KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- SIX

KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN – SIX

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

© May 30, 2012

THE WISE AND THE SIMPLE

You must remember as we take this journey with Kierkegaard that he encountered in his day similar problems to what we experience today.  And like today, coteries of the cultivated ignored or avoided him and his works politely.  In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he reminded readers they were steering clear of the complex problems they faced.  He claimed his age was caught in a self-contradiction.  By ignoring the principle of contradiction, they solved problem meant to produce positive results while disregarding actual problems encountered.  Think of a bell curve with only one end. 

People thought in absolute terms: those on one side thought everything they did was right and proper, and all those on the other side thought they were equally correct.  As a result, the culture of the times lacked genuine passion.  All its ideas evolved into principles, whatever the evidence to the contrary.  With passion spent, wrong became right, evil became good, dishonesty became honesty, and brilliance was believed to be able to build a case that would discourage the less wise to back off from suggesting otherwise. 

In this pseudonymous work, Kierkegaard attacked the cultivated unmercifully indicating he was the “unrecognizable one,” or as the “simple wise person.”  Thus he elevated the difference between the cultivated and the gifted with the simple and untutored with whom he identified.  He proffered such questions, “Isn’t simplicity exactly what the wise person finds most difficult to understand?”  He writes:

“When the child chatters away his chatter is perhaps simple enough, and when the wise person says exactly the same thing, it has perhaps become the most ingenious of things.  This is how the wise person relates himself to simplicity…the simple became something else, even though it in fact remains the same.  The more the wise person considers simplicity, then the more difficult it become for him.  and yet he feels himself seized by a profound humanity that reconciles him with the whole of life, namely that the difference between the wise person and the simplest person is merely this vanishingly small difference that the simple person knows the essential thing that the wise person little by little comes to know that he knows or comes to know that he does not know, but what they know is the same.”

In this observation, Kierkegaard is telling his society that the web of sophisticated definitions as to “what is” and “what is not,” ultimately must intersect with the reality that the “wise and simple” know in their bones because they exist in it, and don’t have the luxury of looking at it from afar. 

This was a warning and challenge to the coterie of the cultivated that it was living in a complacent past, but that the future belonged to the common man. 

The paradox for Kierkegaard was that he could not step forward with authority and rebuke his times because he himself was part of that which he believed had to be censured.  The curious product of this book, then, was that it represented his own soul-searching and therefore was a stage for his own self-education with him being just as much the reader as the author of the work. 

He came to discover speculative thinkers see the idea of paradox as something that needed to be abolished, whereas the simple person understands himself by means of the paradox.  He writes:

“The simple wise person (here he means himself) will immerse himself in grasping the paradox by arriving at the understanding that it does not exist.”

Then later:

“To understand that a human being is capable of nothing is equally difficult for a remarkably talented king and for a poor wretch, and is perhaps more difficult for the king because he is so easily tempted by the circumstances that he is capable of so much.”

The wise and simple person is tethered to the ground and is not given to wild speculation and the hubris of grandiose risk taking that has been demonstrated on Wall Street with other people’s money, often money of the wise and simple.  Kierkegaard is saying the cultivated people, not the common people are the problem. 

Towards the end of his career, he made the issue even more poignant by insisting that cultivation not only confused a person but also prevented that person from the attainment of true awakening.  We see evidence of that all around us today.  He writes:

“I am aware (of my) inability to elevate myself even slightly above the intellectual horizon of the lowest class.  I am aware of how closely it borders on satire that after spending time and energy for years, one ends up coming no further than to what the stupidest person knows.”

Kierkegaard is attacking the smugness of the speculative thinkers of his time, finding the common man as a person not given to being corrupted, as had the cultivated man.  Why: because the common man’s capacity for action had not been sapped by obsessive reflection.  Thus for Kierkegaard, the common man served as a foil and reinforcement for good because he was awake and it was impossible to awaken the cultivated man to the actual challenges before him.  One hundred fifty-seven years later, little seems to have changed.

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CHILDREN'S BOARD OF HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY (FLORIDA)

THE CHILDREN’S BOARD OF HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY (FLORIDA)

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

© May 28, 2012

REFERENCE

Readers know I have a problem when someone is punished unfairly, when they have little recourse to do anything about it.  Daniel Ruth is the author of an article titled "The horror that is the Children's Board."  He is a throwback to the entertaining scribe, the late Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune, but not always with the same civility.  A reporter has called and emailed me, seemingly incessantly, to get my take on the current unraveling between CBHC's board chairman and the director.  I've chosen not to get into the fray even when mention was made in the newspaper that I was shorted some $3,000 in my contract.  I break that silence now because it would seem Mr. Ruth’s newspaper, The Tampa Bay Times, feels less vulnerable to the high jinx and alleged horrors of CBHC.  The agency has problems, but I’m not convinced that many are of its own making. 

*     *     *

Twelve years ago, I was contracted to do a study of CBHC.  I met with the director of CBHC and asked her, “What do you want me to do?”  She said, “Find out why we can’t get our work done.”  It became the title of my report.

After the fact, the attorney for the CBHC claimed I didn’t fulfill a number of indices, none of which were shared with me when I commenced the study.  My penalty was not so much failing to honor my contract.  My penalty was that the study was shelved to haunt the operation twelve years later.

This is not unusual behavior.  I come out of the private sector and nearly all my work in the complex organization has been in the private sector.  That said the problems in the public sector are not unlike those in the private sector.

My discipline is organizational development or OD.  I come to it having been a day laborer in a chemical plant while going to college, an R&D chemist after college, then a chemical sales engineer, field manager, and finally an international corporate executive for a chemical company working in South America, Europe and South Africa.  I retired from that career in my thirties, took a two-year sabbatical, and then returned to university for six years, year around, to earn my MA and Ph.D. in social and industrial psychology.  After which, I consulted in OD for ten years, then returned to the high tech private sector to work first as a management and organizational development psychologist, then once again as a corporate executive as the director of human resources, planning & development for Honeywell Europe Ltd. during the early days of the EEC.  Retiring early, I have subsequently written ten books mainly on OD, along with more than 400 published articles in this and related disciplines.  This is the experience I brought to CBHC.

What prompts this response is a diatribe in yesterday’s Tampa Bay Times.  My first reaction, knowing what I know about CBHC, was to be saddened by how much distortion and false speculation can cloud such a vital activity, an activity clearly in some trouble, but an activity that gains little from the thousands of words in print that have been weighed against its operation recently

The director and personnel that were at CBHC when I made my study were dedicated professionals proud of their communal function.  It would appear this is not enough.  It is so easy to write a column, or a series of columns how terrible things are, and pen such inflammatory expressions as CBHC has “contempt for integrity and ethics,” a “social service agency (that) segued to Lord of the Flies,” to stimulate the schadenfreude of readers.

Organizational development is physician to the organization in the same manner that the clinician is psychologist to the individual.  A board or a director may hire OD, but as unobtrusive observer, the focus of OD is not in pleasing the client.  It is in unearthing chronic problems and perturbations that prevent the organization from doing the work for which it is designed.  The purpose of an organization is what it does.

In the public sector, the board is authorized and responsible for setting policy.  If the policy is happenstance, or the board is not functionally sound and knowledgeable of the work at hand, the board, believing itself cognizant of “what is,” when it isn’t, will tend to mettle in operations, which is beyond its purview.  More importantly, it compromises the authority and efficacy of the director in that operational role.

For example, a board is not meant to mettle in daily operations by soliciting comments from operating personnel.  To do so, only increases the fog index.  When an operation is already sick, this is an unnecessary and counterproductive activity and is iatrogenic.  While the attention of recent comments on CBHC is on the director, it would seem the board is not functioning as authorized.

CBHC would appear leaderless.  My problem with this is that leaderless leadership, something I have written a great deal about, is endemic to our times.  A leader of any enterprise struggles with being perceived as too much a micromanager or too much hands off.  Then too, in a wider sense, CBHC would appear to suffer from being too decentralized from Hillsborough governance for proper oversight.   

Much is being made of the $450,000 of no-bid contracts without delving into particulars.  I suspect that these might have been software contracts or similar devices to improve delivery of services.  Were I in the director’s shoes, and there was someone who knew our work, our needs, and the idiosyncrasies of our operations, and could give me a fair price, I’d do the same.  Sometimes expediency demands a little wiggle room. 

One of the executive mantras that is fundamental to operating successfully is always keeping the boss (or the board) informed.  We don’t like surprises.  Sometimes a clash of personalities has little to do with the actual problem.  The chairman of the board of Ford fired his CEO because, “Sometime you don’t like certain people.”   

Not for the first time, I saw the quote of the director: “If we don’t understand what it is we’re doing, how the hell are we going to make a decision about cuts.”  On the surface, this is quite incriminating, but in closer examination it is the crux of the matter. 

CHBC budget is $30 million.  I believe it was larger twelve years ago with more people to serve today, more agencies to support, more new contingencies to address.  The director’s comment I take to be an honest one.  As Truman said, when you’re in the kitchen “the buck stops here.”

What I hear the director saying is that we are spreading a mere $30 million so thin how in the hell can we cut a penny?  The irony twelve years ago is that CBHC had trouble getting the money out into the field.  Once you start providing services, those benefiting don’t expect those services to be curtailed or diminished.  They budget for them.

So, why did I say, “CBHC can’t get its work done?”  People – because of the pressures I suspect to justify their existence – were more interested in data collection and statistics than in pressing the flesh by showing up in the field.  Too many never left their desks.  One person commented that he saw me more than anyone else from CBHC.

Another problem was complementary service providers were not working in proximity to each other so they could collaborate on joint projects.  There was too much of the John Wayne syndrome of going it alone. 

Then too, the director I believe felt it was more important to be politically engaged than to be hands on involved in the daily activity. 

My sense is the beast that everyone is seeing CBHC being is misplaced, that CBHC professionals and the director are unwitting victims of a campaign to discredit them, which, in my view, is misplaced.

My experience was that those receiving CBHC services twelve years ago held the agency in high regard.  Were there malcontents twelve years ago?  Of course, there were.  Ask malcontents how they feel and they will oblige, ask them what should be done to improve the situation, and they will have little or nothing to say.  They are complainers not contributors. 

When obsessed with quantifying intangibles, and when intangibles are the primary business, the quantification takes away from the mission.  That is the precise problem with CBHC.  It is trying to do the impossible. 

It was trying to do it twelve years ago, and it can’t be done.  What amazed me in the thousands of words written on CBHC is the lack of testimonies from the myriad of communities CBHC serves, communities that would be in great peril were the agency to disappear.  It was too self-absorbed twelve years ago.  I feel now, in retrospect, the internal focus was believed necessary to justify its existence at the expense of its mission.  Accountability is misplaced when performance is a political charade.  Journalists who buy the charade only compound the problem.

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IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

 IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

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

© May 27, 2012

Newspapers are dying.  Blogging is rising.  Facebook, Youtube, Googleplus and host of others are dumbing us down to a commonplace, while cable television is making news as entertaining as Disney cartoons and equally as relevant. 

Against this uninterrupted tsunami surge, a few pondering middlebrows attempt to gain our attention against the clashing noise of these crushing waves. 

We have the legend of the Pied Piper leading children to the mountain where they disappear in full.  My wonder is what will be said a hundred years from now when the metaphorical Pied Piper leads mindless society to the abyss with no one aware of the danger because their attention is elsewhere.

David Brooks is a New York Times columnist who is too sensible to have such an apocalyptical view of the future.  He reads, observes, writes, doggedly trying to get the attention of those he believes could restore order to the chaos, along with some morality to the decadence, in short, some positive spin to actual reality. 

He reads some of the same people I do, and writes books about what they have to say.  For example, he has come to believe feelings are an important part of thinking, and has justified this assessment by referring to the works of Antonio Damasio, among others. 

Brooks is always gentle in his probing, somewhat of a middle of the roader, working for a newspaper that is skewed so far to left that it takes a telescope to find the center.  How he survives in that culture can only be explained if one reads Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” of which it resembles more than the newspaper would like to admit. 

But I wander from my premise, “Is anybody listening?”  Obviously, they aren’t and I’m singling out David Brooks for his patience to abide the times by writing his columns and books, going home to his family, and apparently telling himself, I’m doing all that I can against the forces of this tsunami, and letting it go at that.

Today (Sunday, May 27, 2012), his column sounds like a commencement speech to the four walls of his study addressed to the more privileged college graduates of this spring, by privilege I mean those HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) institutions that cost a fortune to attend, and then expect multiple fortunes in turn for the attendance. 

Brooks is concerned about these grads skewing their careers mainly to finance and business to the exclusion of a myriad of other possibilities.  He doesn’t say it but I couldn’t help but see the similarity to the recruitment and cultivation of high school athletes to attend our football and basketball colleges with the promise of large professional bonuses and contracts when they complete their matriculation.  It is the same motivation but skewed a little differently. 

For the athletes so motivated, education is not even relevant but something to endure to get those professional scouts at their games.  For these prospective Wall Street financiers and consultants, these entrepreneurs and prospective CEOs, the motivation is the same with a catholic education secondary to getting those high grads from high flying institutions so that they qualify for the big show on Wall Street or in corporate America.

We wonder why our society is walking around headless operating on instinct when nine out of every ten college graduates are not invited to the party, but must fend for themselves with what is left of the economic pie when nine out of the ten slices are not left when they go to get their piece.  It is the same of all those aspiring athletes in college that don't have a tinker's damn chance of becoming professional athletes.  

Compounding this ridiculous picture, the 90 percent left out of the sharing are the ones buying the tickets that cost a fortune for the athletic contests of professional athletes.  They watch the ridiculous cable sport critiques of every moment of these athletes, tune into the radio shows that discuss and cuss these same performances, and live fully vicarious lives while sharing the economic peels left for them. 

Making the picture even more absurd, these college graduates that don’t count find it necessary to attain a worthless MBA degree, feeling some kind of kinship with the ten percent that have ninety percent of the goodies.  Meanwhile, the ten percent plays monopoly for real with their retirement funds and limited savings on Wall Street, often risking the pensions of teachers and other unions to acquire bigger bonuses with no one the wiser, especially the ninety percent that have never had an opportunity to share in the economic pie in the first place. 

David Brook is too much of a gentleman to say such things said here.  He actually believes the people of HYPE are smarter, that they are the “best and the brightest,” which they were called a few years ago.  They aren’t.  They are just subtler about their greed. 

Yesterday, I wrote that we have lost our sense of community.  I also implied that we are most comfortable with our own kind, but that possibility has been obliterated in an age of continuing warfare and electronic social connecting. 

During the Great Depression, for one example, when the African American Church was the cornerstone of a black community, the majority of black families were two parent families, and unwed childbirth was practically unknown.  This was during our worst economic times.  Despite the times, the center held firm for the black family.  Today more than 50 percent are single parent families, and more than 60 percent of births are out of wedlock. 

In that same piece, I mentioned that once you change the status quo it is changed forever, as you cannot go back.  But you can restore the compass as governor to existence as we go forward, hopefully more wisely. 

We have discovered in the last sixty years that the religious is a human and flawed institution, that it exhibits the same depression, self-indulgence and structural flaws that have come to be common to us all.  So, there is not much point in blaming the church, or waiting for the church to correct itself.  It won’t happen until we do.  It is not a chicken and an egg proposition. 

Brooks claims young college graduates have deep moral yearnings, but tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions.  How true.  It is a way to separate us from the taint of our own reality.  He ends by saying these same young people should get away from Excel spreadsheets and read Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.  Dostoyevsky, as my readers know is one of my heroes, and they also know I write like Job.

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HOW MANY MISSIVES HAVE YOU WRITTEN & OTHER QUESTIONS

HOW MANY MISSIVES HAVE YOU WRITTEN & OTHER QUESTIONS

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

© May 21, 2012

TO MY READERS:

I have been asked many questions about "the peripatetic philosopher" over the years.  I don't always respond and for that I apologize. 

Like others who have jobs that are of a specific number of hours, I write or read or walk most of my waking hours.  Of late, I have not been walking because of plantar fascia problems.  What follows quite briefly are answers to common questioned asked of me.

(1) Why something so weird as "peripatetic" and then "philosopher" as the title to your website? 

Peripatetic means "wandering," and I got it from reading Aristotle who generated his ideas walking around.  Philosopher is the wondering part of the wanderer, and seems fitting.

(2) Do you have a specific frame of reference to your missives? 

No.  They are eclectic but often thematic as it takes several of a type to complete my thought on a given subject.  Readers remind me that I am long winded and that they are not.

(3) What generates your missives? 

Something I have seen, heard, read or observed that triggers my wondering and compels me to write.  I often compose as I wander (walk).  Recently, I have been writing about Soren Kierkegaard’s take on the common man, remembering some of the things he once said, and realizing they were consistent with how I see the present situation and the plight of the common man.

(4) Who is your audience? 

Myself.  That may seem narcissistic, and, indeed, it is.  But this is also true of as contrasting thinkers as Kierkegaard and Krishnamurti.  

We only come to know ourselves by an extensive internal conversation, as these and other thinkers have pointed out.  It is a painful process but necessary to lead to a more than superficial life. 

It is quite distressing to discover that most of what we have been taught, most of how we have been programmed to think, has been to protect us from self-discovery.  This is done in an effort to control us by celebrating a collective conscience that is external to us.  This led George Orwell to write “1984” (1948). 

Most individuals run into themselves when they face a fatal illness and a possible premature death.  My fatal illness was South Africa’s apartheid policy, and the death of my conscience.  I was introduced to my psychosexual self, and to my commonality with humanity, which I thought I had successfully blocked out through discipline and the strength of my will.  What I had thought was my great strength was my debilitating weakness, and what I thought was my great control was my collective submissiveness to the will of others.   

I was quite a disturbed young man when I came back from South Africa in 1969, and found I had to totally reconstruct myself or go mad.

I wandered into the Haslam Bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida and found myself examining a book by Krishnamurti.  Some thirty of his books later, I realized he had been my constant companion for my retreat from youth into middle age, and hopefully, sanity.   

Obviously, I read many others including Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Heiddeger, Kierkegaard, Orwell, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kafka, Goethe, Milton, and many others.  It occurred to me that these authors projected their internal dialogue into a solution for us all, when what they were actually doing was introducing me to myself.  Now, I am attempting to introduce the reader to himself in my writing.

(5) Do you publish many of your missives? 

Not anymore.  At one point, nearly 80 percent of my missives were picked up by journals and periodicals.  I stopped that when one publisher published without my permission. 

(6) I think I see writing similar to yours in some things I read.  You have told me before that you don't publish anymore, but I suspect I have seen works that seem to have the Fisher imprint without the Fisher credit.  Is this possible?  If so, what have you done about it? 

Others have told me that they still see my stuff "out there."  If it is, it is not authorized.  People who publish without permission of the copyrighted author are just asking for trouble.  It is their quicksand, not mine.  And no, I don't worry my mind about it. 

On the other hand, having published nearly a million words, it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that someone reading me has recognized the same rhythm in their own head, and quite innocently, has written words that have the same cadence.  There is no such thing as an original writer, as there is no such thing as an original inventor.  We all piggyback on each other.

(7) Do you make a great deal of money writing? 

Not like an NBA baseball player.  Actually, given the time I’ve put into writing, I doubt if I have earned 10 cent an hour.  I know people consider how much money they make writing as indicative of writing talent, and they may be right, but that does not concern me. 

Certainly, it did concern Samuel Johnson, the author of the Oxford English Dictionary.  His biographer, James Boswell, has him saying, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”  What is not apparent in Boswell’s biography, and something that Johnson wanted desperately to hide, is that he (Johnson) was essentially self-educated, while wanting to be seen in association with privileged members of British society that had a birthright to attend Oxford and Cambridge.  Look under the rocks and you see us all.

(8) Do you write for money or write because you have to? 

The fact that you ask that question assures me that you don't read me.

(9) How long have you had a web site? 

Since the 1990s, after I came back from Europe where I worked for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. 

My life and writing has been blessed with a marvelous wife, Beautiful Betty, who has supported me, and who is largely responsible for the success of my first book on management, “Work Without Managers” (1991), as she systematically collated all my research.  The book wasn’t meant to be prophetic, but that has proven to be the case with many of its dispositions and perturbations unraveling right before our twenty-first century eyes. 

My nephew, a computer expert, is the architect of my website, and to him should be given credit for its success. 

 

(10) How would you describe your writing -- journalist, essayist, novelist, biographer, autobiographer, historian, others? 

I would describe my writing as that of a peripatetic philosopher.

(11) You have tantalized us with a novel of South Africa seemingly forever.  Are you going to publish, or are you just playing with the idea of writing the novel? 

The novel is in its final editing and rewrite stage.  It will be published.

(12) How long have you been working on the novel? 

For more than forty years.  If you read the novel, you will see that I was writing it in my head and in code that long ago while experiencing South Africa. 

When I came back to the United States, I retired from work, and lived on my savings for two years, reading, attempting to write short stories, and playing tennis, letting my four children pretty much do as they pleased.  Some fifty years later, I realize I was not a great father. That is one of my disappointments in life.  A person who lives in his head best be a priest or a professor or a hermit, but not a father.  A father is a full-time job, and I was not wired to be that person.

When I returned to university and graduate school in a totally different discipline, I did so primarily to understand why I had been so successful in life so early, doing most of what I did intuitively.

I tried to capture this in “Confident Selling” (1970), which became a runaway best seller. 

In that same year (1970), at university, I had the good fortune to run into a professor who enabled my recalcitrant personality to breathe.  Dr. Billy G. Gunter taught industrial social psychology.  One of the assignments was to write about sociological theories in the context of our industrial experience.  I wrote a 78-page paper (single spaced), and he asked to see me.  We have been friends ever since. 

Dr. Gunter rescued me again when the university tried to make me behave, and although I was a straight “A” student, was going to deny me my degree by sabotaging my defense of my thesis.  He intervened and not only rescued me from that fate, but may have save my life. 

It was 1976 and not that many years from the trauma of South Africa.  Thanks to Dr. Gunter, my fragile personality was buoyed up by his kindness.  If my writing ever comes to have meaning to others, Dr. Gunter and Beautiful Betty deserve the credit. 

(13) Is your novel on South Africa, then, biographical? 

Is the pope Catholic?  Novels that are not formula novels cannot help but be biographical.  Even formula novels have a penchant for biography as novelists write from experience.

(14) Are you afraid of hurting those in your novel or being sued? 

My sense is that most people who appear in my novel are likely to be dead.  If they are not dead, chances are they will not see themselves as they are in the book.  My experience, and I’ve written about this, is that if you have twenty people write profiles of each other (as I did in one executive intervention), and then display them and ask them to pick out the one that best describes them, that less than 10 percent can.

(15) Are they accurate portrayals in your novel?

Of course not, not even close.  It is, after all, a novel and everyone, including the main protagonist, is a composite.  Events may have historical significance but the characterization of those events and activities are largely inventions.

(16) Are you proud of the work? 

I don't think of my writing in terms of pride, but in terms of truth.

(17) Are you an angry or pessimistic writer? 

That seems a loaded question.  In any case, it is for the reader to decide.  I think I answer that question from my perspective in my last remark.

(18) If the South Africa novel is your longest writing project in terms of pages and time, what was your shortest? 

Obviously, you do read me.  “A Green Island in a Black Sea” is more than 600 pages in manuscript form. 

“Confident Selling” (1970) was less than 200 pages, which was written in six weeks, and accepted immediately by Prentice-Hall, Inc. But the shortest book was “The Worker, Alone!” (1995), which was 104 pages.

I ghost wrote another book in four weeks for a guy who gave me a box of his experiences with no idea or interest in doing the work to make it a book.  I was paid in five figures.  Others have asked me to ghost write for them, but I have declined. 

You haven't asked, but some authors have asked me to collaborate with them.  I am not a collaborative writer.  Still others, who are professionals, who cannot write, but would like to have a book to promote their work, have asked me to take my commission by a percentage of the royalties.  I've declined that offer as well.  President Kennedy was known for authoring books he never wrote, even won a Pulitzer Prize for one. 

Writing is a craft like carpentry, and you get better at it, like you do in carpentry, by writing, not by publishing.  Writing is very hard work, and people who think that they have a book in them have no idea what a commitment that writing demands of them.  That is why those with means or reputation or celebrity, dodge the reality of writing, by having someone else do the hard lifting.  

(19) Do you have a favorite book that you have written? 

Yes, "The Worker, Alone!" Going Against the Grain" (1995).  I dedicated it to my brother-in-law, William Waddell, who is the salt of the earth, and I think the book is, too.  The book anticipated the intrusive world in which we now live.

(20) What is your least favorite book? 

Probably, it is "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996).  It needed serious editing, and to be cut by at least one-third.  It also needed a more appropriate title.  A better title would have been, "Be Your Own Best Friend,” something positive.  Ironically, it has a lot of good writing in it, but it is buried, unfortunately.

The other unfortunate thing is that I was mesmerized by the success of an article of mine in The Reader’s Digest (June 1993), which the periodical said generated 20,000 reprints in the month after publishing.  The article begins, “To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.”

(21) What will you do after your South Africa book is published? 

You mean besides dying?  I will continue to write, probably missives and continue to read.  I don't know about another book much less a novel.  This will be my eleventh book, and eleven is my favorite number. 

(22) Do you think future generations will discover you? 

My dear reader, I am writing for future generations.  I am suspicious of my own generation and of that of my children and grandchildren. 

They have had the luxury of being insulated from the reality of a world that is starving, going up in flames, lacking sanitized water and adequate sewage treatment, a world of disease and conflict, without adequate housing, a world in which those in power kill their own kind, a world carpeted by the mindset of fear. 

They have their electronic toys, and their bizarre games and live in virtual reality, while five billion of the seven billion souls on earth struggle every day just to breathe another. 

(23) Are you a suspicious or pessimistic person?

How could you be intellectually alive and not be pessimistic?  As to suspicion, I smell flowers and look for coffins.

(24) You claim you are your own audience.  Then are you saying you don't write to an audience? 

I'm not saying that at all.  If you write honestly to yourself, as you have the God given talents to see the world clearly, you are writing to a wider audience, an audience, hopefully, that doesn’t have its head in the sand.  Every age in the history of man has been in denial, and most everyone who points this out in boldface terms is likely to be ignored.   

(25) Then you don't write for money? 

My dear reader, again, it is obvious you don't read me.

(26) I like statistics.  You say this will be your eleventh book, how many missives have you published on your blog? 

I would not know this but google is such a careful bookkeeper.  According to google, since the 1990s, I have published 721 missives totally 40,944 pages.  What is also not unusual for a writer, I have more than ten fully written manuscripts that have not been published, and partial manuscripts to another ten.  Should my writing have some kind of clout, posthumously, they may find their way into print, but I won’t be around to defend or take the flack for them.

(27) 40,944 pages are on your blog? 

Yes, according to google.

(28) Do you have a wide readership? 

No.

(29) No?  How come?  Doesn't that bother you? 

To your first question, perhaps my missives are too long, and then too, they might be found boring. 

My sense is different.  My writing tends to bore into the comfortable cutaneous of skin-deep thinkers. 

Life is a constant hassle to most people.  It is perhaps why they prefer fast foods and empty calories to fill their bodies and constant texting to fill their empty minds.

The frenetic pace of life to succeed, to excel, to keep up with others, to stay employed, to be in tune with what others claim important, has to be exhausting.  I don’t blame them.  It is very hard, perhaps even impossible for most people to get off the treadmill.  Consequently, few venture beyond the expected. 

(30) This may seem presumptuous, but don't you think you're wasting your time, and the readers, too, and just taking up space with what I would call some of your missives as diatribes? 

You do read me!  Excellent!  I plead guilty to all the charges.

(31) Do you plan to do anything about it? 

No.

(32) Do you think you are a good or great writer? 

It isn't for me to decide, but I would rather think I have been some kind of useful in my long life.  "Good" and "great" don't have much purchase with me.  I would go for not getting in the way of others.

(33) The title of your novel, “A Green Island in a Black Sea,” what is the origin of the title?

To me, South Africa was paradise, a green island essentially insulated and isolated from the rest of the world.  A slender minority of white people, but not terrible people, but terribly misguided people, the Afrikaners, who ruled the majority population of a vibrant physically beautiful black people.  The colonial Brits counted the coins that the Bantu (blacks) and Afrikaners generated.  It was for a totally unprepared young executive, yours truly, to step into this world and to experience the misguided policy of apartheid. 

*     *     *

KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- FIVE

 KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- FIVE

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

© May 20, 2012

ANTICIPATING DISINGENUOS TIMES

Kierkegaard could see that putting the face of sincerity on insincerity would become endemic in the future.  Through war, disappointment and deprivation, people would weary of living authentic lives, and would feel more at home playacting as if someone else in a more surreal world. 

The ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, the playing with thematic nuances, the coquettish crackle of style over substance, the face of calm in the midst of agitation would win psychological approval for an age refusing to accept the face of maturity.

The Danish philosopher could see fresh and lively originality with elemental inexhaustibility, and passion broken into a myriad of facets that would generate a smoldering intensity that would burst into unnecessary wars but also a torrent of creativity.

The source of the torment was a society that never wanted to acknowledge much less experience the drift of time, or the necessity to change or grow old.  Kierkegaard saw this firsthand.  He could see the establishment ignoring and denying the charge to modernity with the eternally young, fiery and restless not letting up.  They were consumed daringly with ideas and vaulted over the stars to throw society, as it was known, down into the abyss.  He was writing about mid-nineteenth century Europe, but could have been writing about today:

“Time has asserted its rights.  Some things have been consigned to the past.  But now the ideality of recollection will cast a brilliant light upon the entire performance, an incarnation that was not present in those first days of youth.

 Only in recollection is there absolute rest, and this is precisely why there is also the quiet fire, the imperishable glow of the eternal.  And she rests reassured in the eternity of her essential genius.  She has no childish or wistful longing after the flames of what has disappeared.  Her metamorphosis has left her too ardent and too rich for that.  Like an idealizing light, this pure, reassuring, and rejuvenating recollection will illuminate the entire performance, which will become completely transparent in that illumination."

It is this notion of reliability, the imperishable glow of recollection that we have come to live in the past while going forward, playing roles that are etched in history, but not wavering from the same anachronistic footprints.  To Kierkegaard’s mind, it is the nature of our cultivation:

“The elasticity of the inner being is indeed the measure of essential cultivation.  A serving girl who is essentially in love is essentially cultivated.  A man of the common people who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated”

He sees cultivation in sincerity, in duty, in responsibility, and in action, and he sees this best demonstrated in the common man and least evident in those that hold power.  He turns the guns on his own class of affluence and privilege that has become so reflective that exploration and explanation have led to end in descriptive analysis, a comfortable distance from real problems and issues.  He writes:

“The present age is essentially reasonable, reflective, without passion, flaring up in fickle enthusiasm and shrewdly relaxing in indolence . . .A passionless and reflective (age) transforms the expression of strength into a dialectical tour de force: it permits everything to continue to exist but cunningly deprives it of meaning.  Instead of culminating into a rebellion, it ends by exhausting the inner reality of things in a reflective tension that permits everything to continue to exist while transforming the whole of existence into something ambiguous.”

What did we learn from Vietnam to explain Iraq and Afghanistan?  What did we learn from Enron to explain Wall Street corruption and the economic collapse of 2008?  What did we learn from the HIV epidemic to explain the scourge of pseudoephedrines and methamphetamines?  It would appear nothing.

We declare war on crime, on drugs, on terror, or whatever currently is in the collective social conscience, but we manage, in our reflective state, never to deal with the root causes, and so these problems drift with time.   

*     *     *

We are a reflective society but not a problem solving society.  The tool of reflection on the one hand exposes religious illusions (and the cultural illusions with which religious illusions are connected), and on the other hand directs our attention to the immediate, to the simple, to how it registers with the common man. 

Pathos, Kierkegaard tells us, is grounded in the principle of contradiction.  We see it in the histrionics of the current presidential campaign.  The play is on fear treated as fact, the past as blueprint or foil to the future.  Words become the equivalent of action, promises the nourishment at the dinner table.  The principle of contradiction is meant to discourage the common man from thinking of anything else than the juxtaposition of the contradictions.  These have the lightness of air but can drive one to distraction if not destruction.  Kierkegaard adds:

“Enthusiasm is the unifying principle in a passionate age and envy is the negatively unifying principle in a passionless highly reflective age … Close air always becomes noxious; thus, when it is not ventilated with action, with events, closed-in reflection becomes the most reprehensible envy.”

One can only imagine what Kierkegaard would think of the synthetic age that technology has created.  Facebook has 900 million in what it claims as a global social connection when most of those so connected probably don’t know their next-door neighbors. 

One hundred years ago the automobile changed our psychosexual and cultural norms.  Today, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, among others, have been handed the challenge.  The automobile led us to concreteness, whereas information technology, which deals primarily in the abstract, is leading us away from each other while connecting us electronically with machines.  Kierkegaard saw the virtue of concretion as essential to prevent the individual from being reduced to a “public.”

The nineteenth century “Age of Reflection” created that irresponsible abstraction called, “the public.”

The public carries the power of suggestion to the ultimate unreality of polls, position papers, ethnic profiles, and demographics.  In our age, it has reduced meaning to sound bytes, statistics, algorithms, and mock scenarios in which no real people need participate. 

These self-fulfilling prophecies are treated as if they are indisputable projections and that people best abide by the findings.  Primary information, consistent with the principle of contradiction, information gained through direct experience and learning is relegated to being far less valid than second and third hand information.  Experts and authorities know best and show the way, and they have thrown us into the abyss.

The public, the ultimate display of the disingenuous, is not a people, not a generation, not a group, not a congregation, not an association or anything human because all of these are what they are by some connection, not concretion.  It could be said the public is everything and nothing at all, the most dangerous of powers and the most insignificant.  It is less than one single individual, however, unimportant as that person may be. 

Kierkegaard stresses again:

Only the person who is essentially capable of remaining silent is capable of speaking essentially; only the person who is essentially capable of remaining silent is capable of acting essentially.”

He recognized that he was explaining the inner conflict mainly of himself.  He writes:

“The person who is a child of the times but who wishes to fight against those times cannot do so with authority, as someone recognizable, as a prophet who wishes to lead a lost generation back to time honored ways of doing things.

Only by means of an action that involves suffering would the unrecognizable one dare to help leveling in its progress, and by means of this same suffering action he will pass judgment on the instrument used.  He does not dare defeat leveling straightforwardly.  That would be the end of him, because it would be acting with authority.  But in his suffering he will defeat it and will thereby express once again the law of his existence, which is not to command, govern, or lead, but to serve while suffering, to help indirectly.” 

The relevance of existential common man, then, according to Kierkegaard, is predicated upon the individual in the situation having the courage to make choices and decisions based on the principle of contradiction.  This was a striking but indirect force against the opposition in Kierkegaard's disingenuous age.  It might be the same in ours.

*     *     *

KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- FOUR

KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN – FOUR

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

© May 16, 2012

THE COTERIES OF THE CULTIVATED

There is nothing that Americans attempt to do more strenuously than to escape the commonality of their roots.  The motivation is to win acceptance and inclusion in the believed to be rarefied air of the cultivated, to bathe in the reflected light of the real people who count for something, as if common man counts for little or nothing.

Money, alone, will not get them there.  Education has a better chance, but it, too, cannot do the trick.  Often, marriage provides a leg up to shed the blemishes of their roots.  Nor can academic, political or business acclaim ensure membership in this coterie.  To blend in as well as be accepted, they must be seen as belonging by the patina of manners, diction, interests, beliefs and gravitas.  This is required of even peripheral insiders who serve the coterie. 

It is a heady climb and can take generations by going to the right schools, marrying the right people, pursuing the right careers, and living in the right part of the country.

Sometimes the climb for peripheral insiders can be accomplished in a single generation by being celebrities in one's own right, as television commentators, journalists, bankers or extraordinaire entrepreneurs.  Occasionally, Presidents of the United States make the cut, but not always.

Thinking as I have of late of Kierkegaard and the common man, I was reminded of this watching PBS television, and a rather obsequious and fawning discussion of J.P. Morgan Chase’s current financial fiasco in losing $2 billion of its clients' money. 

Charlie Rose and a New York Times columnist admitted at the outset of the discussion that they “were friends” of CEO James Dimon.  This disclosure was meant apparently to diminish any bias, while broadcasting their connection to one of the wealthier men on the planet as well as one of the best connected. 

As amusing as this was, David Brooks managed to top it with his description of President Barack Obama as “the ESPN man.”  Cable television in 2012 is doing for the president what the Internet did for him in his campaign in 2008.  The coteries of the cultivated are lining up in support of him.  Brooks notes this is keeping him competitive for reelection when all the traditional indicators would suggest otherwise, given the economic mood of the country and the shift towards conservative politics.  Why so?

Brooks writes:

“Normally, presidents look weak during periods of economic stagnation, overwhelmed by events.  But Obama has displayed a kind of ESPN masculinity – postfeminist in his values, but also thoroughly traditional in style – hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self-doubt, rarely self-indulgent.”

As a result, the president comes off aggressive, but also in touch with the middle class.  His coterie leadership style is keeping him afloat.  Brooks continues:

“He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manner and reticence.”

In politics, as in life, it is all about identity, which brings us back to Kierkegaard.

HOW THESE COTERIES OPERATE

Most Americans of European stock have descendents in their tree of the peasant class, which formed cliques working the land of feudal lords.  Our brief three hundred years of history can find the so-called "cultivated," rising out of that stock. 

Kierkegaard was born (1813) when feudalism was being replaced by budding capitalism, but the seeds of feudalism in cliques remained.  People still cowered in fear, he suggests, as “the manner, not the message, was the reason.”  It was best to stay in your place, and not create waves.

The Danish philosopher saw that the church and humanists combined  to preserve the traditional religious-political climate he appalled. 

We have seen evidence of this mindset in the United States to our day.  The public scoffs at poor people of all races being on welfare.  At the same time, that same public does everything to keep them there, by limiting access to unions, education, craftsmanship, and emergence from such dependency. 

Kierkegaard enjoyed the form and the content of culture by dint of his social class and education, and even admired the aristocracy of the intellect while attacking it incessantly.  He did this because he understood the tenor of his times was directed against the common man. 

He was weary of the cloak of coyness that maintained the "coteries of the cultivated" that pulled everyone down to the same level. 

It was a little bit like the present.  The tenor of Kierkegaard’s time was a sociable tone of conversation that dulled the edge off of discussion of real issues and real problems, until there was no originality of thought.  Today, those in positions of power are quick to be skeptical of any originality encountered that addresses the plight of the common man.  Instead, we have collectively gravitated to a mania for sameness, for the protocol of the acceptable, leaving no room for either pathos or passion. 

To combat this mania, Kierkegaard in his refined and underhanded way, behind the disguise of indirect communication, constructed bombshells with his books meant to explode in the minds of readers once his message was digested. 

Like Shakespeare, he saw life as a stage and all of us actors on that stage.  My sense is that my words might have resonated with him:

“We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts.  Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage.  The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage to loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.” (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996)

Kierkegaard knew that living in the moment, what an actor does, triumphing over stage fright when defending oneself against discrimination, ridicule or unfair practices, demands a composure and ease on that stage in this dramaturgic play in life. 

Often, when we are the victim of circumstances, we instead act as if the guilty in our unease.  Against this, Kierkegaard mounts a self-defense:

“Completely unselfish students of truth have never played hide-and-seek with the crowd so that they could then play the game of surprise on the rare occasion when they present themselves as objects of astonishment.  On the contrary, they have lived with the common man, have conversed in the streets and alleys, renouncing every claim to respect.”

The whole piece here is a self-examination and a self-defense disguised as a dramaturgic analysis.  It is this little work on the theatre of the mind in which he reflects on unrest, playfulness, coquetry, and especially, reliability.  Reliability is the existential touchstone that makes it possible to defend all the playfulness, secretiveness and style. 

His interest is in the power of the creative force that permeates the unconscious and is displayed as unrest.  The unrest that he is talking about is not the unrest of which one soon tires, but the unrest of infinity that stirs the timbers of our souls to rejuvenate us, refresh us, heal us, and raise us to higher understanding. 

This, he says, is the unrest of genius.  It reveals something common to us all, elemental, inexhaustible, but tapped by few of us.  It is the playfulness of a mind such as when Einstein flirted with ideas beyond the pale of convention, and pursued them like the sound of the wind. 

Such actors have the ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, playing with thematic nuances of their discipline but with the agitation of unrest but the reliability of calm to see what has never been seen before.  Kierkegaard writes:

“Only in recollection is there absolute rest, and this is precisely why there is also the quick fire, the imperishable glow of the eternal . . .Like an idealizing light, this pure, reassuring, and rejuvenating recollection will illuminate the entire performance, which will become completely transparent in that illumination.”

A writer composes out of his own age and the reflections it germinates.  Kierkegaard’s age was that of revolution with the birth of mass society.  He could see the rise of common people, whereas many of his ilk would deny such a rise.  He writes:

“A man of the common people who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated.  A superficial and fragmentary set of manners based upon an inner emptiness, the colorful display of swaggering weeds in comparison to the humble bowing of the blessed grain is mere form and affectation.”

True as these words are, as I’ve attempted to display in these opening lines, weeds are as stubborn today as they were in his day.

*     *     *