DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 28, 2020

A READER COMMENTS ON “THIS I KNOW”:

Enjoyed reading this, but I disagree that things changed with the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. They changed for the people at the top and the educated, but did very little for the people in the rest of the population.

The rest of the population may have gained a little freedom. Having now lived 81 years, what I have experienced in my life is that the people at the top want control and most everyone else submits. I even saw that in the school system. They left you alone in the classroom unless they had problems from your students, but when it came to anything else it was control from the top.

Over all it has been the same thing over and over again. From the history I have read and the experiences of my life very little has changed in human behavior.

RESPONSE:

As William L. Livingston IV, my mentor and friend, has taught me – “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!” To get above the mentoring line, as he puts it, you have to put aside all your precious perceptions and see beyond sight to insight. This means that you have to table the desire to change the equation of life, and your perceptions of “what is” in that equation. Why? Because first you have no control over anything beyond your own initiative, and second, what you think is, isn’t necessarily so.

Humanity limps along, but humanity has always limped along; and somebody will always be in charge because most people don’t want the aggravation. They want to be comfortable, content, and yes, essentially be able to luxuriate robotically, but they still wouldn’t turn down the benefits that accrue to those who puts themselves on the line and risk everything to establish an identity outside the norm.  Leadership is an act that becomes a habit.

As many philosophers have written, often in ponderous tomes, Rousseau for one, people don’t want freedom because they prefer “chains” rather than submit to the demands that freedom calls for.

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During the decade of the 1970s, I was a police consultant along the East Coast from New York City to Miami, as well as giving American Management Association (AMA) seminars across the nation in which senior police officers and government officials were in attendance, along with teaching as an adjunct professor at several universities in their Criminal Justice Colleges and Police Academies across the State of Florida, as well as making major organizational development (OD) interventions for The Professional Institute of the American Management Association with The Fairfax County Police Department, Fairfax, Virginia, and for The Public Safety Institute (PSI), a police consulting firm, in Raleigh, North Carolina with The Raleigh Police Department.

I wrote my Master’s Thesis on my nine months while embedded in the Fairfax County Police Department after a white police officer shot and killed a 27-year old unarmed African American man in a 7-11 Store, after which a riot took place (MA thesis: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, 1976).

Two years later, I would write my doctorate dissertation (The Police Paradox: A Systematic Exploration of the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed, 1978), substantiating to a considerable degree what former Los Angeles Police Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh, who became a bestselling novelist, once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.”

This is mention in the context of these remarks because, while much of what this writer says are true, a completely different perspective could be argued with equal validity. As Sir William would say, “what is the point?” And he would be right.

THIS I KNOW was a reflective piece from my working life and scholarship, and that is that education is or can be liberating with a few caveats.

During the 1970s, the Florida University System did a study, finding that police officers who went to the trouble of acquiring baccalaureate degrees tended to be more tolerant than police officers with only GED’s or high school diplomas.

This study was so convincing that the State of Florida launched a program to give police officers who acquired a college degree a substantial boost in their income. Statistics in my work towards my dissertation confirmed these findings, as well as I have observed the significance of this correlation on tolerance in my police consulting work and riding with police officers on the job.

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Homo sapiens as a specie climbed out of the Dark Middle Ages in Europe with the “Renaissance” or the rebirth of learning in the 14th to the 17th century, producing such polymaths as Leonardo de Vinci and Michelangelo, among others, with an eruption of intellectual, political and social change. You are an artist and you have benefited from this breakthrough. There was however an innocence in this explosion.

Now, the “Age of the Enlightenment” from 18th to the 19th century was much less innocent, from my point of view, and much more contrived, so I will give you that.

With good intentions, it however “threw the baby out with the bath water,” wanting to improve the human condition in a material sense with less concern about the spiritual nature of man. Thinkers of this age valued reason, objective science, natural rights of man to liberty and property, all very admirable, but finding little room for religion other than a grudging tolerance, as religion and the afterlife to these thinkers were considered suspicious and irrelevant to man’s dignity.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, among others, believed people were innately selfish and self-interested with marginal tolerance for others. Hobbes wrote:

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone. 

John Locke, on the other hand, was less pugnacious in his thinking on the “nature of man.” Locke gave us many powerful treatises including “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” which would become reinterpreted in our times as a self-conscious obsession with the idea of the “self.”

Ironically, that was not the case in either Hobbes or Locke’s time for the ideas of “The Enlightenment” mainly failed because they were scores of years ahead of the times when society would be ready to absorb such ideas.

But “Enlightenment ideas” are very much alive today in which, as you point out, they have not turned out as their creators would have expected. Today, in a very quiet way, far removed from the “women’s lib” movement, women are asserting themselves.  This is a nascent product of "The Enlightenment."

That said, education of the masses, and I include myself as one within that multitude, have profited from education in a very real sense. Were it not for the benefit of an education, I don’t know what I would have done because I have no talent beyond that of a day laborer.

I write of the ascent of women in MEET YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND (2013):

Women who view life through the feminist prism campaign for an Office of Gender Equity, implying a gender bias favors men, especially with regard to education. A review of the facts paints a different picture:

· While boys get higher scores in mathematics and science, girls get higher scores in reading and writing.

· Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely to be held back a grade, and boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the special education population.

· 67 percent of female high school graduates go on to college, compared with 58 percent of male high school graduates.

· In 1970, women were only 41 percent of all college students. Today, women account for 55 percent of all undergraduates, and they receive 54 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States.

· Regarding graduate school, in 1970: Women received 40 percent of all master’s degrees; today they are 59 percent of all master’s degree students and earn 53 percent of all master’s degrees.

· Women earned only 6 percent of all first professional degrees; by 1991, that figure was up to 39 percent.

· Only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women, but today that figure is up to 39 percent. The medical degree earned during that period by women jumped from 8 percent to 36 percent. In 1993, 42 percent of first-year medical students were women; now over 50 percent of all medical school graduates are women.

· Five percent of women earned law degrees; today that figure is more than 40 percent.

· Women received only 1 percent of dental degrees, compared with 32 percent in 1991.

· Women today earn a majority of the degrees awarded in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

· There is, however, a growing gender imbalance in higher education among minority students. Among black students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1990, fully 62 percent were female; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female. Among white students, the imbalance is 53 percent to 47 percent in favor of women (pp. 27-29).

Given these encouraging statistics, I can recall 80 percent of the top 10 percent of my class in high school were women, at the university, the top 10 percent were 80 percent men and 20 percent women.


High School Graduates (all)            College Graduates (Male/Female)  


1900 – 6 percent                                                   


1930 – 29 percent


1940 – 51 percent                                  6/3 percent


1964 – 77 percent


1970 – 80 percent


1984                                                       23/16 percent


2000 – 78 percent


2019                                                     33/35 percent

If I have learned anything from life, it is that those willing to take risks and endure pain and experience failure on their way to success tend to fill the vacuum by those more able but unwilling to do the same.  You can talk about the emasculation of society of the male, but what is the point? 

In the peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com, I write in an essay titled “Job Security in An Uncertain World” (June 16, 2014): No One Promises You a Living, No One Owes You a Job!

In an uncertain world, where job security is vital to our self-interests, we often do all the wrong things to put ourselves back together again.  Instead, we panic or become traumatized when made redundant, when our place of work closes, when the skills we have that once were in demand are no longer, when we are asked to take a 10, 20 or 30 percent cut in wages and benefits for the company’s survival, and are barely making it on our current income.  How could this happen when we’ve done nothing wrong?  Turns out we’ve done a lot wrong, starting with waiting for someone to rescue us from our predicament and ourselves.  

In such circumstances, we are consumed with the law of anxiety that looks at nature backwards:

Everything is the reverse of common sense with everything turned inside out and upside down.  Suddenly, circumstances have forced us to be in charge of our lives and no one has prepared us for that ordeal, leastwise ourselves. 

We think we live in a time of unusual insecurity.  This is not the case at all.  In the past hundred years, or throughout the past twentieth century, long established traditions have broken down continuously: the traditional family, social life, government, economic order, religious beliefs, values, ethics, and most notable of all, morality. 

We have seen society stagger out of the Industrial Age only to be caught in a breathless dance in the Information Age, as manufacturing assembly lines have become a shadow of the former status.  This watershed moment of the early twentieth century was the backbone of the spirited working middle class, now replaced by quick minds and fingers on computer keyboards all but obliterating the blue-collar working class. 

There is no longer certainty.  Actually, certainty never existed, but it remained a myth perpetuated by a society deep in denial.  Institutions denied the reality by failing to pay attention, workers denied it by failing to learn new skills, and companies denied it by failing to press for change as the metamorphosis of the workforce went from blue-collar to college trained white collar.  Meanwhile, schools and universities continued to teach as if locked in 1945 nostalgia, even as private and public workplaces managed as if the color of the workers’ collars had not changed.   If blame is the game, there is more than enough to go around, but that doesn’t get us off the dime.

That said, for far too long the majority were willing to put up with lives largely doing jobs that were boring and inconsequential, content in earning the means to seek relief from the tedium with periodic respites of drinking and partying in expensive pleasure, or going on shopping sprees with reckless abandon.  Saving for a rainy day was not in the specs as the weather ahead was full of sunshine and promise with no dark clouds.  Neither workers nor employers were looking ahead.  It wasn’t anybody’s job!

All I can add is, “Indeed!”