WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 5, 2011
A READER WRITES FROM GERMANY:
Jim,
Aren't you sometimes a little too pessimistic with your views on the U.S.?
Sure I'm also very much concerned about the development in politics and economics.
But as long as the U.S. is doing better than most other countries, it is not too bad.
Or how do they say in sports: As long as we are on top, we don't care about the poor performance!
And there are always possibilities for improvement.
Hope you had a nice July 4th.
Manfred
* * *
Manfred,
Your question of whether I am too pessimistic or not is a legitimate one.
We Americans are known as an optimistic people. We are inclined to gilt the lily, as they say, and have the amazing hubris, after the fact, to believe we are able to rectify our situation with minimal damage no matter how egregious the fault.
It worked for a long time but it is not working too well now. In fact, it is not working at all.
As your German sociologist, Max Weber, once said, "A bureaucratic society is constructed on negative entropy, and for that construction is nearly impossible to destroy." He pointed out that the Roman Catholic Church is such a bureaucratic institution, and despite all its excesses and abuses, it has remained essentially intact over twenty centuries.
The United States is an infant construction of only a few centuries, and its future is based on an idea, and that idea is individualism, independence, a spirit of cooperation, and freedom.
I see little individualism, less independence, a clash of spirits and growing unfreedom.
I had not read the current issue of Time magazine (July 11, 2011) when I created the remarks in this current missive (Retreat from Adulthood -- Number Three).
Time features an article, "The Pessimism Index," which represents a new poll that shows how perilous American lives are thought to be ten years after 9/11. The article claims that Americans have sunk into the same despair noted among Europeans during the decades following World War II.
I don't write for a national or international media outlet. Nor do I have a research staff of hundreds of trained scholars and journalists to create my copy. I glean it out of my reflective walks, speaking into an ancient mini-cassette, and then transcribing, and editing my walking remarks.
This current missive was composed June 29, 2011, and finally reached this final form on July 4th, our American Independence Day, and national birthday.
It is not important to me if we are considered Numero Uno, a "great people," or, indeed, a "super power." What we have going for us, and what we have always had going for us is our independent spirit and our willingness to embrace our challenges. 9/11 knocked us off this fulcrum, and as Time's article points out, the enemy we currently face is not elsewhere, but in ourselves. My missive was meant to address that enemy.
A final aside: A reader writes, "How can you say we are not connected at all when everyone is connected to everyone everywhere?" He was of course referring to our obsession with electronic devices and that electronic connection.
I shook my head when I read this. BB tells me I explain myself too much. In this case, I explained myself too little. I had written, “We feel connected when we are not connected at all.” I meant, “we are not connected to ourselves, and if not connected to ourselves, it is all academic if we are connected to a million others.”
We are other-directed to the extreme, and are too often caricatures of poet T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men.” Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers, but he messed with 3 million American minds, and we are now in the wake of that shock, groping to come to grips with it. The Time’s article would seem to confirm this.
It is no accident that the United States is the tinsel (movie) capital of the world. We love to live in the spirit of the fanciful, and have had presidents that treated the fanciful as reality.
That was not always the case. Dr. Donald Farr sent me a piece of what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. They weren’t men who lived in the fanciful: 5 were captured, tortured and killed, 12 had their homes sacked and burned to the ground, and two lost sons in the American Revolution. It gave me pause.
There is a nightly news program on Public Television, “The News Hour,” in which names, photographs, military service, rank and age are presented as the deaths of these brave young men and women are confirmed. They are babies, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, never having had a chance to live. Yet, they have made the ultimate sacrifice for us. I sit there with tears welling up in my eyes, totally flummoxed about this war and this sacrifice. This is real, and it doesn’t make me a happy camper.
Thank you for sharing,
Be always well,
Jim
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