The Challenge of Maturity in the Age of Anxiety
JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2016
A READER RESPONDS:
Dr. Fisher,
As
a maintenance officer for 4 years in the USAF and a teacher for 35 years, one
thing I have learned whether at Emory to study Comparative literature, at USF
for a Masters in art education and eventually for an MFA, was that very few
people want to hear what you have to say unless you agree with them.
One
of the ironies about all this thinking is that when I went to Newberry, a
Lutheran College in South Carolina, where I wound up majoring in English Lit, I
ran across two English professors who might not have agreed with everything
their students said, but they allowed them to express their ideas. When
they did not agree, they would tell you so, but it never affected your
grade.
As
a naturalized citizen born in Berlin, Germany in 1939, I find that no matter
what faults people find with this country, every morning when I wake up, I am
glad I landed here. That is one of the issues I have about Obama and his wife
both of whom went to good schools and were making good money, and she had the
nerve to say this is the first time I am proud to be an American. This country
is not perfect, but it sure beats most of the rest of the world.
As
for education not teaching high order thinking that issue is being promoted by
the spoiled brats Jim described so eloquently, and the university
administrations that are all into codling. I experienced the beginning of
that when I went to Emory to work on a PhD. A certain kind of thinking
was required which had little to do with high order thinking. I spent most
of the rest of my years teaching: first English to seventh graders and after 3
years art mostly in high school.
I
witnessed the behavior and ambitions of many, many students, and much of what
they brought to the school environment came from home. All the teachers I knew
worked hard to provide a learning environment, but they continued to be blamed
for things over which they had no control. The education thing is just
like the Black lives matter movement.
Yes,
Black lives matter, but all the black on black killings also matter, but they
are ignored by the black leadership and community because it is all somebody
else’s fault. The last point is about this election. I liked
neither candidate. But when Trump won, I certainly did not think breaking
things would help anything. That too comes from home. I watched my
two daughter grow up, and am now watching my grandchildren grow up, and it is
all about genes and environment which are elements about life that no
government can fix.
Klaus
I've just got to this, something you wrote a week or so ago. How beautiful, measured, perceptive, fair minded, and yes, eloquent. It is a keeper.
You were born in my favorite European city, Berlin, BB and I spent a vacation with a rail pass traveling throughout Europe several years ago, spending much time in both West Berlin and East Berlin. My best friend in the US Navy was Wolfgang Erdmann, whom I've written about many times, having been put on the Eastern Front Lines against Russia as only a boy, losing his parents in the war, raised in East Berlin and acquiring a doctorate as an optician. We were put in the Medical Division of the USS Salem (CA-139) because of our academic training and together on that Flag Ship for two years. He found his way to America with his wife staying in East Berlin. She was a dedicated Communist. I've often wondered if his wife joined him in the United States after he left the navy.
New York columnist David Brooks is still ranting as if someone stole his fourth grade lunch money. I still read him with pain having wondered if he had abandoned serious reading. Oh, he quotes authors that are on the cutting edge of mediocrity, but I mean serious writers who have been dead for 200 or 300 years such as Vico, Hamann and Herder.
I have suggested that we are a meatloaf culture for such attention. So, why should we be surprised that Hillary Clinton and the Donald became the last two standing? We go for the lowest common denominator and then fudge what we call the numerator. It is called "media."
We are lucky you became an educator, and it is obvious that you have had more good than bad experiences soaring to your acclaimed academic status as a teacher and molder of young people.
Moreover, I appreciate your high regard for the United States of America as your adopted country. You have the perspective of being born at the end of the Great Depression, a few years after Adolf Hitler had come to power, as I was born when he did. As you came into the world, he was about to invade Poland and launch WWII. We are all collateral survivors of that tragedy.
History is not episodic but a vast drama reflecting the destinies of humanity in some teleological fashion in which each great cultural epoch takes center stage with all of us actors in that play. The problem is we don't know the denouement. But there are indicators and that is why I write about such things as the SPOILED BRAT SOCIETY.
The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Dr. Edward Piper, writes that for the past several generations since WWII, the indictment of his industry, education, is that it has sponsored elitism and has developed narcissistic and self-absorption students who think life is without consequences and that they are superior because they are Americans.
They have ridden to the top of Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" and see themselves totally self-actualized pyramid dwellers laughing in the face of self-responsibility and self-discipline. Small wonder our workers in every industry at every level reflect this preoccupation and malady.
Dr. Piper says we have selfish students and selfish student bodies at our universities continuing the practice programmed into them in grammar school and high school. They think good grades can be extrapolated into competence. They consider themselves smart and informed when they know nothing about anything much less about life.
Richard Weaver wrote "Ideas Have Consequences" three years after WWII, at the height of the post-WWII optimism and collective confidence/security of the American people as the chosen people.
Weaver's analysis was an unsparing diagnosis of the ills facing people of the modern age. What author Weaver saw was the consequences of that utopian revolution. The consequences were at first gradual (then accelerated) erosion of distinctions and hierarchies with the subsequent enfeebling of Western minds.
We saw it in education, commerce, government and religion as those in charge lost the capacity to reason. We saw it in students who equated good grades with the ability to think, forgetting that intelligence is not an I.Q. test score but what intelligence does.
These effects -- as I say in hard ball prose -- has produced a SPOILED BRAT SOCIETY which touches everyone in manners and morals as the pervasive societal ill of our times.
Bad ideas lead to bad culture, and bad government leads to bad communities. We have sick communities across the land and the best we can do is point fingers at police or some other agency including the church as the target of our anger; never at ourselves. Good ideas, Weaver tells us, lead to the opposite as history shows in generating good kids.
German gestalt psychiatrist Frederick Perls (1883 - 1970) identified the problem as "garbage in, garbage out" in his book "In and Out of the Garbage Pail" (1969). The idea here is that poor quality input will always produce poor faulty output. Perls, Piper and Weaver are talking about behavior. Garbage in, garbage out now is dominated by the field of electronic information and communications.
"Garbage in, garbage out" now refers to computers, since they operate only with logical processes, but can produce nonsensical or erroneous data with the hubris of infallibility, as we have seen with polls in the most recent presidential election.
We have become a waist-high culture where the bestseller industry of fantasy/science fiction, play stations of pointless brutality dominate. Meanwhile, candy coated popular histories of little ideas to fill the void left by our distaste for challenging big ideas have become national bestsellers. We have as a culture lost our heart and cannot find our soul, and wonder about maturity in this age of anxiety.
Stay well, keep reading, keep thinking and keep writing, as you have done here. Let your experience be your guide to what you believe, value and respect. We need a fair minded nation like you, indeed, we need a world like you.
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