RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD -- NUMBER THREE

RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD – NUMBER THREE

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY?

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

© July 4, 2011

REFERENCE:

It is perhaps impertinent I post this on INDEPENDENCE DAY, our national birthday.  I see little independence in the macro or micro sense in our Republic.  Our state governments and corporations are bloated, lethargic and dysfunctional.   Thirteen counties in California have petitioned to succeed from the state, and establish a fifty-first state.  A major corporation has attempted to embrace this dilemma, only to be thwarted by the unions and the federal government.  There is little evidence anywhere of grown up behavior.  Our leadership acts as if it is stuck in the sixth grade.  One indicator of this sorry situation is the loss of civility.

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DUE PROCESS, CIVILITY, AND THE RULE OF LAW

After the terrible carnage of WWII (1939 – 1945), the victorious Allied Forces had the civility to create a military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany (1945 – 1946) to bring to justice war criminals in a court of law.  Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels escaped such justice by committing suicide.  Then we were a civil society with it unlikely they would have been summarily executed.

Mossad captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, transferred him to Israel where he faced a public trial, was convicted and hanged in 1962.  Six million Jews perished under his direction, yet the rule of law prevailed here as well.

Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003 by the American military, tried by the new Iraqi government, found guilty of war crimes, and was executed in December 2006 after a long trial.

Would Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels be treated to such justice today? 

The President of the United States, and his Cabinet, watched via satellite television as the US Navy Seals raided the estate of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, shot and killed the unarmed al qaeda leader on the spot.  No trial, no due process, no civility, just a summary vigilante execution. 

The media raved about it, the nation gave a sigh of relief, and the Six Navy Seals became national heroes, receiving commendations from the president.  It also sparked the president’s popularity in the polls despite the sluggish economy.

Has it changed the war on terror, or has it created a new breach between Pakistan and the United States?  Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and is, at best, a fragile state. 

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PITFALL OF POWER: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

It is not fashionable to question this precipitous behavior.  Yet there is a societal danger when the conscience functions collectively and rigidly on automatic pilot, unable to sense this overreaction as a departure from civility.   

Civility implies maturity.  Maturity suggests adulthood.  Moral accountability is as relevant to heinous crimes as to any other.   Are we to believe that Osama bin Laden is the exception to civility?  If so, what does that say about the mindset of the nation?

Are we Americans frightened out of our wits that we are as vulnerable as the rest of the world to the insanity of terrorism? 

No paranoia appears able to match ours.  We see this in airport security checking two-year-olds and ninety-year-olds for concealed weapons without a wit of civility or discretion.  Has 9/11 stood us on our head without dislodging our neurotic façade of complacency?  Are we unable to come to grips with inherent issues of adulthood?    

The other day a television commentator asked his guest, “Could the rioting now occurring in Greece happen here?”

The guest answered, “It already has, it already is.” 

He mentioned the current public workers’ protests in Wisconsin and Ohio over proposed laws in those states to restrict collective-bargaining rights of public employees, and to force these workers to contribute to their own pension funds. 

The Detroit Riot of 1967 comes to mind.  Police brutality triggered massive burning and looting that spread from the Northwest side of Detroit to the South East Side.  The mania of the mob launched a masochistic conflagration of its own homes, businesses and workplaces.   

Then there was the bloody Los Angeles Riots of 1992 that occurred after the beating of Rodney King by police, caught on tape.  More than $1 billion of property was destroyed and 53 people lost their lives.

We take comfort in conformity and stereotype while hostility lurks in the darkness and waits, afraid to step out of the shadows until it has no other recourse.  Then, it is the mob that rules.  People remain silent as they watch the social fabric unravel.  They sense intrinsic danger in being found original, different, or out-of-step with the majority.  Conversely, they find security in blending in, saying nothing, until it is too late to say anything at all. 

The pitfall of power is the herd mentality of true believers with a recalcitrant juvenile style for dealing with frustration and anxiety.  Members of the herd avoid conflict and confrontation.  They protest infrequently, but then violently, not unlike what we see in Greece, and in pockets across the United States.

We crave prestige vicariously with a sense of belonging without the penalty of possible rejection.  Our electronic toys give us this sense of omniscience and power.  We feel connected when we are not connected at all.  That is why “American Idol” is so popular.  Our iPods, cell phones and other electronic wonders are safe passive vehicles to fill the vacuum of worthlessness and powerlessness. 

Media exploit this weakness.  They are presently consumed with the Casey Anthony trial of a young mother who is alleged to have murdered her baby daughter.  It has been going on for weeks.  It is in the hands of the jury as I write.

The trial was pure schadenfreude, a gossiper’s delight.  Someone else is in the dock, revealing all her secrets to strangers, and for it, their fear of being mediocre is put on hold.  It is the perfect palliative to a gnawing sense of insignificance. 

People watched the trial on television for hours, and then spent hours listening to talking heads discuss it.  Others fought for a place in line outside the courthouse to watch it “live,” driving or flying from everywhere.  Alfred Adler described this addiction as pathetic, and “the most evil of our civilization.”  We may not think it so but it is a manifestation of mob psychology in embryonic rudeness and crudeness.

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UNION MANIA, CIVIL UNREST, MIRAGE OR CULTURAL TIC?

Unions dealt bravely against the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century who hired thugs to disperse or discourage them.  They struggled mightily in the first quarter of the twentieth century, gained momentum in the second quarter, and reached their zenith in the decades after WWII.

Unions in the private sector had the right to strike, and often did.  This worked well for unions until they mirrored the greed of corpocracy.  Like corpocracy, unions failed to appreciate the challenge of the world once it caught up with the United States.  Instead, they launched themselves on self-defeatist trajectories, striking and striking again until there was nothing left to strike for because the plants and jobs were gone. 

Leaders, managers and workers of industry and commerce across the board created the current mess.  Prolonged hopping from one horn of the dilemma to the other has produced in its wake demoralization, as well as economic turmoil.  Yet, none of the principals seem to possess the deep-seated realization that in warring against each other they are providing their competitors and enemies a Pyrrhic victory by default. 

Alas, we are children in the storm with no adults in sight to guide us to safety.

The corporation acted as parent to union workers in both the public and private sector.  Workers were programmed in learned helplessness, in terminal adolescence, unable to fend for themselves.  They became dependent on corporate and state largesse, a luxury corporate society can no longer afford.  With the safety net disappearing, workers are acting like the petulant children they have been programmed to be.  It is sad to see, but my sense is the anguish is just surfacing.

Parental overprotection poses a paradox.  Workers coexist with management in irritable hostility as the child, while management dominates as the reluctant parent linked in hostility to care and be over concerned with workers’ welfare. 

Workers vent hostility through passivity, not functioning at full capacity, intent on punishing authority.  Management unable to reconcile this non-cooperation finds the US no longer a manufacturing or working class country.  There are no winners when civility has no place in the bargain.  

Complicating matters further, now four of every five workers is college trained, but primarily without union benefits.   The irony is that professionals demonstrate the same on the job cultural immaturity as their factory cohorts. 

An inner hatred of authority, a cultural holdover from a pampered workforce, hamstrings professionals as they are afraid to take risks, take charge, or fail, but inclined to please parental superiors.  They are unfree with the same passive self-defeatist behaviors legendary with blue-collar workers, but without the perks.

Professionals can work forty, fifty or sixty hours a week, many do, and get no more compensation for the time, whereas blue collar workers are likely to earn time and a half, or double time for such extended hours.

An egregious error in civility, they can be let go without cause with little chance for redress.  Lee Iacocca in IACOCCA (1984) illustrates this after a stellar performance as CEO of Ford Motor Company. 

After receiving notice he was being fired with an impersonal letter, he confronted Henry Ford II: 

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

But Henry (Ford II) couldn’t give me a reason.  “It’s personal,” he said, “and I can’t tell you any more.  It’s just one of those things.”

But I persisted.  I wanted to force him to give me a reason because I knew he didn’t have a good one.  Finally, he just shrugged his shoulders and said: “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.” (page 127)

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Will this indifference now plague public employed workers?  It is apparently a concern in Wisconsin and Ohio.   These workers don’t want to lose their collective bargaining rights, or to hear their pensions are a burden taxpayers are unwilling to assume.

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At a time when we should be all on the same page in labor relation issues, it would appear we are setting the table for European’s Airbus to eat our lunch in aircraft manufacturing with its modern and comprehensive aircraft family. 

Boeing has made a valiant attempt to compete with Airbus, building a $1 billion facility in South Carolina creating thousands of jobs, all nonunion, while expanding its facilities in Seattle, where thousands of jobs are also being created.  So, what is the problem?

The problem is a cultural tic, operant security. 

We have developed over years a neurotic dependency, cradle to grave, to be taken care of by our employers and protectors: first our parents, then our teachers, and then the corporations and institution for which we work. 

Individuation, the separation of oneself from the herd, which brings feelings of loneliness and powerlessness, has become a myth.  We are actually mired in counterdependency to companies and public sector employers valiantly trying to survive no longer able to prevail.   

This finds the National Labor Relations Board siding with union workers in the northwest, as opposed to the new plant and workers in the southeast.  The South Carolina plant is running but its future is tenuous, strange to say, when national unemployment is more than nine percent.

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In our neurotic culture, undercutting our assumed independence, there is always room for the regular guy, for the one who accepts cultural fictions and prejudices without question, who conforms and submits as long as the pay and benefits are good, who is the safe hire.  “Playing ball” and being a “team member” in compulsive socialization has found us turning away from self-assertion to self-infantilization.  We have left our roots and are dangling like a participle.

When we yield our initiative and integrity, submerging our will to the cause of another person or group, retiring into ourselves as a passive-receptor, we have annihilated our selfhood. 

The world gets better one person at a time, and that person demonstrates maturity when he or she shows the same civility to others expected of them.  Such a person refuses to take the well-beaten path of conformity with predictable outcomes for relative safety.  It takes the adult to steer this course.  The adult knows relative safety no longer exists, and that it is a time to take charge.

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