1960s FREEZE-FRAMED IN THE 21st CENTURY

1960s Freeze-framed

In the 21^st Century

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

© July 5, 2020

I am in the process of using quotes from Eric Hoffer books to illustrate another way of looking at THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ when it occurred to me that what I have been insisting in my writing that we created a “spoiled brat” generation after World War Two, also known as “The Baby Boomers,” was also a concern of Eric Hoffer fifty to sixty years ago. 

In this newest treatment of this The Fisher Paradigm, the reference typology PERSONALITY is classified  as a SENSE OF SELF, GEOGRAPHY as a SENSE OF PLACE, and DEMOGRAPHY as a SENSE OF SELF-WORTH. Only “the sense of worth” is covered in this expose.

What follows are quotations (with book and page designations). Remember, Hoffer was writing in the 1950s and 1960s when African Americans were known as Negroes.

DEMOGRAPHY -- SENSE OF SELF-WORTH.

We have over the centuries gone through alienation, self-estrangement, the divided self, the disowned self, the sexual self, a nomenclature that gets increasingly weird without apology.

As a consequence, a SENSE OF SELF-WORTH has lost meaning in terms of personal identity, as it continues to ignore the fact that a biological male or female is determined by distinct sets of chromosomes and not by sex role identities which now number in over 100.

There is probably no better way of gauging the nature of a society than by finding the direction in which ambition and talent flow. In what fields are there to be found the greatest rewards? What achievements does society prize most? In this country until not very long ago the social landscape was steeply tilted toward the marketplace. Most energies and talents flowed toward business. The American businessman, served by lawyers and politicians, ruled the roost. He dominated not only the marketplace but “society.” (The True Believer, p 43).

It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions, and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalistic environment (The True Believer, Preface, 1951).

It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals. You take a conventional man of action and he’s satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on (Ibid, Preface).

The successful businessman is often a failure as a communal leader because his mind is attuned to “things as they are” and his heart is set on that which can be accomplished in “our time.” Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs. And it is perhaps fortunate that some proud natures when suffering defeat in the practical world do not feel crushed but are suddenly fired with the apparent absurd conviction that they are eminently competent to direct the fortunes of the community and the nation (Ibid, p 74).

The readiness for self-sacrifice is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life . . . For self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act. It cannot be the end-product of a process of probing and deliberating. All active “mob rulers” strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. The facts on which the TRUE BELIEVER bases his conclusions must not be derived from experience or observation but from holy writ . . . To rely on the evidence of senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs (Ibid, p 75).

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self. The fact that they understand a thing fully impairs its validity and certitude in their eyes. They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society (Ibid, pp. 76 -77).

The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived . . . “They pray not only for their daily bread but also for their daily illusion.” The rule seems to be that those who find difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism (Ibid, pp. 78-79). 

Fanaticism

The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources, out of his rejected self, but finds it only in clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength (p 80).

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatic atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. He is an atheist with devoutness and unction. According to Renan, “The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedness of all men.” So, too, the opposite of the chauvinist is not the traitor but the reasonable citizen who is in love with the present and as no taste for martyrdom and the heroic gesture (Ibid, p 81).

"Mob Rule" and Armies

Both “mob rule” and armies are collective bodies; both strip the individual of his separateness and distinctiveness; both demand self-sacrifice, unquestioning obedience and single-hearted allegiance; both make extensive use of make-belief to promote daring and united action; and both can serve as a refuge for the frustrated who cannot endure an autonomous existence (Ibid, p 83).

Who would have dreamt that an unprecedented improvement in the lot of the Negro would result in burning and looting in cities; that the unprecedented affluence of the young would bring into being adolescent skid rows with adolescent whores, pimps, dope pushers, moochers and derelicts; that unprecedented opportunities for education would bring anarchy to places of learning? Whereas medical doctors when they prescribe a new drug warn the patient against dangerous side effects, our quacks of the body politic assume their prescribed reforms can never go wrong. We know now that in human affairs there is no certainty that good follows from good and evil from evil. As we enter the last third of the century it ought to be self-evident that when a society sets out to purge itself of iniquities and shortcomings it should expect the worst and grid itself for a crisis that will test its stability and stamina. A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness (First Things, Last Things, 1968. pp. 100-101).

It is questionable whether the Negro revolution can do much for the Negro. The Negro’s future in this country will be determined by his ability to compete and excel. If the Negro cannot learn to strive and build on his own he will remain lowest man on the totem pole no matter how explosive his slogans and how extravagant his self-dramatization. Nevertheless, the Negro revolution is a fateful event because of its effect on non-Negro segments of the population. It is an illustration of the fact that the most important revolutions are those other people make for us. The effect of the Negro revolution on the non-Negro young is as unexpected as it is puzzling. Why have the young so whole heartedly adopted the Negro’s way of life? The Negrification of the young will have profound and durable effects on language, sexual mores, work habits and the attitude towards drugs. Even the young white racists are Negrified and do not realize it (Ibid, pp. 101 – 102). 

Unifying Agents – Hatred

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into on flaming mass. Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred. “Mob rule” can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil (The True Believer, pp. 85-86).

We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us. There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness (Ibid, p 89).
Imitation

Imitation is an essential unifying agent. The development of a close-knit group is inconceivable without a diffusion of uniformity. The one-mindedness and Gleichschaltung (i.e., synchrony) prized by every “Mob rule” are achieved as much by imitation as by obedience (Ibid, p 94).

What strikes one about the activist young is their lack of zest. Their obscenities are wooden, their insolence without a sparkle, and even their violence is trancelike. They dissipate without pleasure and are vain without a purpose. The revolution of the young is not against regimentation but against effort, against growth and, above all, against apprenticeship. They want to teach before they learn, want to retire before they work, want to rot before they ripen. They equate freedom with effortlessness and power with instant satisfaction. Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults. A society that takes its solemn adolescents seriously is headed for serious trouble. How humorless and laughable the solemn young! One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does. There is a lack of seriousness and dehumanization. Is there anything more serious that a cow grazing in the pasture? The nonhuman cosmos is immersed in an ocean of seriousness. Man alone can smile and laugh (First Things, Last Things, pp. 103 – 104).

One has the impression that the young do not want to, or perhaps cannot, grow up. Our campuses have become dour, playless nurseries echoing with doctrinaire baby talk. You see six-foot babies clamoring for power and protesting against universities not having adequate arrangements for child care. Here is San Francisco, as I watch the young with their bedrolls hitching rides and see them sprawled on the grimy sidewalks of Market Street and Haight-Ashbury, I am reminded strong of the Great Depression. That the great affluence of the 1960s should have produced a phenomenon so similar to that produced by the Great Depression, only substituting juveniles for grownups, is one more striking absurdity of an absurd age. Never has youth been face to face with more breathtaking opportunities and more deadly influences, and never before has character been so decisive a fact in the survival of the young. Nowadays a ten-year-old must be possessed of a strong character in order not to get irrevocably flawed and blemished. The road from boyhood to manhood has become sievelike; those without the right size of character slip into pitfalls and taps. The society of the young is at present almost as subject to the laws of sheer survival as an animal society. In the Bay Area you can see the young preyed upon by dope ushers, pimps, perverts and thugs. The supposedly most sheltered generation is actually the most exposed.

The present-day young do not seem to go anywhere yet they are impatient. They cannot hide their time because it is not the time of their growth. It seems doubtful whether a generation that clamors for instant fulfillment and instant solutions is capable of creating anything of enduring value. Instantness is a characteristic of the animal world, where action follows perception with the swiftness of a chemical reaction. In man, because of his rudimentary instincts, there is a pause of faltering and grouping, and this pause is the seedbed of images, longings, forebodings and irritations which are the warp and woof of the creative process. Peter Ulich, in The Human career, underlines the social significance of the pause: “Rarely is anything more important for the rise of civilization than the human capacity to put an interval between stimulus and action. For within this interval grow deliberation, perspective, objectivity, all the higher achievements of the reflective mind” (Ibid, pp. 105 – 106).

One also suspects that the young’s exaggerated faith in spontaneity and inspiration is a characteristic of unstretched minds. Creative people believe in hard work. At the core of every genuine talent there is an awareness of the effort and difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. It needs great effort to make an achievement seem effortless (Ibid, p 107). 

Intimidation

Thousands of peaceful Americans in city streets and ghettos, in suburbs and on campuses are meekly submitting to muggers, robbers and hoodlums, and to foulmouthed insults and threats. Few hit back or speak out loudly in outrage. The other day, at Berkeley, a class of 250 students was addressed by an intruding Negro student as mother……. and warned not to come to class next day or have their throats slit. The punk was not thrown out. The professor, a famous teacher, begged the intruder to leave the class. Would it have been overreaction had the class rushed the foul-mouthed punk and thrown him out? Was it sheer humanness that kept the famous professor meek in the face of insults and threats? The students and the professor were plainly afraid. When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot. Our sociologist quacks are warning us that violence is a symptom of a deep-seated social disease; that “it is the most dangerous error to treat symptoms and not get to the root causes of the disease itself.” They deprecate the demand for law and order on the grounds that “those who raise it are not intelligent enough to comprehend fully any complex issue or else have something other in mind than the concern for public safety.” In human affairs it is the shallow mind that refuses to deal with symptoms and is not awed by the mystery of the visible. Those who, when probing man’s behavior, brush aside what’s on the surface, and look for “root causes,” are like those who, when peeling an onion, discard scale after scale, and look for an inner kernel (Ibid, pp. 108-109).

The evidence of our eyes tells us that violence is not the outer manifestation of some dark disorder in the cellars of the mind but the perverse highjinks of unruly punks who think they can get away with it. We have here a virulent form of juvenile delinquency on a large scale. Seventy-five percent of crimes in the streets are committed by adolescents under twenty-one, and the odds are five to one they won’t get caught. (The odds are fourteen to one in stealing and nine to one in housebreaking.) The young thugs stalk older people like animals stalking their prey. They not only rob but brutally beat their victims. They do it for money but also for the excitement. It needs swift, unrelenting justice to take the fun out of violence and make willful juveniles think twice before they let themselves go.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the unprecedented meekness of the majority is responsible for the increase in violence. Social stability is the product of an equilibrium between a vigorous majority and violent minorities. Disorder does not come from an increased inner pressure or from the interaction of explosive ingredients. There is no reason to believe that the nature of the violent minorities is not greatly different from what it was in the past. What has changed is the will and the ability of the majority to react.

It is hard to tell what causes the pervasive timidity. One thinks of video-induced stupor, intake of tranquilizers, fear of not living to enjoy the many new possessions and toys, the example of our betters in cities and on campuses who high-mindedly surrender to threats of violence and make cowardice fashionable (Ibid, pp. 110 – 111).

THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ interest is in providing intuitive insight into where we seem to be in this long journey away from self-knowing. Eric Hoffer’s commentary is presented here in that spirit.

ONCE MORE, WAKING A GIANT

ONCE MORE, WAKING A GIANT

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

© July 3, 2020

Klaus writes,

Jim,

Did you get the article from the WSJ? Racism is still an issue as well anti-Semitism. I read Eric Hoffer a long time ago and still have his book.

I do think all the confederate monuments should be taken down as well as the bases named after confederates should be changed. Those people were traitors, and they were lucky at the end they were not hanged.

The statues and the bases were erected and named during the Jim Crow era. When the mayor of Washington DC painted black lives matter in front of White House Trump did not complain, but when it was going to be painted on street where Trump tower is located, he complained. All police are not evil either, but when they do something bad like kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over 8 minutes even though he had his hands handcuffed behind his back they should be punished.

As I have said before when I first came from Germany at the age of nine, I played with black kids. At one point a bunch of white kids our age started throwing rocks at us, and shouting I assume racial words at us even though my understanding of English was not that great at the time. I was also a teacher when they first integrated the schools. The first year we had about a hundred white kids at Young Junior High and the rest were black. Trump also tweeted that video where the man was shouting white power. Also, I think that the people who were doing the looting used the demonstrations as a back drop.

Klaus

Jim Responds:

Yes, I read this, piece and, sadly, I know it is only too true.  

I also agree criminals were at the ready to exploit the situation.  

Your view is legitimate.  Mine may differ a bit with yours, but it is respectfully submitted, not to refute yours, but to explain mine.

During the 1970s, when I was a police consultant, I witnessed this bias with some police organizations in terms of failure to promote deserving African American and Jewish police officers.  While traveling over a thousand hours with police officer in patrol, I never witnessed anything approaching what happened to George Floyd.  

That said, I did, however, write my Master's thesis on my nine months while embedded in the Fairfax County Police Department, an affluent county just outside Washington, DC.  What brought me to be so situated was a white police officers emptied his revolver on a 27 year old black man in a 7-11 Store in Herndon, killing him, after the man took the police officer’s nightstick, and began to beat the police officer on his head and shoulders.  A riot followed (re: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, University of South Florida, 1976).   

Unlike you, I grew up in a community of 33,000 in Iowa without a single African American in my high school class, although when I was a junior, there was one on my high school football team.  

Less than one-tenth of one percent African Americans lived in Clinton, Iowa in the 1950s, or less than 300.  I never saw them at the Clinton swimming pool, the stores downtown, at the baseball ballpark, or in the neighborhood. 

It was not until I was at the University of Iowa that I had classes and made friends with them.  Throughout my life, I have always had African American friends, and have a granddaughter whose late mother was African American.  Her father, my son, has a tennis club in Jupiter, Florida.  The great African American tennis professional, Venus William, a friend of my son’s, while visiting him, met my six-year old granddaughter, who appears to be white, but who declared to Venus proudly, “I am an African American like you are.”

I had Jewish classmates in high school and at university, and during Christmas vacations, I would hang out at the Clinton County Library every day, studying.  My mother once asked me, “Jimmy, do you see any of your friends at the library?”  I answered, “Only my Jewish friends.”  My mother was quite enamored of the Jewish ethnicity, I think, because Jewish parents in her experience motivated their children to study.  She once said, “If I were not an Irish Catholic, I would prefer being Jewish.”

ONCE AGAIN, WAKING THE GIANT

Comparing the history of the United States to what you remember from Europe, and especially Germany may not be a reliable gauge. 

It is not in most history books, but the Thirteen Colonies that fought the Revolutionary War of Independence from Great Britain, were not all interested in being part of the United States of America. 

Tiny Rhode Island held out before finally abandoning its independence as a “separate country” within the confines of the United States. 

Southern states, of the 13 colonies, also demonstrated similar reluctance (see “The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution: 1788 – 1789” by John J. Ellis, 2015, profiling George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, and their respective roles in The Federalist Papers and the American Constitution). 

Another source, which demonstrates the ambivalence of the 13 colonies, was the War of 1812, in which Great Britain attempted to step into the American chaos of the time and regain control of its original colonies (See “Union1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A. J. Langguth, 2006, and “Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle that shaped America’s Destiny” by Brian Kilmeade, 2017).

We have always been a violent society according to sociologist David Riesman informs us in “The Lonely Crowd,” (1950).  See Chapter One: The American Character & Society. 

The irony is that American society, while seemingly to be individualistic, at one level, and has always been a contentiously conforming society at another, with resistance to that conformity always percolating just below the surface. 

Force harmony, which is compliance, is not the glue that holds a people to a common purpose but managed conflict, which sponsors cooperation.  This is a major theme in itself and can only be mentioned here.

My point is that Southerners did not see themselves as traitors, but as patriots defending States’ Rights in which slavery became the burning issue supplanting this original complaint.  Ken Burns did a television series on the American Civil War with Southern historian Shelby Foote eloquently presenting the States’ Rights justification for the rebellion of the South.

Closer to our own time, Texas and California have threatened to succeed from these United States. 

That said, slavery cannot now, then or ever be justified. 

In this era of the pandemic, we might just be awakening the sleeping giant in the American electorate.  Andrew Jackson did it in his presidency, which changed the presidency forever (See “America in the Age of Jackson” by David S. Reynolds, 2008) and Japan did it once again on December 7, 1941 bombing the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. 

Jim       

PS I am using Eric Hoffer quotations from his books to illustrate The Fisher Paradigm©™ in a new way vis-à-vis the Pandemic.  Stay tuned.

   

CONVERSATION WITH A READER ON SUBTEXT

A Conversation with a Reader Subtext!

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

© June 28, 2020 (March 19, 2016, originally published) 

A READER WRITES 

So...am I correct that you are saying that the subtext we all carry with us will impact how we view the content and context of our current life/affairs? 

It seems to me that the subtext, if that is correct, is the background of our lives and will be different depending on the time and place of our development. Consequently, though you and I are both from small town mid-west up-bringing, your subtext as someone whose formative years were during the late depression and WWII will be different from mine which results from growing up in the 1950s. As one psychologist put it years ago – “who we are depends on where we were when...” If that is all even close to what you mean by subtext let me know.

DR. FISHER

That is precisely what I mean by subtext.

But subtext is more than many faceted. Subtext applies equally to race, religion, nationality and culture, indeed, civilization, as they are all protean to its construction.

Subtext relates to us individually and collectively, and is marinated with our distinct histories. We bring our subtext in greetings to those with whom we interact and relate, and ultimately assimilate without conscious awareness of how aspects of that exposure finds its way into our own subtext.

In the end, we are always richer for the exposure and attention although that may not seem so at first.

Humanity is one body. Subtext may differ but it rises from that same source. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes that no subtext is superior to another but all can be identified through events.

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and etymologist E. O. Wilson developed the theory of "sociobiology," claiming that our subtext remains with those who follow. It surfaces quite dramatically and sometimes radically when continuity leads to discontinuity to disruption to catastrophe, or simply to mock catastrophe in comedic relief.  The point is that subtext is not usually apparent.

The stock market crash of 1929 and in 1987, and again in 2008 was evidence of the subtext surfacing and going awry in mass hysteria.  Ironically, people who had no money to lose talked as if they did.  It was an opportunity for subtext to be on display.

On the other hand, the current divisiveness in the Republican Party is playing out as dramaturgic relief as The Donald (Trump) exposes the hypocrisy in subtext. His popular bombast reveals an uptight nation comfortable and complacent in its denial.

Everything is subtext to behavior but most people do not understand that.

Occasionally, over the years, I've published "Fragments of a Philosophy." It was quoted in a missive on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) August 30, 2009, titled "The Subtext of Life and Its Meaning." It remains the most popular piece I have ever posted:

“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 gone now. 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.

“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they are. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people, 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, a drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories.  “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 psychopathologic behaviors occur because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their lives and therefore 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 READER

What is happening in the world is that at any given time the current content and context are what develop the subtext that will be the life background baggage for those who are at that time in their formative years.

DR. FISHER: 

The subtext can include baggage, but it is not background.  Oh, no!  It is always there working its ways to the fore but just not always apparent.  In any case, acknowledged or not, it influences events.  

The subtext is what is.  It is what drives events.  

The source of subtext is the subconscious (individual or collective) from which the content and context of behaviors are displayed and ultimately managed or mismanaged.  

You could liken subtext to values if you like or collective history but only as a gauge.  The subtext is there, fully operational, but not apparent.  By that I mean that during periods of order surface consistency give the mocking sense that all is well when it never is.

Great disruptions, personal or societal, bring the subtext to prominence and to the confusion of those in charge, who are so schooled in denial that "what is" does not get much attention.  We have seen this in love and war, politics and religion, especially in politics and religion.    

It is during these periods of disruption, such as our current "Age of Technology," that subtext is neither acknowledged nor challenged.  It is avoided by more wondrous technology.

To be fair, there has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300.  So, rather than acknowledge subtext, and deal with its root attributes, we call this the "Age of Anxiety" and develop drugs to treat the condition, or writes books to describe it, and on and on.  

We valiantly avoid doing anything constructive about it, which would start by addressing the nature and function of subtext relative to the current age.   

THE READER

Hitler had not attacked the US and yet we declared war on Germany and in less than 4 years the US alone killed at least 2 million Germans.  In the 1940s there was no question in our collective mind that Germans were bad and in need of killing.  Hence it was a short war.  

DR. FISHER: 

Oh, dear!  That great justification, attrition!  

Here it is an expression of content (numbers) and context (dead Nazis) as it was also used in Vietnam, but without any attention to the events (including Vietnam history), which were driving subtext.  I will have more to say about WWII shortly. 

The US military routinely published its daily successes in Vietnam in terms of "body count" (Vietnamese killed) on the television nightly news as if a war of attrition was the answer to a war without a purpose.

That attention shows a total ignorance of subtext, and yet no one in power or public life at the time seemed to see the absurdity.

The French ruled Vietnam for more than a century, the subtext of a colonial power.  When France fell to Germany in WWII in 1940, this colonial power base was disrupted.  Finally, in 1954, France lost the First French Indo-China War, and Vietnam received its independence, being divided into North and South Vietnam as if you could separate a common people without disruption. 

Not surprisingly, that solution aggravated the problem of the subtext of Vietnam as a common people wanting total independence from foreign influence.  

President Kennedy stepped into this South Vietnam quagmire in support of a corrupt South Vietnam regime with American advisers and trainers.  

From that point forward it became a descent into the subtext of hell with more than 55,000 Americans in the military losing their lives in a cause that history hasn't treated kindly.  A generation of young Americans who protested against the war and refused to join in the fight were consumed in subtext and eventually stopped its advance.  

The subtext has a very long pull from the collective or historical subconscious of a people.  The book I'm now writing, NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, is an attempt to give subtext to the American madness that currently dominates the content and context of our times, which is optimism in the face of reality of a pessimistic future.

To give you a closer sense of how pervasive subtext can be to history, consider WWII.  It all started long before even WWI.

Up until WWI, the aristocracy controlled every aspect of life of the European Western world.  The pull of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, alone, is impressive.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was a grandchild. Other grandchildren included queens of Greece, Norway, Romania, Spain and Sweden and the Tsarina Alexandra of Russia.  

WWI broke up this comfy aristocratic status but not its aristocratic subtext.  We are still feeling it to this day.

By the end of WWI, the high aristocracy collapsed.  The tsar, a relative of King George V of Great Britain, was overthrown and he and his royal family murdered by the Bolsheviks.  The great disruption didn't end there.

In the 1920s, the royal families across Europe had to find new ways to make a living as the aristocracy was in a state of collapse.  Take Germany's aristocracy as palpable evidence.  By 1938, nearly a fifth of the senior ranks of Heinrich Himmler's SS Gestapo were filled by holders of titles of nobility. The subtext goes ever deeper.  

The Third Reich of Hitler's Germany had a cozy relationship with King George and Queen Mary, current Queen Elizabeth's parents.  Her father even taught her the Nazi salute as a child.  

Many of the English aristocracy were fond of Hitler's Germany and believed he had restored political and social order.  They also saw him as a perfect foil to communism.  That was the content and context of the times with many with royal ties advocating an Anglo-German alliance.  

Great Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, gave an appeasement speech (Munich Agreement) in 1938 essentially conceding the Czech Republic to Hitler while ceremoniously declaring, "We have peace in our time."

This speech was given one year to the month before Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, launching WWII.

Appeasement was but a mask to the prevailing subtext of those in power in the British government.  Many prominent Brits were willing to make huge concessions to Hitler to avoid war.  One man understood the subtext of events and their meaning, and he saved the day for the West.  

Were it not for Winston Churchill being elected Prime Minister, it is difficult to imagine Great Britain not capitulating to the will of Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain resigned eight months after the start of WWII, the war going badly at the time, with Churchill taken office on May 10, 1940, and having to resist Nazi sympathizers in Great Britain from the first. 

THE READER: 

In the new century, based on changed subtext we have a very different context and content.  We accept Islam as the religion of peace and are careful to sort out the bad Muslims who have hi-jacked the religion, from the good ones.  The war being, for that reason, more nuanced is longer but we are killing far fewer.  That is not business as usual for us – that is progress.

DR. FISHER:

I hope what you imply is true, that our subtext reaches such maturity.  It is possible.

The People of Islam are victims of history as were the Japanese, and as are we all. Demagogues throughout history have adulterated the subtext of a people to present aspects of subtext in a twisted content and context to further their aims.  

Yet, the subtext of a people's history can be ripped from the bowels of their beliefs to present ugly aspects of that subtext.  No history is without this occasional momentum, not even ours.

The al-Qaeda terrorists present themselves as fighting a holy war, but what they want is power and the pride and identity of that power with their people. They are using religion the way Roman Catholicism justified the Inquisition, or forcing Jews to become Christians, and the list goes on.  No people or history is without the ugly side of subtext.    

Interestingly, your last word is "progress," seeing tolerance for Islam and Muslims a sign of progress.  I see it as a common sign of decency for differences. 

Everyone thinks progress is good, at least most Americans. General Electric once boasted "Progress is our most important product."  Progress is as deceptive a word as is Islam or Christianity.  African Americans understand what I mean by this.

Everyone influenced by such words thinks they understand and are simply dealing with the content and context of matters when it is subtext that is ruling the day, and not necessarily wisely.  

For example, Spain wouldn't be as Spain is today without the invasion of the Moors from North Africa in the eight century.  Nor would Europe be Europe without the Moors who would dominate well into the sixteenth century.  The Moors brought with them art, literature, architecture, mathematics, science and culture to the continent, a culture of black men who were then called "Negros" and who also taught discipline, military expertise and tolerance.   

Shakespeare would capture something of this with his "Othello" in the sixteenth century.

My views, I must confess, were influenced by a nun.  I had the good fortune of having Sister Mary Cecile as my seventh and eighth grade teacher in grammar school at St. Patrick's School, who taught me about the Moors and about their influence and culture.  It has never left me.  

No, I have no love for terrorists of any stripe, but I have no fear of a new mosque going up in my neighborhood, or of a family of Muslims moving in next door.  

Thank you for stirring up my little gray cells.  Keep thinking and reflecting.

And always be well,

Jim