THANK GOD FOR DIFFERENCES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 21, 2009
© October 13, 2015
This is the last excerpt of “Self-Confidence: The Elusive Key to Health and Happiness before it is published later this year.
“Management deals best with what it knows, which means people are often managed as things. People do not behave, react, or forgive the way things do, which is the basis of conflict. Relationships imply conflict. As sociologist Georg Simmel observed, conflict can be the very glue, which binds people to a task. Yet conflict is considered a pejorative. Disagreement is considered disruptive when it is a vital precursor to agreement. Managed conflict keeps the organization on course and is essential to its health.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Six Silent Killers”
(1998), p. 119.
CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY OF A MIND
SELF-IGNORANT OF ITSELF
After reading the novel "Train" by Pete Dexter, winner of the National Book Award for "Paris Trout,” I could not find his books on the shelves of either Barnes & Noble or Borders.
Thanks to the Internet I was able to order all his published works at discount prices, which made me wonder how could someone write so well, so honestly and poignantly and not have an audience. I answered my own question.
It was another nail in the coffin of our current cultural discontinuity. But that is not why I am writing this today. I am writing about the marvel of television that despite all its inanities manages to connect us to the continuity of "minds alive" on noncommercial television’s Public Broadcasting System, or PBS and C-Span and its “Book Beat,” as it is better known, proving not everyone is asleep.
That said commercial television has its merits for a baseball fan. To take a break from reading, I checked the baseball games on television -- Reds and White Sox, Red Sox and Braves – and during a commercial break, I wandered over to C-Span. There I caught Jay Wesley Richards lecturing on his book, "Money, Greed and God" at the Enterprise Institute.
Richards is an advocate of "intelligent design," which rejects the theory of natural selection, or Darwinian evolution, arguing that the complexities of the universe and of all life suggest an intelligent cause in the form of a supreme creator. In contrast, Darwinian evolution is the theory of evolution by natural selection. It was first formulated in Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. Darwin, and others discovered that Nature represents a process by which organisms change over time out of necessity for survival. These changes are manifested in heritable, physical or behavioral traits.
Richards is a passionate young man with a point of view, an educated perspective, and a convincing way of presenting his argument. Knowing that he was an apologist for "intelligent design," I wondered if I would have listened to his ideas on capitalism (which he sees as the solution not the problem), missing an opportunity to experience an engaged mind. I must confess I might have done so. If I had, it would have been my loss.
We don’t grow wiser only listening to those who espouse what we already know to be true, or think to be so.
He covered a lot of territory that I have considered often with a different slant but honestly not from his point of view. He reads Ayn Rand (on selfishness) the same way I've read her, but has a different appreciation of greed and interpretation of self-interest even though my sentiments are similar. I feel uncomfortable bringing a theistic point of view into my thinking and writing although, I suspect, Richards has had similar training to that of my own.
This is further evidence that our cultural moorings influence how ideas and information are processed, then interpreted and become assimilated into our thinking. Stated another way, we are never freely engaged no matter how disciplined or structured or how arduous our training. Ideas seem to always be tainted by our initial exposure to and in life.
It is difficult to get out of the cage of our cultural programming, which is most apparent when we give matters of some discontinuity a rational twist to continuity, often not realizing we are doing so. Social psychologist Leon Festinger might suggest our views were tainted with a bit of cognitive dissonance. He claims we are inclined to process new information so that it fits comfortably in our minds with what is already there; otherwise, it is likely to be rejected. [1]
Richards breaks down words into their Latin origins, and defines them in those etymological terms. For example, "altruism" does not mean "selflessness" but "other directed," from the Latin "alter." An individual doesn't abandon "self-interest," but is "other directed" to promote self-interest in relating to significant others. This is consistent with Freud’s "quid pro quo," or something gained for something given. In such terms, self-interest is not only critical to success, but essential to survival.
The author demonstrates his finesse in making this connection, while intrinsically establishing a different set of biases to my own. So, his connection in one sense becomes a disconnection in another sense to my thinking, or his continuity leads to discontinuity between us. Simply put, he believes in “intelligent design” and I believe in Darwinian evolution.
Clearly, we can we speak a similar language but differ widely in its application, interpretation and meaning.
The irascible curmudgeon Christopher Hitchens in January 2008 had a debate on “intelligent design” with Richards. Hitchens loves combat, his opponent loves congenial discourse. What an odd couple! On stage was Richards, boyish, clean cut and well groomed and Hitchens, overweight, disheveled needing a shave and haircut. Hitchens is the darling of agnostics and atheists of the liberal left, and Richards, a passionate defender of theistic Christian conservatism.
It is refreshing to see television sponsoring discussions of people of ideas, allowing them to have free reign in that climate. This exposure may reduce the screws of intolerance a twist or two.
We live in an age where people off the rails of conventional norms have difficulty being heard. It is even more difficult for them to get into print much less find an audience. Kudos to C-Span and PBS for providing this small window compared to the panoramic screen that commercial television offers to our collective lowest common denominator. As long as we have this small window, ideas will not die.
Richards referred to a book about "bees" in which he described how combative, self-interested, and conflicting were these bees, while being terribly productive. An experimenter introduced a chemical to make the bees less aggressive, and the hive fell apart.
Edward O. Wilson at Harvard has been telling us for years that the smallest creatures on earth, insects, behave precisely as man, or is it the other way around? [2]
Anyway, conflict has been a thesis in my books on organizational development (OD). Managed conflict and polite confrontation is the glue that holds workers on task. It is harmony that leads to discontinuity and functional collapse, not conflict. Harmony is the antithesis of productivity, and like the bees, dissolves cohesiveness.
We have had eighty years of increasingly harmonious organizational life, thanks to the auspices of Human Resources (HR) management. The faulty thinking that this entails goes back to 1927 and Elton Mayo’s study of the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric in Chicago. The study found that manipulation of various hygiene factors – changing the lighting, moving workstations, or changing working conditions – resulted in increased worker productivity.
This led HR to give workers everything but the kitchen sink, which first created the Culture of Comfort, which then led to the Culture of Complacency at the expense of the Culture of Contribution. The latter is necessary to generate productive work.
How bizarre this quest for continuity can lead to discontinuity was revealed by the experimental program at Bethlehem Steel and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). These two major companies launched in the 1960s a furlough experiment with their veteran workers. John Strohmeyer writes about this in Crisis in Bethlehem (1986) showing how it all went awry.
The plan was for Bethlehem Steel and ALCOA to give senior workers 13-week paid furloughs every five years when these workers were already the highest paid in American industry, and had more entitlements and benefits than nearly any other American workers. Strohmeyer refers to this “as the crippling goose that laid the golden egg.”
The masterminds of this program envisioned the furlough experiment to be an effective way to induce workers to greater productivity and more effectively manage manpower requirements. It was anticipated that many of these workers would use this “paid for free time” to pursue educational opportunities (which these companies also paid for), travel and enrich their lives, or pursue favorite hobbies they never had time for before. What do you think most of them did?
They acquired second jobs to increase their income. This led to something approaching a nightmare. When workers returned to their regular jobs, because they needed the additional income to maintain their new standard of living, many attempted to manage two jobs, performing poorly on both.
Instead of seeing the futility of this, and how they were equally responsible for the continuity leading to discontinuity, they took their wrath out on management.
From an insightful point of view, there was some merit to this, as these workers exposed the fact that they were behaving at work mainly as dependent twelve-year-olds in fifty-year-old bodies.
These companies had unwittingly developed a counter dependency that was only exacerbated by this intervention. In assuming responsibility for their total well-being, workers became obligingly suspended in terminal adolescence. No thought was given to how this program might rupture and/or reinforce this dependency. It was telling evidence of how vacuous was the idea and how clueless was the management of these workers’ psychology.
The experiment compressed rather than broadened these workers’ horizons while diminishing them as proud and engaged workers.
Work was all they knew and what they knew came to fill the void of the 13-week furlough.
We are so late smart when it comes to understanding what makes us tick and what does not. Continuity and discontinuity are normal fare in the life of the individual and in the collective life of the workplace, and by extension, society.
Remember this, whether you are an advocate or adversary of the theory of evolution or “intelligent design,” you can learn a lot about yourself, especially in the other thinker’s camp.
No one has a monopoly on ideas. But there is no better way of understanding oneself than to entertain ideas outside the realm of one’s own thinking and experience.
The steel and aluminum workers in the 13-week furlough experiment were as self-ignorant and on automatic pilot as those workers in 1927 at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric in Chicago. Those in the social and behavioral sciences have been misreading ordinary people for a century now, and management has been unwittingly their sponsor. May I remind you that management is still in charge?
Notes:
[1] Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA., 1957.
[2] Edward O. Wilson in Naturalist, Inland Press, Washington, D.C., 1994. Wilson gives a definitive appraisal of the dynamic world of ants, which has more than a little in common with our own.
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