THE DIFFICULTY OF KNOWING WHAT IS WHAT

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

© November 4, 2012

REFERENCE:

Readers know that I make no claims to being an expert.  I’m simply an ordinary person who reads, thinks and processes information to make some sense of it, if for no other reason then to put one foot in front of another and move on.

My sense is that most people of the current generation voting for the first time are too busy with their electronic toys to read much outside academic requirements or their jobs.  Time instead is spent in texting ad nauseum. 

In the current election cycle, they fall into one camp or another and drift towards idealism rather than ideology.  Chances are they don’t see the world they about to inherit in real terms, a world coming apart at the seams, a world driven by misinformation and hysteria in presidential politics.

President Barak Obama will probably win reelection, but not on his record.  It has been a disappointing four years for most Americans.  He will win reelection on the strength of incumbency and the gathering storm of emotion in support of him.  Were he judged on performance, he would unlikely get a promotion to four for years.  But presidents are not judged on performance.  Presidents are judged on charisma, personality and popularity.  Incredibly, voters don’t vote on their self-interest.  They vote on the basis of what they know, whatever that is, versus the fear of what they don’t know and might get.  

Even my generation, which goes back to The Great Depression, is not what you would call readers or informed.  Most readers, I suspect, the kind with which I identify, come from families in which the parents were readers, in my case my mother, or tended to be naturally reclusive.  Americans have never been readers like Europeans.  So, in defense of being non-readers, Americans could take comfort in the chaos of European politics.

The Internet, e-mail and Facebook, among other outlets, have changed everything.  Non-readers are now readers, even writers, diary keepers, ledgers, with websites and elaborate indexes of preferred “friends” or social-professional contacts. 

There is a veritable explosion in communications, which makes my humble attention to the reading of books and periodicals insignificant by comparison.  My problem with this is that it is so much chatter with little depth or meaning other than instantaneous the in situ exchange to the process.  Said another way, there is no story here, and life is all about stories.

It occurred to me when I was a working professional that people would say things to you over the phone that they would never have the courage to say to your face.  Now, I’m told that same behavior is demonstrated on the Internet.  You can read a person’s sincerity face-to-face for that is the nature of intimacy, and without intimacy any stories that developed are more “out there” then hallucinations.    . 

This is the age of the irony of anxiety, an age when reality television is surrogate to a story line, while our greatest daily newspapers and network television programs have headline “stories” once limited to so-called scandal rags.  Now, these “stories” have become the popular diet of readers and viewers that find it necessary to be jolted out of their somnolence.  More than $2 billion have been spent on the current presidential political campaigns to corroborate this society manifestation.

Politicians and celebrities, authors and activists will do about anything short of killing to get their moments on television.  As a result, it has made international celebrities of obsequiously interviewers who throw them softball questions.  My problem with this is not “they,” but we.  We are complicit in this charade because we gave birth to this incessant carnival of dissembling.   

We all have a serviceable filter of skepticism bordering on cynicism that protects us from being unduly influenced by what other people write, say or think.  In this age of media blitz, not only in the entertainment industry, but also in academia, and in the political, industrial, and intellectual community, we look for stars not starters.  We look for those with credentials not ideas.  We look for those with pedigrees not provocateurs.  We look for those with Pulitzers, Nobel Laureates or degrees from celebrated institutions.  We never entertain the doubt that we may be passive participants in a grand hoax.  Somehow, we have abdicated control of our lives and forgotten the watchword,  “Caveat emptor!”

A GERMAN READER WRITES:

Jim,

I'm really impressed. You read so much literature - and obviously also specifically on Germany.

Joachim Fest worked at the same broadcast station as my brother (born in 1925), who was a program director at the NDR.  My brother, who had - despite our Prussian family tradition - refused to fight in the German army, and was not very impressed by Fest.

Fest obviously had written his book on Hitler because he needed the money, and was very much involved in the Historikerstreit.

I recommend to you the book "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" by Patrick J. Buchanan (Crown Publishers).

Best regards

Manfred

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

“Historian” Pat Buchanan

It so happens I am familiar with Pat Buchanan and his writing, including this work.  He is an Irishman, a devout Catholic, former speech writer and operative in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses, a regular on the John McLaughlin Group on PBS television, a 1992 primary presidential candidate running as a conservative and isolationist, and a writer of revisionist history.

I say revisionist history because he has a way of reinterpreting the facts to fit his opinions.  There is a racist quality to his writing as it is apparent he has no great fondness for Jews.  It is also clear that he blames Sir Winston Churchill for the breakup of the British Empire, which Churchill adored, and puts this former Prime Minister on a slippery slope nearly as dastardly as Adolf Hitter and Joseph Stalin. 

It makes me fairly cringe when I read the Holocaust and all the other atrocities of WWII were precipitated by villainous policies of Churchill and not the responsibility of the maniacal Hitler.  Buchanan blames the weakness of the British military for Auschwitz, and by extension the Allies, as if the seeds of the Holocaust were not innate to Nazism. 

If WWII was not necessary, how can you explain the end of fascism and Nazism, the liberation of the death camps, the new democracies in Central Europe, the totally reformation of the German Republic to becoming the keeper of the peace and today the core to economic stability in Europe, not to mention the end of Jewish persecution? 

As a consequence, Europe has enjoyed sixty-seven years of relative peace despite the Berlin Wall not falling until 1989.  The previous seventy years Germany had been at war with France three times.  Germany has risen like a sphinx from its ashes to be a central fixture to global stability in the twenty-first century.

An American perspective as a boy

As often is my inclination, I explain my perspective by sharing some of my history.

When I was a boy, I went to the Clinton Public Library in Clinton, Iowa and was browsing through the aisles looking for a book, and came across the intriguing title, “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935) by Sinclair Lewis.  I had read previously the author’s “Main Street” (1920) and “Babbitt” (1925). 

The novel “Main Street” seemed like the underbelly of my hometown, the part you would see if you lifted up a rock and looked at the teaming duplicity and misery underneath.  I expressed that thought to my teenage friend, Eric Chalgren, on a street corner one night shooting the breeze after reading the book.  I wonder if he still remembers these many years later.

Babbitt was about a business world far removed from my working class family.  The complacency he described would stick with me, and be defined a half-century later in “Work Without Managers” (1991, pp 185-212) as “the culture of complacency,” a culture that had come to dominate the corporate workplace.  

Author Sinclair Lewis was a Midwesterner (like me) and won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930).  His social criticism registered with my growing awareness of the world I was entering as a professional. 

Already, at that early stage in my life, I was questioning much of what I saw and felt.  It was the aftermath of WWII wondering what the future held for me, a poor Irish American kid with some athletic ability but little else. 

“It Can’t Happen Here” caused me to pay attention not only to history but also to authority figures.  My parents worshipped FDR but were nonplus about the little man from Missouri, now president, Harry S. Truman.  It was hard to imagine Truman as a demagogue who would morph into a totalitarian ruler, which was the subject of the Lewis book.  Truman did drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was very unsettling for my grammar school mind (see In the Shadow of the Courthouse 2003).

The Lewis book was scary.  Senator Windrip (yes, that was the main character’s name) was elected president promising to end crime, restore economic prosperity, and return the nation to pride, patriotism and traditional values. 

He defeats FDR, and immediately neutralizes Congress and the Supreme Court, setting up a paramilitary force to carry out his edicts, organizing concentration camps for those who opposed him.  The book had the feel of Nazi Germany. 

Published in 1935, the parallel to Hitler was even more frightening: Windrip loses popularity and then power, a coup d’etat follows, underlings seize power, the president is exiled to Europe, a power vacuum spawns chaos, which leads to riots and rebellions across the country. 

The book has alerted me to the power of bombast and how it plays on mass society fears to gain control.  Later, I sensed the same mechanism in play in the workplace, the church, the school and the government.  I believed then as I believe now “it can happen here!”

An American's experience as a man

As a man, I have been in organization but never of organization.  I have never been a joiner, but have been most comfortable as an observer and studier of organization and how organization behaves consistent or inconsistent with its stated function.  Likewise, I have observed and studied individuals in organization in that same context.  Writers have provided me with vocabulary to express such sensitivity in words. 

When I read Gunter Grass’s “The Tin Drum” (1964), which was the author’s first book, I could imagine Oscar Matzerath’s refusal to grow up in the rising turmoil of the totalitarian state of Germany under the Third Reich. 

There is a time, I suppose, for us all when responsibility and accountability for our actions can no longer be blamed on our parents, or nuns and priests in our care, but much fall to us.  It is that moment when we might prefer never to grow up.  In my time, there was no cushions, no excuses.  You either grew up or life crushed you.  That all changed in the 1960s and beyond when three generations found no need to grow up.  Now, today they are running things. 

The Gunter Grass is a novel of chaos, and is celebrated in part because of this.  It is also a novel in which Oscar asserts his individuality against a world alien to him. 

I read it during one of my international assignments for Nalco Chemical Company during the 1960s.  I saw great wealth and great poverty; I saw how we exploited countries and their resources to our advantage, and then I was introduced to South Africa apartheid and my life changed forever. 

Like Mazerath, I did my best to rationalize what I saw and felt.  But my mind would not rest.  The evidence was everywhere and it could not be misconstrue, not in my own company or among other professionals I would meet. 

Gunter Grass captured something of twentieth century madness, a world in upheaval, a world in which values were becoming inverted and indistinguishable, a world in which the tragic and the comic had become agonizingly ludicrous, a world I was expected to be grateful for my rise to comfort, but a world that demanded I sacrifice my identity for that luxury.  It was a luxury I could not afford.

Pyramid climbing became the name of the game.  Professionals could never find time to do the job they were paid to do, as they were too busy filling the boxes necessary for the next promotion. 

It suddenly occurred to me there were no adults on the premises.  All the modes of civility and decorum had been tabled, replaced by frantic competition at the expense of cooperation.  The irony is that this insanity was bridged by what was called “teaming,” which now found teams competing against each other as individuals once had.  Madness!

Chaos had become the outward appearance of the inner principle it sought to capture.  Crisis management became routine.  Symptoms of a problem became the focus, but now treated as if the cause.  Imagination and vitality, and creative affirmation had given rise to a dominant sameness everywhere.  People dressed alike, talked alike, behaved alike, and pain and discomfort were avoided at all cost.  Fifty years later, we have the world of today.

*     *     *

Prior to going on assignment to South Africa, during one of these long trips abroad, I read Hermann Hesse’s “Demian” (1919), which had something of the flavor of James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916).  Both authors used incidents in their own lives to illustrate a growing consciousness through life encounters that led to their individuality. 

Joyce’s resonated with me easily as his background and culture was similar to my own.  This was not so much the case with Hesse.  The German plunged the depths of youth, not so much one youth, exploring the difficulty of personality integration in his time. 

Personality is the acquired self, the self that is a product of society, whereas essence is inherited characteristics of the individual.  When personality and essence are out of balance, so then, too, are the times.  In that sense, you might say Hesse was prophetic.

Having read some Freud, Adler and Jung, I could see the influence of that psychoanalytical tradition on the novelist.  The author was concerned with the self-knowledge necessary to produce a maturity specific to cope in a changing world through the force of will.  It would prove a crisis to me in South Africa (I write about this in my unpublished novel, A Green Island in a Black Sea).

*     *     *   

Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” (1912) was read in one sitting, as it is quite short.  By contrast, I was a young man, while Gustave von Aschenbach, protagonist of the story, is a famous middle-aged writer.  It resonated with me, I suppose, because of its psychological intensity and tragic power to show how aging passion can survive in the midst of the bubonic plague. 

Gustave has lived a disciplined and exemplary life, but is aging and near physical collapse if not death.  He sees a beautiful boy in Venice, who epitomizes his ego ideal in a city surrounded with evidence of the plague, and falls passionately in love with this vision of the boy. 

The denouement of the story comes when the writer is again watching Tadzio (his name) playing with his friends on the beach.  He is pushed to the ground and his face pressed into the sand, then the boys run off.  Humiliated and hurt, the youth walks down to the water, looking seaward, a young Saint Sebastian to the writer, and then turns and looks directly at him.  It overwhelms him with emotions; he tries to rise, only to fall back into his chair, Tadzio wanders off.  He dies that night in his room, a victim of the plague.

Mann brings together in this book conflicting themes of life and death that have held singular fascination for me since my da’s death three days after his fiftieth birthday to multiple myeolma.  I have never taken a single day for granted since. 

It dawned on me that trained in science I saw the world controlled by art.  Like many other projects in my life, the gestation period has sometimes been quite long, but often when it has come to fruition the influence of artists was apparent.  This fact is celebrated in “Profiles of the Leader-as-Artist”  (www.peripateticphilosopher.com, March 27, 2004), a work that has appeared in publications around the globe, but was inspired less by the principals profiled then by such authors as Grass, Hesse, Joyce and Mann.  Incidentally, only Joyce among this group failed to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Historikerstreit

It is true that there is a German influence to my thinking and writing, but I am not alone in this affinity.  Alan Bloom wrote a powerful book in 1987 about this fact in “The Closing of the American Mind.” 

Bloom was a professor at the University of Chicago, and a colleague of Nobel Laureate Saul Bellows.  “Closing” was about higher education and its failure to prepare students for life.  I saw verification; you might even say vindication, for my suspicions when it came to “cultural studies,” and the new wave of “cultural psychology” and “cultural psycho-neurology.”  Bloom saw the “openness” of academia actually closing young students’ minds to the realities they were to encounter. 

It was a charade in the corporation to have an “open door” policy, which was anything but, while in contrast, those who preferred close doors to their offices were most likely to be the most open to those that entered. 

This is mentioned here because I “histoikerstreit” means historical quarrel of matters historical, intellectual or political.  That is precisely what Bloom’s book is about.  Critics, mainly other academics, came out of the woodwork to charge him of all sorts of crimes, including betrayal of his colleagues.

What stayed with me with me the most was the many facets the German influence is endemic to the American character and American culture.

Now, you have a connection with Joachim Fest with which I cannot identify.  I am currently rereading his “Hitler” (1973), and find it spellbinding.  Whether I will reread other Hitler treatments, I don’t know. 

As BB can attest, when I develop an interest, as I have with Freud and Einstein among others, I tend to behave close to a scholar.  To give you a sense of this, here is only part of my library on Hitler and Nazism:

(1)   Hitler in Vienna: 12907-1913 by J. Sydney Jones, 1983

(2)   Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship by Brigitte Hamann, 1999

(3)   The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1971

(4)   Dictionary of The Third Reich by James Taylor and Warren Shaw, 1997

(5)   Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer, 1970

(6)   Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny

(7)   Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, 1977

(8)   Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet: Hitler by Fritz Redlich, 1998

(9)   The Hidden Hitler by Lothar Machtan, 2001

(10)                       The Hitler of History by John Lukacs, 1997

(11)                       The Man Who Invented Hitler: The Making of the Fuhrer by David Lewis, 2003

(12)                       The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report by Walter C. Langer, 1972

(13)                       Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bulloch, 1962

(14)                       The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler by Nigel Jones, 2004

(15)                       The Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor by David Irving, 1983

(16)                       Blood & Iron: From Bismarck to Hitler: the von Moltke Family’s Impact on German History by Otto Friedrich, 1995

(17)                       Hitler by Joachim C. Fest, 1973

These are representative, and as you can see, from many different perspectives without anyone being sympathetic to the former dictator.  That is why Pat Buchanan’s book is in stark contrast.  My wonder is if James Buchanan our fifteenth President of the United States (1857-1861), or president before Abraham Lincoln, is a relative of Pat Buchanan. 

My sense is these volumes capture a great deal of the historiography of Germany after WWII.  As mentioned earlier, I don’t think Americans should take any comfort in “this” only happening elsewhere, as the seeds of malevolence are quite apparent in the American culture.

*     *     *

Finally, my research of that European period also includes an extensive library on the Roman Catholic Papacy, especially that of Cardinal Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII.  My ship, the flagship of the Sixth Fleet (USS Salem CA-139), had a private audience with the pope shortly before his death.  The ship’s photographer captured me on the aisle as the pope came by carried in the papal chair by the Swiss guards.  It reminds me now of “six degrees of separation,” the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world.

I purchased a book at the Book Nook of our local library on the subject: “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” (2003) by Duncan J. Watts.  It is mentioned here because the idea didn’t come from a scientist or mathematician.  It came from a short story writer, John Guare.  Pay attention to artists.  They are often light years ahead of scientists.  

Be always well,

Jim