THE AVERSION TO GREATNESS OF A ONE-DIMENSIONAL SOCIETY

THE AVERSION TO GREATNESS OF A ONE=DIMENSIONAL SOCIETY

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

© April 29, 2014

REFERENCE:

Another vignette from “Six Silent Killers.”

THE HUNT FOR THE AUTHENTIC AMERICAN CHARACTER

To discover the source of this aversion to greatness, you need look no further than our educational system. In its quest for egalitarianism, education has substituted skill-building for knowledge building and diversionary entertainment for challenging study.

Instrumental education has taken precedence over classical education.

Workers and managers have received vocational training at the expense of a humanities foundation. Page Smith in “Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America” (1991) accuses our most prestigious universities of reducing education from thinking to technique and from teaching to instructing.

Because you can only deal with what you know, the organization and its people are vocationally led and trained. This presents a problem.  If management and workers think primarily in terms of utility or from a vocational perspective—with management thinking what it can get out of the individual, and the worker thinking what he can get out of the organization—they share a common cynicism about work. At another level, vocational education puts the emphasis on doing only what makes people successful, not necessarily what is best for the organization. “That is what the company values,” workers and managers tell themselves, “and that is what I am going to do.” This attitude existed before the downsizing and redundancy panic, which only reinforced it. “Hey, I could be out of here next month,” the survivor thinks, “If you’re not out for yourself, who are you out for, right?” And thus workers and managers gravitate toward a one-dimensional society.

The MBA degree is essentially a vocational degree in the same sense as a trade school education. MBAs scoff at the idea that their work has cultural implications. They find the concept of workplace culture suspect—too abstract. Being trained in a set of skills—finance, information systems, macroeconomics, statistics, computers, and management practices—they find little time and less inclination for background reading on culturally related subjects. “What’s the point?” one young man said to me in exasperation, “Why should I read a lot of dead authors?” Because the masters of the ages dealt with many similar perturbations in their times. Here is a short list:

Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey

The Bible

The Trojan Women by Euripides

The Torah

The Birds by Aristophanes

The Bhagavad Gita

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

The Holy Crusades (History of) by Joseph F. Michaud

The works of William Shakespeare

The Republic by Plato

Alexander the Great by John K. Anderson

The Gallic Wars (Commentaries) by Julius Caesar

The Epistles of St. Paul

Paul: Mind of the Apostle by A. N. Wilson

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Reading these works reminds you of the French saying, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” This cultural tip of the iceberg would probably surprise the novice reader, reflecting as did Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

We are the product of thousands of years of acculturation, and yet, our evolution is seemingly incomplete. Knowing something about our heritage is much more useful than being obsessed with our family genealogy. The family of man is technically and culturally a true family. We are all related. The better we understand this, the greater the possibility we have to live and work together in harmony.

Given our one-dimensional mentality, it comes as little surprise that the answers sought to poor performance of the workforce are likewise one-dimensional. Trust is placed in the rational solution to purposeful performance. Half the brain is put to the problem, resulting in half-baked solutions. Circular logic dominates as we attempt to solve the problems with the same type of thinking that caused them—like a dog endlessly chasing its own tail. Over the years, the deficiency in this approach has produced Reader’s Digest minds and McCult-type systems for closing the gap between the left and right brain:

There is the Aspen Institute approach in which executives gather in picturesque surroundings to get in touch with Nature over cocktails and the drone of glassy-eyed consultants in accustomed psychobabble.

The Great Books Clubs in which a common herd mentality of like-minded culturally deficient minds ponder the syllabus of their misspent education.

The satellite cultural-fix operations, such as The Center for Creative Leadership (Greensboro, NC) and The Tom Peters Group (Silicon Valley, CA), which attempt to make a difference, but only make an impression.

As Edward de Bono writes in “Parallel Thinking” (1994), “They are in the business of attempting to discover a solution when the only way out is to create one.”  

These retrofitted strategies sell well, but nothing changes. We are in the throes of a cultural dilemma. We need change, but we would prefer to adjust the limits and call it “change.” Integrative thinking, cultural awareness, service oriented leadership, and value change will take many years. The only thing that might accelerate the rate of change would be a cultural catastrophe, the size of which the workplace has never experienced. You cannot overcome a century of progressive cultural neglect by the miracle of some McCult-type solution. Only time and attention, and much patience, will overcome the cultural biases that no longer serve the American character. It will be decades before the American psyche will:

Re-establish the sanctity and stability of the family or some appropriate alternative.

Advocate creativity over discovery.

Accept the necessity of disobedience over conformity.

Prefer cooperation over competition.

Celebrate greatness over mediocrity.

Encourage students with original ideas over “A” students.

Award high school diplomas only to students who are proficiently bilingual.

Promote, mobilize, and utilize diversity in support of effectiveness.

Sponsor, recognize, and reward team performance over individualism.

Promote a global perspective over a parochial point of view.

Support fine arts in high school as much as athletics.

Support high school debate, essay, and speech events as much as athletics.

Start language education in French, German, and Spanish in preschool.

Make the teaching profession the highest paid profession of all.

If this sounds ambitious, compare it to what our world competitors are doing today.  This would be a start and put us into the company of Europe and Asia, and many rising Third World nations.