NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND - TWENTY

 Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land - TWENTY

Separation by cultural and political persuasion can become a self-imprisonment of another kind.

 

Progress and the Great Divide!

 

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

Originally © August 27, 2016/August 17, 2021

 

The highly civilized apes swung gracefully from bough to bough; the Neanderthaler was uncouth and bound to earth.  The apes saturated and playful lived in sophisticated playfulness, or caught fleas in philosophic contemplation; the Neanderthaler trampled gloomily through the world, banging around with clubs.  The apes looked down on him amusedly from their treetops and threw nuts at him.  Sometimes horror seized them: they ate fruits and tender plants with delicate refinement; the Neanderthaler devoured raw meat, he slaughtered animals and his fellows.  He cut down trees that had always stood, moved rocks from their time-hallowed place, transgressed every law and tradition of the jungle.  He was uncouth, cruel, without animal dignity – from the point of view of the highly civilized apes, a barbaric relapse of history. 

Arthur Koestler (1905 – 1983), Darkness at Noon (1940)

 

THE MASK OF CIVILITY

By the 18^th century across the American and European landscape, great houses and formal gardens materialized, slaves worked the stately homes of Washington and Jefferson and the aristocracy of Europe.  The rights and movement of ordinary citizens were rigidly controlled.  Certificates of the movement was necessary to move elsewhere, and they were rarely granted, whereas Negro slaves had no rights at all.

Paupers in receipt of welfare were obliged to wear a large “P” on their clothing, similar to the “Star of David” people of Jewish heritage had to wear in their outer clothing in Nazi Germany in the 20^th century.

In England, under the Poor Act 1697, paupers in receipt of parish relief were required to wear a badge of blue or red cloth on the shoulder of the right sleeve openly and visibly, to discourage people from collecting relief unless they were desperate, as while many would be willing to secretly collect relief, few people would be willing to do so if required to publicly wear the “badge of shame.”

The yellow badge that Jews were required to wear in parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, and later in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe during the 20th century, was an equally effective “badge of shame” as well as identification of the person.





The yellow badge that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany as a badge of shame



Even more egregious, in some instances, people were forced to go barefoot contrasting their appearance with that of others. This was used to showcase their submission to authority as well as to distinctly lower their status incidental to enslavement, captivity, or imprisonment. So shamed, people so identified had no rights, civil or otherwise. Not surprisingly, this practice was widely used in the antebellum South in the United States before the “First Industrial Revolution” and American Civil War (1861 – 1865).

Meanwhile, the new landowner class was finding agriculture highly profitable. Wheat output increased 75 percent, barley by 68 percent, oats by 65 percent, and livestock by more than 25 percent. Since the year 1500, yields on crops across Europe had doubled. Moreover, a cotton farmer in the American southern states could not produce cotton fast enough to satisfy Great Britain’s manufacturing demands. With affluence, southern plantations owners built estates to rival those of the aristocracy in Europe.




Typical antebellum plantation in the American South before the American Civil War



Rationalism had triumphed over disorderly nature with man dedicated to reshaping nature to reflect his sense of harmony and purpose. This was evident in the continuing attempts of the affluent to perfect and beautify nature with new landscaping techniques by creating elaborate gardens.

This sometimes meant the removal of peasant hovels that spoiled the view. The new 18th-century catchword that would never go away was “progress.” Soon to follow progress were the alliterative catchwords “precision” and “perfection.” The idea was deliberate. Nature shouldn’t be accepted and enjoyed “as is.” Nature required innovation with the application of rational thought guided by mechanistic principles to see to its improvement.

New tools made it possible for this implementation. Innovative agriculture was a reinvigoration of the medieval techniques of Benedictine monks who believed humankind was placed on earth to create the paradise God had envisioned, which authorized man to dominate and control nature. Alas, this was a cartoon reading of Genesis, which was always known as a story of myth, a poetic rendering of truths that could not be assessed in any other way. It was only with the rise of modern science that the Genesis myth came to be misunderstood as an explanatory thesis.

The emergence of the Puritans, who believed the Bible literally, took things a little further. The puritans were never a formally defined sect or movement, or religious division of Protestantism. The word “Puritan” was rarely used to describe the people after the turn of the 18th century. Some Puritans became incorporated into the Church of England rejecting Roman Catholicism while some were absorbed into several other Protestant sects that emerged in the late 17th and early 18th century in the Americas and Great Britain. Congregationalists, considered a part of the Reformed tradition, claim to have descended from the Puritans. So, Puritanism isn’t a monolithic group.

What Puritans held in common was that human nature could and should be tamed. In that same sense, Puritans believed personal desires could be controlled. Work improved character. Unremitting toil was humanity’s lot and the key to salvation. Persistent application to this routine was proof of an obedient spirit. The Puritan work ethic was so successful in generating wealth that it precipitated the financial revolution of the 18th century across Europe and America, and with it came another tool to organize and control nature through society with economic capitalism.

Capital or money was a new kind of exciting tool because its capacity for self-increase was unlimited. This accrued perfectly with the new scientific materialism of an infinite universe. Science and capitalism were thus locked in the progress of a new dynamic.

The financial institutions of the time were primarily inspired by the work of John Locke who reconciled in a new way the concepts of universal law, dominion of nature, and profit. Locke saw the growing vegetation and the movement of the heavens as part of a designed universe working together according to Natural Law with the world constructed according to reason and order. Therefore, God’s design for nature was a match with His design for man. God put man on earth to do something. So, by discovering Natural Law, and choosing to act according to his cosmos duty, man was following the Divine Plan of God as a result of reasoned thought rather than blind faith.

Self-interest, above all else, would ensure that people would obey laws aimed to preserve private property and the wealth of individuals. The chief reason for men to unite into a commonwealth was for the preservation of that property.

The next world-altering reality appeared first in Amsterdam. The Dutch East India Company had been set up in the 17th century and looked for increased commercial opportunities in the Far East. Dutch political authorities established a new exchange bank to raise and administer the flow of capital to fund that purpose. This new banking system was so successful that it was soon adopted by the state becoming a highly profitable monopoly of the exchange.

With banking now part of the government, this new system of commerce offered unprecedented financial security. Funds poured into Holland from abroad. The exchange was able to provide merchants with the foreign currency they needed for expenses and settlement of bills. The bank paid all depositors’ bills by transferring written notes for the amount to be debited from their deposits without actually moving any precious metal. The deposits gave Dutch currency the kind of stability that rapidly made Amsterdam the financial capital of Europe.

Capitalistic finance was increasingly generating major changes in social behavior as wages altered the nature of work. This in turn altered the relationship between workers and employers and introduced “the great divide,” which was between the generators of currency, the workers, and the controllers of currency, the money changers.

As the system matured, it took the control path of technology. Manipulation of resources and capital became inevitably fragmented, which was quickly apparent in the production process.

Work was subdivided into jobs and the value of these jobs was further subdivided into unskilled workers in repetitive work functions, and skilled workers with flexible functions and requirements. Workers were now treated as units of production, no longer individuals, meaning they could be manipulated as interchangeable parts as if cogs in a giant machine. Workers acclimated to the machine designation as they were limited to the task at hand with little acquaintance beyond that work. A new kind of work-life was being created that of mindless repetition of meaningless tasks set to the tempo and speed of the machine with the worker powerless to do anything about it.

This new way of working was canonized in 1776 with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” which became the factory handbook for owners. Smith used the idea of Natural Law, as did Locke, developing a systematic analysis of economic factors in the creation of wealth. The true wealth of a nation, he reasoned, was its labor force.

“Cut and Control” economics was here, and ready to take off. All that was needed was a new means of production that would make use of unskilled labor. No longer was there the time or the inclination for the old style of apprenticeship and the patient orientation and training of the pre-industrial guilds.

Alas, the new means of production were found! The steam engine was invented and “The Industrial Revolution” was underway at full bolt as the Deus ex machine. Nothing was impossible now!



THE GREAT DIVIDE WIDENS

The Industrial Revolution not only widened the gap between work and the worker but also between technologists with the ill-informed public.

Scientific innovations in chemistry, biology, physics, and engineering were rapidly changing the public’s life in unexpected ways. Serendipitous discoveries were being made nearly every day often quite accidentally. At the beginning of the 19th century, the new gas light used coal gas. This was derived from the coal coking process which in turn created huge amounts of coal tar. During an experiment with this coal tar in 1856, chemist William Henry Perkin (1838 – 1907) discovered mauve, a substance with dyeing properties. This led to the foundation of the aniline dye industry.

At the time, the technology of chemistry was still a primitive industry although the atomic theory was accepted and major chemical elements had been discovered, as well as techniques to analyze some elements in compounds. It was still difficult for fledgling chemists, however, to determine the precise arrangement of the elements in compounds.




Factory workers on the line

In this climate, William Henry Perkin, a 15-year-old boy, precocious for his age, entered the Royal College of Chemistry in London where he studied under August Wilhelm von Hoffman (1818 – 1892), a German chemist and the first director of the Royal College of Chemistry. Hoffman had published a hypothesis on how it might be possible to synthesize quinine, an expensive natural substance much in demand for the treatment of malaria.

Perkin, working under Hoffman, embarked on a series of experiments to try to achieve this end. During the Easter vacation in 1856, only 18-years-of-age, alone in the rough laboratory in his apartment on the top floor of his home on Cable Street in East London, he performed some further experiments and made an accidental discovery.

He found that aniline could be partly transformed into a crude mixture which when extracted with alcohol produced a substance with intense purple color. Already interested in painting and photography, Perkin immediately became excited about the results, carrying on further trial with his friend Arthur Church and his brother Thomas.

Since these experiments were not part of his work for Dr. Hoffman on quinine which had been his assignment, the trio carried them out in a hut in Perkin’s garden to keep them secret from the chemical director. They satisfied themselves that they might be able to scale up production of the purple substance and commercialize it as a dye, which they did and called mauveine.

This was to prove one of the first successful experiments in producing a synthetic substitute to replace a natural substance. Moreover, natural dyes were not stable and washed out of clothes or faded when exposed to light. Demonstrating the entrepreneurial spirit, they sent samples of their dye to a dye works in Perth, Scotland. They received promising results about mauveine’s stability after constant washing and exposure to light. Perkin filed for a patent in August 1856, only five months after his 18th birthday. England was in the cradle of the Industrial Revolution and Perkin was about to become a very influential, rich, and successful man in this new era.

That said technology had inadvertently created a new problem. Industrialization and cheap food had resulted in overcrowding and unemployment in burgeoning cities and towns across Great Britain. The growing delinquencies of out-of-work young people indicated the clear need for increased municipal control.

So, new monitorial schools were set up ostensibly to educate but were designed specifically to train children to attain rudimentary skills that had already been used to train and discipline their parents in factories. Unfortunately, the teaching of spelling by dictation reduced literacy and arithmetical skills by limiting numbers to rote memorization. It was pure exploitation in providing children with the bare minimum needed to perform factory work.

In arithmetic class, ciphers were read aloud to the class and the sums were repeated in an iterative process similar to factory work. While the explicit educational agenda was reading, writing and arithmetic, the implicit disciplinarian agenda was punctuality, conformity, submission, obedience, politeness, and passivity.

This programming would spread like a poison through the cultural psyche of the malleable and impressionistic minds of children, giving them a distaste for education that has trickled down to the present. Small wonder that the hard wiring of an out-of-touch and out-of-sync mass population across the Western world plagues 21st-century students more than 200 years later.

Incredibly, the most successful educational initiative of the late 18th century was the Sunday school. This was introduced to neutralize disruptive behavior in the home, school, and workplace. Sunday schools started in 1785 to clear the Sunday streets of rampaging children with nothing to do. Dangerous libertarians were spreading the idea, at the time, that discipline was not needed in the wake of the French Revolution (1789). These schools were only opened on Sundays so as not to interfere with young people’s weekday work in the factories.

Victorian society began using church ceremonies for indoctrination purposes with the hymn books now carrying powerful propaganda messages. Sunday school started in England spread quickly to the American continent with long-term liturgical and social influence well into the 20th century.






Typical 18th century Sunday school class in front of the schoolhouse

Hymns exhorted the singers to run straight races, endure suffering nobly, play the game fairly, and be decent and honest. Each group was encouraged to accept its social station meekly, while hard work and social acquiescence were emphasized.

Many hymns admonished believers against involvement in behavior that might disqualify them from heaven. Take the English hymn written by Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) titled “Father in Heaven.” This hymn included all the major control slogans: patriotism, racism, and the urge to charity, the value of work and obedience, and a call to arms in defense of the realm. To wit:

Land of our birth, we pledge to thee Our love and toil in years to be; when we are grown and take our place as men and women with our race; the land of our birth, our faith, our pride, for that dear sake our fathers died; oh motherland we pledge to thee, head, heart, and hand through the years to be.

THE SUNDAY SCHOOL FUNCTION

Sunday schools in England were first set up in the 1780s to provide education to working children. William King first started a Sunday school in Dursley, Gloucestershire, aimed to teach the youngsters reading, writing, and ciphering, and knowledge of the Bible.

By 1785, 250,000 English children were attending Sunday school. There were 5,000 in Manchester alone. By 1895, the “Society for the Establishment and Promotion of Sunday Schools” had distributed 91,915 spelling books, 24,232 Testaments, and 5,360 Bibles.

The Sunday school movement was cross-denominational, and through subscription built large buildings that could host public lectures as well as classrooms. In the early days, adults would attend the same classes as the infants, as each was instructed in basic reading. In some towns, the Methodists withdrew from the large Sunday schools and built their own. The Anglicans set up their own “National Schools” that would act as Sunday schools and day schools. These schools were the precursors to a national system of education.

The role of the Sunday school changed with the Educational Act of 1870. In the 1920s, these schools promoted sports. It was common for teams to compete in a Sunday School League. They were social centers hosting amateur dramatics and concert parties. By the 1960s, the term “Sunday School” could refer to the building and not to any education classes. By the 1970s even the largest Sunday school at Stockport (England) had been demolished. Sunday school became the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays by various denominations (source: Wikipedia).

In the 18th century England, education was reserved for a minority and was not compulsory. The wealthy educated their children privately at home by a governess, tutors for older boys of the same class, or these boys of every age were sent away to boarding school, which were confusedly known as “public schools” (as they are to this day). Daughters from such classes were left to learn from their mothers or their father’s library on their own. The children of factory workers got no formal education, typically working alongside their parents in factories six days a week often as many as 13 hours a day.

In 1781, after prompting from his friend William King who was already running several Sunday schools in Dursley, Robert Raikes, editor of the Gloucester Journal saw the plight of children living in the Gloucester slums and opened a school on Sunday, the only day these boys and girls living in the slums and working in the factories could attend. Using the Bible as their textbook, he taught them to read and write.

Within four years over 250,000 children were attending schools on Sunday throughout England. 1784 was an important year, with many new schools opening, including the interdenominational Stockport Sunday School with 5,000 budding scholars in 1805. By the late 19th century, this was the largest such school in the world. By 1831, it was reported that attendance at Sunday schools across Great Britain had grown to 1.2 million. Robert Raikes' schools were seen as the first schools of the English state system.

The work of Sunday schools in the industrial cities was increasingly supplemented by ragged schools (charitable provision for the industrial poor), and eventually by publicly funded education under late 19th-century school boards. Sunday schools continued alongside such increasing educational provision and new forms also developed such as the Socialist Sunday Schools in the late 19th century.

THE MYTH OF MIDDLE-CLASS ECONOMIC PARITY

The Industrial Revolution drove country folk off the land and sucked them into the squalor of newly created industrial towns. These towns couldn’t keep up with the flow or the demands of infrastructure requirements in terms of roads, bridges, businesses, or sanitation and living conditions.

The effect of rapidly rising populations of factory workers and the new problem of unemployment began to express itself in civil disturbances. Workers and their families were obliged to live in often unspeakable conditions. The factory regime ignored the problem giving factory workers no freedom, education, or access to political power.

Conditions were rife for human combustion in the form of plant sabotage, thievery, work slowdowns, work stoppage, and finally riots. The government addressed the problem by cracking down, passing legislation, and dispensing propaganda. This was the formula in 18th century Great Britain quickly spreading to 19th century America.

In tandem with the government, the so-called “middle class” led Evangelical Movement Moral Crusade (EMMC) in England preached discipline and self-control to the lower classes. It cited them as the aggressors, not the victims, as the perpetrators of discord, not the violated and exploited. The lower classes failed to know their place and were put in it with draconian finality.

God had taken on a human face as the employer and he was not happy with his employees. His harsh authority was for everyone’s good, and only those willing to adapt and adjust to this fact were worthy of being saved from the wrath of God.

[Researching a book I was writing on my youth growing up in the Mississippi River town of Clinton, Iowa, I was staying with my mother. I came back from having conducted several interviews with people of my era and was met at the door by my mother, hands on her hips, a defiant look in her eyes, thrusting a red notebook of mind in my face, which had been left on the coffee table. “I read this!” she fairly shouted. “You describe us as working-class poor.” I said, “Mom that is what we were.” She walked away, then turned around and said, “We were middle class!” And with that, she retired to her bedroom and didn’t speak to me the rest of the night. Should you read, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel” (2003), you will see unmistakable evidence that we were members of the working-class poor. But to admit to being of that class was a mark of shame as if it were our fault and not society’s gift to us.]

But factory workers were not without their advocates. An English social commentator William Cobbett (1763 – 1835), a journalist and reformer wrote fierce pieces against the cavalier treatment of the working class poor under the byline “Peter Porcupine.” He charged that the real aim of the movers and shakers of society was “To teach the people to starve without making a noise, and to keep the poor from cutting the throats of the rich.”






William Cobbett, portrait in oils, possibly by George Cooke, 1831, National Portrait

William Cobbett believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm laborers. He used provocative language such as borough-mongers, cushy parasites, and "tax-eaters" relentlessly. He was also against the Corn Law, which was a tax on imported grain, as corn was a staple of the poor.

Early in his career, he was a loyalist supporter of King and Country: but later he became radicalized, successfully publishing his radical views, which led to the Reform Bill of 1832. At the same time, he became one of the two Members of Parliament (MPs) for the newly enfranchised borough of Oldham.

Paradoxically, although not a Catholic, he became a fierce advocate of Catholic Emancipation in Great Britain. It wasn’t always easy to predict his views, but his opposition to authority stayed constant. He wrote many polemics, on subjects from political reform to religion, but is best known for his book from 1830, Rural Rides, which is still in print today and listed on www.amazon.com.

The reason this book is still in print, I believe, is because we have never gotten beyond its polemical message, that is, remedies for agricultural distress or an understanding of the fundamental nature of the rural mindset and perspective.

Cobbett in 1821 embarked on a series of journeys by horseback through the countryside of Southeast England and the English Midlands and wrote about it from the farmer’s point of view as a social reformer. Rural Rides documents the early 19th-century countryside and its people as well as giving free vent to Cobbett’s opinions.

It should be mentioned that twice Cobbett was prosecuted for libel, then imprisoned for two years for his criticisms of flogging, which was then a common practice in the army. He was also forced to defend himself for his seditious views and did so successfully. After the First Reform Bill was passed, largely due to his diligence, restoring some rights to the working class, he ended his days in Parliament as a member of the Oldham district.

The zeal of Evangelicals resulted in its members infiltrating banking institutions as well as the government. Many served in the armed forces seeing themselves in the front ranks for social stability. Evangelicalism, the movement Cobbett had opposed, with its language of war, conflict against evil, and its stress on order and discipline helped to channel dangerous social dissatisfaction into more acceptable patriotic directions.

To the radical left, which included Cobbett, these moral reforms were nothing more than propaganda for the authoritarian and repressive industrial system, a means designed by the forces of law, order, and manufacturing to create a sober, disciplined, obedient, and non-confrontational working class. The radical left’s reaction to this was to organize.

By 1818, a loosely formed organization of working-class workers penetrated manufacturing areas in cities and towns across the English midlands in the North, forming networks of clubs for political discussion and agitation. The government struck back at the grassroots level by implementing an educational system where it would face the least well-organized opposition and could program young minds to appreciate its agenda. It was an economic war of a new kind.

This programming started in England then throughout Europe and into the United States would be so effective that today, some 200 years later, the work climate in most organizations differs little with this approach to the problem.

Human Resources (HR) has replaced the Evangelicals, but with a similar agenda. HR’s policies and procedures, incentives, and entitlements are meant to control workers in the workplace under the umbrella of hierarchical management with its sublime authority to do pretty much whatever it desires. Moreover, as a consequence of this structure, workers are passively oriented, conforming, dependent on management, and counter dependent on the workplace for their total well-being.

The consequence of this “Cut & Control” process in an otherwise sophisticated technological environment is that most workers in the 21st century are handicapped with “learned helplessness” in arrested development while suspended in blind obedience and terminally adolescence. Paradoxically, while the workforce has changed from 90 percent essentially untrained manual blue-collar workers to 90 percent college-trained professionals, the mystique of dependency is still a shroud that masks actual work in most workplaces. German observers call this “the American disease” (Amerikas Krankheit) because although denied it dictates the structure and function of work, and therefore organizational behavior. From Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (2015):

Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum swings from centralization to decentralization and is more like a yo-yo contest with no clear winners and only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.

Just as we have the myth of the professional class today, it was the middle class in the 19th century when authorities created the myth of its eminence only to further entrench its conformity and obedience by engineering its complicity to draconian practices. The complex commercial, industrial and institutional organization did this by playing on its collective fear that the vast formless underclass was a threat to its comfort, security, and stability.

Today, in the United States and Western Europe, the threat is immigration, but whatever the threat, real or imagined, it is used as a lever to divide and conquer the masses into conformity, which never seems to go out of style.

In 1884, the British Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall (1842 – 1924), known for his concept of “time analysis,” and whose “Principles of Economics” (1890) is still a standard textbook today, suggested that labor camps of the underclass be set up to siphon off this detritus.

Crowded into slums where decency and healthful existence was impossible, Marshall regarded this vast population as a sea of degenerates that could become a major threat to society. There was little compassion in this utopian view of an ideal society as he saw the poor and disadvantaged as simply an embarrassment. This was a way of putting that embarrassment out of sight and out of mind.

American financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837 – 1913), better known as “J. P. Morgan,” got together a private army to shoot it out with troops hired by his competitors such as financier Jay Gould (1836 – 1882), who incidentally was called “the most hated man in America” for causing the “Black Friday” stock market crash of September 1869 along with his associate Jim Fisk (1835 – 1872). They were commonly referred to (as a group) as the “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age (1870 – 1900), a term coined by Mark Twain in his book “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873).

The business world wasn’t much different than it is now. Speculation was rampant in the 19th century as railroads were the Internet companies of the 1800s. Their stocks were overvalued being one factor in the crash of 1869.

During the 1800s, New York City was a tangle of country lanes, empty fields, forests, squatters’ sheds, factories, and dry docks on the Hudson River, alongside elegant sprawling estates of the Morgan’s, Gould’s, Fisk’s and Tweed’s.

By the mid-19th century, the city had developed multiple personalities which were reflected in the city maps. Big estates existed side-by-side working-class hovels, apartments, and modest homes while shantytowns infested with gangs marked the perimeter of the city sprawl.

Meanwhile, as crooked as city street thieves were on a modest scale, there were politicians as criminals on a slicker scale such as William Magear “Boss” Tweed (1823 – 1878). He was head of the corrupt Tammy Hall Democratic political machine that flanked out from the city center to smoky bars and elegant dining rooms in the shadow of the infamous hill of Gallows Heights in New York City with a history of hangings since the days of the American Revolutionary War.

At the height of his influence, Tweed was the third-largest landowner in New York City, a director of the Erie Railroad, the Tenth National Bank, and the New York Printing Company and proprietor of the Metropolitan Hotel. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1852 and the New York Country Board of Supervisors in 1858, the year he headed the Tammy Hall political machine. He was elected to the New York State Senate in 1867, but his greatest influence came from the people he appointed to the various boards and commissions, as he controlled the political patronage system. Therefore, he influenced nearly every major engineering or building project in New York City.

According to Tweed’s biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman:

It's hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed's system ... The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury, and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing, and organization.




William Magear “Boss” Tweed of Tammy Hall renowned

Nothing was too small for “Boss” Tweed. So obsessed with profiting from his activities, in small neighborhood development, he pocketed “$6,000 in kickbacks in the sale to the city of a piece of property worth $35.

PROGRESS AS MYTH IN FULL RETREAT

By the late 19th century, every Western nation had come to accept the requirement of technical training and had set up the necessary institutions. This also was to increase the influence of the state in the life of the individual. Still, Western societies realized that the educational system was inadequate for the demands of technology as it seemed to constantly run ahead of its ability to keep current.

Railroads were creating a huge and impossible demand for engineers, technicians, and technologists; the same was true in manufacturing, mining, shipping, and banking. The unsettling fact is that technological demands would continue to outstrip the educational output from then on, and even into our present day.

Meanwhile, general technology and control methods of the “Industrial Revolution” were changing the shape of society on a wider scale. New industries first disrupted and then destroyed traditional career tracks, especially in the rural social structure. Previously, individuals had lived in close-knit extended families in country communities where social mobility was limited, while the authority of parents was clear. Moreover, relationships between siblings were strong with most expecting to work where their parents had worked. The motivation to work was little more than providing for a subsistence existence.

New industrial towns cut off village settlers from nature and the comfort and identity with which nature had given. This removal from the land, especially for young people, took away their sense of place and space. It isolated the individual from a connection with tradition, robbing him of the self-assurance that this connection had provided.

From this fragmentation, obligations became confused and responsibilities disparaged as traditional responsibilities were no longer clear cut; nor were the roles of the individual in the family and the community.

As parents were forced to leave the land and the familiar to move into the city and work in factories, the role of parents moved from the center of their children’s existence to the periphery, first in subtle ways and then more demonstratively as children came to ignore and distrust their parents, leaving them essentially to fend for themselves without a reliable center or moral compass.

The factory system introduced cash wages. Now, it was not what you put into work, as it had been working the land, or the satisfaction derived from that experience, but what you took out of work in the form of cash.

The factory system placed a premium on vigor, strength, resilience, and predictable behavior, in other words, a focus on the young and the virile. This impaired and then destroyed the authority of the old. The cult of youth would come to be narcissistic and self-indulgent.

This veering from the norm was modest in the 19th century compared to the 20th century. Parents in full retreat, unable to control their children, would come to mock their children in dress, speech, values, lifestyles, and conduct, throwing society’s implicit moral and behavioral code out the window moving ever so close to Nowhere Land and strangely close in identity to Nowhere Man.

[Urban communities changed in the 20th century after WWI, frolicking to what was called “The Roaring Twenties,” then blunted by the sobering experience of The Great Depression of the 1930s, only to rediscover new momentum and spiked enthusiasm with WWII, followed by the synthetic economic boom of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, while the vaunted middle class thrived on fool’s gold, only to be interrupted from that false sense of security with the Vietnam War, with draft aged young men saying, “Hell no, I won’t go” (to Vietnam), flying off to Canada to avoid the draft, while the Flower Children left behind formed communes and gravitated to weird religions chanting on psychedelic highs, “Make love, not war!” Vietnam is history, but not Iraq and Afghanistan, nor such trouble spots as Syria, Iran, and North Korea if not Russia and China, but while the economy is tanking and the national debt is spiraling no one seems to be all that concerned early in the 21st century, as seemingly no one in charge.]

Urban communities flourished after WWII as the middle class left the city centers and moved to the suburbs, creating a vacuum in which the disenfranchised minorities flocked and filled this void bringing with them their poverty, hopelessness, anxiety, and angst for the lack of jobs and job skills, lack of education and other support systems, and so crime and drug trafficking thrived as if that was the original design. African Americans, immigrants, and refugees took over the city centers of Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York City only to find they were proprietors of Nowhere Land.

Then late in the 20th and early in the 21st century, affluent suburbanites returned to the inner cities with reckless abandon, driving the minorities once again out of their homes, razing them, and putting up mammoth high-rise cathedrals of monolithic steel and glass or stylized townhouses in the architectural splendor of earlier periods, bulldozing the collapsing buildings of leaking roofs, fading paint, broken windows and crowded rooms with rapacious glee with not a thought about the displaced status of houseless and homeless.

Notice that when the “Cut & Control” philosophy materializes in action, it is always accompanied by monumental problems, a connection seldom made because the focus is on progress not on the displaced or the displacers.

Middle-class industrialists changed the concept of time. Previously, when most workers farmed the land, work was defined by nature and the seasons of the year. A seasonal rhythm sets the tempo of productive work altering between intense labor to moderate industry. Now, in the factory system work was a matter of how much time a task required, how many units could be produced, and how many hands to complete the schedule.

MYTH OF PROGRESS & TIME MANAGEMENT

Timesheets were introduced, so were timekeepers, and work checkers who would report and exact fines for those found idling. The time clock was locked so that it could not be tampered with as punctuality was as important as performance. It didn’t take workers long to grasp this reality. They found ways to seem busy when they weren’t to the frustration of their bosses.

Passive behavior came to resemble social termites doing unspeakable damage, but right under everyone's eyes as the behavior was largely invisible. Workers learned how to burrow into the infrastructure of the workplace with obsessive-compulsive, malicious obedience, approach-avoidance, and other passive behaviors throwing schedules off with silent behavior, only to be discovered too late for damage control (See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, 2015).

This obsession with time would result in the focus on means (process) rather than ends (outcomes), introducing into the language the judgment of how difficult a task was and how much time should be allotted to it.

British naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909 – 1993) wrote in Parkinson’s Law, The Pursuit of Progress (1958) that work expands to fill the time allotted to its completion. Subordinates, he continued, multiply it at a fixed rate regardless of the amount of work that is produced.

Parkinson’s Law provides insight into the primary barrier to time management and thus explains the frustration that efficiency experts have faced, and now take for granted. Allington Kennard of the Straits Times wrote:

"In exactly the same way nobody bothered and nobody cared, before (Isaac) Newton's day, why an apple should drop to the ground when it might so easily fly up after leaving the tree, " there is less gravity in Professor Parkinson's Law, but hardly less truth."

By the end of the 19th century, the effects of the “Cut & Control” philosophy of technology had shaped the modern world. Working life was now chopped up into small measurable tasks, set in orderly tractable sequences, and timed to the rhythm of metronomic conformity of the machine.

This was a natural progression in the utopian belief that if you have a place for everything and everything is in its place, nothing can go wrong. A century later, paradoxically, we find that usually, everything does.

A good example of this utopian philosophy was prominently practiced in the 20th century in the United States called “Management by Objectives” (MBOs).

The utopian theory of this practice was to break down the corporate goal for an enterprise into manageable pieces, assigning a piece to finance, sales & marketing, engineering, production, research & development, human resources, and security. Then within these functional groups, breaking that function’s piece of the goal into sub-pieces among its members, and holding each of them accountable to completing that sub-piece efficiently, on time and complete was considered the satisfaction of the group’s objective.

Once all these objectives had been completed and reported as scheduled, they were reassembled into the whole of the corporate goal, and if everyone met the full measure of their respective groups’ responsibility, the expectation was for success.

[The problem was that it didn’t work. I know because it was my function as an organizational development psychologist to counsel these functionaries to that end by dealing with their respective management groups.]

It was professor Russell Lincoln Ackoff (1919 – 2009) of the Wharton School of Management who showed the fallacy in this thinking On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events (1972):

If you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be sure, the system as a whole will not behave as well as it can. Now, that is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to systems thinking. The corollary to this is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be.

Despite the obvious wisdom to this, the corporate world has continued to compound this fallacy of utopian conceit by measuring performance and awarding promotions and raises based on the Performance Appraisal System (see The Worker, Alone, 2016).

Performance appraisal was meant to be a vehicle to assess and chart the development of each member in a functional group in terms of observed readiness (for promotion) and efficiency (in the job). Any shortfall would be subject to training or retraining. The process, however, became a ruse as departmental MBOs and personnel performance were reduced to justifying rate increases for individuals.

The proof was in the pudding: companies could display great MBOs and Performance Appraisal proficiency and still be failing as a company.

A CASE IN POINT



Enron Corporation’s precipitous decline



One company that comes to mind, Enron. The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas, as well as to the de facto dissolution of Arthur Andersen, one of the five largest audit and accounting firms in the world. While being, at the time, the largest bankruptcy in American history, Enron also represented the biggest audit failure. On the surface, the company was doing all the right things (MBOs and Performance Appraisals) in terms of fiscal responsibility), yet in reality, this amounted to cooking the books.

Enron was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay after merging with Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. High flyer Jeffrey Skilling was hired to develop a staff of top-level executives. By the use of accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting, he was able to hide billions of dollars in debt from failed deals and projects. Then there was Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, who along with his direct reports, was able to mislead Enron's Board of Directors and Enron’s Audit Committee on high-risk accounting practices while pressuring Andersen to ignore the issues.

Enron shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit after the company's stock price, which achieved a high of US $90.75 share price in mid-2000, plummeted to less than $1 by the end of November 2001.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigated. Energy competitor Dynegy attempted to purchase Enron at a low price and the deal failed. On December 2, 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. With Enron's $63.4 billion in assets, it was the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history until WorldCom filed for bankruptcy the next year.

Many executives at Enron were indicted for a variety of charges and some were later sentenced to prison. Enron's auditor, Arthur Andersen, was found guilty in a United States District Court of illegally destroying documents relevant to the SEC investigation which voided its license to audit public companies, effectively closing the business.

By the time the ruling was overturned at the US Supreme Court, Enron had lost the majority of its customers and had ceased operating. Employees and shareholders received limited returns in lawsuits, despite losing billions in pensions and stock prices. As a consequence of the scandal, new regulations and legislation were enacted to expand the accuracy of financial reporting for public companies.

Enron may be the apogee of dissembling, but the nadir is the fallout that legitimate companies suffer that don’t cook the books; companies that benefit from the practice of MBOs and Performance Appraisals; companies that give a reasonable return on individual effort.

Enron, on paper, was a complex organization in which all its departments met company objectives, but sank into duplicity and chicanery under the weight of the deception. Consequently, tens of thousands of stockholders and thousands of employees lost millions. When you live in the utopian glee of false progress, you are rushing to Nowhere Land where everyone is reduced to Nowhere Man.



FREDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR

Consistent with Progress and the Great Divide is the proliferation of specialty disciplines in technical forms of industry knowledge from which the vast majority of the public is excluded, and consequently, must buy on trust.

Over the history of mankind, education has been limited by both church and state to mainly the privileged few at the expense of restricted many. The whole basis of the “Industrial Revolution” was to use workers as fodder for the amoral industrial machine, keeping them ignorant and passive as much as possible. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) captured the essence of this mindset in his The Principles of Scientific Management (1911):

One of the very first requirements for man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type.






Frederick Winslow Taylor in a 1900 photograph

In the late 19th century, against this harsh sentiment emerged a movement sponsored by both socialist and communist organizers and that was for workers to acquire the socioeconomic ownership of the means of production.

MARX AND ENGELS

The inspiration for this came from the German economist, social and political philosopher Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) who believed along with his collaborator the German social philosopher Friedrick Engels (1820 – 1895) that the working class itself must play the role as a change agent in mounting a social-political revolution known as “scientific socialism,” or more commonly as modern Communism. The joint efforts of Marx and Engels produced the Communist Manifesto (1848), a masterpiece of political propaganda that ends with the celebrated battle cry:

The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all lands, unite!

Marx and Engels owe a debt to the German radical idealistic philosopher Friedrick Hegel (1770 – 1831) although they were quite critical of his idealism and philosophy of history. Hegel argued that history is not meaningless chance, but a rational process of spirit and mind making itself real in history. Marx and Engels chose the view that the material world determined our ideas rather than our ideas are determined by the material world.

Hegel, a logician and contributor to Communism’s “dialectic materialism,” reasoned that thesis generates antithesis and that both are superseded by a higher synthesis, which incorporates what is rational in them and rejects what is irrational. His thesis, antithesis, synthesis became popular with historians and other disciplines as a conceptual trope.

Like Adam Smith, Marx agreed that the true wealth of a nation was in its labor force. Where he differed with Smith is in his theory of surplus-value, class conflict, and the exploitation of the working class. He predicted that the suppression of capitalism by socialism would result in the “withering away” of the state as the classless society of communism was achieved. The role of communism was to ease the birth pangs of this evolution. “Philosophers,” he argued, “have previously tried to explain the world, our task is to change it.”

Communism saw the political power of the working class as essential to achieving this end. The formation of major unions of unskilled workers took place under the socialist leadership on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary aim was to strengthen the connection between political power and bargaining rights with factory owners.

What was emerging with the union movement was a mirror image of the corporate factory system that workers loathed, a system of rank conformity to authority in which workers were obliged to accede to the leadership demands of the union without recourse. Given this cynicism, the union leadership embarked on a program of propaganda and education to justify its role and to distance itself from that management system workers despised.

The second half of the 20th century would give birth to the Cold War of the United States and Western Europe with the Soviet Union, a war between democratic capitalism and totalitarian communism. Interestingly, the Roman Catholic Church, now seeing its existence threatened by atheistic communism, sided enthusiastically with the capitalistic West, although many of its social objectives were more consistent with those of communism.

Marx, incidentally, never advocated communism as a utopian ideal, but a pragmatic materialistic systemic objective. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, interpreters of Marxism, took this ideology and created the Soviet Socialistic Republic (USSR) after the bloody Red-White Revolution of 1917.

After overthrowing the Russian tsar Nicholas II in 1918, the communist regime mounted with such draconian zeal, would collapse and disappear three-quarters of a century later with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Russia would write a democratic constitution and elect a Federal Assembly with a president, prime minister, and two houses of government to replace the Soviet system. A quarter-century later, 2016, with Vladimir Putin, once again president, Russia has the nostalgic feel of the Soviet Union with the government seemingly moving dangerously close to a new Cold War.

After first escaping Nowhere Land, Russia is seemingly destined to find itself in the company of Nowhere Man.

WILLIAM MORRIS

We have had our utopian idealists. William Morris (1834 – 1896), an English craftsman, poet, and socialist, considered work the primary source of human activity. Work provided identity, enjoyment, and a sense of achievement, all necessary for the human soul to flourish.

He was a prolific author and a romantic at heart in the tradition of the classics in art and architecture from pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones to the architect George Edmund Street; from the poetry of Chaucer to the epics of Virgil and Homer, all of whom he managed to write about at some length.


William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, 1887

His utopian ideals envisioned a socialist society where the factory would be a primary educational center for everyone. Morris pictured this idea in the context of a communal free society of artists and artisans, scientists and engineers, factory workers and landscapers as the workplace would be surrounded by gardens. Buildings would be beautiful and functional and workers would be engaged in meaningful productive work. The socialist factory, he wrote, in The Dream of John Ball (1888), would provide:

Work light in duration and not oppressive in kind, education in childhood and youth, serious occupation, amusing relaxation, and more rest for leisure of workers, and that beauty of surroundings and the power of producing beauty which are sure to be claimed by those who have leisure, education, and a serious occupation.

Morris sought to return to the working operations of the Middle Ages and a revitalization of the splendor of the medieval decorative arts. In his writing, he contrasts the ugliness of the machine with the poetry of the Middle Ages.

Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1912), an American romantic, set up the Roycrofters Craft Community in East Aurora, New York embodying the ideas of Morris. Hubbard, a man cut from the same cloth as Morris, left a successful business career and his family to form this community of workers and to write orations to his beliefs. He championed rugged individualism and wrote a famous pamphlet, A Message to Garcia (1899). It was a lesson on duty and loyalty taken from an incident in the Spanish American War, where a soldier carried “a message to General Garcia” through enemy lines no questions asked. Hubbard perished on the Titanic when the luxury liner hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. This is his peroration on genius:

Genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it, so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success? As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in. In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no defeat except from within; there is no failure except in no longer trying; no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.

Industrialization produced two parallel universes: socialism and capitalism. These two ideologies would “Cut & Control” the Western world between them. The insatiable demand of the industrial economy for raw material and raw manpower would lead to the establishment of a new Western world in the Americas, a world with a mania for progress. This mania would create an economic divide in the Americas even greater than that of the United States.

It was apparent from the first but no one noticed as progress was not questioned. Books through the centuries including the 21st century by Nobel Laureate economists have not changed the great divide or the equation in any real sense.

Yet, the wisdom of Hubbard seemed irrefutable on the surface as duty and loyalty embodied purposefulness, and purposefulness embodied progress, and progress embodied freedom, but has that often proven to be the case?


Elbert Hubbard

This discussion introduced a quote from novelist Arthur Koestler’s dystopian novel Darkness at Noon. The author came to feel disillusioned over communism when all that he thought was true, wasn’t, and all that he believed to be certain, proved not to be so. He writes:

“In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations and social determinants, where now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink.”

As we shall see, it was with good intentions that European Christian missionaries in the 16th century (and beyond) accepted bracing hardship and palpable danger to bring Christianity to the New World of the Americas putatively to save the immortal souls of the indigenous peoples, finding it a condition that inevitably resulted in the destroying of their temples and crushing of their culture in the Name of Salvation. As a boy, like Koestler, I embraced the Christian ideal of these missionaries only to find in my maturity it had been written in invisible ink.

NEXT - Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land – PART TWENTY ONE – Christian Missionaries on the New Frontier!