FROM THE PAGES OF "TIME OUT FOR SANITY!"

FROM THE PAGES OF “TIME OUT FOR SANITY!”

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

© November 26, 2014

REFERENCE:

Readers seemed to enjoy the excerpt from this book to be out in 2015.  This is another segment from the chapter “THINKING DOESN’T MAKE IT SO.”

   

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George Bernard Shaw was fond to remind us that the virtues we hold dear to our hearts have a price tag on them. Shaw asked an elegant lady of society if she would go to bed with him for 20,000 British pounds. She replied, “But of course, silly, who wouldn’t?” Then Shaw parried, “Would you go to bed with me for five pounds?” Indignantly, the lady said, “I most certainly wouldn’t,” then added, “what kind of a woman do you think I am?” To which Shaw rejoined, “We already know that, my dear, now don’t we? We’re just trying to determine your price range.”

The games scholars play is not unlike the game we all play.  We compare and compete failing to see the flaw in imitation.  Consequently, deviant behavior often hides behind the mask of incorruptibility. Scholars lie. Scholars cheat. Scholars play the con. This is a humanistic fact and not a self-righteous fiction.  Supportive evidence is too overwhelming.

We know we lie and cheat and play the con on ourselves as well as others, but we are not scholars so we are excused for being human. We expect scholars like our priests to be above reproach, but they are not. We are all prisoners of our society’s mind, and that mind not only condones lying and cheating and playing the con, but also continuously invents new imaginative ways to exercise the propensity.

Scholars cheat because many are involved in research that they know beforehand is pointless, valueless and meaningless, and like hundreds of studies done before. So, why do these scholars write for grants to attempt research, the character of which is inconsistent with their professional code of ethics?

Scholars cheat for the same reasons that we all do. They cheat to keep the wolf from the door. They cheat because the academic freedom they purport to enjoy does not in fact exist. They operate in a managed environment of compromise and trade offs: from “publish or perish” to the seductive possibility of tenure and promotion.

This is not unlike the larger environment that embraces us all.  And like us, the majority of academics are docile, timid, tentative, yielding, unimaginative, protective, security conscious, afraid, mechanistic and unoriginal. It is the mindset that permeates our society, so why shouldn’t it penetrate the ivory towers of academia?

Academics are also petty because they are powerless; slaves to the norm and obsessively driven to replicate these norms, while giving off the impression to the contrary. They are not only nonthinkers like most of us they are non-leaders as well. They are our mirror image, and not protectors of the lamp of Diogenes that we fantasize them carrying with due diligence.

How they differ from most of us is that they can cover their deceptions in a sea of words, or hide their illusions in an ocean of statistics, which fortifies the veracity of their findings. Thus the “I” of academia from the societal “we” proves a gap too wide for ordinary minds to challenge. That is unfortunate as the question must be asked: if one community is sick can the other community be well?

Leon Festinger describes in “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance” (1957) how our obsession with making everything in our minds fit with everything else that is already there closes our minds to what is actually being experienced. No one, he cautions, totally escapes this self-imprisoning mania that requires cognitive consistency.  

As a coping mechanism, and given our limited capacity to store information, Festinger found that people modify incoming information to fit what is already there, thus the dissonance with the reality of experience.

We change things around to fit with what we perceive to be true no matter how outrageous the discrepancy. We are motivated to achieve consistency between our attitudes and behavior.

When it does not exist, our minds make the adjustment to make it so. It is why stereotypes are so precious to us. They save us from the drudgery of thinking, or the need to process information in real time and in real terms as it is experienced.

When someone says we have a twisted mind, they are not talking out of school. We all do. Unbeknownst to us –- our minds, vain, emotional, immoral, deluded, pigheaded, secretive, weak willed, and bigoted — push and pull, twist and turn our perceptions of reality until they fit with what is already there.

The scholar prides himself in his objectivity, his value-free conscience, his integrity, and open mindedness. He sees himself as a high priest pursuing research above the banality and carnality of society. He cannot accept academia being a reflection and pawn of society, and so he denies it emotionally and intellectually, hard evidence to the contrary be damned! He cannot accept it; therefore, it does not exist.

Consequently, the behavioral scientist in particular and the social scientist in general equate proliferation with profundity and methodology with meaning. They can describe society’s dilemma in impressive terms, but have failed to move society one iota closer to resolution of its conflicts. They have had little success in explaining why we lie, cheat, and steal from ourselves, much less make us less inclined to do so. They can define populations but not divine personal behavior. They are artists of methodology and paradigm, but continue to represent disciplines in search of a philosophy.

Fifty (50) percent of the world’s psychologists and seventy five (75) percent of the world’s sociologists work in the United States. They were given the body of America as patient in the 1960s to study. What single contribution did their collective genius produce?

They developed a new descriptive lexicon and new catch phrases such as “fail safe,” and “one man one vote,” “no child left behind,” and “Medicare,” “Medicaid,” “Megadeath,” and “lifestyle,” and “black humor,” and “elephant jokes,” and “God is dead” (Nietzsche style), “sensory deprivation,” “double-bind,” “cognitive dissonance,” “empowerment,” “weak affect,” “bad vibes,” “programmed learning,” “learned helpless,” and then produced “non-books.”

Whether at their instigation or inspiration, there arose the pervasive use of “soul,” “shrink” and “open system,” and “Marshall McLuhan imaginings,” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf innuendos,” and “cross-busing, and cross dressing,” “transgender,” “homophobic,” and “sex change,” “cluster development,” “cloning,” “white backlash,” and “multiversity,” and “super star,” “Super Power,” and “Super Bowl.”

Those so inclined have had no trouble mentioning in the same breath “White Paper,” and “Black Power,” and “New Math,” and “Sit-ins,” and “de facto segregation,” and “ad hoc committees,” and “Black studies,” “war as normalcy,” and currently, the most ambiguous term of all, “terrorism.” Then, in finance, there is “exponential expansion,” “sequestration,” and “flat lining.” We also have the hash tags dumbing down” and “charter schools” in education.

Here in 2014, our economy is limping along in recovery, while our school children continue to lag in basic skills compared with other advanced societies. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as of 2009, US students are 31st in science, 17th in reading and 23rd in math. Shanghai-China is first in all three categories.

James Reston wrote:

“No nation ever fought such a vicious war (Viet Nam) in the midst of such sacrifice by some of its people and so little sacrifice by the rest.”

He was referring to one ethnic group, blacks, which make up 12 percent of the population but have represented more than 60 percent of the 55,000 fatalities in that war.

In the wake of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, killing nearly 3,000 innocent people, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism has become the most feared expression in the English language.

Although this word is bandied about and expressed with confidence by nimble social scientists, there is no reliable understanding of either the word, terrorism, or precisely who or what are terrorists.

At a fundamental level, a terrorist is hauntingly stereotyped and personified as a Middle Easterner man of the Islamic faith bearded with a leathery pallor and out to do the West harm.

“Terrorism,” however, is a fiercely political word and incredibly alive in our consciousness. Terrorists were thought to be nationless, but now we have the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” referred to as ISIL with the ambition of establishing a caliphate as part of Syria and Iraq and naming itself “the Islamic State.”

Recently, ISIL has resorted to beheading journalists and captured soldiers of the West. Recalling Reston’s words, while this disturbs our consciences, it hasn’t resulted in collective action.  Of course scholars were too busy to note the import of Reston’s words, as they were congratulating themselves with the panache of James V. McConnell, who proclaimed in Time magazine (April 2, 1973):

“I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual’s behavior.”

McConnell is not alone. Behaviorists have for the past four decades held the heady belief that people can be molded by simply deciding how they should be molded and then manipulating their behavior to that criteria, as if man were a laboratory mouse.

Scholars have been given the exalting role of society’s thinkers, a role the rest of society relinquishes with a sigh of relief.

Scholarship, or the product scholars’ produce, is accepted unequivocally as the blueprint of wisdom and master plan of good sense. Little note is taken of the lack of originality, spark of wisdom, or pinch of sense.

Society accepts their prescriptions as the remedies it is looking for, even if these formulae later prove to be embarrassing, as McConnell’s thesis has proven to be fort years later.  Fortunately, most of these prescriptions have the innocuous consistency of placebos. Still, the danger exists because they are trusted without qualification, making society vulnerable to their hubris and excess.

Scholars have the comfort of hieroglyphic speak in that laymen fail to have access to their technical shorthand. One need only spend an hour in a university library perusing the journals of scholars to see how true that is. They insulate themselves from the vernacular hiding their frustration in a glib rhetorical style accompanied by grids and graphs, schematics and statistics that conveniently bury the definition of the problem in the blur. The non-scholar reader expects to be so impressed by this disguise that he takes solace that better minds than his are so employed.

This is obvious in social and behavioral research, but is equally true in the hard sciences as well.

To be fair, academics and scholars pursue the well defined boilerplate of Western thought with the hubris it has enjoyed over the centuries. If the rise of the jihadists of al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack, along with the pusillanimity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should do anything, it should be to first humble us and then alert us to the fact that we are in a changing world and not conditioned to understand much less deal effectively with that world. 

ISIL is another iteration of this aggravation with the unasked questions: “What inspired this insanity?  What part have we played in its creation?  What can we do now, short term, and later, long term, to defuse its justification and thus the possibility of its emotional spontaneous combustion?