The Peripatetic Philosophers examines Leadership's Cultural Blind Spot

LEADERSHIP’S CULTURAL BLIND SPOT

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

© November 5, 2019

AUTHOR/PUBLISHER KEN SHELTON replies to missive, “LEADERSHIP & CULTURE”

As editor/publisher of Leadership Excellence for 30 years, I must agree with you, Jim.

Culture wins over the nature and nurture of leaders. Even the best of men and women,
once enmeshed in a cannibalistic culture, might dine with swine, get drunk on cheap wine.

Ken Shelton, editor, agent, CEO

Executive Excellence, LLC

MY RESPONSE

Ken,

You have a poetic way of rhyming the crime.  I have often wondered if this is malice, malfeasance or simply cultural ineptitude.  

I was reading the featured article in Foreign Affairs, a quarterly publication, of an academic and former White House adviser, and turned to BB and said,

“This is quite good.  This guy makes a lot of sense (the article was on US foreign policy).  Everyone in the US Congress should read this.  Do you think that is happening?”

“No,” BB answered while sorting the mail.

“No?”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.  Do you?  I don’t think the White House or Congress is the audience.”

Then who is?”

“People like you, intellectual types who like to read.”

“But people like me have no power, no clout, and no role in this.  I‘m just a reader.”

“Exactly.”  She said and then left the room, while I went on to the next article wondering if it is part of our cultural DNA to remain arrogantly detached to the plight of the indigenous peoples about the globe and ignorant of their needs, identity and essence. 

That certainly wasn’t the case of the French in the late 18^th century.

Another side of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte

It is common knowledge that Emperor Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in Belgium (We lived not far from that site for two years in the 1980s) in 1815.  What is not common knowledge is Napoleon’s stupendous cultural success. 

This is a subject that has been largely ignored by historians.  It relates to the expedition of French scholars, scientists and artists deployed to Egypt in 1798.  This “cultural army” of 167 men of high qualifications recruited from schools, universities, studios and laboratories were supported by Napoleon and his army each with a different role and agenda to perform.

Napoleon had an ulterior motive for this expedition as he thought if he won India, England would be weaken and he could be a second "Alexander the Great.”  The path was through Egypt. 

What these cultural savants wanted (that is what they were called) was new knowledge and discoveries.  The average age was 25.  They were mathematicians, physicist, physicians, chemists, engineers, botanists, zoologists, geologists, pharmacists, architects, painters, poets, language specialists, sociologists, anthropologists, musicologists, printers, archivists and historians. 

The organization was splendidly encyclopedic.  The ships also carried printing presses, scientific instruments, and instruments used in mechanical arts, and sciences.  The printing presses carried fonts in Greek, Arabic and other common languages with materials for writing, drawing and painting. 

Although the army resented these “cultural savants,” Napoleon never wavered in his support of them or their mission.  He also, along the way, abolished slavery. 

That said, this learned corps was repeatedly exposed to resentment and attacks by sometimes violent native revolts.  Seemingly overnight, these academics, laboratory and studio scientists were transformed into soldiers on the firing line building fortified places of work, occupying and becoming governors of villages, excavating ruins, making of machinery with unfamiliar tools, inventing pumps and processes, and even making pencils without graphite.

When the bubonic plague and typhoid hit Egypt, astronomers became meteorologists predicting wind directions and weather. 

The twenty month study found these interpreters totally engaged and in many cases assimilated into the Egyptian culture.  The study and the knowledge accumulated filled twenty volumes (called “Description of Egypt”).   It was one of Napoleon’s most significant achievements but with little notable acknowledgement by historians.

Then there is the 20^th century cultural snafu: The Vietnam War

It is hard for a layman with no special ax to grind, no special interest group or political party to support, who simply reads books and reflects on what he reads, to understand how the majority of Washington, DC politicians with their Ivy League pedigrees, millionaire status, and access to the most sophisticated intelligence gathering resources known to man could be so lame in understanding an indigenous culture and people as that of the Vietnamese.  

This harkens back to the ignorance on display of England's King George during the American Revolution.  

One wonders if paranoia and tunnel vision dominate the American self-indulgent psyche?  It certainly appears so. Consider this brief review of the last half of the 20th century.   

The Truman Doctrine refused to recognize Ho Chi Minh’s 1945 Declaration of Independence for Vietnam, but instead chose to support the hapless pro-French government’s Indochina policy.

French Indochina was a collective name French colonies of Southeast Asia established in the 19^th century subsequent to the Vietnam Wars of the mid-1990s.  The fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 signaled the end of French Power in the region.

President Eisenhower stepped in with his “Domino Theory” as shorthand for the United States’ policy in South Vietnam to contain the spread of Russia and China’s communism without a clear understand of the Vietnam people or apparently the cultural validity of such a policy. 

In retrospect, the policy seems culturally xenotropic.  Culture becomes a problem when there is a lack of understanding between gender, races, classes and nations.  That is why Napoleon’s cultural initiative in Egypt looms so significant.   

This layman who reads books wonders why the United States so often operates with its cultural head in the sand.

To wit, President Kennedy decided on having an American presence in South Vietnam of 700 “advisors.”  With Eisenhower, this number was amped up to 12,000 in support of the Southeast Asia Treaty Agreement Organization (SEATO), which was designed to combat the “domino effect” of the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, thus becoming president, would eventually have a regular military force in Vietnam of: 410,000 Territorial Militias and 532,000 Regional Forces. This would total: 942,000 in 1972.

It all started with the Tonkin Bay Resolution. On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia.

It was passed by the U.S. Congress after an alleged attack on two U.S. naval destroyers stationed off the coast of Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution effectively launched America's full-scale involvement in the Vietnam War.

Of the 58, 220 Americans who would die in Vietnam, 83 percent were white; 15 percent African Americans, when the actual African American population of the United States was 12 percent.

The Vietnam War, never a popular war, especially with draft eligible American young men, reached its nadir when the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive on January 30, 1968.

This was a surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. The name of the offensive comes from the Tet holiday, the Vietnamese New Year. 

Ho Chi Minh, the architect and spirit behind the attack, died September 2, 1969, the cultural leader and father of the Vietnamese people.

[The Tet Offensive is reminiscent of General George Washington’s crossing the Delaware River so that his army could attack an isolated garrison of Hessian troops located at Trenton, New Jersey. After several councils of war, Washington set the date for the river crossing for Christmas night 1776. The surprise attack and victory at Trenton was important to the American cause for several reasons: for the first time, Washington's forces had defeated a regular army in the field. The victory sharply increased morale. And in retrospect, it signaled the changing momentum of the American Revolution.]

The Vietnam War (1955-1975) didn’t officially end when President Nixon attempted to negotiate a treaty with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. At the time, his administration was immersed in the Watergate Hearings with the looming threat of his impeachment. In face of this, he chose to resign as president on August 9, 1974 with Vice President Gerald Ford, now President Ford, issuing him a pardon on September 8, 1974.

Finally, on April 30, 1975, as acting President General Duong Van Minh of South Vietnam and his cabinet surrendered to the Communist forces of North Vietnam unconditionally in the Independence Palace in Saigon.

The Vietnam War thus came to an end. It had lasted for nearly 20 years. As many as 250,000 South Vietnamese’s soldiers died in the war, which likely was only a fraction of North Vietnamese’s deaths.

The French, then the Russia occupation of Vietnam, followed by the 20 year war in Vietnam of the United States points to a cultural and leadership blind spot that seems endemic to the West.

In an entirely different context but uncannily apropos to this cultural and leadership fixation, I wrote in The Worker, Alone, Going Against the Grain (1995):

For the past quarter century we have had a bombardment of ideas on how to manage change. Change will come about naturally over time, once workers and managers bring about change in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change of attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in how workers and managers view the world. Such radicalism requires the individual going against the grain.

We have only to look at our own government to see how prominent this blind spot is, and by extension, how it cripples other nations of the world as well.