James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 2, 2013
EXORDIUM (An introduction to a treatise or discourse)
Our psyches are constantly peppered with warnings concerning the nature of our times. You see them every day on the opposite page to the editorial page. I invariably go first to the sport’s page of the morning newspaper at breakfast at 5 a.m. to wake up, and then to the op-ed page to get my brain working. The disputation and perturbations of the day here are sometimes quite serious and others quite mundane, but all express the United States of Anxiety. It is a wonder that we ever move off the dime.
Mayor Bill Foster of St. Petersburg (Florida) wrote a column on the op-ed page of the Tampa Bay Times defending his stand of holding the Tampa Bay Rays (Major League Baseball) to St. Pete’s Tropicana Field until 2027, although it has the lowest attendance in the major leagues with less than 300 season ticket holders.
Satirist and sometimes personality assassin Daniel Ruth has had fun with the mayor’s stance in a column on these op-ed pages to which Mayor Foster was reacting in this column. The mayor claimed he deals in facts and not opinions, implying that there is no credence to Ruth’s column or the legitimacy of the Rays’ ownership desiring to move to more economic digs. That ownership has countered playing the fear game suggesting that major league baseball may have no other option than to move the Rays out of Tampa Bay “if” the team is not released from its contract with the city of St. Petersburg through 2027.
Now, I mention this because within opinions there are many facts, and within facts there are selected opinions. In more sophisticated language, opinions and facts represent a combination of cognitive and cultural biases. Few of us, whatever our pedigree, say precisely what we mean, or mean precisely what we say, as these agitations interfere with our perspective and point of view.
It is however interesting to report that opinions or biases, if you prefer, husband data in support of the views of the discriminating minds whenever ideas escape Pandora’s Box of conventional thinking.
Admittedly, baseball is a pretty mundane subject, and if the Tampa Bay Rays choose to leave the bay area, the world will not implode, but the mechanism in play here is just as common to science as well as philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political science and sociology, to name a few serious pursuits.
People who pause to ponder, observe and transform information into thought, with the best of intentions and the most impeccable credentials, can be totally right or totally out to lunch. We make progress in life as well as in sport slowly and not always wisely.
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PERICULUM IN MORA (There is danger in delay.)
Since the 1990s, or for a quarter century, we have been riding a watershed moment to technological explosion, as the computer age, the Information Age has become a train wreck to convention. It is changing us in ways we don’t fully understand but feel powerless to resist the momentum is so strong.
At the end of the 19th century, and by 1913, thanks to the ingenuity and risk taking character of the bicycle mechanic turned automaker Henry Ford, the Model T, which represented the progression through the alphabet of multiple failures (A through S), the socioeconomic and behavioral fabric of society was changed radically. In that year:
(1) Ford was producing 1,000 cars a day, a process Ford established that took worker ownership out of workers’ hands producing to piecework on an assembly line. Workers hated the work so much that quit in droves, making it necessary for the company to constantly retrain workers at considerable expense to the automaker.
(2) Henry Ford came up with the wage of $5 a day and created profit sharing with workers. Thousands turned up to work at Ford, as the wage was double what unskilled workers could make elsewhere. Many were immigrants from more than fifty countries speaking one hundred languages. Ford made conditional of this wage and employment that these workers learn English and adopt the American culture, the majority did. With this move, he created a market for his automobile, quieted the critics of alienation of workers for the monotony of the work, and seeded the incipient working middle class, while Americanizing an eclectic of otherwise splinter groups.
(3) The Model T was accessible to the working class ($800 versus $2,000 for competitors’ models), which gave workers a level of mobility and freedom never known before, and rapidly changed the psychosexual behavior of car owners.
Henry Ford never completed eighth grade, but was a mechanical genius, while his friend, Thomas Edison, never went to school. They were bold visionary, without the breeding or credentials of the gentry, but seeded the twentieth century to reflect their own mental roadmaps. Both men, always in a hurry, never had time to look back, or to second-guess themselves. In contrast, academics and scholars did that for them. Edison gave us 24-hour daylight with his electric power plant, and Ford gave us Detroit that would stir the American economic drink for the twentieth century.
There were 57 American car companies at the beginning of the twentieth century; there are now three. Momentum is everything. He who hesitates is lost. Success is chased by failure to oblivion for most. It is no different at the fin de siecle.
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We find now a cadre of young Turks, often college dropouts, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, redefining this new century with a new set of monumental changes to human existence. Is it more dramatic than the twentieth century? Time will tell.
What is apparent is the introduction of a new impersonal communications universe that introduces a new kind of alienation. Now, it is not work, but the self separated from itself and living in virtual reality. Ron Sachs, a media consultant, writes on the op-ed page of the Tampa Bay Times that there is a “rush towards connected detachment” that a generation of the young is pushing everyone.
While the automobile shrunk distances across the land, Internet technology has shrunk the planet into Hillary Clinton’s “global village.”
Sachs writes, “We’ve largely forgotten what our own handwriting looks like. We are too snug in our modern communications cocoons, opting for exchanges that provide empty soulless solitude rather than enriching human interaction.”
We have a famous Notre Dame football player, Manti Te’o, with a three-year relationship with a virtual reality girlfriend that, once the hoax was exposed, dramatized a new kind of social toxicity. His access to this girlfriend was totally through electronic communication. Sachs continues, this “demonstrates that too many people are living their lives virtually.”
Virtual reality in advanced societies has resulted in fully 80 percent of those able to text from 5 to 75 voluntarily confining themselves to the narrow stalls of technology. It is changing language and expression to the disconnected connection of a miraculous handheld electronic device.
As everything gravitated to the automobile in its myriad of social-cultural vicissitudes, we are in the midst of the same addictive power of the various iterations of the iPod and iPad. More astounding, we are already feeling this impact after only a decade into the twenty first century.
Owen Felltham in “Resolves” (1623) wrote, “Nothing wraps a man in such a mist of errors as his own curiosity in searching things beyond him.” We have evidence of this as we retreat further from each other and ourselves.
HINC ILLAE IACRIMAE (Hence these tears)
Academics and yes, amateurs like myself, try to make sense out of the nonsense of their times. Times change but people remain pretty much the same. They go from victory to defeat to paranoia whatever the age, and seem surprised when they land on their feet.
On these pages, I’ve shared with you the struggle of Gustave Le Bon to penetrate the meaninglessness of the crowd, as did Eric Hoffer a few generations later. I’ve also shared with you the works of Soren Kierkegaard and his search for the common man who his time largely ignored. Most recently, I shared a work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his dichotomy of the “Superman” and “the Last Man” to explain how Western man had tired of an apathetic God he felt he no longer needed.
Remarkable about these men and their works is that they sought the core values of their times, and how environmental factors – technology and science – were forcing men into the safety of the “true believer” crowd, or retreat into conspicuous materialism.
Today, economists and statisticians have replaced such wonderers – mayor Bill Foster would call opinionated – with their hypotheses and replicated verifiable data. The uncertainty principle, however, is more certain in everyday life as well as in science then ever before.
David Brooks is a journalist and columnist for the New York Times, and often appears on the op-ed pages. In his social and political analysis, he is careful not to offend anyone who may see him or herself as a social-political “thinker.”
The dinosaur party, once known as the National Republican Party (NRP), is seen as trying to recover from four years of nay saying to find some kind of relevance by excoriating itself in a current confab meeting somewhere in the dessert.
NRP gutted itself in the recent presidential campaign attempting to make a case about half of Americans not paying any income taxes, and then confounded this problem by managing to insult people of a different lifestyle than conventional, different ethnicity and belief system, thus ensuring defeat at the polls, hence the tears.
The Republican Party is trying to change, says Brooks, but “change is hard because people don’t only think on the surface level. Deep down people have mental maps of reality – embedded sets of assumptions, narratives and terms that organize thinking.” Translation: NRP has no defense against virtual reality except then to deny its existence.
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Enter the economists and statisticians. Brooks mentions economist Mancur Olson and the statistician and social apologist Charles Murray who he implies understand this topography and these demographics. Olson argues in “The Rise and Decline of Nations” (1982) that aging institutions get bloated and sclerotic and retard national dynamism. Notice the metaphor of aging and the central economic issues of the day. Murray insists in “Losing Ground: American Social Policy” (1984) that America is coming apart at the seams, dividing into two nations, one educated and stable with opportunity, the other uneducated and unstable with little opportunity. Like most such thinkers, once they state the obvious they think there work is done, when what they tell us 99 percent of us already know.
Brooks claims most people never change their underlying narratives or unconscious frameworks, but when the Olsons and Murrays of the world come down hard on these frameworks the policies and programs that follow too often make the situation worse or iatrogenic.
Olson and Murray are governed by data that is crafted to make tantalizing sense to materialize into action, whereas Le Bon, Hoffer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are mainly -- releasing themselves from the nonsense -- governed by their lights to understand the meaning of the midnight shadows, letting people make of the attention what they will.
Murray wrote a controversial book, “The Bell Curve” (1994), the title coming from the statistical curve of the I.Q. It proved controversial as it argued (in part) the genetic differences in I.Q. between whites and blacks. This argument was featured in only a couple chapters, but enough to have the book denounced by such scholars as Stephen Jay Gould who saw no such differences (see “The Mismeasure of Man,” 1981).
ALEA IACTA EST (The die is cast)
It is what it is, and it is best we embrace our resistance to that fact as history has shown that programs and policies don’t change events, often they simply exacerbate them, people do, and people do when they are ready to change.
Where Olson and Murray, and the others seem to be right is that people, whatever their current predilections, are part of a consistent organic whole. William Faulkner said in his Nobel Laureate speech, “man will not simply survive, man will prevail.” In the 24,000 years that man has walked this earth, he has always found a way to correct his false steps and overcome his anxiety. His disconnected connection is simply the latest self-made hazard to overcome. His constant mantra, resurgam (I shall rise again.) acknowledges this fact, or is it an opinion?
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