear within – struggle to become what they are not and fear of being found out for what they are.

Pretend and pretension, derivatives of tension, are prominent features of the American character.  Show me a youngster smiling easily in play.  Instead, America has seven-year-olds playing organized football as if they were in the NFL.  Parents-as-coaches can be heard yelling at their prepubescent youngsters, whose bones are not yet mature enough for such punishment.  “Put your head down and take him out,” or.  “Hey, hey, hey!  What’s your problem, fellah, where’s your toughness?”

Would that such energy and enthusiasm were directed at their studies.  Young minds are quite nimble for such challenge if their bodies are not ready for such abuse.

The mania of forcing maturity on youngster is programmed at a very early age.  My grandson, Ryan James Carr, is two.  He is a big boy for his age, about the size of many four-year-olds, but his mother is 6’1”, so that is not too much of a surprise.1  He is attending a religious-sponsored preschool for two-year-olds, which is run like an army boot camp.  These two-year-olds are expected to go to the bathroom precisely at 10 a.m., to play prescribed games without stepping out of line, to neither cry nor fuss with their peers, and to clean up their play area or be given demerits.

God forbid, one of these little tykes should have an accident and go in their pants.  First, they are scolded in front of the group, then asked to sit outside the group, and, worst of all, to manage in soiled drawers until a parent comes along.2

The teacher sees nothing wrong with this.  Listening to her, you would think she was talking about teenagers.  What she is doing could not be more wrong.  If a child is not allowed to have fun and be a child, the child will likely be a problem for society when he is older.

It doesn’t stop here.  Watch six-year-old baton twirlers, toothy grins barely covering absent teeth, displaying little joy in the exercise.  How many of these little girls chose to be so regimented?  How many of them are playing out their parents’ fantasies?

There is a greater pull in the American culture to “please others” than to “please self.” 

This programming is justified by “it is good for you.”  More often than not, pleasing others is simply “parental authority” over adolescent powerlessness, and its need to be pleased.

What this creates in a developing youngster is self-doubt, bordering on self-contempt – internal conflict when the child is starting to learn to be a friend to himself.

Translated, this manufacturers tension to replace natural nurturing.  It is an American disease, orchestrated by well-meaning parents on the young. 

“Doing what is good for you” is inadvertently interpreted as “doing what is expected of you.”  Disquieting at best, the whole process turns to viciousness when the aspect of “competition” is added.

Americans workers assume that competition is as inherently good as breathing is natural.  Competition is worn as though a badge, and workers swagger with a sense of what they think it means.  Economist W. W. Rostow belies that before Americans can compete, they must first learn how to cooperate.3

Americans attempt to outdo each other.  Rostow even goes further.  He fears America might go the way of Great Britain, which, between 1870 and 1971, went from 32 percent of the world’s industrial production to generating only 4 percent.  Rostow suggest that the only way to avoid that catastrophe is for the American workplace to develop an organizational infrastructure that champions cooperation over competition (Six Silent Killers, pp 83 – 85).

*     *     *

Obviously, when I refer here to “American workers,” I am referring to everyone, including movers and shakers in Congress, Wall Street and Main Street.  I have argued that the MBA degree is a misapplication of our common interests forcing our eye on the wrong ball.  Your comments confirm that fact. 

Why did I share this passage with you?  It has not lost its relevance, and we are still encamped on the same dime.  Elsewhere, I have been writing RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD.  Sociologist Erich Fromm captures the sense of this with these lines:

Man himself, in each period of history, is formed in terms of the prevailing practices of life, which in turn is determined by his mode of production.4

Our education system is a factory, and we are all products of that factory for better or worse.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

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1 Ryan has just turned seventeen here in 2011 and is 6’6” tall and weighs more than 260 pounds.

2 Ryan enters his senior year next month at a prestigious prep school that is run much like that preschool was those many years before.

3 W. W. Rostow, “To Compete, Americans Must First Cooperate,” International Herald Tribune, March 16, 1987.

4 Erich Fromm, BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSIONS  (1962 p, 41).

DRIVEN OFF THE ROAD BY MBAs

DRIVEN OFF THE ROAD BY MBAs

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 10, 2011

The organization’s romance with the MBA needs to be necessarily a brief one.  The argument, that the training middle managers and MBAs receive makes them good candidates for top management, is faulty.  That is what we now have.  No, the whole mystique of middle management and MBAs is wrong.  Middle managers are gophers and MBAs are mechanics, dedicated to ‘cipher management.’  Leadership requires more, much more.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990)

*     *     *

In zeroing in on MBAs, which at the time was America’s sacred cow, and the meal ticket to the good corporate life, I created a fair share of enemies. 

In Work Without Managers, I argued that they were the personification of our one-dimensional society.  Just as we now fight wars without understanding the cultures of the lands that we would nation build, the United States was producing products for disappearing markets such as big automobiles.  We were being beaten at our own game of producing quality products by Japan, South Korea and Europe. 

Now, today, we are virtually a service-oriented society with Europe setting the curve in manufacturing.   Exports of German manufactured goods in May exceeding 4 percent, considerably higher than the expected one percent. 

*     *     *

The MBA degree, I suggest, is a vocational degree not unlike trade schools, only it is exalted because it deals with cipher management or primarily finance.  I wrote Work while living and working in Europe in the 1980’s.  I write:

A corps of 80,000 new MBAs, epitomizing the quintessence of the verbal, analytical and rational mode of left-brain thinking, annually marches out of American universities to exacerbate the problem rather than resolve it.  Meanwhile, Western Europe, which represents a population approximately 100 million greater than that of the United States, produces only 4,000 MBAs per year. Remarkably, because we have turned to MBAs for salvation, we have fallen further into our own inferno.

*     *     *

I share these tidbits with you because Rana Foroohar of Time magazine (July 18, 2011) has written a column suggesting that the rise of business schools coincides with the fall of American industry.  She builds her case around a new book by Bob Lutz, an automotive executive.  He claims Detroit’s demise was driven by the fact that it “made the cars too well.”  I don’t think so.  His book is titled, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business.

His simplistic answer to the problem, according to Rana Foroohar, is to fire MBAs and let engineers run the show. 

My training is in engineering, worked as one with a chemical company, then worked with engineers as on organizational development (OD) psychologist for a high-tech company, including working with engineers at Charles Draper Laboratories at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  For ten years, I also taught mainly engineers as an adjunct professor at several Florida colleges and universities in MBA Programs. 

This prompted me to write in A Look Back To See Ahead (2007):

The paradox is that insiders capture our attention while outsiders stir the drink.  Outsiders write most of the books with insiders’ names on the jackets . . .This is played out with bizarre finality in the engineering community.  The modern world is a product of the engineering mind.  Yet while they created this world, it does not belong to them.  It has been stolen from them (p. 113).

Later, I attempt to explain why:

Engineers have a fatal attraction for being exploited.  This inclination is derived from their conformist education in which skills are honed out with well-established engineering and mathematical principles that can easily be replicated and therefore are indisputable.  Yet engineers are disinclined to selling or messy politics.

This results in the hard wiring of engineers to stay and not stray from consistency.  While developing their essence to the fullest, their personality is left vulnerable to attack on all sides.  They are outsiders in which insiders can exploit them at will, and unfortunately do.

A consistent complaint of engineers is that they are under utilized.  It never occurs to them that it is their fault.  They expect their value to be self-evident and appreciated.

Engineers are not decisive because they don’t see decision-making as part of their job.  They are problem solvers that are easily thrown off stride by turf wars or the politics incidental to perks and salary concerns.  Consequently, pay them a dollar more an hour than they can afford to quit and you own them (p. 115).

There were times I hoped my thesis would prove wrong when a brilliant engineer was promoted into top management.  Invariably, they became bean counters braying to the corporate cheer that would seem true of the book by Bob Lutz.

Foroohar writes in her article:

Lutz wisecracks his way through the 1960s design and technology led glory days at GM to the late 1970s takeover by gangs of MBAs.  Executives, once largely developed from engineering, began emerging from finance.  The results ranged from the sobering (mangers signing off on inferior products because customers “had no choice”) to hilarious (Cadillac ashtrays that wouldn’t open because of corporate mandates that they be designed to function at –40 degree Fahrenheit (Time, July 18, 2011, p. 22).

*     *     *

This is not new, and in the telling it may be entertaining but nothing changes.  Take this scenario reported in Work:

The General Motors assembly plant in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles instituted the Japanese approach to the team concept in 1987. Three years (1990), an incident indicated how badly it was failing.  Barry Stavro of the Los Angeles Times tells the story:

“It was only one of the 3,000 or so parts that go into a new Chevrolet Camaro or Pontiac Firebird.  But for Larry Barker, a welder . . .one part summed up all that is wrong with the way GM builds cars.

“One night last fall, Barker, along with the rest of the shift was sent home early after GM ran out of a reinforcement panel that is welded next to the wheel wells near the motor compartment.  The panels come in pairs, one for the right side, one for the left side.  When the plant ran out of panels for one side, the assembly line stopped.

“A night shift supervisor came down and actually took one of the panels from the other (wrong) side and literally tried beating it into place with a hammer and then welding it.

“The Rube Goldberg-fix-it took so long, Barker said, that GM decided ‘it wasn’t worth it, so they sent us home.’  But if the wrong part could have been forced into place faster, he believes, ‘they probably would have run the assembling line’.” (pp. 145 – 146)

*     *     *

Foroohar concludes: The only time Apple ever lost the plot was when it put the MBAs in charge.  As long as college dropout Steve Jobs is in the driver’s seat, customers (and shareholders) are happy.

This brings to the fore my frustration with this article and, I suspect, with this new book.  It is not as simple as she would imply.  I wrote in Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998):

The lessons of workplace culture and organizational structure don’t end here (I was referring to the train wreck when Jobs stepped down).  The man Jobs personally recruited to give Apple stability, John Sculley of Pepsi fame, curtly kicked him out of the company he co-founded.  Jobs was brutal, brash, and brilliant, and treated and trained co-workers as part of his intellectual harem.  This was okay for a newborn company, but not for one when it found its own legs.  The hubris that technology will save us from ourselves is encountering some uncertainty.  Technology has changed us.  It has made the organization, as we know it, anachronistic and management irrelevant.  It has changed the nature of work and created a professional class of workers, but the workplace culture and the organizational structure remain essentially unchanged.  So the dream still implodes causing nightmares for nearly everyone (Six Silent Killers, p. 56).

The plot at Apple is, indeed, the personification of Steven Jobs, and the culture reflects his beliefs, values, interests, and expectations.  John Sculley was a bad fit because he wasn’t  Jobs, couldn’t be Jobs, and therefore didn’t appreciate and was unable to absorb the culture.  The culture drives performance.  Jobs, in his writings, points out that when he came back he recognized this and assumed the burden, sometimes at the expense of his health.

The late John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in Economic in Perspective (1987) that the hysterical search for profits would find most companies surviving on the basis of playing the money market.  He envisioned capitalism giving way to a mandarin like technocracy, where moving money around would take precedence over making things.  To support his thesis, he pointed out that for every 840 graduating MBAs only 50 planned to go into manufacturing jobs. 

We not only kick the can down the road.  We kick it around the block and always end up right where we started.  Why should the MBA dilemma be any different?

*     *     *

LOVE LOCKED OUT -- BOOK REVIEW AND COMMENTARY

LOVE LOCKED OUT – BOOK REVIEW AND COMMENTARY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 9, 2011

James Cleugh, an English author, published LOVE LOCKED OUT in 1963 when he was seventy-two, six years before his death.  He was witness in his old age to the collapse of morality and the advent of soaring licentiousness of “The New Age.” 

The book is a survey of love, licentiousness, and love’s restrictions in the Middle Ages fueled by repressive Church dogma, superstition and senseless violence.

It makes no claims to be a definitive work, or a scholarly study.  It succeeds, however, in showing how institutional fear can translate into extreme sexual perversion when physical love is locked out.

I first read the book as an idealistic young man reared in Irish Catholicism, and now have reread it at the age of the author.  We may not become wiser with age, but we do gain some perspective on our folly.  It is for that reason I offer this review. 

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

Cleugh uses the mechanism of juxtaposition of extremes to illustrate his points. 

He opens with Paul the Apostle, now a martyr.  Paul’s legacy finds Emperor Constantine of Rome (312) making Christianity the religion of the realm.  Fast forward to 1498, and you have the Italian monk, Savonarola taking Paul’s word to the literal extremes, and using that authority in Florence, Italy to burn valuable books, works of art, and other personal adornments considered indecent. 

Florentines didn’t take kindly to this.  So, Savonarola, the ascetic mystic and brilliant scholar was arrested, mobbed, tortured and burnt at the stake. 

What Savonarola failed to understand is that physical love is at the core of the human spirit.  Fail to give that spirit oxygen and decadence flourishes.  In fact, Cleugh insists pagans before Christianity paled in licentiousness once it became the religion of the realm.  Astute St. Augustine observed, “We are all born between urine and feces.”

Savonarola searing contempt for the flesh, Cleugh points out, was already in decay by the fourteenth century.  A complex of causes was responsible from material success, to increased travel, which provided knowledge of other civilizations and cultures.  At the same time, both laymen and priests came to lead secret lives.  The idea of obscenity was born.  To wit, Michelangelo got into serious trouble with Pope Paul IV for showing sexual organs of the figures in the “Last Judgment.” 

FEAST OF FOOLS

Between the thirteenth and sixteenth century, the “Feast of Fools” was created, a religious and secular festival.  Sexual repression took a holiday during these wild orgies.  The backlash of these orgies became Martin Luther’s Reformation.  Yet Cleugh claims, “If not for the dancing holidaymakers of the Middle Ages, modern civilization might never have grown out of its suicidal rigid theocracy.” 

Before the advent of Christianity, worshipers of Orpheus and Adonis had mingled the profane with the sacred in their religious rites.

The Fools Cult produced a cadre of clowns who made themselves useful by being entertaining to those in power at every level.  Most service-oriented positions today are derivatives of this Middle Age Fools Cult from town clowns to academic gowns.  Fools were often rogues, hideous, witty, solitary, defiant of authority, and generally beyond the reach of any authority for serious chastisement.  Fools turned out in many cases to have more sense than their employers.  This “cult of folly” prompted Erasmus to pen his IN PRAISE OF FOLLY (1509).  It proved the predicate to sycophants and entertainers moving into the roles of movers and shakers up to our day.

Jesters of the fifteenth century pointed out that while monks went about barefooted, they lived in extravagantly glorious monasteries, and while they had enormous quantities of corn, they didn’t grow any themselves, and while they were celebrate, they had lots of little children as if they had grown like vegetables in their gardens.

COWLS AND COIFS

St. Paul’s sales pitch was to reject life and all its temptations for eternal happiness impossible to confirm in the next.  He was selling the sizzle, not the steak.  This seeded the franchise industry of the Middle Ages, monasteries and convents.  It was a logical development of a faith that rejected the world.  Who bought into this idea?

Cleugh indicates that in the fifth and sixth century members of the aristocracy abandoned their estates and flocked to these domiciles.  In doing so, did they reject the licentious world?  Cleugh says, no, they did not.  As early as the reign of Pope St. Gregory I (540 – 604) “the Great,” indiscriminate concubinage had come to be accepted.

Monasteries and convents flourished, but not without debauchery.  Convents were the only places where girls could be given a decent education to fit them for the running of large households on marriage as they were all from the aristocracy. 

This changed in the twelfth century when the Church encourages daughters of tradesmen, agriculturists and artisans to become nuns.  Combined orders of canons and nuns were instituted with 300 males to 60 females.  Scores of penniless and derelict women, even lepers, clamored for admission.  The experiment of double monasteries with only a wall between monks and nuns proved a shocking failure, as nearly all the women became pregnant. 

Imagine the reaction of a young devout Catholic in the twentieth century reading of this behavior in the twentieth century.  In his catechistical education, there had been no mention of bad or nasty popes, debauchery monks or wayward nuns, much less popes such as John XII (955 – 964) who kept a harem in the Lateran Palace.

Popes through the centuries, interrupted occasionally by saintly ones, openly ignored celibacy and did not differ much in character with robber barons.  All Europe seemed to be racing down into what Alcuin of York called “a flood of fornication, adultery and incest.”

By the eleventh century, when it was widely believed that the wrath of heaven over debauchery would destroy the world, a campaign was launched to eradicate clerical concubinage.  It failed. 

Pope Gregory VII (1073 – 1085) was of another mind.  In 1085, he made the papacy the supreme secular and ecclesiastical authority of Europe, which included the celibacy of the clergy.  Roman Catholicism became a theocratic empire.  Rome remains the last such empire in the twenty-first century.

That said official celibacy would lead over the next thousand years to repeated scandals up to modern times.

The confession of sins to a priest was common from the early days of the church, but the confessional box was not instituted until 1565.  Cleugh says this was necessary to put a stop to sexual shenanigans taking place behind the altar between the priest and confessors. 

Closeting monks and nuns in cloistered existence worked up to a point.  Thousands managed to survive an existence deprived of physical love, but Cleugh asks, was this the best use of humanity? 

Erasmus himself considered that chastity was more endangered in the cloistered life than any other place.  Then there were popes such as John XIII (965 – 972) who found nunneries as amusing to visit as brothels and did so regularly.

This nasty pope was condemned and deposed by the Council of Constance, which he had summoned in 1413 for self-confessed “incest, adultery, general loose living, homicide and atheism.”  Once disposed from his exulted office, he wasn’t burnt alive, as was reformer John Huss for heresy the following year, but made Dean of the Sacred College.

Cleugh writes:

“Attacked from without for hypocrisy and betrayed from within by reckless licentiousness the Church hierarchy still had to maintain the official restrictions on sex expression … Christianity could never have survived the paradox inherent in these circumstances if not for men like Canon Hemmelin who stuck to the middle of the road.”  

The Canon believed, as did Francis of Assisi, that the church must build, as do men and women who “fall in love,” from physical beauty to spiritual beauty.  It was the best way to come to terms with foolish intolerance of the erotic appetite.  Unfortunately, he proved the exception rather than the rule.

WITCH HUNTS

Pope St. Gregory I launched the first witch-hunts in 600.  The victims were often silly or pretentious old women or hysterical girls. 

Witch ceremonies called “covens” (for covenant) were often held in the dead of night, and in the forest.  This paranoia took a bizarre turn in the early fifteenth century with the strange life of Gilles de Rais.  Cleugh included it in this section for that reason.

Gilles de Rais was the loyal companion to Joan of Arc in her successful quest to Charles of Ponthieu (Charles VII) on the French throne after the English attempted to install King Henry V, He turned out to be one of the most notorious serial killers and sex feigns of all time, sadistically raping, mutilating, butchering and killing more than six hundred women and children. 

The nobleman was a patron of the arts, a skilled painter, learned alchemist, and esteemed citizen.  His career luridly illustrated the close connection between witchcraft, black magic and erotic excesses of the Middle Ages.

Witchcraft started as a defiant perversion of the Catholic Mass with the Black Mass, the worship of the devil instead of Christ, as well as defiance of sexual austerity with salacious depravity.  Socratic “daimon” became “demon” with Satan in the new theology.

In 1491 Jeanne Pothiere, a nun of Camrai, swore she had been forced to copulate 444 times by a demon.  Quite a number of her Sisters in Christ became victims of Satan in a way that went to their heads.  They tore off their habits, assumed the attitudes of copulation, shrieked or gabbled obscenities, blasphemed, seized their colleagues with libidinous intent, making noises indicative of enjoyment of an act absolutely prohibited by the Fathers of their order.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

French author Honore de Balzac saw how the Church used superstition to exploit the masses, and wrote about it.  The belief in demons became a powerful tool of priests to control excessive carnality. 

New Age Writing of the twenty-first century attracts youths of both of high and low intellectual inclination to buy into a concoction of the mystical and erotic.  It is the occult’s confection of the Holy Trinity and heaven, and the fallen angel Satan and hell as point counterpoint to social good against licentious evil.  Occult science deals with the irrepressible urge to promiscuous lovemaking despite the social reserve of society.  Black magic, Black Mass and Black Art come to mind as well as necromancy or sorcery.  . 

In the fourteenth century, nudity was not enough for dramatists.  Satan had to appear nude with an immense artificial phallus to symbolize his magic and power.  By the end of the century, however, “Moralities” were dramatized. With characters as ethical abstractions, not religious figures, especially of the Seven Deadly Sins with Lust opening the door to extravagance. 

Love being locked out produced extremes in the Middle Ages that led to a chaotic laxity of a dying culture, a culture to which the evidence suggest we have not escaped. 

Physical love has been locked out, but keeps returning despite the bigots and cynics, and despite rather than because of religious institutions.

WHOREDOM

St. Jerome defined prostitution as mere promiscuity.  By the third century, it was maintained that any woman who copulated for any purpose other than procreation was automatically a prostitute, whether she received money or not.

Medieval gentlemen, too, preferred blonds, as whores, or as wives.  Girls with blond or red hair had a better chance of marrying well, mainly because the Madonna and Christ were thought to have had fair hair. 

The Manicheans, who first influenced St. Augustine, approved prostitution as they believed amorous ecstasy resembled the exaltation of mystical piety, and the greater the sinner the more joy there would be in heaven over his or her salvation.  There was an obvious contradiction with the Church here, as this was considered Christian heresy. 

The medieval harlot’s life was permeated with dogmatic Christianity for bawdy houses were often called “abbeys,” and full of icons and holy images.  In Russia up to the twentieth century, girls prayed to these images before submitting to their clients in the hopes of preventing injury, disease or childbirth. 

In 386, St. Augustine understood the paradox.  “Remove harlots and you will pollute the world with the crime of lust.”  Many modern sociologists have echoed these sentiments. 

The papacy reached its apogee in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but physical pleasure for plain men and women held its ground.  This despite endless wars, epidemics, famines, social injustice, enforced celibacy of the clergy, and the prospective menace of eternal torture and damnation after death. 

The slow decline of priestly despotism after 1300 was met with the rising standard of secular education.  Men and women began to think more highly of themselves.  They grew less amenable to pastoral injunctions of humility and to the idea of being miserable sinners. 

DANSE MACABRE

Cleugh writes, “Medieval Europeans lived on far more familiar terms with plague, famine and violent death than even the populations that have faced the blood-stained, morbid and starvation-ridden twentieth century.”  He continues, “Religious fanaticism, not only, of course, in Christian lands, has always exacerbated warfare.”

He would not be surprised by the reign of terror, 9/11, the Arab Spring, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

“Woe to the vanquished” was the cry the Romans during the Middle Ages, as they ruled the battlefield, slaughtering their captives in the thousands.  Much of the primitive barbarity that brought horror and desolation upon Europe, between the years 500 and 1000, was followed by a cultural resurrection, as plague and pestilence in 1000 made it seem certain it was the end of days. 

Europeans of this period descended into erotomania with a scarcity of mental alternatives to sexual incontinence or senseless physical violence.  The merciless annihilation by the medieval papacy of unorthodox Christian sects or reformers, especially if they advocated polygamy or sexual freedom, resulted in wholesale slaughter.  Cleugh writes, “As in so much else the medieval mind in war and love was a child which has so far not grown to much more than an adolescent.”  I have made that same charge in a different context elsewhere as a reflection of our times and how we handle are social, economic and political problems.

Similar to our times, epochs of moral depravity coincided with those of high morality.  The medieval revolt against ecclesiastical taboo on carnal love afforded an extraordinary climate for venereal disease, which reached epidemic proportions, as there was little understanding of the disease or how to treat it. 

The same was true of bubonic, pneumonic and septicemia plagues, as well as diphtheria, typhoid, typhus, malaria, leprosy, cholera, smallpox, influenza and syphilis.  The sixth century bubonic plague complicated by smallpox devastated the whole Christian world for fifty years hastening the darkening of moral horizons.  With Church theology having a strangle hold on knowledge, there was no inquiry into causation of these plagues except secretly and then under the pain of death.

The “Black Death” raged for a generation in the fourteenth century with twenty-five millions Europeans perishing.  Civilization virtually stopped.  Boccaccio wrote in the preface to his Decameron that three out of every five Italians died in the years of this plague.

Gonorrhea was more common than syphilis in the Middle Ages with neither disease yet proven to be transmitted by sexual intercourse.  It wasn’t until the fifteenth century common sense about carnal love was gaining some footing.  The moral disgrace with syphilis and gonorrhea, once the cause was known, found many puritanical nineteenth century doctors refusing to treat any patients with venereal diseases.  Cleugh writes:

“The scientific innocence, the utter lack of any idea of hygiene, the gross superstitions and the lax of sexual habits in general of Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century rendered syphilis for thirty years as potent a promoter of the very sin which many people supposed to have originated it, as bubonic plague itself.”

The average fifteenth century citizen, in his relative ignorance, cared little about his aches and pains until they became unbearable.  Many suffer that same inclination today.  Medieval doctors did not guess the existence of bacteria, so without microscopes they only could guess the cause of disease much less venereal diseases.

Pope Alexander VI (1493 – 1503) was considered the incarnate of Satan himself.  He was suave, cunning and unscrupulous, lecherous and greedy, and led the way into every kind of erotic frenzy, normal and abnormal. 

During the pope’s reign, syphilis was said to have killed a third of Europeans population.  Cleugh says the “herd instinct” took charge just as it does in war with the excitement of fear with man “reeling back into beast,” sliding in reverse down the staircase of evolution.  When plagues struck in the Middle Ages, the population was already set against clerical persecution of their sexual instincts.  With death everywhere, everyday life, Cleugh says, “went rotten with concupiscence.”

The Paris Faculty of Medicine declared, during the Black Death, that medical science could do nothing against either the will of God or Satan.  Nuns hurried from their cloisters to dens of debauchery, while the average man and woman preferred to try to forget the malady by giving every carnal appetite free reign to the point of utter exhaustion.

PORNOGRAPHY

It would not be proper to end this review without indicating how locking love out gave birth to pornography. 

Christian pornography was present from the earliest days when physical love was feared, failing to see its connection to spiritual love, except ascetically.  It was first disguised in transcendental or sentimental robes, in chivalry with damsels and ladies forgiven their transgressions and violation of the sexual code because of their physical beauty, misfortune or social courage. 

Pope St. Gregory VII (1073 – 1085) was one of the most important and influential popes in the entire history of the Church, marked with watershed moments.  He acquiesced, however, to erotic license and adulterous acts under the holy portico itself, and did nothing but register disgust to the coarse profligacy in a formerly civilized country.  He was tactful to a fault with the debaucheries of kings and nobles who in other ways supported the Church.  His eye was on another ball, solidifying the political and spiritual power of the Church.  Pornography flourished.

Street corner storytelling and courtly bards alike were set in love between men and women, and conflict between men.  There was the popular and the high flown with increasingly fornication disguised and blatant entering the stories.  There is Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485), which was published fourteen years after his death, and remains popular to this day.  Sexual passion, which is the core of the story, is the root from which all fictitious narrative, good, bad and indifferent arises.  But it is highly significant that the official repression of sexual love by Christian Europeans, from the fifth to the fifteenth century, found the spirit of poetry and prose glorifying the rebellion against marital fidelity so commanded by the Church.

One gay story of marital infidelity tells of a merchant’s wife, whose husband returned after two years abroad to a child.  His wife told her husband that some snow that she had swallowed while thirty had done the trick.  The husband pretended to believe her.  On his next trip he sold the snow-child for a good sum.  When he came back, he told his wife that the boy had melted away on a sun-scorched sandbank when the ship had been wrecked.  He thus turned the tables with a wit peculiarly medieval.

We have seen in modern times pornography become a multi-billion-dollar business protected by the first amendment to the constitution.  Nudity has once again become common fare, and x-rated films as available as peanuts.  The Internet has hundreds of pornographic outlets and conventional films push the limits of propriety.  War and scandal grace the tabloids today with periodic attempts to chasten the promiscuous, but as it was in the Middle Ages, surges and fluctuations match the morality of the times that can be traced to ripples to thunder as Aphrodite in some form rides the waves, and Cleugh concludes, “and will forever against the rocks.” 

LOVE LOCKED OUT

This was a theme that resonated with me as a young man.  I read this book when I was virgin, uptight, and nearly through university with my mother saying to me one day, “Jimmy, you’re not still a virgin, are you?”  I was because I bought the programming.  I followed the dictates of my Church, and I must confess at this late stage, I was a mess. 

My catechetical education during my impressionistic years found my mind separated from my body, and physical love dissociated from spiritual love.  It has taken me a lifetime to repair the damage, and this book read when I was thirty flew into the face of everything I thought I knew.  I have read it again more than forty years later, and this time, it made sense to me, not because there were bad and nasty popes, or debauching nuns and priests, and depraved kings and nobles, but because I finally understood the ecstasy of physical love cannot be locked out of the heart if spiritual love is to find a home in it.  Humanity today, as disgusting as it sometimes seems, has made real progress in giving love a break.  In this progress, we find ourselves not separated from people of the Middle Ages, but a new iteration, dealing with life, its joys and its problems not too much differently from the way they dealt with them, but fortunately, with many more tools than they had at their disposal.  

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