The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a vignette to appear in a new book,

THE SUBTEXT OF LIFE AND ITS MEANING

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 30, 2009

© August 31, 2015

“There is general denial of the subtext of life. It is contained in a kind of culture that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, a kind of culture that once flourished in typical neighborhoods across the country, but is now gone. It helped to stem lawlessness, greed, corruption and other social diseases. It was a kind of social resistance that is lacking today, something upheld by average citizens, but by people in authority as well. There was a subtext of restrain undefined, unwritten, unspoken, but nonetheless felt, practiced and experienced.

“Today, the gap between people’s dreams and experience is too large. People have resorted to living life on the edge, running without thinking, on automatic pilot in the rhythm of the content and context of things without a sense of restrain or penalty.

“We see this in general apathy as people react to the lead stories on television nightly news and in the headlines of morning newspapers regarding murder, mayhem, rape, fraud, and malfeasance with irritations but little more. It is the ghost in the room and not the elephant.

“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they came. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people down and leaves them untethered. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people who are wounded human beings.

“Once upon a time, they were children, little ones running down the street at the start of school with their backpacks bouncing in cadence to their happy feet. They were on their way to school and on their way out into life. One wonders watching this parade if there goes a thief, a wife beater, an addict, a drug dealer, a murderer, a rapist, an embezzler, a gang member, a prostitute, a pimp, or some other drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories that we essentially ignore.

“Is this predetermined? Quite the opposite. But only if people use their intelligence and good will to get beyond surface issues of class and race, status and wealth, education and profession, immigration and ethnicity, religion and ideology, language and culture to consider the subtext of life to uncover what destroys social restrain and how to prepare the damage.

“The world gets better or worse one person at a time. Apathetic or psychopathic behavior occurs because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their own lives and therefore are enslaved to surface issues. It was the same a hundred years ago and is likely to be so a hundred years hence.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

THE PRICE OF A CELEBRITY CULTURE – AN AVERSION TO SUBTEXT

Great talent wastes its gifts when it loses contact with its subtext. Richard Burton was the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation but sold out to Hollywood. Norman Mailer saw himself as heir apparent to Ernest Hemingway, but sold out to the false bravado and high jinx of that writer, and thus became a caricature of himself.

Albert Einstein was the exception. He had similar celebrity pressures as his most productive years were before he was thirty, and he lived into his seventies. He ignored this pull of celebrity because he was well acquainted with its subtext. It was not false modesty but the realization that he had been lucky in his discoveries. He was lucky because he got beyond the content and context of Newtonian physics to explore the subtext that was not readily apparent, a subtext that physicists for more than two hundred years had not visited because they thought the work of physics had been completed. 

Einstein was a dreamer and could see himself riding a light beam in the darkest recesses of the universe and played with that image in his mind until his thoughts rearrange themselves into his theory of relativity.

Talented people ultimately sell themselves out to the celebrity culture which always threatens to embrace them.  Talented people are adored for all the wrong reasons. It is the herd mentality on display, the self-indulgent and hedonistic desiring to experience the wonders of genius, if only vicariously, by having power over that genius by their flattering attention. 

Sycophants do not appreciate the talented; sycophants only appreciate basking in its reflected glory.  Thus the talented unwittingly compromise their genius by failing to recognize and therefore being able to resist that symbiotic connection and sycophants’ mocking embrace.

The quest for celebrity is apparent in critics who can’t write, performers who can’t act, people with little more than good looks to be television journalists, or novelists with one idea to capture it in scores of books. The chiaroscuro of content and context pulsates with monotonous consistency as brand not brilliance reduces tastes to the lowest common denominator.  Gore Vidal, for instance, is a decent enough writer whose celebrity is his angst.  This finds him a guest on the couch of late night television shows.  Hundreds have copied him. 

It is a different problem for John Updike. Literary critic Grandville Hicks of the Saturday Review of Literature once said of him that he wrote like an angel but had nothing to say. Updike mastered a beautiful lyrical style, and became the darling of The New Yorker magazine, but was less attentive to subtext of the lives he created. He seemed satisfied to create thematic caricatures, which are apparent in “Couples” (1968) and with his “Rabbit” (1960s) series.

Updike approached the sex revolution from his Protestant Calvinistic stiffness as well as the feminine and civil rights movements on a tactile level without getting caught up in the tangled web of contradictory subtexts of American life.  He had an opportunity, which he didn’t explore, of the radical abandonment of the common good for personhood by his narcissistic generation.

The accident of him jelling with The New Yorker and falling into a profession not sought goes a long way to explain the problem.  He first wanted to be a graphic artist, a cartoonist, where linearity of content and context is featured. He gravitated from that to studying as a painter, mastering the techniques of texture and graphic composition, but unable to grasp the subtext that makes a Picasso a Picasso, taking up his pen to write novels, short stories, and criticism of art with the fluid ease of a New England Puritan.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., from the middle of the United States, had a different problem. He lived in the subtext and tried desperately to reach an audience in content and context. The strain became the perplexity of his life. This frustration shows in his last book “Armageddon in Retrospect” (2008). There he challenged the Mona Lisa being a perfect painting. “Listen,” Vonnegut writes, “her nose is tilted to the right, OK? That means the right side of her face is a receding plane, going away from us, OK? But there is no foreshortening of her features on that side, giving the effect of three dimensions. And Leonardo could so easily have done that foreshortening. He was simply too lazy to do it.”

I don’t think so. I prefer to think Da Vinci lived in a casual subtext. He didn’t suffer the anguish or doubt of Michelangelo.  He had little time for pathos preferring to dance with ideas perceived watching men run, birds fly and fish dive to the deep.  That is how he came to envision the airplane, human anatomy, the submarine, automation and other devices that rose from his subtext to breakthrough the world of content and context. It was enough for him to surface such issues and let posterity work out the details. 

“No wonder she (Mona Lisa) has such a cockeyed smile,” Vonnegut adds. But that is precisely it. She is meant to be enigmatic. The smile is a reflection of what is going on beyond the surface. It is the mystery of her that haunts us to this day. Were the painting as Vonnegut proposed, it is doubtful it would be a masterpiece.

There is a reason why the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Joyce are still read. They dealt with the subtext of their stories while telling the surface story on the popular level of content and context. Hemingway escaped all his bravado, while dealing primarily with subtext in “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) and won the Nobel Prize for the gamble.

*     *     *

Over the last sixty years, I have seen a tectonic shift from subtext to content and context as the issues that drive behavior are pushed aside to celebrate the superfluous.

With the lack of restrain, without the tension to sublimate creatively but instead fell a niche, to create a brand, to make ourselves giddily rich for the effort, we have failed to produce great writers, composers, painters, and architects.

Noise has become the predicate of music, exhibitionism the art, bland glass buildings the architecture, and the shocking and bizarre popular comedic entertainment. We have become a surface disposable culture with a dull if not permanently damaged affect.

The reader may argue what about the great electronic breakthroughs, what about them? Alas, what could be a better example of the charge!

Computers have been around for sixty years, but have been perfected and made available to support people’s lives at the content and context level as never before. We have innovation, not invention, replication, not creative subtext, fads and fantasies, not transcendence.  We are locked into mediocrity as if it were a plague. 

Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak were making electronic games when Jobs happened on the personal computer at Xerox, which management refused to fund, and so Jobs stole it.

Bill Gates won the software contract with IBM by default when the wife partner of a husband-wife company wanted more assurances. Gates required none at the time as he basically had only his boldness to sell. He quickly acquired the software from another fledgling company for peanuts and was off to the races.  Two decades later, because he understands the importance of subtext, he is the richest man in the world on a foundation of other people’s ideas.  Understanding this about himself, he is also one of the most generous philanthropists in history.

DOUBLE-EDGED “CUT & CONTROL” HISTORY OF HUMAN CULTURE

We have just experienced a global economic meltdown (2008) that terrified advanced societies from one end of the globe to the other, a meltdown that to this moment viewed in terms of content and context with hardly a glance at the subtext of the calamity.

True, mention is made of our inclination to live high now and pay for it later. That is hardly profound.

Economics has proven a faulty profession, as has management. I wrote this in “Work Without Managers” (1991), some twenty years ago:

“We desperately need minds with a natural affinity for culture in the boardrooms across America, as well as in every other walk of professional life. We need poetry in commerce, government and industry.

“Engineers, economists, and political scientists have done about all the damage we can stand, perhaps more than we can absorb.

“Economists, for one, readily admit they are operating in a fog. From former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns (“The rules of economics are not working quite the way they used to.”) to Milton Friedman (“I believe that we economists in recent years have done vast harm by claiming more than we can deliver.”); from former Secretary of Treasury Michael Blumenthal (“I really think the economic profession is close to bankruptcy in understanding the situation, before or after the fact.”) to Juanita Kreps, former Secretary of Commerce, when asked if she would go back to Duke University upon leaving government (“I wouldn’t know what to teach.”). (WWMs pp. 253 – 254)

Economists have always been enamored of algorithms and mathematical models, analysis at the content and context level, while management has treated people as things to be managed. Now they all have egg on their faces.

Geopolitics has also proven a faulty profession. Little time has been devoted to the subtext of why the Twin Towers of New York City were destroyed. Instead, there has been a visceral response at the content and context level of military preemptive war.

This response has put the United States and its future in economic and political jeopardy without yielding cost benefit equal to the investment in life and capital.

Much talk is about the recession being behind us, but what is ahead? Inflation? The world sits on the precipice of inflation and a repeat recession/depression to this moment, which is a matter of subtext.

*     *     *

We glory in instant communication where everyone has a cell phone, BlackBerry, computer, or laptop to busy him or herself with the nonsense of white noise. Electronics have become a form of addiction in this Information Age. No longer is drunk driving the only major cause of deaths on our highways and byways, but people texting and tweeting on their electronic contraptions.

No one seems to be looking at the downside of this paradigm shift, which has elevated content and context to the status of a new religion. We have cut existence away to a new sense of reality that has no pause.


It has been a “cut and control” journey throughout man’s history with something different gained from something forever lost. The hunting and gathering period 12,000 years ago has often been depicted as a matriarchal society or a society controlled by women as there were no boundaries.

There is some evidence to suggest this. Archeological evidence and study of modern hunter-gatherers suggest that pre-agricultural humans were much more gender egalitarian than modern societies.  Women live longer than men, and humans are one of the few species whose females live for quite a long time after child-bearing age. Since men might be much more likely to die young from hunting accident or skirmishes with other tribes, it would make sense for women to serve the collective memory of the tribe.

Also, pre-agricultural humans likely didn't understand how exactly sex and pregnancy are related, and even if they did, they almost certainly weren't sexually monogamous, so one's mother was the only parentage anyone could be sure of.  That said even in our species' earliest days, the structure of human society could be dramatically different from place to place, so there are no universals.

Agriculture led to a patriarchal society with men giving up their nomad existence to settling down raising crops and owning property with boundaries that had to be defended.

This led to an industrial society where owners ruled and cities grew. This broke up the cohesive harmony and domestic culture of life on the farm as young families flocked to the cities to work. They found themselves living in cramped unsanitary tenement houses imprisoned in blatant squalor and crushing poverty, slaves to inanimate machines.

The gap between haves and have nots grew, as society moved swiftly through the modern management class to and through the postmodern era of capitalists, as managers first replaced owners, and they in turn were replaced by indifferent stockholders who valued profits above people.

This elevated finance, an industry that produces nothing but exchange rates, to the ultimate power broker of investment bankers and venture capitalists. They became the significant differentiators as power shifted from people to property to products to floating capital.

This all came down as a crushing nightmare in 2008 when the wonder of electronic transfer of complex derivatives sped out of control as capital was leveraged thousands of times greater than its capacity to honor its debt as the “cut & control” journey of 12,000 years found the subtext of life once more breaking through the content and context of existence. Man keeps pushing forward blindly and incomprehensively, and then wonders what he has done wrong.

ALL TOO HUMAN

As a person who has worked about the globe, and who has thought about such things, I have concluded the subtext of life is the controller, the part in which the undercurrent of society is manifested with no controls.  This is not the life presented to the public or to friends, but the one that is puppet master of each of our individual fates.

Imagine a rubber band with certain elasticity. We know a new rubber band has much more elasticity than a much-often used one. In the human psyche we don’t look at elasticity, or flexibility in terms of use or age. We think we have the moxie whatever the circumstances to find our way out. We don’t believe we have nine lives like a cat but ninety-nine lives, and of course that is where the fallacy lies.

Think of all the people who garner the headline stories, people caught in shameful acts. Now think of all the people who lie for them: parents, grandparents, siblings, relatives, and friends. Not only that, think of these same people bailing them out of their difficulty, feeling sorry for them, buying their cheap excuses for the shameful behavior, and you have the making of an emotional and psychological crippled culture.

That person cold in the morgue killed by a hit and run driver has no sense of social justice and goes to his maker without anyone taking responsibility for his early demise.

I once knew a young man who went to the bachelor party of a friend. He didn’t drink and when the party got ruckus he chose to leave and walk the two miles home. It was eleven o’clock.

He worked his job religiously, didn’t make much money, lived alone in a modest apartment, read books, and that is how I got to know him. He read mine. He would discuss them intelligently and critically and I grew to respect him. Then one day, 42-years-of-age, he was no more.

It is assumed some drunken fool hit him, knocked him a hundred feet into the air and leaving him to die on the side of the road, his shoes left at the point of impact. There is a chance the person was so intoxicated that he didn’t know he hit the man. The shoes however were fifteen feet off the road. His death is a cold case now ten years old, which is unlikely to ever be reopened.

I have no sympathy for drunks, no sympathy for people who smoke themselves to death, no sympathy for drug addicts because I have no sympathy for people who are unaware of the subtext of their lives, and how it is managing their existence.  Friends and family don’t have the courage to remind them of this fact. There is complicity here. We never go badly alone.  We have a lot of complicit contributors.

It is in the subtext that the health of the elasticity of life is lost never to be discovered. Nor will I accept that alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases. They are choices. They are people who choose to ignore their reduced elasticity, which is apparent in the subtext of their lives. Through artificial stimulation they promote the illusion they have much greater flexibility and elasticity than they have. The subtext of life reminds us we are dying a little every day and therefore should make the most of our days, not hide from them.

The subtext of life will not allow us to fool ourselves. The embezzler knows he is committing a crime but deludes himself that he will never get caught, justifying the behavior in rationalizations: his wife is dying of cancer, his sons need money for prep school, and he has the right to a better lifestyle given the many years of service in which he has been taken for granted and shown little respect.

Rationalization is the product of content and context but never the subtext of the matter, which is the fear that life in sum total amounts to nothing. The embezzler’s elasticity is gone, and so he says, “Why not!”

I have no sympathy for Bernard Madoff who bilked investors and companies of billions of dollars while denying the subtext of his life. He is not a bad man but a little man with an obsessive need to please and feel important, but why? The answer is in his subtext.

Then there are people who have buried terrible deeds of their past in their subconscious. Now, they have resurrected themselves as religious fanatics feeling everyone else suffers from the same demons as they do.

What is incredible is that they convince people they do! Sin becomes the armor plate as the proselytizer’s zeal the voice of salvation. A flock is formed as the proselytizer’s subtext becomes that of the converted as well.  No one seems to see the folly in this.

The flock is badgered to repent or they will be damned. By whom? By God, of course, because the proselytizer is the self-anointed self-appointed messenger of God. The individual caught up in this charade may forget he has a right to question the messenger's legitimacy, or if there is an Almighty God or a God at all. What we cannot question is our decreasing elasticity, which limits what we can and cannot do.

*     *     *

In this business of coaching, counseling, studying and dealing with people for many years from the impersonal (consulting) to the personal, my role has been to observe, assess and suggest but not carry anyone or any organization when they best carry themselves. I have refused to carry my own children once they had left home.

The irony is that my second child, a daughter, has attempted to carry her other siblings well into their adulthood forgiving them for their improprieties, which has stunted their growth and development resulting in none of them becoming truly adults.

Now, when she has come into a hard patch in her life, her siblings are not there for her. They are insensitive and unsympathetic to her ordeal, angry that she has little time to listen to them now, and no longer has the wherewithal to bail them out of their self-imposed miseries.

Has this made her bitter? No. Has this made her vindictive? No. Has this found her angry? No. It has made her resilient. The subtext of her life has proven to have much greater elasticity than one would expect. It came about when she stopped denying its existence and finally said, “Hey that is where my strength lies. Hey, that is why I am so understanding of my siblings. Hey, that is why I can tolerate my parents. Hey, that is why I am me!”

With this resilience, she discovered she could refocus and reenergize her efforts to go forward accepting this bump in the road. That is what she is now doing. She finds she is a learner not a knower, a doer not a thinker, a problem solver but in the subtext of intuition not cognitive analysis. It is working for her.

She has two beautiful children who are a projection of her. She married a person like her siblings. She is the best thing that has happened to him. He gets into one economic strafe after another. Will he ever grow up? I don’t think so. Will he ever examine the subtext of his life? Not on a bet. Will he continue to repeat the same errors? Undoubtedly. Am I being cruel and non-empathetic? After more than fifteen years of observations, I don’t think so.

In my subtext, there is a very strong moral authority that has little room for waste or variance from effective utilization of my inherent ability. I suffer fools poorly including my own folly. 

While failing to heed this moral authority many times, I have learned to live with that deficiency.  I also know that my elasticity is practically gone. The little bit left I deposit in words, ideas, philosophies and projections of what I’ve learned and what I know, and what might prove useful  to others as I pass on.

Do I think I am an especially kind person? No, but I’m not malicious. I get no satisfaction seeing other people being dominated, diminished or failing. Is it important for me to be liked? No, but it is important for me to be respected.

SUBTEXT UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

The content and context of my life would suggest that I’m mainly intuitive because that is what I like to project, but the subtext of my life suggests that I am cognitive, analytical, critical, and conceptual. The fact that the subtext has come to the surface in the evening of my years is representative of another quality, the need to leave something of value behind.

My life has been one of being very structured, disciplined and demanding of myself as well as of others with little give – little elasticity – displayed. The irony of this subtext is that I am more comfortable in chaos than order, more energized in confusion than in certainty.

·       Item: I was only a junior corpsman in the medical division of the flagship (USS Salem CA-139). We were having military exercises in the Mediterranean with more than one hundred American ships and some 50,000 men. The gun mount in a destroyer escort “hang fired.” The blast of the explosion torched the gun crew of thirteen men, badly burning several. They were brought to the Salem and treated in our hospital. Three of them died while we were attending them.

Doctors from other ships were brought on board. It was general chaos. None of these doctors had experience with badly burned trauma cases nor did any of the corpsmen. Some could not deal with the carnage. By default, I had to assume a senior role to fill the void and received an accommodation. I was twenty-three-years-old, and learned something about myself that day that I didn’t know before. Highly emotional on the surface, there is a calm in my subtext that surfaced in that crisis. It has repeatedly surfaced since.

Given this awareness of our limited elasticity, I know we all have a breaking point. Our elasticity can go from resilient to brittle to snapping without warning. It may be precipitated by “emotional exhaustion” or “hypertension” or “mental breakdown,” or some other current psychiatric labeling such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or some other “mental disease.”   

Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, author of “The Manufacture of Madness” (1970), “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1974), among other books, himself a psychiatrist, sees modern psychiatry using its ideology and insanity plea as a convenience to avoid confrontation with the hard moral conflicts and social problems of the day. Clear speech, what he calls the “second sin” is missing in the prognosis. Broadly speaking, Szasz is addressing subtext.

Of course, we all talk to ourselves; we all have dreams of loss, confusion and betrayal. That is part of the subtext that is the driver of behavior. Some people are made uncomfortable because they think you can read their minds. You can’t. But you can read their behavior, which is quite apparent for anyone paying attention.

You don’t do this with eye contact, which is supposed to indicate sincerity for eyes lie. We have all become very good liars. Some people can even control their emotions to the point of passing polygraph tests with ease.

Actively listen to what people say and channel this into the rhythm of what they do and you will be able to assess how genuine they are. You see in their gestures, the care of their nails, the texture of their skin whether they are or aren’t what they wish to project. Our faces are roadmaps of self-indulgence. The subtext of our lives oozes up through our pores to confirm or deny the content and context on display. We all become eventually what we are.

There are palpable warning signs before a person commits suicide; before a person takes that first dollar out of the till that doesn’t belong to him. There is no such thing as an innocent cup of coffee between a man and a woman married to other people. All of these indicators are there and all of them are rejections of the subtext of life.

When the subtext is ignored or rejected, life becomes a lie. There is no possibility for understanding the authentic self.

My nickname is “Rube,” which is commonly translated to mean a farmer, or a rustic and unsophisticated person, in other words, a derogatory identity. I have always been delighted with the sobriquet as a source of pride.  

At a dinner in New York City, someone once confronted me. “I understand your nickname is ‘Rube.’ Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Are you comfortable with that?”

“Quite, why do you ask?”

“You’re not offended?”

“No.”

“Then you’re a country bumpkin?”

“If you like.”

“That doesn’t offend you?”

“No, why should it?”

“Do you like being called ‘Rube’?”

“I love being called ‘Rube’!”

“Why is that?”

“Because it's a name associated with the most wonderful time in my life growing up in the middle of the country in the middle of the century when I was catching baseball for the Courthouse Tigers as a kid.

“There was no actively I loved more. I took pride in that. I would watch catchers in the Industrial League with a dreamy like concentration as Quentin Tarantino watches film. I loved putting on the ‘tools of ignorance’ (catcher’s equipment) knowing I was the best catcher around for my age. I am Rube. Rube gave me my first taste of excellence and how to achieve it.”

That seemed to end the conversation.

Coming from a farm state, I must confess I’ve never actually been on a farm. My people in Ireland as well as America have always been city dwellers. My da was born in Chicago as was his parents, but his mother died in childbirth and his father took off never to be seen again. He was reared in Clinton, Iowa, a small industrial city on the Mississippi River by his grandmother. My siblings and all of my children have gravitated to metropolitan areas no farmers in our family tree.

The subtext of the connection, however, is real. I have the down-to-earth values of the farmer, a love of the seasons of the year, of the fertilizing, planting and growing of ideas, the earthy norms that identify a person with a particular place and space, the sense that a man’s word is his bond, the humility that Nature knows best, and that we are all connected. We are caught in the subtext of our geography, which we carry wherever we go.

From the library of The Peripatetic Philosopher:

CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY

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

© May 12, 2013

© August 28, 2015

REFERENCE:

This is a chapter out of a book now being written.

The question of confidence, who has it and who doesn’t, is revealed by an intricate complex of subtly interconnected emotional states forming a singular framework and approach to daily life.

Self-confidence has taken a jolt in recent times due in no small measure to an emerging climate of doubt and uncertainty.  Nothing is certain anymore if it ever was, but there once existed the hubris of imagined predictability. 

That has vanished with economic fluctuations, chronic national and international crises, verisimilitudes of gender issues, collapsing belief systems, while nobody seems to be in charge anywhere.  This has led to the cynical suggesting, “Stuff happens and then you die.”

 Misplaced is an appreciation for the richness and diversity of human experience with its endless variety of people, places and things as increasingly these have become cross currents with false expectations spiraling individuals and societies into despair: 

·       Terrorists took control of two commercial airliners and flew them into the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 innocent people and reducing these structures to rubble. 

·       In 2003, President George W. Bush launched a preemptive invasion of Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which proved false.

·       In 2008, there was an economic meltdown on Wall Street with collapsing banks and brokerage houses, and a wave of bank failures across the globe threatening another Great Depression even worse than that of 1929.  The US Federal Government felt compelled to bailout businesses too “big to fail” with taxpayers’ money such as General Motors, Chrysler and Wall Street, an approach that was followed by European and Asian governments. 

·       In 2011, the Tōhoku (Japan) earthquake and tsunamin took nearly 16,000 lives destroying more than 120,000 building and half collapsing another 300,000. The Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, "In the 65 years after the end of World War II, this is the toughest and the most difficult crisis for Japan." Around 4.4 million households in northeastern Japan were left without electricity and 1.5 million without water.

The tsunami caused nuclear accidents, primarily the level 7 meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex with the evacuation affecting hundreds of thousands of residents.  At least three nuclear reactors suffered explosions due to hydrogen gas that had built up within their outer containment buildings after cooling system failure resulting from the loss of electrical power. Residents within a 12 mile radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were evacuated.  The area today is little more than a death zone, uninhabited with questions of why it was allowed to happen.

·       The American withdrawal from Iraq in 2013 led to a civil war in that country.  That spun over into Syria and Turkey with ISSI, an al qaeda like group, declaring itself a new nation state taking hostages, beheading them, and further destabilizing the Middle East.

These and many other unexpected and equally wrenching events continue to occur while citizens in everyday life act as if unconscious of the impact on their personality. Yet that is improbable, given the high collective anxiety of society – murders, rapes, suicides and riots – and the high incidence of recreational drug abuse and stress related diseases.

We are in the Information Age and there are no secrets anymore.  Billions of souls across the globe have instant knowledge of any untoward or disruptive event, while social media find these same souls captive to their electronic mobiles.  These instruments have become the worry beads of the postmodern secular universe.

THE LONGING FOR STABILITY IN AN UNSTABLE WORLD

Self-regard and confusions of aims lies beneath the surface of public life often in chaotic detail concealing actual motivation and projected experience.

We long after some unitary truth that will altogether transcend our problems and the distractions that plague our routine existence. In the course of a century, we have departed from our spiritual anchors of family and church to scientism and commercial secularism blurring our boundaries and introducing us to an alien world with its new litany of what is important, significant and admirable. In the process, we have left ourselves behind and with it our self-confidence and self-control.

Laws now divide us between science and Utopia, effectiveness and vanity.  In every domain of our lives, we have relegated our existence to reason and observation in a scientific age abandoning the contentment of the unknown and unknowable.

We are governed in an expected direction, where our course has been plotted more or less precisely, as if we were a clock and our movements were synchronized with a future that had no past with no need to find a home in the present. That is the legacy of the twentieth century.

We have limped into the twenty-first century bruised and beaten with accepted beliefs no longer considered relevant or feasible.  To survive in this climate of doubt, our institutions have had to be more malleable and our laws more elastic then at any other point in our history. Given this predicate, we have yet to decide whether our creative or destructive capacities are to prevail.

We as human beings can be radically altered, re-educated, reconditioned and turned topsy-turvy into something other than what we are or what we thought we were. 

Daniel Yankelovich writes in New Rules: Search for Self-Fulfillment in a World Upside Down (1981) that traditional ethics of self-denial and self-reliance are being replaced by self-indulgence in an effort to seek narcissistic self-fulfillment. In other words, there are no rules to point the way. 
  

Yankelovich is writing in the tradition of such cultural standards as David Riesman’s "The Lonely Crowd" (1950) and William H. Whyte’s "The Organization Man" (1950).  To be fair, he can’t be held to those 1950’s norm as the current age is much more muddled and upside down.

The traditional American credo: "I will work hard, defer my gratification, swallow my frustrations, love my spouse and family, and, in return. I will receive a steady and increasing income, a house in the suburbs, a loving family, and the respect of my community” is now committed to history. 

That post-WWII cliché was displayed with much confidence between 1945 (the triumphant end of that war) and 1975, when Japan and South East Asia quietly stole the manufacturing base of the United States. 

Wages since the 1980s have failed to appreciate, tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost forever, and the American dream and with it the formerly sacrosanct views of marriage and family, women's roles, work, and leisure time, money, and security have faded away.  We are truly in a new day.

That cultural shift came at a time when the United States was on route to double digit inflation and double digit unemployment.  At the moment, forty years later, the American economy is relatively stagnant.  Meanwhile, politicians, pundits and gurus continue to promote self-assertive psychologies insisting the future is in our hands. 

The future is actually hostage to failing schools, high illiteracy rates, and worthless high school and college diplomas and degrees when it comes to the new skill requirements on the job of a digital economy.  In addition, we have a crumbling infrastructure while commercial and industrial organizations and academic institutions act as if nothing has changed. 


Aldous Huxley attempted to stimulate our unconscious with the shock of Brave New World (1932) as he anticipated the impact on society of cloning, robotics and pharmaceuticals used to alter states of consciousness.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) attempted to alert us to the dangers of closed societies of totalitarian regimes with their invasive “Big Brother” watching us 24/7. Today, “Big Brother” is as obvious in democracies as oligarchies.  Likewise, Huxley’s prescription for disaster is now common fare everywhere.

We have become an obliging parody of ourselves as if a patch quilt of synthetic pieces grafted onto our collective free floating anxiety. Our fixed habits and uncritical assumptions leave us in the void, supported only by the frivolous language of psychological psychobabble or corporate speak.

We think in words, as I am doing here, but fail to realize language is suffused with irrelevant or clashing metaphors, and therefore representing a retreat from reality to an elaborate electronic counterfeit facsimile that we embrace with surreal delight. 

It is only when our nerves touch other nerves deep within us that we feel what we are feeling, think what we are thinking, and are conscious of the electric shock of what is genuine and germane. Otherwise, we go through life robotically with nothing touching our quintessential self. We become furniture of our external world.

TOWARDS A MORE CONSCIOUS SELF

Self-confidence requires self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-actualization.  Each requirement synergistically supports the other.  Together they put us in charge, in control.  It allows us to pulsate with energy, meaning and joy, as a satisfying medium in life’s endeavors.

In a pragmatic sense, confidence evolves from the problem solving, as problem solving is central to our sense of self.  Americans pride themselves in taking on and successfully dispatching such challenges.

Do not confuse defining the problem with problem-seeking solutions.  We inhabit a solution driven economy with little appetite for the hard work of problem defining.  Nor does this mean that the problem solver, in the best case, is well acquainted with his subconscious where most of answers reside, and therefore seldom surface. Problem solvers are not comfortable with this meditative process for it sounds too much like philosophy.

This is the terrain of novelists and speculative philosophers, the world of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, of Nietzsche and Kant, but not of Wittgenstein and Russell.

The aim of science is to note the similarities in the behavior of objects and to construct propositions of generality from which the largest number of such uniformities can be logically deduced.

For the novelist and philosopher it is just the opposite. Feelings and introspections do not lend themselves to the rigors of mathematics, yet science separated from that most real world of the intuition can result in unintended negative consequences.  

Does anyone know where cloning, the use of drones, the forgiveness of self-indulgence with pharmaceutical palliatives, or the building of nuclear reactors will lead?   

The novelist sets forth subconsciously a somewhat biased ways of looking at people, places and things to exercise control over the landscape with a story.  Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge claims he can identify every one of Tolstoy’s characters in his novels as people in the great Russian’s life.  This lifting of the subconscious into a bevy of classic figures has found our conscious minds celebrating his works.  This is what it is 'to understand' is largely about.

Literary language describing ordinary experience is employed in an opposite manner to that of scientific language. Feelings and impressions are treated as facts and are integral to the story, but not so in science.  Massive amounts of data are reduced to verifiable facts, and proved to be true in a discrete scientific process.

Literary language, so used, is not meant to develop unassailable principles but to communicate relatively stable characteristics of an external world, which forms the frontiers of our common experience in a life largely consisting of external controls.

It is good that we have science but sensitive self-adjusting, self-adapting methods as well.  Obviously, this methodology cannot be measured precisely or weighed exactly or fully described at all.  It is necessary that the reader plug into it with the relevance of the story to his own life beyond being simply entertainment.

What I am saying here has only value if it has value to you, the reader.  Otherwise, it has no value and can be ignored.  Like Muggeridge’s comment about Tolstoy, my writing rises out of empirical experience and is as much a part of me, as I hope it will find connection with you. 

Confidence is metaphor for the fluctuations in experience that are our teachers, and which become the basis of our understanding of what works for us and what does not.  No one can teach or tell us this.  We must find it out for ourselves.

Unfortunately, we live in the age of the professional, where knowledge is power, and 'power' often gets lost in what can be done and what cannot be done. We trust experts more than our own experience. 

Since education is constructed on the basis of what has worked before, there is a rigid dependence and loyalty to the past.  We are asked to trust what we are taught, and when experience proves inconsistent with that learning, we are expected to adjust to that teaching.

That has proven a fatal flaw to the educational system as education has been reduced to an infallible construct rather than a learning institution.  Students leave with diplomas and degrees in miseducation.  They enter the workforce as educated but not necessarily educable. 

Confidence is the practical genius that differentiates learners from knowers, and listeners from tellers. It is the difference between people having a conscious self with a trusted center that governs their behavior, or a rationalization repertoire that apologizes for it.    

When we are on top of things, we behave confidently because we are confident. We may not be able to explain why we are so.  We just are. We need not worry, once acquired if is always there whatever the shock to the system.  It is like being able to ride a bike.  As soon as you learn, you may not be able to explain how it is done, but you know the skill is part of you.

IS THERE A CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE?

President Jimmy Carter got into trouble giving a “crisis in confidence” speech on July 15, 1979.  The nation was in an economic slump with double digit unemployment and inflation.  Inspired to use the phase by political scientist James MacGregor Burns, the speech was made in a style reminiscent of the fireside chats of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during WWII. 

The president was dressed casually in a cardigan sweater to suggest intimacy.  Unfortunately, the “crisis in confidence” speech found the president’s popularity tumbling.

Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column on how Americans’ self-confidence had also pummeled in this new century.  Brooks had asked readers to respond to him on the question of their self-confidence.

·       A mother wrote that she might as well have her vocal cords cut because her children want her to stay calm, talk nice to the point of not wasting their time.

·       A military man claims women shut down women who are confident more than men do.

·       Another woman, a business owner, claims that workers don’t want her to interfere with their dress or manners, much less their work, and prefer her to act as if invisible, blending into the world as passively as wallpaper, more like a lap dog than a border collie.

·       Another person pronounces that all men and women suffer equally from “under-confidence.” Men bluff their way through while women choose to be skeptical and to look for advice or simply remain passive.

In each of these instances, the projection of undernourished personal confidence centered on the need to please others at the expense of pleasing ‘self,’ preferring the role of victim to that of victor.

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts shows a different aspect of what happens when our confidence deserts us.

Pitts writes of Brenda Heist who showed up at the police station in Key West, Florida stating she was a missing person. Eleven years ago, when the bottom fell out of her marriage, and she was turned down for housing assistance, three strangers found her crying in a park and asked her to hitch a ride with them. 

From that moment forward, her existence went into a tailspin of pastiche alliances, petty crimes, panhandling, trailer parks, and common law marriages, sleeping under bridges, and working as a housekeeper. This lifestyle was mirrored on her recent mug shot, measured against her old driver license photograph. She looked at least a decade older than her actual age.

Pitts believes everyone thinks at one time or another of running from life, but it is just that, the thought and not the act. Yet, tens of thousands of people do it every year.

Brenda Heist daughter says her mother can rot in hell, her husband doesn’t want her back, and the saddest part of all, she is so damaged that she doesn’t want herself either. With confidence, we embrace our resistance to life’s challenges and soar over them, but with despair, we run away from life and ourselves until life catches up with us.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, always one to look on the dour side of things, while not engaging this subject of confidence directly, implies its relevance by default.

Dowd’s subject is sexual harassment citing a Pentagon study estimating that 26,000 men and women in the military were sexually assaulted in 2012. Only 3,374 incidents were reported, as the majority of victims were afraid to lose a paycheck, while only 238 assailants were convicted.

The columnist profiled United States Air Force Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski accused of sexual battery. Krusinski, it so happens, is in charge of the sexual assault prevention programs for the U.S. Air Force.

Dowd bolstered her column against Krusinski by reminding us of the Thomas-Hill hearings, in which Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was Anita Hill’s boss, and was accused by her of vulgar and insinuating behavior while in his employ. Thomas at the time was the nation’s top enforcer of laws against workplace sexual harassment.

The angels and demons of our nature are often revealed by what we claim to be vehemently against rather than for.  Our angels take on the hue of our demons revealing our buried or secret personal obsessions, while presenting the persona of the high-minded person.

Ergo, be skeptical of the person who protests too much.  That person may be revealing more naked truths than he would care for you to know.

Confidence is an enabling disposition, and exposes culpable behavior for what it is, how it takes hold, and why those who seem the most in control and confident, are more likely out of control and victim to their demons.

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an excerpt:

WELCOME TO HELL! OUR NEXT STOP HEAVEN!

                                                                                                          

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

© August 11, 2015

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

NOTE:

This is a short excerpt from Self-Confidence: The Illusive Key to Health and Happiness.  It should be ready for publication in late Fall 2015.

There is no time in which anxiety, free floating or otherwise, is of greater intensity than during those halcyon days of college.  

Rollo May devotes a good deal of his book The Meaning of Anxiety (1977) to anxiety and its development of the self.  College, compressed into a short number of years, isolated from the real world, and confined to variable ideas, theories, truths, facts, myths and biases, is a time of much anxiety and agitation. 

Uncertainty, depression, stress, distress, confusion, and anxiety compete for the student’s constant attention.  And if that were not enough, associated demons play havoc with the student’s dreams while asleep.

When I am in a state of anxiety, a variation of two dreams dominates.  One, I am afraid to get my grades for fear I have flunked out.  Mind you, I graduated from university a half century ago.  The second dream, I have forgotten my class schedule – what class I am supposed to be attending, where and what time – and find myself lost on campus.  I encounter students rushing to class, but am too embarrassed to ask them where my class might be meeting.  I wake up in a cold sweat, and go to my study to write, unable to sleep the rest of the night. 

Someone might look at my accomplishments, then at my comfortable existence, and say, “How is that possible?”  Soren Kierkegaard had the answer:

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself.  So it is too that in the eyes of the world it is dangerous to venture.  And why?  Because one may lose.  But not to venture is shrewd.  And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture, and in any case never so easily, so completely as if it were nothing – one’s self.  For if I have ventured amiss – very well, then life helps me by its punishment.  But if I have not ventured at all – who then helps me?  And, moreover, if by not venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of oneself) I have gained all earthly advantages . . . and lose my self!  What of that? [5]

Long before I knew Kierkegaard’s words, I was stumbling and bumbling along, and ineptly but diligently embracing my resistance to my anxiety.  I found it true that the creative imagination is stimulated by accepting anxiety as real with lessons to teach us, that it is important to resist the urge to find safe haven in some cage.   

Each of us has a role in life to play involving the positive aspects of our selfhood.  We develop as individuals as we confront, move through and overcome anxiety-creating experiences.  There have been many people along my long life that have opened the door of my cage, which I have not always heeded.  When I have, the road ahead became easier.

IS KAFKA’S TRIAL OUR OWN?

 How often I have heard variations of Kafka’s lament in his book The Trial (1925):

 Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. 

It is a novel of vast symbolism and a bracing psychological study of a system whose leaders are convinced of their own righteousness.  To some the court is a symbol of the Church as an imperfect bridge between the individual and God.  More pertinent to today, it appears more likely a symbolic bridge between corporate society and economic security. 

 It is a challenge to trust the “system” to produce the leadership necessary to bring about social justice along with comfort and security to individuals collectively in that society.  No surprise, given the speed with which technology has emasculated society, Western civilization in particular and the rest of the world in general is failing badly in leadership. 

 This implies that the burden of the responsibility of leadership is a few individuals and not the responsibility of the individual.  Note: 

Everyone is a leader or no one is a leader.  

There is no way a few individuals in leadership roles can bridge the gap between the ideal and the real in the world of everyday life by themselves.  What happened to Joseph K happens every day because the passive majority expects their wishes to materialize without any effort on their part at all.

Plants close, jobs disappear, industries evaporate, communities become lifeless, values change, as well as sacred beliefs, skills become anachronistic, positions become atavistic, neighborhoods are erased from the map to make way for progress, and in a crushing state of anxiety, fingers are pointed in all directions except back at the individual.  

In this crippling sense of anxiety, who do we elect to public office?  Do we elect people who remind us of our leadership responsibility?  No, we elect people who promise us to ease our pain, create jobs, and improve our circumstances.  We elect counterfeit leaders to perpetuate our counterfeit existence, and wonder why we become increasingly dependent suspended in our own self-pitying misery.

Although we are repeatedly disappointed in leaders who make promises that they cannot keep, we cannot rise to accept the fact that leaders are probably as lost as we are.  What is a person to do when he has done nothing wrong?  But is that true?

We can’t change the world to fit us but we can change ourselves to fit the world.  Managing anxiety involves the self-development of the self to an ever-changing world.  W. H. Auden captures this in The Age of Anxiety (1947):

. . . . it is silly

To refuse the tasks of time

And, overlooking our lives,

Cry – “Miserable wicked me,

How interesting I am.”

We would rather be ruined than changed,

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

We remain architects of our destiny no matter how much we would prefer giving that role to someone else.  In the end as in the beginning, all we ever have is ourselves to blame.

*     *     *

 REFERENCES:

[1] Rachel graduated with honors from a top prep high school.  With advanced courses already completed in high school, she will register as a second semester sophomore as she enters college in the fall of 2014.

[2] This tense experience is given a novelist treatment in A Green Island in a Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa During Apartheid (2014), which is available on Kindle.

[3] See James R. Fisher, Jr.’s unconventional approach in Confident Selling (1971, 2^nd edition 2014), as well as in A Green Island in a Black Sea.  Long before he was acquainted with Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking (1977), he was practicing the approach.  For example, Confident Selling looks at the prospect as a partner not an adversary, and the selling of systems not products or services. 

The titles of other books follows this lateral thinking theme (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991, 2^nd edition 2015), The Worker, Alone!  Going against the Grain (1995, 2^nd edition 2015), Meet Your New Best Friend (1996, 2^nd edition 1996, 2^nd edition 2014), Six Silent Killers (1998, 2^nd edition 2014), Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (2000, 2^nd edition 2014), and Time Out for Sanity: Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age (2007, 2^nd edition 2015).  All of these books are available on Kindle or TATE Publishing Company.

[4] The memoir is In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003, 2^nd edition 2014).

[5] Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 52.

The Peripatetic Philosopher continues to ponder:

Why is religion important?

PART TWO

Pilgrims on the Mayflower reach America!

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

© August 10, 2015

 "Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.  His mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour.  We have created a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

"We trash about.  We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.  Religion will never solve this great riddle."

Edward O. Wilson, “The Social Conquest of Earth"

READER’S COUNTER ARGUMENT:



The Pilgrims came to this continent to escape religious persecution by people who claimed to know the ultimate answer.  However, the Pilgrims were of the same persuasion because they were the people who had the ultimate answer and persecuted those who disagreed.

The reason that later religious freedom became a fact in the US was because all the religions in this country wanted to prevent dominance by any particular religion. Yet today many of these Christian sects make every effort to impose their interpretation of the truth on the rest of us of which the prevention of gay marriage is just one example.

When Christianity became the state religion under the Roman Emperor Constantine, it did unto non-believers or those who had different interpretation of Christianity what had been done to them for three centuries by pushing the idea that they were the only one with the ultimate truth.

Even if you find a positives in religion, for the most part it has caused a lot of pain. The Emperor of Japan was considered divine, and during WWII the population was willing like the Islamic suicide bombers to die in support of an ideology.

Religion may be critical in explaining the human journey but for the most part it has made a negative contribution to that journey.

The Catholic Church apposed science in many ways. Galileo is just one example. The church kept insisting the Ptolemaic interpretation was correct. Islam stopped people from scientific investigation around the 12th century because it was interfering with the religious beliefs.

Since Protestantism existed in the US it would be difficult to determine its effect without having the same situation without Protestantism as a comparison.

In all you have written here your response has not addressed the questions I have raised which is that religion is an ideology that like any ideology proclaims to have the key to the ultimate truth and does not question the behavior of the god who is the center of that belief.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

There is much that you say here that makes perfect sense if we are addressing a rational matter, which we are not when it comes to religion. 

Religion all the way back to the medicine men and witch doctors of the beginning of man’s journey on this continent have dealt with irrational fears with the semblance of what seems rational and believable to those terrified of what is not known or understood. 

Science attempts today to fill that void, but unhappily at the expense of disregarding the basic spiritual emptiness, the loneliness that can find no purchase with simply the rational and sensible of that which can be replicated and verified. 

The world has always been a hostile environment not meant for or conducive to the terror of that exists in the human soul, a soul that science denies it exists because it cannot be identified or isolated and therefore replicated and verified with instrumental or concrete values. 

Yet, the soul can be consoled with love and caring and self-forgetfulness, terminal values that comfort the soul to what it cannot understand or relate to that might have existed before, or beyond human knowing.  Alas, life is a lonely experience if one does not embrace the beauty and mystery of this enchanting planet.

All the things you charge religion for, charges that clearly have a history that verifies your assessment, can equally be seen to taint the wonders of science as it in its own way is dogmatic, absolute, unyielding and as aggressive as the ideologies of religion.  

Whereas religion felt duty bound to proselytize the infidels, science has its own inquisition of public opinion in that few if anyone challenges its authenticity, authority or relevance wherever its research might take it.

We have nuclear weapons of mass destruction and cloning and robotics and now we learn of the selling of body parts of fetuses “for science,” when science, blindly going forward, never considers what is lost for what is gained, or what the ultimate consequences might be.   Nature has no conscience and Nature is the god of science.

WHY THE PILGRIMS CAME TO AMERICA

Angie Mosteller posts a compelling article on the Internet regarding the pilgrims.  It is clear, as you point out, what they were escaping from but not what they were going towards. 

In 1534, England broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church. Protestant Reformers saw this as an opportunity to bring true reform to the church in England.  These reformers came to be called Puritans.  However, many Puritans felt little progress had been made toward true reform and that it was time to separate from the Church of England and start anew.

Unfortunately, at that time in England, the Church and State were intimately tied, and Puritans were considered treasonous and lived in danger of both persecution and imprisonment. For this reason, a small group of Puritans determined it was time to leave England. So, in 1609, they sailed to Holland (not America).

For more than a decade, they enjoyed religious freedom in Holland and gathered openly for church under the leadership of Pastor John Robinson. So why not stay in Holland?  

These Pilgrims had deep concern for the well-being of their children. Life in Holland proved difficult. The only work available to immigrants was poorly paid, and despite their hard labor, they struggled constantly with poverty. Work was taking a toll on both parents and children. Furthermore, some of the children were assimilating into Dutch culture and abandoning their parents’ values.

William Bradford (a passenger on the Mayflower and governor of the Plymouth Plantation) explained:

“Of all the sorrows most heavy to be borne (in Holland), was that many of the children, influenced by these conditions, and the great licentiousness of the young people of the country, and the many temptations of the city, were led by evil example into dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and leaving their parents. Some became soldiers, others embarked upon voyages by sea and others upon worse courses tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls, to the great grief of the parents and the dishonor of God. So they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and become corrupt.”

In addition, the Pilgrims longed to bring the gospel to people who had not yet heard the message of Jesus Christ:

“They cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations, or at least of making some way towards it, for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world, even though they should be but stepping stones to others in the performance of so great a work.”

So for the sake of their children and for the gospel, the Pilgrims made the historic decision to immigrate again – this time to America.

These Pilgrims were prepared to make tremendous sacrifices for future generations – and the sacrifices proved to be costly. By the end of their first winter in America, half of the passengers who had sailed to America on the Mayflower were dead. Yet, the Pilgrims persevered and remained faithful to their God. To use the words of Bradford, these Pilgrims indeed became the “stepping stones” in the formation of what has arguably become the greatest nation on earth.

So, beginning in 1620, according to Max Weber in his comparative religion sociological enterprise, the pursuit of the economic logic of extra mundane beliefs had given birth to a nascent rational ordering system that would ultimately reach fruition in modern capitalism.  Its existential consequences would find no other soil more fertile or no people more ready or resolved than those first Puritan settlers.   

OTHER VOICES OTHER VIEWS

  

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) comes to mind, the preeminent Hindu leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India.  He employed civil disobedience to lead India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.  The Sanskrit for Mahatma is “high souled.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took Gandhi’s model and applied it to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. 

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were benefactors of the individualism, tenacity, resourcefulness of the Puritans who set the template of what became known as the difference between a European and an American. 

Sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that religion defined by its separation of the sacred from the profane, was at bottom society’s worship in a set of collective representations assuring it moral cohesion.  He referred to it as a kind of “Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Solidarity” to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Protestantism.

French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), and author of Democracy in America (1835), was convinced that the political stability of a country always requires a transcendental faith.  He found that in the United States with his Protestantism.  While noting America’s many society flaws, its cohesion was assured due to this fact.   

Whatever the merits or otherwise justifications for a civil religion, there is an insistence among distinguished minds that common presuppositions of any collective life, as you imply, is likely to inhibit scientific classification or taxonomic thrust. 

That said the state of the art of this relatively contentious and sometimes considered obscure branch of learning, religion in the last several decades has had a sharply up take in public consciousness and the public agenda.  How do we explain this?

COULD THIS BE THE “AXIAL AGE OF RELIGIOUS AWAKENING”?

The persistence or revival of assorted branches of Christianity is proof that faith in the divine in this Scientific Age is still surprisingly strong. 

Whatever you may think, religion still provides the spiritual springboard to the lives of the faithful, while a philosophy of disbelief informs them of the vital need for religion, even if they can dispense with god. 

Some religious observers have concluded that all major religious creeds are basically one, sharing a core of common values with liberal humanism in a post-secular age. 

Religion is thriving; religion is everywhere; religion is one, but not necessarily called “religion.”  It could as well be called “science.” 

TO BE CONTINUED